Shakespeare's Macbeth is a tremendous story on many levels. One of its most entertaining and pivotal characters are actually three people: the Witches, or the Weird Sisters.

The witches appear throughout the play. Stage directions begin with "Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches," who ask, "When shall we three meet again? / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?" (1.1.1-2). They plan to find Macbeth upon the heath and exit chanting, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air" (1.1.11-12).

Later the witches meet Macbeth and Banquo and prophesy to Macbeth: "All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!" (1.3.50) They also mention to Banquo that his descendants will be kings, though he himself will be none. (He'll be dead.) Thus begins Macbeth's descent into regicide, betrayal, massacre of innocents, and his eventual bloody death.

The witches continue to lurk about and meet the wicked Macbeth on the heath, a lonely and frequently cursed place. They apparently do have supernatural powers and some of their prophecies are genuine. At other times they seem to play on Macbeth's ambitions and weakness, and push him to be absolutely as wicked as he is already inclined to be.

The witches' bizarre rituals and habit of speaking in rhymed couplets set them apart from the other characters who most often speak in blank verse. They are other-worldly yet entwined with humanity: similar to the Three Fates of Norse and Greek mythology.

They are certainly active in Macbeth's downfall. They make him do nothing; he has free will to act. But they also use half-truths and mysterious sayings to pull out the worst of his behavior. For example, they inform him that indeed his enemy Macduff might present a problem, but why worry? No man born of woman can stop Macbeth! The fact that Macduff was born by caesarean section either escaped their notice, or more likely was a source of secret hilarity to the Weird Sisters.

The scene I chose is their most famous: the "Double, double toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron bubble" enchantment. This is not the whole of the scene: Macbeth enters in as the object of the Second Witch's cry: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!" But I draw the line at assaying three witches, a Scottish king, and Hecate, goddess of magic at least all at once.

Macbeth was probably first performed between 1605 and 1606. The first printed form of the play appeared around 1623 in the First Folio.