Sorry, I have been absent for a week. It’s been a nasty time with headaches every day. When  you suffer from migraine you sometimes run into periods like that.

I’ve bee thinking about MacBeth again, my favorite Shakespearean play. Recently my sweetie-wife and I watched the latest film production of the tragedy, this one starring Michael Fassbender as MacBeth. It was not a great production, oh it looked fantastic but some of their choice in interpreting the text I did not agree with.

That aside one of the things that has always fascinated me about the story is the relationship between MacBeth, the events, and the Witches. In many productions, such as this recent one, the witches are reduced to nothing more than vessels of prophesy, info dumps without agency of their own. This is not how they are in the text of the play. Consider the opening of Act I Scene III

SCENE III. A heath near Forres.

Thunder. Enter the three Witches
First Witch
Where hast thou been, sister?
Second Witch
Killing swine.
Third Witch
Sister, where thou?
First Witch
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munch’d, and munch’d, and munch’d:–
‘Give me,’ quoth I:
‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger:
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.
Second Witch
I’ll give thee a wind.
First Witch
Thou’rt kind.
Third Witch
And I another.
First Witch
I myself have all the other,
And the very ports they blow,
All the quarters that they know
I’ the shipman’s card.
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se’nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.
Look what I have.
Second Witch
Show me, show me.
First Witch
Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
Wreck’d as homeward he did come.
Drum within

Third Witch
A drum, a drum!
Macbeth doth come.
ALL
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace! the charm’s wound up.
Enter MACBETH and BANQUO

The witches have motivations, goals, and purposes all their own, They are characters of malintent whose conscious actions drive the plot and force the events. In a lot of film productions these bits are discarded and that radically changes the nature of what transpires.

I am often intrigued by the question of culpability in the play. MacBeth would not have embarked on a course of treason and murder without the witches prophesy, something that if the witches know the future must also know. Yet it is by MacBeth’s hand, not his wife, not the witches that Duncan in murdered. He plunges the dagger, no one else.  Remove the witches’ malintent and Macbeth become more responsible unless one reads the prophecy as inevitable, but that is not the text.

Today I had an epiphany into a way to re-interpret this. I can’t share it publicly yet, because it may form the basis for a new novel, but it makes me terribly excited.