The Witches
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Agents of chaos and prophecy; the supernatural catalysts for the tragedy, often called the Weird Sisters.
- 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, thou 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. 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.
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 a 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 most lethal of them, the crowned Child’s guarantee, names the impossible condition Macbeth will read as proof of his invincibility.
Original
Macbeth shall never vanquished 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 escalation in supernatural register matches the escalation in equivocal cunning. 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 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 prophecy is technically true – a wood does not, in the natural course, walk – but its phrasing conceals its functional meaning, since Malcolm’s camouflage stratagem at A5S4 produces the moving forest the literal event seemed to forbid.
"Macbeth is the play of the uncanny – the uncanniest in the canon."
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 1987
Key Quotes
Quote 1By 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.
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.
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?
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" is one of the most important single lines in the play, and 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.
At the level of thematic announcement, the line names the play’s principal interpretive challenge. The conventional moral universe works by stable categories – fair is distinct from foul, and the moral life consists in pursuing the former. 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, and in which the surface of any moral judgment may conceal its functional opposite.
The echo is exact. Macbeth’s first line, at A1S3 – "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" – repeats the Witches’ formulation almost verbatim before he has met them. He has, before any prophecy is 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’ 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 in the 1597 Daemonologie and on the threat posed by figures who used equivocal language to undermine the legitimate moral order. 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.
How do the Witches influence Macbeth’s actions?
The question is one of the play’s most carefully constructed pieces of moral-philosophical ambiguity, and the text supports more than one legitimate reading.
The Witches deliver three prophecies in A1S3. The first 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, 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.
(Macbeth, 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.
Within minutes of the prophecy’s delivery, Macbeth has mentally converted "shalt be king hereafter" into "the imperial theme" – the political mechanism that will produce his accession. The Witches have not instructed him to murder Duncan, provided a plan, or supplied a weapon. They have simply named the future status he will eventually occupy, and Macbeth’s interpretive imagination has done the rest.
The narrowest reading is that they predict without commanding. A. C. Bradley’s 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy argued this position: "they did not solicit. They merely announced events." The evidence is Banquo, who hears similarly alluring prophecies and does not act on them as Macbeth does. The deeper psychological reading complicates this: Macbeth’s response is not that of a man introduced to a new idea but of a man whose existing thoughts have been given external articulation. Harold Bloom’s 1998 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human characterised this as Macbeth’s "proleptic imagination" – the capacity to imagine future possibilities so vividly that they begin to operate as present realities. Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers names the same function: the Witches operate as the dramatic externalisation of Macbeth’s interior. The prophecies are necessary but not sufficient for the tragedy. Without them, the ambition might never have been activated; with them, the activation is not coerced but consented to.
Why do the Witches speak in trochaic tetrameter?
Most of the play is in iambic pentameter – the five-foot line (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM) Shakespeare uses for serious dramatic verse. The human characters speak almost entirely in this metre. The Witches break the pattern decisively. Their characteristic line is trochaic tetrameter – four feet of trochee (DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da), usually catalectic, with the final unstressed syllable omitted, producing a chant-like rhythm that works outside the human metrical economy.
Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed.
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 MEWED." The mechanism of the contrast is twofold. The first is inversion: the trochee (DUM-da) is the iamb (da-DUM) reversed, so the Witches’ metre is 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 compounds the effect, leaving the lines structurally incomplete, hanging in the air without the resolution metrical expectation 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 pattern as specifically associated with magical discourse – the chant rhythm of a folk spell. The metrical contrast is therefore not decoration but the play’s most direct evidence of 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 play was written and performed in the immediate aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. 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 idea that under duress one could swear an oath whose literal meaning was true while privately reserving the opposing functional meaning. The A2S3 Porter scene names it directly: the Porter, imagining himself the keeper of hell’s gate, admits "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 Witches’ apparitions work by exactly this mechanism. The Birnam Wood prophecy, quoted in the body section above, is technically true but functionally misleading: the wood does come to Dunsinane, by Malcolm’s camouflage stratagem at A5S4, yet Macbeth reads it as a guarantee of invulnerability because the literal event seems impossible. The A1S3 prophecy that he "shalt be king hereafter" is true but conceals the violent mechanism, and the A4S1 prophecy that "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" is true of every man born in the natural course, yet Macduff’s Caesarean delivery exempts him from the literal phrasing. The play’s tragic resolution depends on Macbeth’s late discovery, in A5S5, that the prophecies he had read as guarantees were in fact equivocations:
I pull in resolution, and begin
To doubt the equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth…
(Macbeth, 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 Witches’ linguistic strategy is exact. They do not lie; they articulate truths whose phrasing conceals their functional meaning. 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, and the link to the Garnet trial would have read to the audience of 1606 as both timely and theologically significant.
How does Banquo’s reaction to the Witches differ from Macbeth’s?
Both men enter the heath together, encounter the Witches simultaneously, and hear the prophecies addressed to each of them. Their responses could not be more different. Macbeth’s first reaction 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, challenges their reality, 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.
(Banquo, 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.
Macbeth is captivated by the Witches; Banquo interrogates them. The post-prophecy contrast deepens the argument. Macbeth begins almost immediately the soliloquy that contemplates "horrid image[s]" of murder, while Banquo’s response is theological framing – he names the Witches as "instruments of darkness" who "tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence." The contrast is the play’s clearest 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 deeper complication, which A. C. Bradley’s 1904 reading developed, is that the contrast does not, finally, survive the play. By A3S1 Banquo’s resistance has eroded: his soliloquy admits he suspects Macbeth has "play’dst most foully for’t," yet he says nothing, hoping the prophecy regarding his own descendants will be fulfilled. The contrast that opens the play is therefore one of degree rather than kind. Banquo’s resistance is more durable than Macbeth’s, but it is not immune to the same forces, and the function of the contrast is to establish that the Witches’ prophecies do not coerce – their eventual reach, given sufficient time and sufficient ambition, is comprehensive.
