Analyse the role and presentation of the witches in Macbeth with reference to Shakespeares use of language, his historical and contemporary influences and the themes addressed by the play.

Kayleigh Edwards.

Analyse the role and presentation of the witches in Macbeth with reference to Shakespeare’s use of language, his historical and contemporary influences and the themes addressed by the play.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate the role that the witches played in Macbeth’s downfall. To touch upon their manipulative natures that only seemed to add fuel to the fire of the weak and power hungry personality that Macbeth seemed to posses .Shakespeare wrote this play in 1605-1606 a time where witchcraft was very much believed and where the audience would have had a great fear of ghosts, spells and the practicing’s of evil. The play is set in eleventh century Scotland and is loosely based on real historical figures taken from ‘The chronicles of Scotland’ but the story is fiction written with King James the first in mind as he had recently fallen victim to an assassination attempt (which could of caused chaos just as King Duncan’s assassination does in the play) and carried an avid interest in witchcraft and the persecution of witches. The play itself is a complicated web of deceit and lies filled with double entendres and a deep insight into the human mind and conscience. The theme of the play is quite simple; all bad will be rewarded with its comeuppance and what goes around most definitely comes around.

In the first scene that the audience come to meet the witches they give off an air of darkness and leave them to anticipate something more sinister could happen later. By ending their encounter with ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ they are immediately setting the key theme of the play which is deception. They leave the audience with a riddle to get their minds thinking. Macbeth is immediately linked to the witches on our first encounter with him and our second with the witches(Act one scene three) His first words are ‘so foul and fair a day I have not seen’ by reiterating the witches words of fair and foul he is seen as in league with them to a certain extent. The witches speak in rhyming couplets throughout the play; this has a spell like, supernatural feeling to it that is dark and unpleasant. Macbeth also speaks in rhyming couplets in certain parts of the play for example in act two scene one as Macbeth is preparing for the assassination of King Duncan he is struck by an imaginary image of a dagger exclaiming ‘is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand; let me clutch thee’ this links Macbeth to the witches and the supernatural which is perceived as evil and the darker side he possesses.

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The audience gets a true look at the witches’ characters in Act one, scene three. They are vindictive, malicious and harsh. One of the witches threatens ‘but in a sieve I’ll thither sail’ meaning she will sink the ship of a sailors wife with the other witches offering to help by saying ‘I’ll give thee wind’ one then goes on to say ‘ I’ll drain him dry as day’ This immediately shows they are not scared to wreak havoc . The witches are important in this scene as the plot of the play starts here. They instigate the happenings of the rest of the play, they know Macbeths ambitions and they exploit them. They sow the seeds with their self fulfilling prophecies for their own amusement. As Macbeth and Banquo approach the witches they speak their first set of ‘prophecies’ to them saying that Macbeth will go on to be ’Thane of Cawdor’ and then ‘King thereafter’. They are praying on Macbeth’s weakness and hopes of power.

It becomes known in Scene five which direction the play is going to go in. Lady Macbeth enters by reading her letter in prose. The rest of the characters with exception to servants such as the porter all speak in blank verse. This gives an air of class and nobility. By making Lady Macbeths first few paragraphs prose this immediately lowers her class letting it be known that she does not possess a noble character. Lady Macbeths ruthless character is portrayed in this scene by her references to Macbeth ‘Yet I do fear thy nature; It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ saying she would have to ‘Pour my spirits in thine ear’ to achieve the goal of Macbeth becoming king. In this scene Lady Macbeth speaks alone to the audience giving the scene dramatic irony and the audience the edge of knowing something the rest the characters do not. If gives a real picture of what she is capable of. She asks the spirits to ‘unsex me here’ which shows she has a supernatural element; she then makes references to hell which reveals her dark nature. Lady Macbeth goads Macbeth into the assassination of King Duncan. Macbeth is not comfortable killing a good man but Lady Macbeth convinces him to ‘be so much more than a man’ and manipulates Macbeth into committing murder on her command. It is possible that Shakespeare was reflecting the views the audience would have shared of a lower class bewitched woman at the time.

In the last scene that the witches appear in they are performing incantations of a hideous spell around a cauldron. Macbeth seeks the witches out for reassurance. He believes that they will predict the future for him and even addresses them differently telling them to ‘answer me, to what I ask you.’ and then later even goes on to say ‘an eternal curse fall on you.’ They give him a series of three apparitions saying ‘beware the Thane of fife’, ‘ none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’ and ‘Macbeth shall never Vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.’ The witches do not tell a truth or a lie in any of these, they show Macbeth the apparitions and leave him to make up his own mind and choose his fate. He has a choice on how to interpret them.

When Shakespeare begins the play with the witches it immediately gives a dark feeling to it, it gives the audience a sense of what is about to come. There supernatural link to Lady Macbeth sets the theme of manipulation, deception and vindictiveness and the audience would have believed that the nature of the devil would have been the same. They are essential to the plot of the play because they instigate what happens with their riddles and meddling games. It is arguable that if they had not approached Macbeth he would of not of acted upon his ambitions and his hunger for power may not have been roused.

Roman Polanski’s 1971 version of the tragedy Macbeth focuses more on the witches than many other versions that have been made. The witches are introduced in the first scene wearing black. The audience will automatically associate black with death and the dark and evil. The witches are more real in Polanski’s version than in Shakespeare’s play. In Polanski’s version they do not disappear and reappear a mystical place whenever the feel. They enter a dark cave like real beings would. Polanski uses this to show the audience that they are real beings embodied by demonic forces. In the first scene the witches spit into a hole. On our first encounter with Macbeth he does the same. This is a link between them; Polanski is showing that real beings can become overcome by evil and end up just as the witches have.

The play is still attractive to an audience in the twenty-first century as there is still power hungry leaders whose ambition will stop at nothing. They will have people around them goading them to make sure they obtain their goals and manipulating them to their own needs.

The play reveals that when good versus evil, good will win and that evil will only result in chaos and the undoing of all that takes part in it.