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Witches In Macbeth Essay

Decent Essays

Hi, I’m Maddy Foster and this is another episode of ‘Which Witch is Which?’ Today we’re going to talk about the witches, also known as the weïrd sisters, in Macbeth.

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest play, but arguably his darkest and most powerful creation. King James I commissioned Shakespeare to write this play for his amusement sometime around 1606. It deals with an array of themes including revenge, guilt, violence, insanity and also the supernatural.

Shakespeare based Macbeth mainly on an Elizabethan report of Scotland’s history called ‘Holinshed’s Chronicles’, written by popular a historian at the time pictured here, but also referred to a few other sources. Macbeth features an interesting hybrid cast between the natural and supernatural. …show more content…

For example, Holinshed’s three weird sisters are “creatures of the elderwood...nymphs or faires” (Chronicles 268). Shakespeare transforms the characters of the weïrd sisters into ugly, androgynous hags to better fit the description of witches in the book, Daemonologie, thus capitalizing on an opportunity to please the King, as well as instilling trepidation in the …show more content…

In fact, the witches bear a striking and obviously intentional resemblance to the fates, female characters who weave the fabric of human lives and then cut the threads to end them. They speak in almost chant-like rhyme with paradox and equivocation, “Fair is foul and foul is fair” (Act 1, Scene 1, Lines 11-12) and "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble" (Act 4, Scene 1, Lines 10-11).

At the time Macbeth was written, necromancy was feared and witches had developed into a serious and ever-present social concern. Bear in mind that those accused of witchcraft 90% of the time were just old, poor, unprotected, single or pet owning women. Nonetheless, ‘witches’ were perceived as evil, sub-human servants of the devil. Shakespeare therefore introduced the witches knowing that they would grip an audience, as anything to do with witchcraft would create fear. In fact, Macbeth is the 17th century’s equivalent to a modern day horror

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