The Three Weird Sisters In Shakespeare's Macbeth

The Three Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare's Macbeth are without a doubt crucial to the play. The question of the Three Sisters is not of their importance, but rather what are the Three Sisters? The Three Weird Sisters, also known as the Three Witches, may not be witches at all. While Shakespeare writes them to have the basic qualities of witches, they are missing a few crucial points that are fundamental of the convicted witches of Shakespeare’s time. The Sisters’ dissimilarity to conventional witches shows that they were used to represent something else. Shakespeare used the Three Weird Sisters to represent the forces of fate that exists in the universe. In order to recognize the Weird Sisters’ connection with fate, the similarities between them and “normal witches needs to be recognized. To begin, a clear indication that the Three Witches are not traditional witches is that they yield control of the weather. Everytime the Witches enter there is a roll of thunder (Shakespeare, 1.1), presumably caused by them. According to Thomas Alfred Spalding’s Elizabethan Demonology, “This command over the elements does not form at all a prominent feature in the English records of witchcraft.” The common witches of Shakespeare’s time that the Three Witches appear to be modeled after do not have that kind of power. Moreover, this means

Although the witches have a cauldron as well as familiars they do not have a certain quality that appears in witchcraft of Shakespeare's time. The Weird Sisters have no direct interaction with Satan, which many convicted witches confessed to (Hawk). However, the witches do have an interaction with Hecate, a pawn of satan. Given this, Hecate, a goddess of witchcraft (Source 2) , does not possess the same magnitude of wickedness of Satan that the persecuted witches claimed to have interacted