Witches, Macbeth

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair."

Right off the bat, Shakespeare plays on the aspersions cast on women of his time; of them been witches. He literally lets the Weird Sisters declare the whole play a tragedy during the very first scene of the play, Macbeth when they chant, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” even before we know anything about anything (except the name of Macbeth). He also depicts them as instigators by giving them the famous lines, “Double, double toil and trouble (4.1.10)” which implies than they only want to cause trouble. He uses the Sisters to plant the seed of hope and ambition in Macbeth’s mind, this controlling and undreamt ambition eventually leads Macbeth to committee regicide and also results in the murder of Banquo, Macduff’s family, Lady Macbeth (indirectly) and Macbeth himself.

He portrays the Sisters as flirty, childish and quite creepy beings. One can even debate that the portrayal of the Sisters is marginalizing in a way; they are often portrayed as doing and saying the same thing as if they are one person with no sense of self or individuality.

By the end of the play, the reader associates the Sisters with chaos and conflict. The women are presented as on understandable, because they defy logic and are caught between the supernatural and physical world. This subtle impression of women left by Shakespeare is quite dubious yet laughable if not insulting.