In Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth (1606), the "Weird Sisters" -called "witches" only six times (all but one these references-I, iii, 5-occur in stage directions) in the Folio (1623)-are problematic figures. In the play's twenty-four scenes, they are involved in only four: I, i and iii, III, v (probably an interpolation by the new resident dramatist of the King's Men, Thomas Middleton, after Shakespeare's retirement to Stratford), and-most significantly-IV, i. They remain, apart from the Macbeths themselves, the play's most memorable characters, yet they are essentially anonymous. Whereas the whole play has 2,349 lines, the "Weird Sisters" (as they are called five times in the dialogue) speak a mere 165.5 lines (.7%), the concentration of those occurring in IV, i. The first member of the trio has by far the most to say (38 lines), whereas the other two together say about 45 lines in total. In the dialogue of the play (i. e., in I, iii, 32, and III, iv, 133) Shakespeare designates these "secret, black, and midnight hags" (IV, i, 47) as "The Weyard Sisters" ("Wyrd" being the Anglo-Saxon word for "Destiny" or "Fate") rather than mere "witches," exactly as in his source, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland (1577 and 1587), which reflects the usage of Scottish writers, who referred to the Classical Fates as "The Weird Sisters."

Although their power is limited (as dictated by Jacobean tradition), the scenes in which they appear were probably staged by the King's Men in spectacular fashion. The witches may have been revealed on the inner stage by drawing back a curtain; each of their appearances was accompanied by stage thunder, which was produced by beating drums or by rolling a heavy ball of iron or stone down an uneven set of steps constructed in the superstructure over the stage. The lightning-effect was accomplished by blowing rosin through a candle flame; a stage mist, also made by blowing rosin, may have risen through the stage's trap door to make the witches disappear in the "fog and filthy air" at the end of the first scene. As a result of these spectacular stage effects and of the witches' foretelling the future for Scotland's leading noblemen, we may be inclined to regard the "Weird Sisters" as "Goddesses of Fate" in the classical mode.

The Morai are regularly represented, from Homer down, as spinners, and from Hesiod down as three in number, called Klotho (the Spinner), Lachesis (the Apportioner) and Atropos (the Inflexible). In [Græco-Roman] art they appear as women, in literature often as very old women,--naturally, for, on he one hand, deities of this very ancient stratum appeared to popular fancy as showing the signs of old age, and, on the other, old women were above all others the traditional spinners of the Greek household. The thread they spin is, or carries on it, the destiny of each individual in turn, and when it is broken, a life ends. (H. J. Rose, 24)

Our word "Fate" is based on the Latin "fatum" ("that which is spoken" or "an oral decree of the gods"), so that, rather than reading from or writing in a Book of Fate, Shakespeare's trio make pronouncements linked by rhyme and repetition. According to Isaac Asimov,

The weird sisters are the three beings who determine fate. They are what were called in Nordic mythology the Norns. Originally, there may have been one Norn (Fate), but the tendency was to make three of them, representing the Past, Present, and Future. (The Greeks also had three.) The Norns were the arbiters of destiny, from whose decisions there was no appeal, and before whom even the gods were helpless. They were the embodiment of What Was, What Is, and, most fearsome of all, What Will Be.
It was these awesome creatures of ineluctable Necessity-and not just old crones, stirring caldrons and cackling-who were awaiting Macbeth. (Vol. 2, p. 160-1)

Thus, Asimov identifies the First Witch, who addresses Macbeth as "Thane of Glamis" (I, iii, 48) as "What Was," the Second Witch, who pronounces Macbeth "Thane of Cawdor" (line 49), as "What Is" (we know from the conclusion of I, ii, that the King has already made him Thane of Cawdor as a reward for putting down Macdonwald's rebellion), and the Third Witch as "What Will Be" because she alone predicts Macbeth's becoming King of Scotland. Since these characters are called "witch" just once in the play (I, iii, 5), it is not unreasonable to regard them as the Scandinavian equivalent of the Greek Moirai, the Norns, whose names were Urd (The Past), Verdandi (The Present), and Skuld (The Future); since

Urd's name is derived from Scandinavian words for "word" and "order" (Ice, Nor, Swe, Dan, ord, "word"; Dan orden, Nor ordre, Swe orden, "order"). The inference is that the spoken word of the Norns was decisive in ordaining the life of individuals. (http://www.asgardtroth.org/Norns.html, page 1)

Their name may be connected with the modern Swedish verb "norna" ("to inform secretly"). Unlike the Greek and Roman Fates, however, these Viking versions were of different ages and temperaments: Urd and Verdandi could be kindly, whereas Skuld was subject to fits of violent temper; Urd, as representative of the past, is an old crone constantly looking backward, whereas the matronly and confident Verdandi (the present), looks forward, and the youngest, Skuld "is usually veiled and holds an unopened book or scroll, showing her reluctance to reveal the future" ("Norns," p. 1). In short, the Norse triad is made up of three female archetypes: "the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, who themselves are linked to the three phases of the moon, waxing, full and waning" ("Wyrd Myths," page 1).

In a sense, although they are characters in the play, the trio exist for the most part outside the human action of the play, interacting only with Macbeth and Banquo (and the latter bregrudgingly) to deliver their "conned" prophecies, with each other in almost backstage intimacy, and with their chief, Hecate, Goddess of Witchcraft. Their society is peculiarly female in its orientation and power-structure, unlike the main-stream, patriarchal society of the play's other (mostly male) characters.

We may, on the other hand, take Canadian actor-director Duncan Campbell's position that Shakespeare's "Weird Sisters" are neither supernatural creatures beyond human control or understanding, nor embodiments of the universal, impersonal power of Destiny and oracles of fate, but merely malicious human beings, camp-followers who are pilfering the corpses of fallen warriors as the play opens. The exact nature of the three crones the text of the play never makes explicit, for they are androgynous (with male beards and singularly unfeminine fingers) and dwell far from society, on a heath and in a cavern. Indeed, they enjoy their anonymity and inhabit "desert" regions-that is, those places not sufficiently arable to support even a village. Like spiritual vultures, they "hover througfh the fog and filthy air" (I, i, 12) and seem drawn to the scent of corruption emanating Macbeth's soul. They dwell in a twilight world and in nature, apart from the hierarchical and social context of the mediaeval castle, which is where we find all the other human characters. While they exhibit the petty malice associated in the popular sixteenth-century mind with witches (for instance, "Killing swine" just before I, iii) and consort with familiar spirits (from the Latin "famulus," servant) and go about begging for food ("A salor's wife had chesnuts in her lap. . ." I, iii, 4), they dare to address two of the country's leading nobles and have an interview with a classical goddess ("Hecate," sponsor of witchcraft).

Moreover, they believe they can vanish at will and ride the winds; one of these old hags asserts that she will become "a rat without a tale" (I, iii, 9) because, of course, humans don't have tales. In contrast to the Blank Verse of the other prominent human characters (notably the nobles Macduff, Malcolm, Banquo, and the Macbeths) and the prose of the drunken Porter, the trio of common, old women speak in trochaic tetrameter couplets, which occasionally render them humorous. Nevertheless, the witches become increasingly sinister, especially when in IV, i, they create a composite beast with the noxious ingredients they have thrown into the cauldron. The later appearance of Hecate suggests that the witches, as demonic underlings, have exceeded their limited powers. To cast their spells and to seduce the Macbeths to evil, the witches have the assistance of their 'familiars' or attendant spirits, who presumably assist them in producing the apparitions that rise from the cauldron in IV, i. Their familiars have assumed the forms of animals conventionally associated with witches-"Greymalkin" is a cat, and "Paddock" a toad-however, the third witch's familiar, "Harpier," has never been successfully identified (like the "harpies" of the Argonautica, it may be a creature with a bird's body and a woman's head). With supernatural assistance and through their perversion of the powerful Macbeth, they unleash the chaotic forces of darkness, murder, and disorder-but, to quote Shakespeare, "The night is long that never finds the day" (IV, iii, 243).

To resolve the question of the nature of Shakespeare's witches on the early seventeenth-century English stage we must ascertain how a contemporary audience would have regarded the Weird Sisters, whether as archetypal female prophetesses or as deluded social misfits and outcasts who dabble in potions, charms, and spells derived from natural magic. The new king for whom Shakespeare first presented the play at Hampton Court in 1606, James Stuart, back in his native Scotland had assiduously prosecuted the mandate of Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and, having written a book on witchcraft (Demonologie, published in Scotland in 1597 but in England in 1603), regarded himself as something of an expert on the topic. For Shakespeare, the story of Macbeth's rise and fall as recorded by popular Elizabethan historian Raphael Holinshed was a godsend because it not only contained all the elements of good theatre-strong personalities in conflict, bloody battles, and great possibilities for special effects-it also contained the origin of the Stuart dynasty under James I's ancestor, Banquo, and one of the new king's favourite topics, witchcraft. "The supernatural element in Macbeth gave Shakespeare an opportunity to introduce a magical dumbshow showing King James's descent from the house of Banquo" (Burgess 223) and to dramatise the spiritual power of another ancestor, Edward the Confessor, from whom James sometimes claimed to have inherited the power to heal merely by touch a skin disease known as scrofula or "The King's Evil." The

existence and power of witches was widely believed in Shakespeare's day, as demonstrated by the European witch craze, during which an estimated nine million women were put to death for being perceived as witches (The Burning Times). The practice of witchcraft was seen to subvert the established order of religion and society, and hence was not tolerated. Witch hunting was a respectable, moral, and highly intellectual pursuit through much of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries (Best ). The belief of the majority during the seventeenth century suggests that the witches are powerful figures who can exercise great power over Macbeth; however, strong arguments to the contrary were in existence at the same time. (Reidel)

However, by the early seventeenth century, James's Scottish and Presbyterrian credence in the power of witches was quite at variance with the growing skepticism of his new English subjects:

beginning with Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) and continuing with Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), elite disbelief in witchcraft gathered pace until even James I was unmasking pretended demoniacs rather than endorsing their fantasies. (Dobson and Wells, 521)

While the witch persecutions of sixteenth-century England had suddenly subsided after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, they actually increased in Scotland. From his 1589 visit to Denmark, where James VI of Scotland had married Princess Anna, the elder sister of King Christian IV, James took home such lurid continental witch-theories as the witch's not merely

contracting her or his soul to the devil, but a demonic 'pact' that involved sexual intercourse with Satan ('the witches'¹ Sabbath'), the 'black Mass' and other inverted religious practices, and numerous activities such as stealing and eating children, exhuming bodies, parodying baptism using cats and other animals, flying through the air, and sailing the sea in sieves. (Braunmuller 30)

Now in the summer of 1606 came the state visit to England of James's brother-in-law, Christian IV, about which Shakespeare as a Groom of the Royal Bedchamber must have heard well in advance. The feature dramatist of the King's Men, he could take advantage of the new vogue for plays about witchcraft inaugurated by his rival Ben Jonson in The Masque of Queens. Thus, ironically, while the monarchs would appreciate Macbeth as a compendium of the old-fashioned popular beliefs about witchcraft, the majority of the English audience at Hampton Court would regard the witches as "over-the-top" theatrical figures based upon the outmoded superstitions of country-bumpkins. It is ironic, therefore, that most people's ideas about early modern

witchcraft are based at least in part on the words of a man who profoundly disbelieved in what he wrote. Though Shakespeare's Weird Sisters were eventually triumphant [in shaping modern beliefs about witchcraft], they were at variance wiuth the use of witches as characters in domestic tragicomedies such as The Witches of Lancashire and The Witch of Edmonton, which sought explicitly to defuse what what they took to be popular superstition by mockery and biting satire. (Dobson and Wells, 521)