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Key Question
Why does Shakespeare begin the play with the weird sisters?
Grade 6
Shakespeare deliberately places the witches at the beginning in order to tap into King James’s fascination with witchcraft, which all Jacobeans would have known about following James’s publication of his book on witchcraft, Daemonologie.
They appear to be in control of the weather, asking when they will next meet, “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” This plays to King James’s belief that witches conjured a storm to try to sink a ship he was travelling on, and could control the weather.
Grade 7
Apart from introducing this main theme of supernatural evil, Shakespeare also uses them to introduce the idea of paradox and deception. Therefore the witches describe reality as “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”, so that nothing is what it seems.
This prepares the ground for Macbeth looking like “the innocent flower” but being “the serpent under’t”. It foreshadows the thane of Cawdor disguising that he is a “traitor”, so Duncan never suspects him. It helps us realise that the witches’ prophecy that Macbeth will be “king hereafter” can be both “fair” and “foul”, because it leads to regicide. Shakespeare therefore creates a world which is untrustworthy and uncertain.
Grade 8
Macbeth, of course, is a play reacting to political events of the day. James is a foreign king, who has just survived a daring and far reaching assassination attempt from what we would now call religious extremists, a group of Catholic plotters. The idea that further cells of plotters might exist all across London is only natural. Anyone could be a secret plotter, a traitor. Added to that, Queen Elizabeth had no heir. Many nobles would view their claim to the throne as no worse than James’, so that he was another “step [they] must o’erleap”, which meant they would need to assassinate him.
So Shakespeare reflects all that uncertainty, and also tries to show a clear way forward, through noble kingship restoring order after the cautionary tale of the tragic hero, Macbeth. However, in doing so, Shakespeare might look at the fear of witchcraft as another symptom of a society which is lurching towards paranoia rather than peace and prosperity.
Firstly, notice how he gives the witches a different meter to their lines:
“When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.”
They are seven syllables long, and the first syllable is stress ed, so it is trochaic, rather than iambic. They are trochaic tetrameter. This marks the witches as different from the other characters. We can argue that the trochee is a sign of their evil. Shakespeare will use it to show a character’s evil thoughts later in the play, when they switch to it from an iambic meter.
Grade 9
Tracy Borman, writing for the BBC’s magazine, History Extra, quotes King James’s Daemonologie:
“James’s beliefs had a dangerously misogynistic core. He grew up to scorn – even revile – women... He took every opportunity to propound the view that they were far more likely than men to succumb to witchcraft. “As that sex is frailer than man is, so is it easier to be entrapped in these gross snares of the Devil,” he argued in Daemonologie, “as was overwell proved to be true by the Serpent’s deceiving of Eve at the beginning which makes him the friendlier with that sex since then.” He would later commission a new version of the Bible in which all references to witches were rewritten in the female gender.”
We can easily see how Shakespeare uses this description of women in his creation of Lady Macbeth, who uses the same imagery of the “Serpent” when persuading Macbeth to murder. She will be shown to be “frailer” when she commits suicide through guilt and madness. She will fear “hell” more than Macbeth because, as James would say, she is trapped by the “snares of the Devil”.
In contrast, Queen Elizabeth had not punished witchcraft. Witches were only punished if they had committed a crime, for example using witchcraft to murder someone. Under James, a witch did not actually need to have harmed anyone – they could be executed simply for being suspected of being a witch. For this reason, witchcraft was used as a reason to execute witches at twice the rate in Scotland compared to England.
Write 3 sentences. Use the words highlighted in the notes (as these are subject terminology).
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Beyond Grade 9
This is important because it gives us evidence to suppose that Shakespeare himself would have good reason not to believe in the power of witches and witchcraft. It gives us an insight in to why he would feel the need to flatter King James by including witches, but also why he might write a play in which the witches are a red herring, a false clue. The real culprits here are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who choose to take actions on their own.
But the trochaic tetrameter the witches speak in also has a very childish rhythm. Shakespeare adds to this with the constant repetition of “when”, the alliteration of “b” and “l”. The simple rhyming couplets, the childlike, almost made up word “hurlyburly”, all combine to suggest that the witches may not be as powerful as they seem and are in fact a simple, childlike fear.
This motif of childlike fear is constantly picked up on in the play. Lady Macbeth will complain to Macbeth that he is like a child, fearing a “painted devil”. Here, the sense of a childlike world is invoked when Shakespeare ends the scene with “Hover through the fog and filthy air.” This refers to the witches’ ability to fly. Spend a minute thinking about this – none of the characters mention seeing the witches fly. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, you might be very sceptical of anyone claiming to have seen women fly on their broomsticks. It is a childlike idea, suited to story, rather than fact.
Another way Shakespeare makes belief in witches seem childlike is in the witches’ conversation with their familiars (animals believed to be the form taken by a demon).
First Witch. I come, Graymalkin!
Second Witch. Paddock calls.
These suggest that the witches are controlled by their demon familiars. But the audience never hear them. Even more significantly, neither do the other witches – the second witch has to explain that “Paddock” is calling her, because the first witch clearly cannot hear “Paddock”.
Again, this raises the possibility that there are no such things, that these are simply figments of the witches’ imaginations. Shakespeare will play with this idea repeatedly, when Macbeth sees the “dagger of the mind” and the “horrible shadow” (Banquo’s ghost), and Lady Macbeth will imagine the “damned spot” of blood she cannot remove from her hand.
Finally, it is worth noting that Shakespeare never names the witches as witches during the play, but only ever refers to them as “the weird sisters”, which were the names for the Norns or Fates in Norse mythology. Here Shakespeare again suggests that witchcraft is not a real power, though fate might be. Macbeth’s tragedy is how he interferes with his fate, rather than the weird sisters making him do anything.
Draw an image in 30 seconds which will help you remember the main ideas.
Label it with 6 key words.
Write 3 sentences. The first words of each one must be in this order. BECAUSE, BUT, SO.
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Did you work out that bold words are subject terminology, and italic words are context?
Make a note of them, and practise using them in sentences.
Every scene is structured this way, so you can choose which grade (6 - 9+) you want to aim for.
Thanks Aya - if you can write this much in the exam, you will fly.
It is all grade 9, with the odd bit of poor phrasing. I hope to get round to publishing this in the Substack, with the corrections in phrasing so you can see my changes.
Hi Sir,
Can I just check, if I write anything psychoanalytical (freudian ideas about id and superego in ACC etc.), will that be given credit at GCSE? I included some in a recent mock and it was highlighted as something not worthy of credit at GCSE, but I wasn't sure about this because of similar ideas being mentioned in many GCSE English lit videos/websites. I'm pretty sure it was related to my question and it was relevant to my overall argument, so I'm not sure whether to include any for the real exams or not