► "Three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world".
► That the three weird sisters should be seen as ambiguous figures, never actually calling themselves 'witches'.
► The Three Witches represent evil, darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents and witnesses.
► In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries.
(During Shakespeare's daythe early 1482-1567s until 1616.)
► The concept of the Three Witches themselves may have been influenced by an Old Norse skaldic poem, in which twelve valkyries weave and choose who is to be slain at the Battle of Clontarf (fought outside Dublin in 1014).
► They appear to have a warped sense of morality, deeming seemingly terrible acts to be moral, kind or right, such as helping one another to ruin the journey of a sailor.
► Their presence communicates treason and impending doom.
Witches were seen as worse than rebels, "the most notorious traitor and rebel that can be".
► They were not only political traitors, but spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs from them comes from their ability to straddle the play's borders between reality and the supernatural.
► They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real world.
► In William Shakespeare's play Macbeth (c. 1603–1607).
The witches' lines in the first act：
" Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air "
are often said to set the tone for the remainder of the play by establishing a sense of moral confusion. Indeed, the play is filled with situations in which evil is depicted as good, while good is rendered evil. The line "Double, double toil and trouble," (often sensationalised to a point that it loses meaning), communicates the witches' intent clearly: they seek only to increase trouble for the mortals around them.
Though the witches do not directly tell, they use a subtle form of temptation when they inform that he is destined. By placing this thought in his mind, they effectively guide him on the path to his own destruction. This follows the pattern of temptation attributed to the Devil in the contemporary imagination: the Devil was believed to be a thought in a person's mind, which he or she might either indulge or reject.
❖ ( Photo by The Three Witches in Orson Welles' controversial 1948 film adaptation. ) - Three gowned figures with long, grey hair hold forked sticks.
► Insertions by Davenant：
In a version of Macbeth by William Davenant (1606–1668) a scene was added in which the witches tell Macduff and his wife of their future as well as several lines for the two before Macbeth's entrance in act 4. Most of these lines were taken directly from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch. David Garrick kept these added scenes in his eighteenth-century version.
● (Fiske, Roger (April 1964). "The Macbeth music". Music & Letters. 45 (2): 114–125.)
► Walpole's political satire：
Horace Walpole created a parody of Macbeth in 1742 entitled The Dear Witches in response to political problems of his time. The witches in his play are played by three everyday women who manipulate political events in England through marriage and patronage, and manipulate elections to have Macbeth made Treasurer and Earl of Bath. In the final scene, the witches gather around a cauldron and chant "Double, double, Toil and Trouble / parties burn and Nonsense bubble." Into their concoction they throw such things as "Judgment of a Beardless Youth" and "Liver of a Renegade". The entire play is a commentary on the political corruption and irrationality surrounding the period.
● (Alexander, Catherine M.S. (May 1998). "The Dear Witches: Horace Walpole's Macbeth". The Review of English Studies. 49 (194): 131–144.)
► Welles' "voodoo Macbeth"：
Orson Welles' stage production of Macbeth sets the play in Haiti, and casts the witches as voodoo priestesses. As with earlier versions, the women are bystanders to the murder of Banquo, as well as Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene. Their role in each of these scenes suggests they were behind Macbeth's fall in a more direct way than Shakespeare's original portrays. The witches encroach further and further into his domain as the play progresses, appearing in the forest in the first scene and in the castle itself by the end. Directors often have difficulty keeping the witches from being exaggerated and overly-sensational.
● (McCloskey, Susan (January 1985). "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, and the 'voodoo' Macbeth". Shakespeare Quarterly. 36 (4): 406–416.)
► Marowitz's and Ionesco's witches' secret identities：
Charles Marowitz created A Macbeth in 1969, a streamlined version of the play which requires only eleven actors. The production strongly suggests that Lady Macbeth is in league with the witches. One scene shows her leading the three to a firelight incantation.
In Eugène Ionesco's satirical version of the play Macbett (1972), one of the witches removes a costume to reveal that she is, in fact, Lady Duncan, and wants to be Macbeth's mistress. Once Macbeth is King and they are married, however, she abandons him, revealing that she was not Lady Duncan all along, but a witch. The real Lady Duncan appears and denounces Macbeth as a traitor.
● (Rozett, Martha (1994). Talking Back to Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press. pp. 127–131.)
► Felipe's adaption to Spanish：
The Spanish poet and playwright León Felipe wrote a version of Shakespeare's play in Spanish which significantly changes the witches' role, especially in the final scene. After Macbeth's death, the Three Witches reappear in the midst of wind and storm, which they have been associated with throughout the play, to claim his corpse. They carry it to a ravine and shout, "Macbeth! Macbeth!
Macbeth! / We have an appointment with you in Hell!"
In the play, they also connect themselves to a painting by Francisco Goya called Volaverunt, in which three mysterious figures are flying through the air and supporting a more discernible royal female figure.
● (Kliman, Bernice; Santos, Rick (2005). Latin American Shakespeares. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 103–105.)
❖ The Three Witches originated as the hosts of The Witching Hour, and were introduced as human witches, not supernatural deities. who established them as a single supernatural entity with three aspects and a much more dangerous, elemental nature. they are listed there as separate characters.
The Erinyes。The Moirai。Hecate, Artemis, Luna。Hecate Trioditus。The Parcae of Rome。Juventas the virgin, Juno the mother, Minerva the wise crone。The Wyrd Sisters。Morrigan (Nehman, Badb, Macha)。Morgaine Le Fay。Mut (Maat, Hathor, Nekhbet).
The Kindly Ones, known by many other names, is a triad of witches：
Cynthia, Mildred and Mordred.
❖ The Hecateae are summoned with several items, namely: honey, a snake, a gallows, and a black she-lamb at a crossroads under a crescent moon at midnight.
❖ Not much is known of the mysterious triad (in actuality, one being with three aspects) known as the Kindly Ones or the Three Witches. In fact, the three have many different forms. One form, known as the Hecateae, is a trio of three spirits who can foretell the future and see where lost people or things are located. Another incarnation is as the Kindly Ones, who bring down their wrath upon those who have spilled family blood.
Individually, the three personas of the Kindly Ones are commonly known by the names Cynthia, Mildred and Mordred (or Morgan). Regardless of incarnation, they manifest as three women of different ages: young Cynthia, middle-aged Mildred, and elderly Mordred. In their common guise as the Three Witches, the Kindly Ones are storytellers who have often associated with Cain and Abel. They often held competitions to see which of the three was the best storyteller, forcing unlucky mortals to judge.
♪ Verdi at least fifteen operas have been based on Macbeth,[25] but only one is regularly performed today. This is Macbeth, composed by Giuseppe Verdi to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and premièred in Florence in 1847. In the opera, the Three Witches became a chorus of at least eighteen singers, divided into three groups. Each group enters separately at the start of the opera for the scene with Macbeth and Banquo; after the men's departure, they have a chorus of triumph which does not derive from Shakespeare. They reappear in act 3, when they conjure up the three apparitions and the procession of kings. When Verdi revised the opera for performance in Paris in 1865, he added a ballet (rarely performed nowadays) to this scene. In it, Hecate, a non-dancing character, mimes instructions to the witches before a final dance and Macbeth's arrival.[26]
♪ In Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas with libretto by Nahum Tate, the Sorceress addresses the two Enchantresses as "Wayward Sisters," identifying the three of them with the fates, as well as with the malevolent witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth.[27]
► In Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897, three vampire women who live within in Dracula's castle are often dubbed the "Weird Sisters" by Johnathan Harker and van Helsing, though it's unknown if Bram Stoker intended them to be intentionally quoting Shakespeare. Most media these days just refer to them as the Brides of Dracula, likely to differentiate the characters.
Drawings contained in "Holinshed's Chronicles", one of the sources Shakespeare used when creating the characters, portray them as members of the upper class. They are wearing elaborate dresses and hairstyles and appear to be noblewomen as Macbeth and Banquo approach. Shakespeare seems to have diverted quite a bit from this image, making the witches (as Banquo says)：
"withered, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth ...
each at once her choppy fingers laying
upon her skinny lips. You should be women,
and yet your beards forbid me to interpret
["Witches: Those well-dressed women are witches?". Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Retrieved 10 May 2008.]
[Shakespeare, W. The Tragedy of Macbeth. act 1, scene 3, lines 39–47.]
The Three Witches of Macbeth have inspired several painters over the years who have sought to capture the supernatural darkness surrounding Macbeth's encounters with them.
For example, by the eighteenth century, belief in witches had waned in the United Kingdom. Such things were thought to be the simple stories of foreigners, farmers, and superstitious Catholics.
However art depicting supernatural subjects was very popular.
Holinshed's Chronicles, also known as Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, is a collaborative work published in several volumes and two editions, the first edition in 1577, and the second in 1587. It was a large, comprehensive description of British history published in three volumes (England, Scotland and Ireland).
The Chronicles have been a source of interest because of their extensive links to William Shakespeare's history plays, as well as King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline. Recent studies of the Chronicles have focused on an inter-disciplinary approach; numerous literary scholars have studied the traditional historiographical materials through a literary lens, with a focus on how contemporary men and women would have read historical texts.[Richard, Helgerson (2000). Forms of nationhood : the Elizabethan writing of England. Univ. of Chicago Press.]
The Chronicles would have been a primary source for many other literary writers of the Renaissance such as Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and George Daniel.["Holinshed's Chronicles, 1577". The British Library. Retrieved 30 January 2019.]
(was a Scottish painter known for Biblical and literary scenes.)
John Runciman, as one of the first artists to use Shakespearean characters in his work, created an ink-on-paper drawing entitled The Three Witches in 1767–68. In it, three ancient figures are shown in close consultation, their heads together and their bodies unshown.
Runciman's brother created another drawing of the witches called The Witches show Macbeth The Apparitions painted circa 1771–1772, portraying Macbeth's reaction to the power of the witches' conjured vision. Both brothers' work influenced many later artists by removing the characters from the familiar theatrical setting and placing them in the world of the story.
(was a Swiss painter, draughtsman and writer on art.)
Henry Fuseli "AR" would later create one of the more famous portrayals of the Three Witches in 1783, entitled The Weird Sisters or The Three Witches. In it, the witches are lined up and dramatically pointing at something all at once, their faces in profile. This painting was parodied by James Gillray in 1791 in Weird Sisters; Ministers of Darkness; Minions of the Moon. Three figures are lined up with their faces in profile in a way similar to Fuseli's painting. However, the three figures are recognisable as Lord Dundas (the home secretary at the time), William Pitt (prime minister), and Lord Thurlow (Lord Chancellor). The three of them are facing a moon, which contains the profiled faces of George III and Queen Charlotte. The drawing is intended to highlight the insanity of King George and the unusual alliance of the three politicians.
["Room 5: Witches and apparitions" (Museum exhibit). Gothic nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the romantic imagination. Tate Britain Art Museum. Archived from the original on 30 April 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2008.]
Fuseli created two other works depicting the Three Witches for a Dublin art gallery in 1794. The first, entitled Macbeth, Banquo and the Three Witches was a frustration for him. His earlier paintings of Shakespearean scenes had been done on horizontal canvases, giving the viewer a picture of the scene that was similar to what would have been seen on stage. Woodmason requested vertical paintings, shrinking the space Fuseli had to work with. In this particular painting he uses lightning and other dramatic effects to separated Macbeth and Banquo from the witches more clearly and communicate how unnatural their meeting is. Macbeth and Banquo are both visibly terrified, while the witches are confidently perched atop a mound. Silhouettes of the victorious army of Macbeth can be seen celebrating in the background, but lack of space necessitates the removal of the barren, open landscape seen in Fuseli's earlier paintings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery of the same scene.
Fuseli's other Macbeth Woodmason painting Macbeth and the Armed Head depicts a later scene in which Macbeth is shown MacDuff and warned to be wary of him. Fuseli evidently intended the two paintings to be juxtaposed. He said, "when Macbeth meets with the witches on the heath, it is terrible, because he did not expect the supernatural visitation; but when he goes to the cave to ascertain his fate, it is no longer a subject of terror." Fuseli chose to make MacDuff a near-likeness of Macbeth himself, and considered the painting one of his most poetic in that sense, asking,
"'What would be a greater object of terror to you if, some night on going home, you were to find yourself sitting at your own table ... would not this make a powerful impression on your mind?"
[ Hamlyn, Robin (August 1978). "An Irish Shakespeare gallery". The Burlington Magazine. Vol. 120, no. 905. pp. 515–529. ]
(was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator.)
● Come and Go, a short play written in 1965 by Samuel Beckett, recalls the Three Witches. The play features only three characters, all women, named " Flo ", " Vi ", and " Ru ".
The opening line： “ When did we three last meet？ ”
[Beckett, S. (1984). " Come and Go ". Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. London, UK：Faber and Faber. p. 196.]
Recalls the： “ When shall we three meet again？ ”
of Macbeth act 1, sc 1. [Beckett, S. (2006). Roche, A. (ed.). Samuel Beckett：The Great Plays after Godot / Samuel Beckett - 100 Years. Dublin, IE：New Island. p. 69.]
The Third Witch, a 2001 novel written by Rebecca Reisert, tells the story of the play through the eyes of a young girl named Gilly - one of the witches. Gilly seeks Macbeth's death out of revenge for killing her father. [Reisert, Rebecca (2001). The Third Witch: A novel. New York, NY：Washington Square Press.]
► Joanne Rowling / J. K. Rowling (Robert Galbraith)
J. K. Rowling has cited the Three Witches as an influence in her Harry Potter series. In an interview with The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet, when asked, "What if [Voldemort] never heard the prophecy？", she said, "It's the 'Macbeth' idea. I absolutely adore 'Macbeth'. It is possibly my favourite Shakespeare play. And that's the question isn't it？ If Macbeth hadn't met the witches, would he have killed Duncan？ Would any of it have happened？ Is it fated or did he make it happen? I believe he made it happen." ["The Leaky Cauldron and MN interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling". The Leaky Cauldron. 28 July 2007. Retrieved 8 February 2022.]
On her website, she referred to Macbeth again in discussing the prophecy: "the prophecy (like the one the witches make to Macbeth, if anyone has read the play of the same name) becomes the catalyst for a situation that would never have occurred if it had not been made." ["What is the significance of Neville being the other boy to whom the prophecy might have referred？". J.K.Rowling official site. Archived from the original on 5 February 2012. Retrieved 26 June 2007.]
The soundtrack to the third Harry Potter film features a song by John Williams called "Double Trouble", a reference to the witches' line, "Double double, toil and trouble". The lyrics were adapted from the Three Witches' spell in the play. More playfully, Rowling also invented a musical band popular in the Wizarding world called The Weird Sisters that appears in passing in several books in the series as well as the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Orson Welles created a film version of the play in 1948, sometimes called the Übermensch Macbeth, which altered the witches' roles by having them create a voodoo doll of Macbeth in the first scene. Critics take this as a sign that they control his actions completely throughout the film. Their voices are heard, but their faces are never seen, and they carry forked staves as dark parallels to the Celtic cross. Welles' voiceover in the prologue calls them "agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic". At the end of the film, when their work with Macbeth is finished, they cut off the head of his voodoo doll. ❖ ( Photo by The Three Witches in Orson Welles' controversial 1948 film adaptation. ) - Three gowned figures with long, grey hair hold forked sticks.
► 黒澤 明 (くろさわ あきら / Kurosawa)：
Throne of Blood, a Japanese version filmed in 1958 by Akira Kurosawa, replaces the Three Witches with the Forest Spirit, an old hag who sits at her spinning wheel, symbolically entrapping Macbeth's equivalent, Washizu, in the web of his own ambition. She lives outside "The Castle of the Spider's Web", another reference to Macbeth's entanglement in her trap.[Jackson, Russell (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 129-131.] Behind her hut, Washizu finds piles of rotting bones. The hag, the spinning wheel, and the piles of bones are direct references to the Noh play Adachigahara (also called Kurozuka), one of many artistic elements Kurosawa borrowed from Noh theatre for the film.
► Raymond Roman Thierry Polański：
Roman Polanski's 1971 film version of Macbeth contained many parallels to his personal life in its graphic and violent depictions. His wife Sharon Tate had been murdered two years earlier by Charles Manson and three women. Many critics saw this as a clear parallel to Macbeth's murders at the urging of the Three Witches within the film.
In Joel Coen's 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth, British actress Kathryn Hunter plays all three witches. Though mostly depicted as three personalities inside a single body, there are several instances where the witch divides into three distinct figures. Hunter worked extensively with Coen to develop a physicality for the witches, describing them as intermediate forms, in between human women and crows (crows are also frequently shown flying through scenes in the film). (The Tragedy of Macbeth is a 2021 American historical thriller film written, directed and produced by Joel Coen, based on the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. It is the first film directed by one of the Coen brothers without the other's involvement.)
In ancient Roman religion and myth, the Parcae (singular, Parca) were the female personifications of destiny who directed the lives (and deaths) of humans and gods. They are often called the Fates in English, and their Greek equivalent were the Moirai. They did not control a person's actions except when they are born, when they die, and how much they suffer.
The Parcae controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death. Even the gods feared them, and by some sources Jupiter was also subject to their power.
► The names of the three Parcae are：
● Nona (Greek：Equivalent Clotho),
who spun the thread of life from her distaff onto her spindle;
● Decima (Greek：Lachesis),
who measured the thread of life with her rod;
who cut the thread of life and chose the manner of a person's death.
► The earliest extant documents referencing these deities are three small stelae (cippi) found near ancient Lavinium shortly after World War II. They bear the inscription：
The names of two of the three Roman Parcae are recorded
(Neuna = Nona, Maurtia = Morta)
and connected to the concept of fata.
► Nona was supposed to determine a person's lifespan on the dies lustricus, that is, the day on which the name of the child was chosen, which occurred on the ninth day from birth for a male and the eighth for a female.
► The recurrence of the nundinae was also considered a dies festus and as such nefas by some Roman scholars as Julius Caesar and Cornelius Labeo, because on it the flaminica dialis offered the sacrifice of a goat to Jupiter in the Regia.
► One of the sources for the Parcae is Metamorphoses by Ovid,
II 654, V 532, VIII 452, XV 781.
Another source is Aeneid by Virgil, in the opening of Book I.
► According to some treatments, the Parcae seem to be more powerful than many, or perhaps even all, of the gods：
" The power of the Parcae was great and extensive. Some suppose that they were subjected to none of the gods but Jupiter; while others support that even Jupiter himself was obedient to their commands; and indeed we see the father of the gods, in Homer's Iliad, unwilling to see Patroclus perish, yet obliged, by the superior power of the Fates, to abandon him to his destiny. "
Similarly："We have the clearest evidence of the poet for it, that whatever happens to us is under the influence of the Parcae. Jupiter himself can not interfere to save his son Sarpedon. "
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❖ ( Photo by The Three Witches in Orson Welles' controversial 1948 film adaptation. ) - Three gowned figures with long, grey hair hold forked sticks.
