Macbeth and the witches: the Weird Sisters between prophecy and demonology

The witches of Macbeth, James I and the Daemonologie, the North Berwick trials and the Hecate scenes: witchcraft in Shakespeare's darkest tragedy.

Macbeth opens with thunder, lightning and three figures arranging to meet on the heath. In a few lines Shakespeare introduces the witches and their ambiguous motto, «Fair is foul, and foul is fair», which announces a world where values are turned upside down. The tragedy, most probably written around 1606 and published in the First Folio of 1623, is the darkest of those devoted to the relationship between ambition and the supernatural.

The Scottish sources

The story comes from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, in the 1587 edition, where Macbeth and Banquo meet three women in strange and wild clothing who foretell their future. The chronicler suggests they were the goddesses of destiny or else nymphs or fairies endowed with prophetic knowledge. Shakespeare calls them the weird sisters, where the Old English word wyrd meant fate: hence the common English name of the Weird Sisters and the Italian Sorelle fatali.

A king who wrote about witches

The political context is decisive. From 1603 the English throne was occupied by James I, already King of Scotland, who believed himself descended from Banquo. In 1590 James had personally followed the North Berwick trials, in which women and men were accused of raising storms against the ship bringing him back from Denmark with his bride Anne. In 1597 he had published the Daemonologie, a treatise in dialogue form against witchcraft.

Many scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth with the new sovereign partly in mind. The procession of the eight kings descended from Banquo, shown by the witches in the fourth act, looks like a direct tribute to the Stuart dynasty, and the theme of contrary winds raised by the witches closely recalls the accusations made against the Scottish defendants.

Prophecies that come half true

The witches do not force Macbeth to kill. They tell him he will be king, and then leave him alone with his own ambition and that of Lady Macbeth. In the fourth act, consulted again, they show apparitions that utter deceptive oracles: no man born of woman shall harm him, and he will not be vanquished until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane hill.

Every prophecy comes true, but in a way Macbeth had not foreseen. The enemy soldiers advance hidden behind boughs from Birnam, and Macduff reveals that he was taken untimely from his mother's womb. This is the typical ambiguity of ancient oracles, which tell the truth in words capable of deceiving those who listen.

Hecate and the problem of the text

In the scenes where Hecate, queen of the witches, appears, the tone changes and songs are inserted that are also found in Thomas Middleton's The Witch. For this reason many textual scholars think those passages were added later, perhaps by Middleton himself, to make the performance more spectacular. The text we read today, therefore, may not fully coincide with Shakespeare's original.

In English theatrical tradition Macbeth has ended up surrounded by a superstition of its own: many actors avoid saying its title backstage and speak of «the Scottish play». Beyond these customs, the work remains a precious document of how early seventeenth-century England imagined witchcraft, between real fear, political interest and the power of imagination.