What is the role of the Witches and to what extent are they responsible for Macbeth's tragic end.

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What is the role of the Witches and to what extent are they responsible for Macbeth’s tragic end.

The witches play a small but important part in the play “Macbeth”. They are seen as supernatural to the cast and by the audience. So as the witches are at the beginning of the play the audience is immediately drawn and interested. They immediately show the audience that they are supernatural when in the first scene they predict the weather, we should notice as the audience that they pick three types of weather that they should meet in as three types of weather for which there will be a lot of chaos, “In thunder, lightening, or in rain.” These three types of weather immediately give the audience a feeling that the witches are a source of darkness and mystery. It tells the audience that the witches are evil “people”. “Macbeth” was a play written for an audience who would have believed in the existence of witches at the time. Witches were believed to be evil by the audience already and so being introduced first by Shakespeare, he has already put evil into the audiences minds and therefore already creates an atmosphere of evil which therefore means that the audience will already be thinking the witches will do something which leads up to a tragedy.

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The next time the witches appear in the play is Act one Scene 3 where their entrance is announced with the sound of thunder. They again immediately begin to talk about evil business which had happened whilst they had been away. Again the subjects of what they discuss have an effect on the audience as they again are indirectly telling the audience that they can change the weather. After a woman refused the first witch food the witch takes revenge on that woman’s husband by “making” a wind which will sink his ship as he is a sailor.

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