The Weyard Sisters Case Study Assignment

The Weyard Sisters Case Study Assignment

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The Weyard Sisters Case Study Assignment

A more difficult question is the precise nature of those prophetic females who open the play. Whether or not there were such things as witches was a fiercely debated subject in the period. In his treatise Of Demonology, King James affirmed that there were.

He believed that, nine times out of ten, witches were women, but women with unnaturally masculine features such as facial hair, that they were in league with the devil, that they had familiar spirits in the shapes of cats and toads, that their most dangerous work consisted of conjuring up images of people and cursing them, that they sent succubi to remove the sexual lifeblood from men, that they caused disease in animals.

One could establish whether or not a woman was devilishly possessed by a “witch mark” on her body that would not bleed if it were pricked. When Shylock in The Merchant of Venice says “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” he means that Jews are not devilish in the way that witches are. The Macbeth witches answer to most of these characteristics: they are women with beards, summoning Grey Malkin the cat and Paddock the toad, while lines such as “I’ll drain him dry as hay” and “Killing swine” suggest succubi and diseased livestock.

But should we necessarily think of them as old hags, fairytale witches? Macbeth’s source, Holinshed’s “Chronicles of Scotland,” variously calls them “weird sisters,” “fairies,” and “women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of the elder world.” A woodcut in Holinshed shows them as rather grumpy but elegantly dressed ladies, certainly not bearded hags.

A further complication is that the only surviving printed text of Macbeth (found in the First Folio) seems to represent the play not as it was written by Shakespeare, but as it was revised for later performance, probably by the younger dramatist Thomas Middleton. The two songs in Macbeth (in Act 3 Scene 5 and Act 4 Scene 1) also appear in Middleton’s play The Witch. The authorship of the songs seems to be the same as that of the rest of The Witch: certain demonic details are borrowed from Reginald Scot’s 1584 treatise A Discovery of Witchcraft, an important source for Middleton’s play but not for

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Shakespeare’s. It is highly probable that the whole of Act 3 Scene 5 and the Hecate portions of Act 4 Scene 1 are Middletonian insertions in the Shakespearean script. They have the self-contained quality of inserted scenes. They are put in to beef up the witchcraft business and spice the play with a couple of song-and-dance routines. They were probably written after Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609), a short text with chanting hags who are well worth comparing to the revised Shakespeare/Middleton witches. Indeed, the final dance in Act 4 Scene 1 may have used the music and choreography from Jonson’s masque.

The additions represent an excellent example of the practice of altering a theater script to cash in on a new fashion. But the change may have been more than local. As long ago as 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a very interesting observation in a lecture: he said that despite living in an age of witchcraft and astrology, Shakespeare included in his plays no witches. He added the parenthetic note, “for we must not be deluded by stage-directions”—what he had noticed was that the sisters are never actually called “witches” by themselves or the other characters. They are witches in the Folio stage directions but “weyard sisters” in the text. The only person who refers explicitly to a witch is the sailor’s wife reported in Act 1 Scene 3. The first weyard sister is obviously not very pleased with the appellation.

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“As Macbeth and Banquo journeyed toward Forres … there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of the elder world” (Holinshed’s “Chronicles

of Scotland,” 1587).

Are the weyard sisters fair or foul? They are more fair than foul in Holinshed. And in the astrologer Simon Forman’s recollection of the performance of Macbeth he saw at the Globe Theatre in 1611, they are described as “fairies or nymphs,” which also sound more fair than foul. The sense of their foulness derives principally from the Middletonian witch-scenes.

Banquo’s description in Act 1 Scene 3 suggests physical foulness, but his language is characterized primarily by bafflement as to the sisters’ appearance. Could they initially have been fair ladies giving apparently fair but in fact foul prophecies? Whatever their appearance, it is significant that they foretell rather than control.

In Shakespeare’s original text, the sisters may have been morally ambiguous creatures who do nothing more than give voice to mysterious and equivocal “solicitings,” oracular prophecies. Middleton may then have converted them into the kind of overtly evil singing and chanting witches who had appeared in Jonson’s Masque of Queens and about which he wrote his own The Witch.

He also doubled their number and brought on Hecate and assorted attendant spirits, including one in the shape of a cat. Crude practitioners of black magic, they are unequivocal almost to the point of comedy. This said, we should not necessarily dismiss Middleton’s contributions as “spurious interpolations”: they are the product of the play’s evolving life in the Jacobean theater.

Shakespeare’s sisters are elusive and equivocal. They are more like classical Fates than vernacular witches. The term “weird” at this time referred specifically to the Fates and the power of prophecy. In order to suggest something of this nature, and to avoid the modern vernacular associations of “weird,” our text adopts the Folio-based spelling “weyard,” suggesting “wayward, marginal.” The sisters are women on the edge: between society and wilderness, culture and nature, the realm of the body-politic and the mysteries of the hieratic.

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HOW MANY CHILDREN?

Why was King James so interested in witches? The main reason was that his ideology of kingship was closely bound to a cosmology of good and evil. He believed passionately in the idea that the monarch was God’s representative on earth. The king was the embodiment of virtue, blessed with the power to heal his people and restore cosmic harmony.

The idea that the devil was active in the world through the dark agency of witchcraft was the necessary antithesis of this vision. The imagery of Shakespeare’s play creates a pervasive sense of connection between the state and the cosmos: witness those signs of disruption in the order of nature reported by Lennox and Ross on the night of Duncan’s murder.

Another consequence of James’s theory of kingship was the idea that royal succession was divinely ordained rather than achieved arbitrarily through a struggle between rival candidates or through a popular vote. It is therefore extremely significant that in Holinshed’s Chronicles Duncan’s anointing of his son Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland is a turning point in Scottish history: this is the moment when the principle of primogeniture is established in Scotland. In Holinshed, Macbeth is Duncan’s cousin and until this moment he has the right to the succession in the event of Duncan dying before Malcolm comes of age.

In the mid-twentieth century there was a tendency among critics to mock the Victorian scholar A. C. Bradley for treating Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real people, with a past and a life beyond that which is seen onstage. The shorthand term for this mockery was Bradley’s question, “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” But Bradley has outlasted his critics: to a greater degree than any other writer prior to the flowering of the realist novel, Shakespeare did use language to create the illusion that his characters have an interior life and that there is a “backstory” to his plots. The language of Macbeth is steeped in images of children, of birth, of inheritance and future generations. The sons of Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff are all crucial to the action, and there is even a telling bit part for the son of the

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English soldier Siward. No other Shakespearean tragedy has so many significant male children in the cast. Only Macbeth is without a son. Hence his appalled realization that he has a barren sceptre in his hand, that his bloody deeds have been done only “to make them kings, the seeds of Banquo kings.”

Shakespeare doesn’t usually portray married couples working together as partners. There are moments of exceptional tenderness between the Macbeths. Yet there is an emptiness at the core of their relationship. The play is scarred by images of sterility and harrowed by glimpses of dead babies. Is power in the end a substitute for love, ambition nothing but compensation for the sorrow of childlessness? It has to be assumed that Lady Macbeth means what she says when she speaks of having “given suck” and of knowing “how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me”: we can only assume that the Macbeths have had a child and lost it. Perhaps that is why they channel the energies of their marriage into the lust for power instead.

Shakespeare is the least autobiographical of great writers, but can it be entirely a coincidence that, a decade before, he too had lost a child, his only son Hamnet, and that in the years since then he had channeled all his creative powers not into a family but into his work, his theater company, and the thrill of those extraordinary occasions when he found himself—a grammar boy from the provinces with no university education—witnessing the King of England and Scotland, with all his court, listening in rapt attention as his words

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Average Score 50-85%	40-38 points More depth/detail for the background and significance is needed, or the research detail is not clear. No search history information is provided.		83-76  points Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is little integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are included. Summary of information presented is included. Conclusion may not contain a biblical integration.			52-49  points Content is somewhat organized, but no structure is apparent. The use of font, color, graphics, effects, etc. is occasionally detracting to the presentation content. Length requirements may not be met.
Poor Quality 0-45%	37-1 points The background and/or significance are missing. No search history information is provided.		75-1 points Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is no integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are not included in the summary of information presented. Conclusion does not contain a biblical integration.			48-1 points There is no clear or logical organizational structure. No logical sequence is apparent. The use of font, color, graphics, effects etc. is often detracting to the presentation content. Length requirements may not be met
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