Meme Dump

The Three Witches (Weird Sisters)

What sorts of things suggest the witches are supernatural?

ALL The weird sisters, hand in hand,

                       Posters of the sea and land,

                       Thus do go, about, about:

                       Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,

                       And thrice again, to make up nine.

                       Peace, the charm's wound up.

• Beards

• Rhymed speech vs all other characters speak in blank verse

• Tremendously powerful (according to their speech) and utterly wicked

• Bizarre potions with strange ingredients

• You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so

• Anecdote - setting a sailor to wander the ocean because his wife wouldn’t give her a chestnut

• Shakespeare’s employment as these three witches as characters played upon the public’s general fear of witches, dark magic and the supernatural

• Thrice - the power of 3 as a supernatural number

The audience is left to ask whether the witches are independent agents toying with human lives, or agents of fate, whose prophecies are only reports of the inevitable. The witches bear a striking and obviously intentional resemblance to the Fates, female characters in both Norse and Greek mythology who weave the fabric of human lives and then cut the threads to end them.

 Some of their prophecies seem self-fulfilling. For example, it is doubtful that Macbeth would have murdered his king without the push given by the witches’ predictions. In other cases, though, their prophecies are just remarkably accurate readings of the future—it is hard to see Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane as being self-fulfilling in any way. The play offers no easy answers. Instead, Shakespeare keeps the witches well outside the limits of human comprehension. They embody an unreasoning, instinctive evil.

At the start of Act 1, Scene 3 of Macbeth, we see the Witches preparing for their first encounter with Macbeth. The First Witch tells her companions that she has been insulted by a sailor’s wife who refused to give her some of the chestnuts that she was eating (‘“Give me!” quoth I. / “Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed ronyon cries’ (1.3.5–6)). The First Witch says that she will take revenge by punishing the woman’s husband, describing in detail what ‘I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do’ (1.1.10) to him: she will deprive him of sleep (‘Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his penthouse lid’ (1.3.19–20)) and ensure that his ship is tossed by the waves (‘tempest-toss’d’ (1.3.25)) and unable to find safe harbour. The passage ends with the Witches chanting a spell as they prepare to meet Macbeth, repeating a movement three times in the direction of each Witch in order to consolidate their power.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth at a time when interest in witchcraft bordered on hysteria. Witches were blamed for causing illness, death and disaster, and were thought to punish their enemies by giving them nightmares, making their crops fail and their animals sicken. Witches were thought to allow the Devil to suckle from them in the form of an animal, such as ‘Graymalkin’ and ‘Paddock’, the grey cat and the toad mentioned by the Witches in Act 1, Scene 1. Those who were convicted were often tortured, their trials reported in grisly detail in pamphlets that circulated in their hundreds. Often, those accused of witchcraft lived on the edges of society: they were old, poor and unprotected, and were therefore easy to blame.

The Witches’ language

Throughout the play, the language used by the Witches helps to mark them out as mysterious and other-worldly. They speak in verse, but it is a form of verse that is very different from that which is used by most of Shakespeare’s characters. Many of the lines in this passage are in rhyming couplets, in contrast to the unrhymed verse used elsewhere in the play. Rather than speaking in an iambic metre, with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables, the Witches speak in a trochaic metre, with stressed syllables followed by unstressed. In addition, where most of Shakespeare’s verse lines have five stresses, the Witches’ lines typically only have four. In this scene, compare Macbeth’s first line with the First Witch’s description of how she will torture the sailor:

MACBETH So foul and fair a day I have not seen. (1.3.38)

 FIRST WITCH Sleep shall neither night nor day

Hang upon his penthouse lid;

He shall live a man forbid (1.3.19–21)

These heavy stresses give the Witches’ speech a sense of foreboding that emphasises their malevolence and unearthliness. In the First Witch’s lines, they make her vendetta against the sailor seem relentless. At the end of this passage, when the Witches chant in unison, they bring a sense of eeriness.

It’s also worth noting that the Witches’ speech is full of numbers. The First Witch will make the sailor’s torture last ‘sev'nnights, nine times nine’ (1.3.22): a ‘sev’nnight’ was a week (seven nights), so the sailor will suffer for 81 weeks. As the Witches chant, they move ‘Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine / And thrice again, to make up nine’ (1.3.35–36). There are further examples of the number three: the sailor’s wife ‘mounch'd, and mounch'd, and mounch'd’ (1.3.5); the First Witch repeats ‘I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do’ (1.1.10); and there are, of course, three witches. Three is a number that is often seen as having a particular significance. In Christianity, for example, there is the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Bad luck is frequently thought to come in threes. Macbeth is hailed by three titles (Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and King hereafter) and is later given three prophecies. When the Witches concoct their famous spell in Act 4, Scene 1, they begin with two references to the number three:

FIRST WITCH Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.

SECOND WITCH Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whin'd. (4.1.1–2)

Nine, meanwhile, is a multiple of three: therefore, ‘nine’ and ‘nine times nine’ multiplies and reinforces the power of the number three. Is Shakespeare suggesting that the Witches are a kind of unholy trinity? It’s an obvious conclusion.

Macbeth

HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

Reign of James I

James 1st’s reign was a period of political and religious turmoil and discontent, continuing the persecution of Protestants. The Stuart kings, like the Tudor monarchs, believed in the Divine Right Theory of Kings, ruling as absolute monarchs with an impotent parliament. However, the growth of democratic idealism from James' time saw the beginnings of the struggle between King and Parliament which led to the Gunpowder Plot of 5th November, 1605, and ultimately the Civil War, the execution of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. At the same time England continued to be at war with Spain, despite the defeat of the Spanish Armada in Elizabeth 1st’s last year,1603.

The Renaissance

James 1st’s reign, occurred historically the end of the Renaissance, the period of a new spirit of enquiry and optimism prompting a new focus on learning. This included the revival of Greek and Roman classical knowledge. It also encouraged developments in architecture and in art. Rich patrons supported artists like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Erasmus of Rotterdam and humanism were central to the movement. The new scientific outlook emphasised rational and logical thinking. The world could be seen as the orderly creation of God, operating according to natural and divine laws. Achievements took place in the fields of mathematics, astronomy and physics. Famous thinkers included the philosopher Micttel de Montaigne(1533-92), Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642), who presented arguments about the earth moving around the sun and the order of the planets. Developments occurred in physics, chemistry and medicine. William Caxton had set up the first printing press in England in 1476 and printing brought new benefits.

Many of the great voyages of discovery, of Columbus, Diaz, Vasco da Gama and Magellan took place increasing the growth in trade, shipping and colonisation which had begun under Elizabeth I with Sir Francis Drake.

SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT

The Elizabethan World Picture and the Natural Order or Chain of Being.

Elizabethan audiences believed in "The chain of being" or " Ladder of being", that is, a natural order in the universe descending from God in a fixed order, through the hierarchy of angels and divine spirits to man who had primacy over the material universe.

The chain then descended further through the lower orders - the animal order, the vegetative, and the inanimate elements, liquids and metals. According to this view, man was the link between the purely rational, spiritual beings (all intelligence) and the animal order which shared with him the quality of life but not of rational thinking, Man thus summed up in himself the total faculties of earthly phenomena and for was called the "little world" or "microcosm".

The extension of this idea was that just as God had primacy over the angels the king had primacy over man, the sun among the stars, justice among the virtues, the head among the body's members, fire among the elements, and so on. All existed to express the unimaginable plenitude of God's creation, its unfaltering order, and its ultimate unity. Each thing could aspire to improve itself to the glory of God.

Irrational behaviour on the part of a King thus had important moral implications in that it subverted the chain of being and provoked disorder. Such a King was inviting chaos upon his divinely ordained place and deliberately creating turmoil in the natural order. This in turn would cause disturbance within the state and throughout the whole chain of being. The Platonists of the Renaissance put Nature above man and below the angels as an intellectual being. Nature here was the creative force, not the natural creation and a direct and involuntary tool of God himself.

Shakespeare was acutely conscious of man's position between beast and angel on the chain of being. He was always concerned with the notions of order and disorder, particularly in the tragic period during which Macbeth was written.

http://www.stanford.edu/ciass/engI174b/chain.html

The Stars and Fortune

The Elizabethans believed that the stars, by obeying God's changeless order, were responsible for the vagaries of fortune in the realms below the moon. Another belief was in the pervasive operation of an external fate in the world. The image of the wheel for the operation of fortune is constant both in literature and pictorially throughout the period. There was also a fairly general belief in astrology. Despite this, the orthodox view maintained that our wills are our own and that the stars' influence could be resisted.

Elizabethans also liked the idea of man being a microcosm of the universe, that order in the state duplicated the order of the macrocosm (universe). The developing Renaissance preoccupation with the nature of self is also important. Humanistic thought had focused sharply on man as an

individual rather than as part of a divine order.

Magic and superstition

Shakespeare's world was very different from our modern world. In one sense, his world was larger because of an extra, or fifth dimension, the dimension of the supernatural. Renaissance humanism had been altering aspects of established beliefs but the Elizabethan audience was still

basically orthodox Christian. Medieval superstitions also lingered.

Shakespeare's times had barely emerged from the Middle Ages. Fear was very real because there was so much ignorance. Much was still unknown and few people were literate. People of all classes were terrified of the plague, or Black Death, and retained superstitious beliefs in ghosts,

demons, evil spirits and fairies. At the same time threats of hell were thundering from the pulpits. In these times witches were blamed if cows died or if children became ill and quite diabolical deeds were attributed to them. Alchemy was also still a serious subject for scholars.

James I, himself, believed in witches and wrote a book entitled Demonology. Belief in demonology had been part of the theological structure of the late Middle Ages and witchcraft mania had developed during bitter religious conflicts connected with the rise of Protestantism.

Many witches, particularly women, were burnt at the stake under the Stuarts.

Research

1. What was the Gunpowder Plot? Describe when and where and why it happened.

2. Research the sources of the play. Summarise Holinshed's account of the story on which Shakespeare drew.

3. Parallel texts - read historical accounts of the period; of the real Macbeth and Banquo; of the way of life in medieval Scotland.

4. Find or draw a map of Scotland and England. Research and map places like Fife, Glamis, Inverness, Cawdor, Scone, Forres, Dunsinane, Caithness, Angus, Northumberland.

5. Research the history and practices of witches in England up until the 17th century.

6. Research the theatre and its role in people’s lives in Shakespeare's time.

7. Search the web to find information about productions and film

versions of the play.