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The Witches in Macbeth — character analysis

Macbeth · William Shakespeare · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. 'Imperfect speakers' — the play's engine of ambiguity

The Weird Sisters open the play in thunder and never explain themselves. They prophesy but do not command; they answer questions with riddles and vanish 'into the air'. Their power over the play is linguistic: paradox ('fair is foul'), equivocation (truths that function as lies), and rhythm (trochaic chant against the play's iambic norm) — they speak a different music, and Macbeth learns the tune. 'Weird' derives from Old English 'wyrd', fate — but everything fated in the play arrives through human hands, and Shakespeare is scrupulous about the gap.

This study ends with William Shakespeare. Build your reading of The Witches in Macbeth, teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare.

How The Witches develops

Their three appearances, and what each does

Act 1: they meet Macbeth 'upon the heath' with three titles — Glamis (true), Cawdor (in progress), 'King hereafter' (the hook) — and Banquo's paradoxes ('Lesser than Macbeth, and greater'). Act 4: sought out this time, they stage the apparitions — the armed head, the bloody child ('none of woman born'), the crowned child with a tree — and the show of Banquo's kings; the riddling now on a grand scale. Act 5 belongs to their consequences: every riddle unknots (Birnam Wood marches as camouflage; Macduff was 'untimely ripp'd'), and Macbeth names the mechanism when Birnam Wood begins to move (5.5) — 'th' equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth' — then, facing Macduff, curses the 'juggling fiends' that 'palter with us in a double sense'.

equivocation: Saying what is technically true in a way designed to deceive. A charged word in 1606: at the trial of Father Henry Garnet after the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation — misleading answers under oath — was publicly infamous, and the Porter's 'equivocator' jokes wink straight at it. The witches are equivocation personified: every prophecy is kept to the letter and fatal in the keeping.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” — The Witches, Act 1 Scene 1

Seven words that program the entire play: value inverted, boundaries dissolved, weather as morality. The trochaic chant (stress-unstress: 'FAIR is FOUL') runs against the play's iambic heartbeat — the witches are metrically alien, and when Macbeth's first line echoes their words, his metre stays human while his meaning has already crossed over.

Methods: chiasmus/paradox · trochaic metre · motif inauguration

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds the Witches

The Witches speak a different metre from every other character: trochaic tetrameter, often catalectic — 'DOUble, DOUble, TOIL and TROUble' — the stress falling first, often with the final weak syllable dropped ('FAIR is FOUL and FOUL is FAIR'). Against the court's iambic pentameter (unstressed–stressed, ten syllables), their verse is inverted and truncated: rhythm itself marks them as nature reversed. When Macbeth's first line — 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen' — echoes their 'Fair is foul', the infection is verbal before it is moral: he is echoing words he has never heard, even though his metre stays iambic and human.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” — The Witches, Act 1 Scene 1

Chiasmus collapses the play's moral vocabulary in its opening seconds: if fair and foul are interchangeable, every later judgement ('worthy Cawdor', 'honest trifles') is booby-trapped. The couplet's rhyme ('fair'/'air') seals the inversion like a spell, and the fricative alliteration (foul/fog/filthy) thickens the air the whole play breathes. Twelve lines into the tragedy, its epistemology is already broken — that is why scene 1 exists.

Methods: Chiasmus · Paradox · Incantatory rhyme · Alliteration

Their power is grammatical restraint: the 1.3 prophecies contain no imperatives — 'shalt be king hereafter' commands nothing (by 4.1 the apparitions do give orders: 'Be bloody, bold, and resolute'). They state futures and let Macbeth supply the verbs ('If it were done…'). Structurally they frame the play (scenes 1.1, 1.3, 3.5, 4.1) but never enter a human dwelling: the evil visits the threshold, and is invited in.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: The Witches control Macbeth's fate and represent the Jacobean fear of witchcraft.

Write: The play is constructed so that causation is undecidable: every prophecy could be supernatural knowledge or lucky malice; every crime requires Macbeth's own 'vaulting ambition' as the engine. Shakespeare stages the period's live controversy — Daemonologie's real witches versus Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) — as a structural ambiguity: the tragedy works identically whether the Witches are agents or mirrors, which is the most frightening design available.

Context in depth: the worlds behind the Witches

James I, Daemonologie and North Berwick. James I published Daemonologie (1597) after personally examining the North Berwick witches (1590–91), accused of raising storms against his bride's fleet — which is why the First Witch's revenge on a sailor ('Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tost') is court flattery in miniature: storm-raising against ships was the king's own case file. The 1604 Witchcraft Act made spirit-invocation capital. On stage in 1606, the Witches were not folklore; they were current affairs.

The sceptical countercurrent. Belief was not monolithic: Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) argued 'witches' were the deluded, the defamed and the poor — and James ordered it answered. Shakespeare's design accommodates both audiences: believers see Satan's instruments; sceptics see three old women exploiting a soldier's vanity. The play's refusal to arbitrate is the period's own argument, dramatised.

Fate's classical ancestry. The 'weird sisters' descend from wyrd — Old English fate — and behind them stand the three Parcae/Moirai who spin, measure and cut life's thread, and the prophetic riddles of Greek tragedy: like the Delphic oracle that destroyed Oedipus, they tell truths shaped to be misread. One clause on the oracle tradition lets you argue Macbeth belongs to a two-thousand-year genre of men destroyed by accurate prophecy — the tragedy of interpretation, not information.

Relationships

  • Macbeth — They greet him with his desires and are never needed again — he seeks THEM in Act 4. The relationship's direction of travel is the moral diagnosis.
  • Banquo — Same stage, same offer, no purchase: 'Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear'. They tell him the truth too — the play's fairness is exact.
  • Hecate (if played) — The Hecate scenes (likely later additions by Middleton — say 'widely considered') reframe the sisters as employees of a goddess; most productions cut them, restoring the sisters' unexplained autonomy.

What The Witches stands for

  • Ambiguity incarnate — 'imperfect speakers' whose gender ('you should be women, / And yet your beards…'), reality and motives are all left undecidable.
  • The storm: they enter with thunder; disorder in nature announcing disorder in the state.
  • Doubling — 'Double, double toil and trouble': duplication, duplicity and the play's twinned structures (two feasts, two kings, two prophecy scenes) in one chant.

Why Shakespeare made The Witches

  • To externalise temptation without abolishing responsibility — the theological tightrope the whole tragedy walks.
  • To speak to the moment: James I wrote Daemonologie (1597) and presided over witch trials; the Gunpowder Plot made equivocation the word of the hour. The witches are 1606 talking to itself.
  • To give the play its sound: their metre, rhyme and paradox infect Macbeth's language — evil as a contagious style.

The Witches — the strongest quotations, analysed

“By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes.” — Second Witch, Act 4 Scene 1

The play's darkest joke: the WITCHES call Macbeth 'something wicked' — not 'someone'. By Act 4 the kingdom's hero has become, to the agents of darkness themselves, a wicked thing. The couplet's nursery-rhyme lilt makes the judgement more chilling, not less.

Methods: dehumanising pronoun · rhyme · role reversal

“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” — The Witches, Act 4 Scene 1

The refrain that names the play's method: DOUBLE — duplication and duplicity at once. The play is built of doubles (two feasts, two prophecy scenes, two Cawdors, the doubling couple), and its language of doubles ('double sense', 'double trust'); the chant is the structure singing about itself. Metrically it is the witches' signature trochaic tetrameter — the inverted heartbeat against the play's iambic norm.

Methods: refrain · trochaic tetrameter · the 'double' motif

“Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much happier. / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.” — The Witches (to Banquo), Act 1 Scene 3

Three riddling antitheses that are all, in the event, precisely true — the play's fairness in miniature: the witches never lie, they compress. Each paradox forces interpretation, and interpretation is where the hearer's soul shows: Banquo files them as riddles; Macbeth begins converting his own set into a plan within the scene.

Methods: paradox/antithesis · prophetic compression · the hearer's test

The Witches: all 8 quotations in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of The Witches can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • Agents of fate, projections of desire, or social scapegoats? The text sustains a supernatural reading (they know the future), a psychological one (they say only what Macbeth wants said), and a historical one (three marginal old women blamed for a state's crimes — the anatomy of a witch panic). Offer at least two; the play was built not to settle it.

Essay arguments

  • The witches' power is grammatical, not physical: they alter nothing on stage except language — and language proves sufficient, which is Shakespeare's point about temptation.
  • Equivocation structures the whole play: prophecies, the Porter's jokes, 'lies like truth' — an essay tracing the word from 1606 politics through the plot writes itself.
  • Their two scenes measure Macbeth's fall by direction of travel: visited, then visiting; warned, then demanding — the tempted man becomes temptation's customer.

The Witches in theme essays

  • Supernatural: obviously central — but the top-band move is pairing them with Banquo's refusal and the dagger's ambiguity.
  • Appearance vs reality: 'fair is foul' is the theme's masthead quotation.
  • Ambition: they supply the object ('King hereafter') but nothing shows them creating the desire. The evidence that it may predate them is in 1.3 — Banquo sees him 'start' and 'seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair', and within moments Macbeth is imagining murder ('my thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical'). 'Black and deep desires' comes AFTER the witches, in 1.4, once Malcolm is named heir: use it for the desire hardening, not for where it began.

Questions that get asked

  • How does Shakespeare present the witches and their influence?
  • 'The witches, not Macbeth, are responsible for the tragedy.' How far do you agree?
  • How does Shakespeare create a sense of evil in the play?

Think you understand it?

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