The Witches
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Agents of chaos and prophecy; supernatural catalysts for the tragedy.
- Key Traits: Equivocal, prophetic, ritualistic, ontologically uncanny, and unpunished.
- Key Themes: The Supernatural, Fate, Appearance, Ambition.
- The Core Conflict: They operate on a register outside human moral arithmetic, exploiting Macbeth's latent ambition through equivocal prophecy while remaining structurally beyond any mortal capacity to confront or destroy them.
- Key Actions: Deliver the A1S3 prophecies that catalyse Macbeth's ascent; conjure the A4S1 apparitions whose equivocations seal his fatal overconfidence.
- Famous Quote:
"Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Unpunished survivors, lingering symbols of the potential for evil that the play's restored political order cannot fully contain.
Agents of Chaos and Prophecy
The Witches, often referred to as the Weird Sisters, are the driving force of supernatural disruption in Shakespeare's play. From the moment they appear, they manipulate Macbeth by tapping into his latent ambition. While they do not explicitly force him to act, their prophecies plant the seeds of treason and murder, directly influencing his usurpation of King Duncan. Their ambiguous language and mastery of equivocation make them the embodiment of the appearance versus reality motif. The A1S3 triplet that opens their relationship with Macbeth establishes the deceptive power that sets the entire plot into motion.
Original
All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to you, Thane of Glamis!
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to you, thane of Cawdor!
All hail, Macbeth! You'll be the king in future!
The architecture of the prophecy is exact. The first line states present fact (Macbeth is already Thane of Glamis). The second is shortly fulfilled by Duncan's title transfer in A1S4. The third names a future status without specifying the mechanism. The Witches do not, on the play's evidence, instruct Macbeth to murder. They name the destination and leave him to discover the route. The terrible mechanism by which the third prophecy will be realised is one Macbeth himself supplies, but the Witches have made it conceivable by giving it linguistic form. Their power lies not in controlling physical action, but in masterful psychological externalisation – they speak aloud what their target's interior has not yet articulated.
Fair is Foul: The Engineers of Inversion
Before any human character has spoken, the Witches deliver the play's interpretive key. The A1S1 chorus, spoken in unison on a thunder-lashed heath, names the operating logic of the moral universe the audience is about to enter.
Original
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What's fair is foul; what's foul is fair;
Let's fly through foggy, filthy air.
The conventional moral universe operates by stable categories – fair (good, beautiful, true) is distinct from foul (evil, ugly, false), and the moral life consists in pursuing the former rather than the latter. The Witches' chorus announces the collapse of this stability. The play to follow will be a world in which fair and foul exchange their conventional meanings, in which the categories are unstable, and in which the moral life consists in navigating an inverted economy where the surface of any judgment may conceal its functional opposite. The echo confirms how comprehensive the inversion will be: Macbeth's first line in the play at A1S3 – "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" – repeats the Witches' formulation almost verbatim before he has met them. The argument is that Macbeth has, before any prophecy is delivered, already entered the linguistic universe the chorus opens. The "fog and filthy air" the Witches hover through is therefore not merely atmospheric description but the visual register of the moral fog the play's subsequent action requires the audience to navigate.
"Macbeth is the play of the uncanny – the uncanniest in the canon."
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers, 1987
The Cauldron and the Apparitions
When Macbeth returns to seek the Witches at A4S1, he finds them mid-ritual around a boiling cauldron. The scene is the play's most extended piece of theatrical supernaturalism – a sustained departure, in metre as much as content, from the human verse that surrounds it. The Witches' opening incantation establishes the register.
Original
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poisoned entrails throw.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All gather round the cauldron, go;
And in it, poisoned entrails throw.
The catalogue that follows – fillet of fenny snake, eye of newt, toe of frog, scale of dragon, finger of birth-strangled babe – is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of grotesque inventory in the Shakespearean canon. The ingredients are not random. They are the products of natural processes pushed past the natural boundary: animals that should not have been killed, parts that should not have been collected, infants that should not have been born. The cauldron is the play's clearest visual emblem of the unnatural register the Witches inhabit. The apparitions they conjure from it – the armed Head, the bloody Child, the crowned Child – deliver the three equivocal prophecies that will dictate the action of Acts 4 and 5. The decision Shakespeare makes is to give the second-act prophecies a different theatrical mode from the first. The A1S3 prophecies arrived as spoken words in the open air. The A4S1 prophecies arrive as conjured apparitions out of a steaming pot of corrupted matter. The escalation in supernatural register matches the escalation in equivocal cunning. The Witches have moved from prediction to spectacle, from announcement to performance, and from the suggestion of future kingship to the concealed mechanism of present destruction.
The Uncanny and the Equivocation of the Fiend
The Witches' power is real but limited. They predict but do not coerce. They activate Macbeth's latent ambition without manufacturing it, and the moment at which Macbeth recognises the trap they have built around him is the moment at which the play's broader theology of equivocation becomes explicit.
Original
I pull in resolution and begin
To doubt the equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth.
(Act 5, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'm cancelling my plan, for I am starting
To doubt the vagueness of the witches' message
That twists the truth.
The recognition comes too late. Macbeth has, by A5S5, built his strategic confidence on the Witches' A4S1 guarantees that "none of woman born / Shall harm" him and that he cannot be vanquished "until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him." The prophecies are technically true (every man is, in the natural course, born of a woman; a wood does not, in the natural course, walk). Their phrasing conceals their functional meaning (Macduff's Caesarean delivery exempts him; Malcolm's camouflage stratagem produces the moving forest). The contemporary 1606 audience would have read "equivocation of the fiend" as a direct reference to the trial of Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Provincial whose defence of mental reservation at the Gunpowder Plot trials had made "equivocation" a contemporary watchword for moral deception conducted through linguistic precision. The Porter scene's A2S3 reference to "an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale" anchors the play's broader engagement with the theme to the same political moment. Marjorie Garber's reading captures the deeper register. The Witches are the play's "uncanny" – the supernatural figures who externalise what was already internal to Macbeth, the dramatic mechanism by which his interior is given exterior articulation. Their power is sufficient to activate his destruction but not to compel it, and the difference is the space within which the tragedy works.
Key Quotes
Quote 1
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
By the pain within my thumbs
I sense that something wicked comes.
Quote Analysis: The irony here is profound. The Witches, who are literal agents of darkness, recognise Macbeth as "something wicked." This reveals the terrifying extent of his moral decay – he has become so monstrous that even the hags of the underworld acknowledge his evil nature. The line is also a piece of evidence on the Witches' epistemology: they detect rather than summon. Macbeth has come to them of his own accord, and they register his approach with the same supernatural alertness with which they detect any disturbance in the natural-moral fabric.
Quote 2
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Quote Analysis: This iconic chant exemplifies their dark power and malintent. The rhythmic repetition creates a hypnotic, ritualistic atmosphere, cementing their role as architects of chaos preparing to unleash further misery and guilt upon Scotland. The metrical signature is exact: catalectic trochaic tetrameter, the inverted metre that marks the Witches as operating in a different ontological register from the iambic-pentameter world of the human characters around them.
Quote 3
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
When will we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Quote Analysis: The Witches' very first lines – the play's opening words – are a question about their own future meetings. The structure is exact: before any human character has spoken, the Witches are already discussing their schedule, their location ("Upon the heath"), and their target ("There to meet with Macbeth"). The play's supernatural agents have organised their plans before the mortal characters have entered the scene. The metaphysical hierarchy is established at the moment the curtain rises, and the rhythmic, rhyming, trochaic pulse of the opening – the formal-poetic signature that will mark every subsequent Witch scene – is established at the same moment.
Key Takeaways
- Catalysts for Tragedy: The Witches do not commit the violence themselves but ignite the ambition that leads to Macbeth's downfall.
- Masters of Deception: They use equivocation to create a false sense of security, directly tying into the theme of appearance versus reality.
- Agents of the Unnatural: Their presence disrupts the natural order and represents the pervasive, corrupting influence of the supernatural.
- Unpunished Survivors: Unlike the mortal characters, the Witches remain untouched at the play's conclusion, symbolising the eternal and lingering nature of evil.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is the significance of the Witches' opening line?
The A1S1 chorus "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" – quoted in full in the body section above and in the Profile box – is one of the most important single lines in the play. Its function works at several distinct registers.
At the level of plot setup, the line establishes the supernatural framework within which the entire tragedy will unfold. The Witches are present before any human character has spoken. The world the audience is being introduced to is one in which supernatural agents have organised their plans before the mortal characters have entered the scene. The play's metaphysical hierarchy is being established at the moment the curtain rises.
At the level of thematic announcement, the line names the play's principal interpretive challenge. The conventional moral universe works by stable categories – fair (good, beautiful, true) is distinct from foul (evil, ugly, false), and the moral life consists in the recognition and pursuit of the former rather than the latter. The Witches' chorus announces the collapse of this stability. The play to follow will be a world in which fair and foul exchange their conventional meanings, in which the categories are unstable, and in which the moral life consists in navigating an inverted economy where the surface appearance of any moral judgment may conceal its functional opposite.
The line is therefore the play's most direct piece of writing on equivocation – the theme that runs through every subsequent piece of the supernatural framework, from the prophecies to the apparitions to Macduff's Caesarean birth.
The echo is exact. Macbeth's first line in the play, at A1S3 – "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" – repeats the Witches' formulation almost verbatim before he has met them. The argument is that Macbeth has, before the Witches' prophecies have been delivered, already entered the linguistic universe the chorus opens. The "foul and fair" categories are not merely something the Witches impose on him. They are the categories he is already operating within, and the Witches' subsequent intervention will deepen rather than introduce his susceptibility to them.
The Jacobean political-theological context makes the inversion thematically charged. James I, on whose throne the play was performed, had himself written extensively on witchcraft (the 1597 Daemonologie) and on the threat posed by figures who used equivocal language to undermine the legitimate moral order. The Witches' opening line is therefore not merely a piece of supernatural mood-setting but a substantive engagement with the king's own intellectual interests. The play's broader engagement with the Gunpowder Plot's themes of equivocation (the Porter scene at A2S3 explicitly references "an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale") connects the supernatural framework to the contemporary political register.
The "fog and filthy air" the Witches hover through is therefore not merely a piece of atmospheric description but the visual register of the moral fog that the play's subsequent action will require the audience to navigate.
How do the Witches influence Macbeth's actions?
The question is one of the play's most carefully constructed pieces of moral-philosophical ambiguity. The play's evidence supports multiple legitimate readings.
The arrangement is exact. The Witches deliver three prophecies in A1S3 (the full triplet is quoted in the Agents of Chaos and Prophecy section above). The first prophecy is a statement of present fact. The second is shortly fulfilled. The third names a future status without specifying the mechanism. Macbeth's internal response to the prophecies, an aside delivered while Banquo is speaking to Ross and Angus, is the play's first piece of evidence on what he has heard:
Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The witches told two truths,
But they're just warm-ups to the main event
Whereby I will be king.
The argument is exact. Macbeth has, within minutes of the prophecy's delivery, mentally converted "shalt be king hereafter" into "the imperial theme" – the political mechanism that will produce his accession. The Witches have not, on the play's evidence, instructed him to murder Duncan. They have not provided a plan, a weapon, or an opportunity. They have simply named the future status he will eventually occupy, and Macbeth's interpretive imagination has done the rest.
The narrowest reading of the Witches' influence is that they predict without commanding. The mechanism by which the prediction is converted into action – the dagger soliloquy, Lady Macbeth's manipulation, the murder itself – is entirely Macbeth's own. The 1904 A.C. Bradley reading argued for this position: "they did not solicit. They merely announced events." The prophecy is information, not instruction. The evidence is Banquo, who hears similarly alluring prophecies (his line will produce kings) and does not act on them in the way Macbeth does.
The deeper psychological reading complicates this. Macbeth's response to the third prophecy is not the response of a man introduced to an entirely new idea. It is the response of a man whose existing thoughts have been given external articulation. Harold Bloom's reading in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) characterised this as Macbeth's "proleptic imagination" – the capacity to imagine future possibilities so vividly that they begin to operate as present realities. The Witches do not, on this reading, create Macbeth's ambition. They activate what was already latent, and the activation is indistinguishable from creation in its effects.
The A4S1 second visit confirms the active choice. Macbeth, on the play's evidence, seeks the Witches out the second time. They do not summon him. The mechanism of his downfall is therefore not the Witches' coercion but his own deepening commitment to the framework the prophecies have provided.
Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare's Ghost Writers names this directly. The Witches operate as the dramatic externalisation of Macbeth's interior, the play's evidence that the "uncanny" – the supernatural that originates inside rather than outside the human subject – is the play's principal metaphysical concern.
The argument the play commits to is exact. The Witches' prophecies are necessary but not sufficient for the tragedy. Without them, Macbeth's ambition might never have been activated. With them, the activation is not coerced but consented to.
Why do the Witches speak in trochaic tetrameter?
The metrical question is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of formal-poetic argument in the play. The function of the Witches' distinct metre works at several distinct registers.
The fact is exact. Most of the play is in iambic pentameter – the conventional five-foot line (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM) that Shakespeare uses for serious dramatic verse throughout his career. The human characters of Macbeth – Duncan, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Banquo, Macduff, Malcolm, the thanes – speak almost entirely in this metre when they speak in verse at all.
The Witches break this pattern decisively. Their characteristic line is trochaic tetrameter – four feet of trochee (DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da), usually catalectic (the final unstressed syllable omitted), producing a chant-like rhythm that works entirely outside the human metrical economy. The A4S1 opening of the cauldron scene is the clearest single example:
Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Three times the tabby cat meowed.
Three times and once the hedgehog whined.
Each line is four trochees, catalectic, with rhyme. "THRICE the BRIND-ed CAT hath MEW'D" – DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM. The metrical signature is unmistakable.
The mechanism of the metrical contrast is twofold.
The first is the inversion. The trochee (DUM-da) is the iamb (da-DUM) reversed. The Witches' metre is therefore the formal-poetic equivalent of their thematic "fair is foul" – the inversion of the conventional poetic order in exactly the same way that they articulate the inversion of the conventional moral order. The catalexis (the missing final syllable) compounds the effect – the lines feel structurally incomplete, hanging in the air without the resolution the audience's metrical expectations would normally provide.
The second mechanism is the historical-cultural register. Trochaic tetrameter was, in Elizabethan and Jacobean popular culture, the standard metre of incantations, charms, and supernatural rhymes. The audience of 1606 would have recognised the metrical pattern not merely as different from the rest of the play but as specifically associated with magical-supernatural discourse – the chant rhythm of a folk spell, the cadence of a magical formula.
The decision Shakespeare makes is therefore to mark the Witches as operating in a different ontological register through a metrical signature the audience would have recognised. The A4S1 cauldron incantation is the play's most extended piece of evidence – the Witches' chanting around the cauldron works as a sustained departure from the human metre that has dominated the surrounding scenes.
The deeper argument is that the metrical contrast becomes infectious. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, at moments when they are most aligned with the Witches' framework, occasionally slip into trochaic rhythms themselves – the "When the hurlyburly's done, / When the battle's lost and won" feel that occasionally infiltrates Macbeth's late soliloquies.
The metrical contrast is therefore not merely a piece of formal-poetic decoration but the play's most direct piece of evidence on the porosity of the boundary between the human and the supernatural – between the conventional metre of human moral life and the inverted metre of the Witches' alternative order.
What role does equivocation play in their prophecies?
The equivocation theme is one of the play's most carefully constructed pieces of contemporary-political engagement. Its operation through the Witches' prophecies is one of Shakespeare's most pointed decisions.
The contemporary context is exact. The play was written and performed in the immediate aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot – the Catholic conspiracy to assassinate James I and the assembled Parliament by detonating gunpowder beneath the House of Lords. The plot was discovered, the conspirators executed, and the 1606 trial of Father Henry Garnet – the Jesuit Provincial of England who had heard the conspirators' confessions – became the period's principal public engagement with the Catholic doctrine of "equivocation" or "mental reservation." The doctrine, developed by Continental Jesuit moral theologians, held that under certain circumstances of duress a Catholic could swear an oath whose literal meaning was true while privately reserving the opposing functional meaning – could, that is, technically tell the truth while functionally lying. Garnet's defence of the doctrine at his trial and execution made "equivocation" a contemporary watchword for moral deception conducted through linguistic precision.
The play engages the theme directly. The A2S3 Porter scene names it. The Porter, imagining himself the keeper of hell's gate, lists his arrivals, the second of whom is "an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven." The reference is unmistakable. The Porter is naming Father Garnet directly, and the contemporary audience would have read the lines as an explicit engagement with the Gunpowder Plot trials of the preceding months.
The Witches' apparitions work by exactly this mechanism. The Third Apparition's prophecy is the play's clearest single example of equivocation in action:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Macbeth will not be trounced and overthrown till
Great Birnam wood has come to Dunsinane hill
To fight against him.
The prophecy is technically true (Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, by Malcolm's camouflage stratagem at A5S4) but functionally misleading (Macbeth reads the prophecy as guaranteeing his invulnerability because the literal event seems impossible). The A1S3 prophecy that he "shalt be king hereafter" is technically true (he will indeed become king) but functionally misleading (it does not specify the violent mechanism). The A4S1 prophecy that "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" is technically true (every man, in the natural course of things, is born of a woman) but functionally misleading (Macduff's Caesarean delivery exempts him from the literal phrasing).
The mechanism of the play's tragic resolution depends on Macbeth's discovery – quoted in the Equivocation of the Fiend body section above – that the prophecies he had read as guarantees were, in fact, equivocations. The link to the contemporary Garnet trial makes the language politically charged in a way that the audience of 1606 would have read as both timely and theologically significant.
The deeper argument is that the play's running theme of "fair is foul" is, finally, an extended exploration of equivocation as the operating logic of the moral universe Macbeth has chosen to inhabit. The Witches' linguistic strategy is exact. They do not lie. They articulate truths whose phrasing conceals their functional meaning. The play's tragedy is the discovery that this strategy is sufficient, in a moral universe where the protagonist's interpretive capacity has been compromised by ambition, to produce comprehensive destruction.
How do the Witches contrast with Lady Macbeth?
The pairing of the Witches and Lady Macbeth is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic argument in the play. The differences between them work at every level of the play's gender-supernatural economy.
The ontological contrast is exact. The Witches operate on the supernatural plane – they prophesy, they vanish, they appear at impossible times and locations, they have access to information no human character possesses, they cannot be killed within the play's framework. Lady Macbeth works entirely within the human register – she is a woman with a name, a marriage, a domestic role, a body that can become exhausted and a mind that can break under pressure. The difference establishes that the play is operating with two distinct registers of female agency, each with its own characteristic mechanisms for producing the tragedy.
The functional contrast works through their relationship to Macbeth's psychology. The Witches activate his pre-existing ambition through prophecy. They name the future status he will occupy and rely on his interpretive capacity to convert the naming into action. Lady Macbeth converts the activated ambition into actual murder through manipulation. Her A1S7 "When you durst do it, then you were a man" speech is the play's most direct piece of evidence on the mechanism by which Macbeth's hesitation is overridden. The arrangement is therefore one of sequential collaboration. The Witches prepare the ground. Lady Macbeth completes the conversion. Neither alone would, on the play's evidence, have been sufficient.
The temporal arrangement confirms the sequence. The A1S3 prophecies precede the A1S5 letter, which precedes Lady Macbeth's invocation of "spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts" – her own appeal to the supernatural register the Witches inhabit. The "unsex me here" speech works as Lady Macbeth's deliberate attempt to align herself with the Witches' framework. She invokes their kind of power. She requests their kind of agency. She presents herself as a figure in transition from the human register to the supernatural one.
The irony is that the attempt is not, finally, successful. Lady Macbeth retains her human capacities (the conscience that returns in A5S1, the body that breaks down, the mind that fails). The Witches retain theirs. The boundary between the registers is, despite Lady Macbeth's invocation, not permeable.
The deeper psychoanalytic reading complicates the pairing. Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers argues that the Witches and Lady Macbeth are linked as figures of female threat to male autonomy. Both, on her reading, represent the maternal-feminine register the play's male characters are attempting to escape. The Witches' bearded ambiguity (Banquo's "You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so") and Lady Macbeth's "unsex me" invocation work, on Adelman's reading, as parallel destabilisations of the conventional gender categories. The play's broader argument – that the male characters' downfall comes through their failure to escape the female-supernatural register the Witches and Lady Macbeth represent – depends on the pairing rather than on either figure alone.
The page-level reading is therefore correct as far as it goes. The Witches and Lady Macbeth occupy different ontological registers and work by different mechanisms. The deeper argument is that the registers are, in the play's broader gender economy, complementary aspects of a single threat to the male autonomy Macbeth and the other male characters are unsuccessfully trying to construct.
Are the Witches presented as completely powerful?
The question of the Witches' actual power works at several distinct registers in the play. The answer the text supports is more limited than the surface drama might suggest.
The A1S3 opening of the Witches' first scene with Macbeth and Banquo includes a substantial piece of evidence on their actual capacities. The First Witch describes her recent encounter with a sailor's wife who has refused to share her chestnuts:
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o'th'Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do...
I'll drain him dry as hay...
He shall live a man forbid...
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Her husband is Aleppo bound, The Tiger's captain.
Towards him, in a sieve I'll sail,
And like a rat without a tail,
I'll do a load of things to him...
I'll stop him drinking, dry as hay...
He'll live transfixed under my curse...
Though his boat cannot be lost,
It will be in a tempest tossed.
The argument is exact. The First Witch can torment the sailor – she can deprive him of sleep, drain his vitality, harass him with bad weather – but she cannot, on the play's evidence, actually destroy his ship. "Though his bark cannot be lost" names the limit on the Witches' power. They can torment but not directly kill. They can manipulate the conditions of human action but not the actions themselves. They can predict the future but cannot, on the play's evidence, determine it.
The deeper theological context confirms the limit. King James I's 1597 treatise Daemonologie – the king's own examination of witchcraft, written when he was still James VI of Scotland and incorporating his investigations into the North Berwick witch trials of the 1590s – held that witches operated by exploiting pre-existing human dispositions rather than by creating new ones. The witch's power was always exercised through human agency. The human's moral responsibility for the consequent action was not, in James's theological framework, mitigated by the witch's involvement. The play's broader Jacobean theological context therefore explicitly limited the Witches' power in a way the play's dramatic surface might initially obscure.
The argument the play commits to depends on the limit. If the Witches had complete power, Macbeth's downfall would be coerced rather than chosen, and the tragic structure – which depends on the protagonist's moral responsibility for his own actions – would collapse. The play's evidence is that Banquo, hearing the same prophecies, makes different choices. That Macbeth, in A1S7, can still refuse the murder when his conscience surfaces. That the dagger of A2S1 may be either supernatural revelation or psychological projection. That the choice to murder Duncan is, ultimately, Macbeth's own.
The Witches work as catalysts rather than causes – as the mechanism by which Macbeth's pre-existing susceptibilities are activated, but not as the agents whose direct power determines his actions. Marjorie Garber's reading of the play's "uncanny" register names this exactly. The Witches are the figures who externalise what was already internal, the dramatic mechanism by which Macbeth's interior is given exterior articulation. Their power is real but limited, and the limit is the condition that preserves the play's tragic register.
The deeper question the play raises – whether the limit on the Witches' direct power makes them more or less morally responsible for the tragedy they catalyse – the play leaves open. What it commits to is one fact. The Witches are sufficient to activate the destruction but not to compel it, and the difference is the space within which Macbeth's tragedy works.
How does Banquo's reaction to the Witches differ from Macbeth's?
The A1S3 contrast between Banquo's and Macbeth's responses to the Witches is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed pieces of argument. The differences work at every level of the scene's dramatic arrangement.
The opening contrast is exact. Both men enter the heath together. Both encounter the Witches simultaneously. Both hear the prophecies addressed to each of them. Macbeth's first reaction, on the play's evidence, is silence – Banquo has to observe his companion's frozen response and ask why he "start[s] and seem[s] to fear / Things that do sound so fair." Banquo's first reaction is interrogation. He asks the Witches directly what they are ("What are these / So wither'd and so wild in their attire"), challenges their reality ("Live you? or are you aught / That man may question?"), and demands they speak to him as well:
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you can see what happens in the future
And know which crops will grow, and which will not,
Then speak to me, as I won't beg, nor fear,
Your favours, nor your hate.
The difference is unmistakable. Macbeth is captivated by the Witches. Banquo interrogates them.
The post-prophecy contrast deepens the argument. Macbeth, having heard the third prophecy, begins almost immediately the soliloquy that contemplates "horrid image[s]" of murder. His mind has, within fifty lines, moved from the prophecy's announcement to the imagination of the violent act required to fulfill it. Banquo's response is theological framing. "But 'tis strange: / And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray's / In deepest consequence."
The argument is exact. Banquo can identify what the Witches are ("instruments of darkness") and can name their characteristic mode of operation (truths-used-to-betray) at the moment Macbeth is most susceptible to the prophecy that has been delivered.
The contrast works as the play's clearest piece of evidence that the Witches' words do not, in themselves, coerce the response. Macbeth's susceptibility was pre-existing. Banquo's interpretive resistance was equally pre-existing. The prophecies activated the susceptibility in one case and were correctly assessed by the resistance in the other.
Marjorie Garber's reading captures the function. The Witches work as agents of recognition rather than as agents of fate, and the recognition they enable can be received in different ways by different recipients. Banquo's "free will" is therefore not the absence of temptation but the presence of moral discipline. Macbeth's "free will" is not the absence of supernatural influence but the absence of similar discipline.
The deeper complication, which A.C. Bradley's 1904 reading developed substantively, is that the contrast does not, finally, survive the play. Banquo's initial interpretive resistance is, by A3S1, eroded. His soliloquy admits that he suspects Macbeth has "play'dst most foully for't" and yet says nothing, hoping the prophecy regarding his own descendants will be fulfilled through the same supernatural mechanism. Bradley's exact line – "we find that he has yielded to evil" – names the arc. The Banquo who challenges the Witches in A1S3 is not, finally, the Banquo who acquiesces in Macbeth's accession by A2S3 and remains silent through A3S1.
The contrast that opens the play is therefore a contrast in degree rather than in kind. Banquo's resistance is more durable than Macbeth's, but it is not, finally, immune to the same forces that destroy his companion. The function of the contrast is to establish that the Witches' prophecies do not coerce. The deeper argument is that the prophecies' eventual reach is, given sufficient time and sufficient ambition, comprehensive.
