Three Witches - Performance

Performance

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. 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 in order 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." In 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 insanity surrounding the period.

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.

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.

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.