Shakespeare also uses the witches in Macbeth as the main vehicles for his verse and imagery and throughout the play these linguistic devices echo the continuous, underlying themes.
In Act 1 Scene 1, Shakespeare’s skilful poetry is immediately illustrated in the oxy-morons, ‘When the battle’s lost and won’ and ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’. These absurd paradoxes demonstrate the unnaturalness of the witches, their role in reversing God’s natural order and they echo the theme of abnormality. The play constantly explores the opposing forces, for example, how can a battle be both lost and won? This apparent contradiction is stressed further with ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ – in this good is becoming evil, which is what happens to Macbeth and his wife gradually throughout the play.
The rhyming couplets spoken by the witches contrast starkly against the iambic pentameter that is voiced by the other characters. Iambic pentameter or ‘blank verse’ is an unrhymed line containing five iambs, for example in Act 1 Scene 3 where Macbeth says, ‘And Thane of Cawdor too: went it not so?’ A verse couplet is a pair of rhymed lines of any metre, for example the opening line of, ‘When shall we three meet again? / In thunder, lightening or in rain?’ Shakespeare has written the play in this form to indicate the definite dissimilarities between the witches and the other characters in the play- they are inhuman creatures and their rhyming couplets appropriately suggest supernatural spells and incantations. Also, there is a frequent couplet at the end of each scene, for example an the end of Act 2 Scene 1 where Macbeth states, ‘Here it not Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.’ These couplets not only indicate the end of a scene, they also display the presence of the witches malevolence throughout the play. This style of writing also reflects the theme of good versus evil; blank verse versus rhyming couplets. The occasional presence of the couplets at the end of each scene represents the immorality creeping into Macbeth’s character as the play progresses, propelled along by the witches.
Another role of the witches is to deliver imagery into Macbeth. In all of his plays, Shakespeare uses imagery to symbolise important themes, to conjure up emotionally charged mental pictures and to anticipate subsequent events. In Macbeth, the key imagery that the witches provide is that of violence, darkness and evil.
In Act 1 Scene 1, the physical disturbances of thunder, lightening and rain serve as a metaphor for the emotional violence that occurs later in the play. In all three scenes that the witches appear in, they are situated in ‘desolate’ places; in Act 1 Scene 3 they are on a ‘heath’ and it is usually stormy and thundering. These places conjure up bleak, dismal images, which admirably portray the witches’ characters and their roles in the play. In Act 4 Scene 1, as the witches are preparing their hellish brew, the phrase ‘Double double toil and trouble’ is repeated three times, evoking malicious images and symbolising the ‘trouble’ that their prophecies have caused Macbeth.
In Macbeth the witches play an important role in creating dramatic irony, especially in Act 4 Scene 1. In this scene the witches are concocting a hellish brew that Macbeth later drinks and is then visited by three apparitions. The first is a bloody head who warns him to ‘Beware Macduff’ and arouses worry in Macbeth. However, the second apparition is a bloody child who tells Macbeth that ‘None of woman born/shall harm Macbeth’, to which Macbeth is delighted as he interprets this to mean that Macduff can’t harm him. However, this is dramatically ironic as Macduff was actually born by caesarean section, thus conforming to the prophecy. The third apparition is a crowned child with a tree in his hand who tells Macbeth that he ‘Shall never vanquished be until/great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/shall come against him’ to which he replies, ‘that will never be’. However, this prediction is again ironic and elusive because in Act 5 Scene 4, Malcolm orders his army to use the branches of Birnam wood to camouflage themselves as they approached Dunsinane, and it is after this that Macbeth meets his impending doom.
As well as promoting Macbeth’s tragic downfall, the witches also bare importance to the destiny of Banquo for without their appearance it is possible that his death could have been prevented for he would have had no reason to suspect Macbeth of murder. Banquo only meets the witches once in Act 1 Scene 3, and yet their interview consequently brought about his death. At first, Banquo is merely that of an enquirer as he asks, ‘Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear/your favours or your hate.’ As he has not been previously harbouring a secret ambition as Macbeth has, the witches’ prophecies do not affect his in the same way as they do Macbeth but he is still deeply troubled by their incantations and finds himself struggling with their suggestions; ‘Merciful powers/restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature/gives away to in repose’. Banquo’s power to resist the witches temptations are demonstrated in Act 2 Scene 1 where Macbeth tells Banquo that if he ‘shall cleave to my consent, when’tis/it shall make honour for you’, meaning that if he agrees to help Macbeth, he will honour him later. Banquo then seals his impending doom by loyally replying, ‘So I lose none/in seeking to augment it, but still keep/my bosom franchised an allegiance clear,/I shall be counselled.’ Meaning that as long as he loses no honour but keeps his heart free of guilt, he shall listen to him. By resisting the witches, Banquo proves that it was possible for Macbeth to do so also if he had not been entertaining secret ambitions, thus proving the witches innocence as the sole instigators to Macbeth’s fall from grace.
One of the most popular arguments concerning the witches in Macbeth is their role in Macbeth’s tragic downfall instigated by his crime of killing King Duncan. Their importance to Macbeth’s demise and whether it was solely the witches’ influence that made him kill the King is one of the most argued aspects of the play. Some critics’ belief that if it was not for the witches, the malicious thoughts of committing the murder would never have entered his mind and he would have stayed content with his title of Thane of Glamis and Thane of Cawdor would have simply been an unexpected bonus. However, a necessary prerequisite for a Shakespearean tragic hero was that he/she must exhibit some defect in excess. Macbeth certainly conforms to this tragic principle in that he has ‘vaulting ambition’, an it is because of this that I consider the witches to simply be catalysts to the inevitable and that it was Macbeth’s fatal flaw that led him to his death.
Others contributors to my theory are the witches inability to control people’s actions and Macbeth’s reaction after he was told the witches prophecies. In Act 1 Scene 1 when the First Witch is telling her ‘weird sisters’ of how she will punish a sailor, she says, ‘Though his bark cannot be lost, yet it shall be tempest tossed’. ‘Bark’ is a metaphor for soul, meaning that the witches do not possess the ability to take the sailors soul but can disrupt it. This is achieved by exploiting their victim’s flaw, which in Macbeth’s case was his vaulting ambition, and wait for them to surrender their soul willingly, which is exactly what happened in Macbeth’s case. This accurately demonstrates the role of the witches – it is not to force Macbeth into killing King Duncan, but to lure Macbeth into doing it himself.
After Macbeth was told the witches prophecies in Act 1 Scene 3, his reaction was revealed by Banquo who asked, ‘Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?’ and then a few lines later he says that Macbeth seems ‘rapt withal’. I believe these two lines to be the entire crux of the play as they show that the prospect of being king had already manifested inside Macbeth’s mind. In Macbeth’s soliloquy at the end of Act 1 Scene 3, within minutes of hearing the words ‘All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter’, Macbeth is already talking of killing King Duncan, saying, ‘Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair’ and ‘whose murder yet is but fantastical’. This confirms that the witches were not to blame for King Duncan’s murder – they did not even mention his name and yet Macbeth alone determines his fate. I am almost certain that Macbeth’s ambition would have inevitably led to his downfall, with or without the witches.
Whether the play Macbeth is filmed or performed on stage, the witches carry considerable responsibility in generating dramatic tension; this role is crucial as the dramatic tension sustains the audience’s attention and without it the success of Macbeth would be questionable. To establish the correct ambience and tone for Macbeth, I believe that directing the opening scene holds imperative significance. It is in this scene that the witches plan to plant the seeds of immorality inside Macbeth’s mind that later tempt him to perform the act that will inevitably lead to his downfall, therefore the atmosphere created must be precise. Although some directors choose to film Macbeth for the use of special effects and specific settings, I would personally choose to direct Macbeth on stage to increase the involvement of the audience and help them to experience the chilling auras that this play creates. Because the scene is set on a stormy night in a place deserted but for the presence of the witches, I would leave the stage bare to create an eerie effect and therefore increasing the dramatic tension. The stage would be enveloped in darkness and the only light would protrude from dim spotlights aimed at the witches’ black, cloaked figures in order to provoke fear into the audience and to demonstrate the witches as being epitomes of darkness. The only special effects that I would include would be the distant echoes of a brewing storm that would steadily increase as the scene reaches its dramatic climax; the mention of Macbeth’s name. When the name is spoken, to emphasize it’s significance to the audience and so that Macbeth’s name is associated with these weird sisters for the remainder of the play, a loud crash of thunder, a sudden, bright flash of lightning and a strong wind would transform the stage into a frenzied chaos. When combined, these effects would help to begin the steady increase of dramatic tension and hopefully give the audience an insight into the sinister play that lies ahead.
To conclude my analysis, it seems that the opening scene of Macbeth and the two scenes in which Macbeth meets with the witches are not only imperative to the success of the play but are also used by Shakespeare to create maximum intrigue, suspense, drama and tension. The witches sustain the audience’s attention in numerous ways by providing authenticity, irony and being strong vehicles for Shakespeare’s poetic verse and imagery and his underlying themes. After thoroughly exploring their role I have reached the conclusion that although they are not solely responsible for Macbeths tragic downfall, their catalytic tendencies provoke Macbeth’s fall from grace in a devious and chilling manner. By exploiting his flaws not only to himself but also to the audience the witches, in my opinion, are the pillars in which the play stand on and are the reason why Macbeth, hundreds of years later, is a play that continues to be as popular and admired as the day it was written.
