In the beginning of Act 1, Scene 1, the witches were introduced as the evil side of this whole play. “A heath, Thunder, Enter three witches” has a lot of meaning. A heath is a barren land, a deserted place with a rough landscape covered with mud, it’s basically a place where no human being will live, and this creates tension amongst the audience. This is also created by using ‘pathetic fallacy’, another technique, in the word “thunder”. This word has a lot of meaning; it can be looked as weather, a sign of evil and darkness but also as a danger or warning. This immediately creates fear and tension. When the “three witches enter” (Act 1, Scene 1), the effect will be almost immediate, somewhere between shock and fear. “Three” is the number that witches mostly use to symbolise evil, so when the three witches enter, the audience is warned about what’s to come.
This relates back to the introduction, in the Jacobean times, the audience will have had a very strong belief in witches and witchcraft; they were convinced that the witches has a lot of power and besides that they also suspected the witches to perform and make spells. On the whole, witches create these dramatic functions by firstly, being the first things to appear on stage, secondly by using pathetic fallacy and by finally talking in the witches language which is mostly made up of chants, spells and evilness. An example of a spell could be “Thrice the brindled cat hath mewed” which could show evil when we see the words “three” and “cats” which are things normally associated with evil.
The witches also act as a plot device, they changed Macbeth’s fortune. At the start of the play, Macbeth is seen as the man of action, he is a fearless warrior and an important Lord who defends the king against treachery. He is praised by the King and by everyone else, including the audience. Initially he has a conscience and a highly developed imagination, “he is full, so valiant” (Act 1 Scene 4) – he sees all too well in his mind the horrors of what he is proposing to do – but he shuts out the implications of what this is telling him. Manhood is important to Macbeth, Shakespeare creates this impression when Macbeth says “I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none” (Act 1, Scene 7). This suggests that Macbeth will “dare” to do anything to show that he’s a man, he also talks back to Lady Macbeth which will give a shock to the audience; this also tells the audience that Macbeth’s manhood is very important to him. This is what the witches play on through Lady Macbeth and her language. The witches influence Lady Macbeth’s language. Lady Macbeth appeals to his manhood when persuading him to murder Duncan in the first place; she also makes a similar appeal during the banquet scene. Lady Macbeth thinks him “too full o’the milk of human –kindness” –an extraordinary statement in the light of the murders that Macbeth commits. The audience’s point of view on Macbeth also changes from strong and loyal to a treacherous and murderous character.
The witches also foreshadow the torture that Macbeth will feel when they say “Hang upon his penthouse lid; He shall live a man forbid”. These words rhyme; this makes it sound like an enchantment, like a chant. “I’ll drain him dry as hay!” is a simile, which has been used to create a picture (of a man being tortured) of what’s going to happen to Macbeth. When the audience hears this line with the word “drain” in it, they will be wondering whether the witches are going to drain him with blood. However it’s only in the next line, “Sleep shall neither night nor day”, that the audience understands that the witches are going to drain Macbeth with sleep like one of the witches did to the poor sailor because of his wife not giving chestnuts to the witch. “And munched, and munched, and munched” is a repetition of the woman eating. This emphasises the point and helps the audience to visualise the eating actions. Witches can’t kill so they would do anything possible to play around with the victim’s consciousness. In Act 1, Scene 3, after the sailor’s meeting, all three sisters pronounce a chant. They also link back to evil when they say “thrice to thine” which again relates back to evil. The audience here will be warned about what’s going to happen to Macbeth, Shakespeare uses foreshadow in this context. With this in mind, when Macbeth says “Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more: Macbeth does murder sleep” (Act 2, Scene 2) evokes a frightening atmosphere. The audience would be aware of this as it has already been foreshadowed in the previous lines of the witches. This is also showed when the witches say “Yet it shall be tempest-tossed!”, this also foreshadows what’s going to happen to Macbeth later on, that they are going to toss him around like he’s in a storm.
The witches deliberately play with the characters; they give misleading visions to Macbeth. Macbeth who was once a reputable, loyal and important Lord becomes involved with evil. We can see this when he says “Though you untie the winds and let them fight…Even till destruction sicken” to the witches on Act 4 Scene 1. This shows that Macbeth is prepared to risk all the common hazards of witchcraft, he is prepared to lay down his arms in front of evil. However what he says can also be interpreted as an uncontrolled ambition. Before Macbeth comes to meet the witches, Hecate tells the other witches that Macbeth has used witchcraft “for his own ends”, not for the witch’s sake (Act 3, Scene 5). In addition, she says that “by the strength of their illusion, shall draw him on to his confusion”. This again foreshadows what will happen later on to Macbeth. When Macbeth comes on stage, the audience will know more than Macbeth, which is dramatic irony.
Macbeth received comfort from the three apparitions that the witches call up. They appear in symbolic form. The first, “an armed head”, represents Macbeth’s own head (wearing a helmet); the “bloody child” that comes next is Macduff, who has been “untimely ripp’d’ from his mother’s womb (as he tells Macbeth in Act 5, Scene 7); and the last, the royal child with a tree in his hand, is Malcolm, the rightful King of Scotland who approaches the palace at Dunsinane camouflaged with tree-branches (Act 5, Scene 4).
These are all forthcoming events but Macbeth looks at them and interpret them as “that will never be” (Act 4, Scene 1). The witches also don’t tell him the real meaning as they want him to get confused, they want to see how he’s going to interpret their pictures, and it’s their type of revenge for him as he had used “witchcraft for his own ends”. He doesn’t think twice about their meanings, he doesn’t even try to understand them. He feels comfortable when he misunderstands that he’s safe. This means that the images can symbolise different things and everyone’s got different ways of interpreting them.
Macbeth cannot interpret these symbols, but Shakespeare expects the audience to understand what is meant. This is ‘dramatic irony’- when the truth of a situation is known to the audience but hidden from the characters in the play. There is dramatic irony, too, in the words spoken by the apparitions, for again we understand the real meanings, while Macbeth can only understand the apparent meanings of the words. Macbeth, however, is in no doubt about the significance of the final ‘show of Eight Kings’. The witches want Macbeth to “Hear his speech, but say thou nought” (Act 4, Scene1). This shows that the witches do not want Macbeth to know what it really means they give ambiguous visions. The witches also say “Seek to know no more” (Act 4, Scene1), this means that Macbeth always wants more, he is greedy but it could also mean that the witches do not want to tell more. They want Macbeth to use his imagination to work out what the symbolic images mean, even though he goes on the wrong path, they do not stop him but encourage him to find his own interpretations. The audience would also probably feel shocked and surprised to see that a loyal man like him has turned into something evil.
One of the main functions of the witches is to affect the language used by other characters – which mirror their evil language. They do this with Lady Macbeth when she starts to use negative and evil connotations. She places herself in the centre of evil, we can see this when she says “And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell” (Act 1 Scene 5). By placing herself there she becomes one of them. Lady Macbeth starts to use symbolism; she uses lots of symbols related to evil such as “raven” and “croaks the fatal entrance”. The raven is a bird associated with evil and fear, raven doesn’t normally croak, fatal also means deadly so the audience might expect murder or something deadly (Act 1 Scene 5). In the beginning of the play (Act 1, Scene 3), Macbeth says “So foul and fair I have not seen” mirrors the witches words. The effect upon the audience of this oxymoron should be immediate; they understand that what Macbeth just said is the repetition of what the witches said earlier on, this brings panic amongst the audience as they start to guess that Macbeth is letting evil penetrate through him.
Macbeth gains the audiences sympathy by exposing his weakness –almost subconsciously. He is not a “bare-faced” plain murderer, but he is also a prisoner of horrendous imaginings. Shakespeare helps him gain this sympathy by making the audience decide on the moral issues involved. Shakespeare allows Lady Macbeth to explain her husband’s character as she understands it, and although she cannot see the whole truth, she tells us a great deal about Macbeth that is true. Two lines of her soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 5 are particularly significant “Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, not without The illness should attend it.” By ‘illness’ Lady Macbeth mean ‘evil’, but her metaphor is appropriate; Macbeth catches ‘evil’, as one might catch a disease. Duncan getting killed creates havoc; it upsets the natural order and the reminder to the audience that you have to accept the King or Queen chosen by God is very well interpreted so that the message is clear. If you unbalance the natural order, you’ll allow ‘evil’ to take over. A paradox is used when Macbeth changes from a loyal Lord to a murderer. This is one of the important turning points.
Macbeth gains the crown; but he loses love, friendship, respect – and in the end his life. His crime is rightly punished. It can be argued that the witches are not human at all, and therefore cannot be considered as a character. They are certainly a malign force in the play. They do not invite Macbeth to murder Duncan or even suggest such a thing. This shows that witches are very powerful. They symbolise evil, but man is free to resist them. Macbeth’s downfall occurs partly because he comes to depend upon their information. The prophecies weren’t prophecies; they were Macbeth’s driving force. The audience will not be very pleased to see the witches as they are supernatural phenomena; they are the device that unbalances the natural order. The audience will also be partly surprised that Shakespeare has included Hecate, the leader of the witches as a real person. But as I said before it was all in Macbeth’s hand, he was the one to choose his faith.
