Sign in Revisiting the Witches – Part 2
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From a plot and literary perspective, the cultural miasma surrounding witchcraft in Elizabethan England is somewhat negligible. We don’t need to be afraid of the witches to understand their place in the story as supernatural agents of evil. However, the weight of their appearance is lost on modern audiences. Imagine the appearance of witches on that stage in 1606, opening the play. These three witches are not just creepy characters to the audience. They are horrors – abominations, the things that go bump in the night. However, unlike the horror movie monsters of the modern era, these creatures were indisputably real. I wish I could give a modern parallel, but there isn’t one. We don’t have anything that is simultaneously unknown and terrifying while at the same time considered completely real.
So how could we bring the impact of witches into the modern era? Let us say you were directing Macbeth in 2021. What choices could you make in order to translate not only the witches but their historical context to your audience? Many productions have tried different strategies. The one that immediately comes to mind is Orson Welles’ famous “Voodoo Macbeth,” which featured an all-Black cast and swapped medieval witchcraft for, as the name suggests, voodoo. This was in 1936, which, while not exactly recent, is far closer to the present than Macbeth’s original incarnation. The success of this play is likely due, in part at least, to its substitution of witches, which provided the interwar audience with a far more germane fear (although that fear was likely reliant on xenophobia and misconceptions about a different culture, which is problematic in its own right). Despite the relatively small amount of time since this production and the present, this approach would likely fail to strike the same chord today. The combination of increased knowledge about other cultures and general distaste for blatant xenophobia would likely sour a voodoo adaptation of the witches. While the fear of medieval witches was based in part on the fear of “the other,” witchcraft was not seen as a foreign phenomenon. It was distinctly alien but certainly was not regulated to any other culture. Even when Voodoo Macbeth would have been most effective, its portrayal of the witches would still be accidental to their original effect.
More modern productions have attempted other methods. In the Macbeth episode of ShakespeaRe-Told, a 2005 BBC mini-series that recontextualized Shakespeare plays (although without the original language), James McAvoy portrays Joe Macbeth, a sous chef at an upscale restaurant who kills the restaurant’s owner, celebrity chef Duncan Docherty. The witches in this adaptation are garbage collectors. I find this adaptation to hit the mark in some ways. Sure, garbage collectors are not the scions of evil that witches would have been seen as, but this version of the witches does some things right. ShakespeaRe-Told’s Macbeth develops the idea that the witches know the dirt on everyone (as binmen would). There’s an element of knowingness to these witches, and their profession helps reinforce the idea that they know more than they let on at any given time, which is disturbing in its own way.
Leaning more towards the horror spectrum, Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth (2010), directed by Rupert Goold, features the most ostensibly creepy witches I’ve seen. As in many productions of Macbeth, the witches are featured heavily in the background of various scenes, being a constant presence. However, they are introduced and most often presented as a trio of nurses. While it can come off as a little “haunted house-y,” these witches are undoubtedly creepy. The production evokes a distinctly unnatural feeling, with sterile lighting, bloody plastic hangings, and implications of something supernatural. As Macbeth speaks to the witches, a cadaver wrapped in a body bag begins spasming. In another scene, the witches construct a kind of effigy of Macbeth with an overcoat, IV stand, and blood bag. This production probably does the best of any modern production to bring the abject horror of the witches to the modern audience, drawing on allusions and invocations of horror movie tropes and imagery to deliver something unsettling. However, when viewed alongside the original reception of the witches, one can see a clear delineation. While the witches were terrifying, unnatural, and unknown, they were also considered a reality. Creepy supernatural nurses, while unsettling, don’t pack the same punch.
At the end of the day, it seems almost impossible to replicate the same type of emotional impact that the original witches would have had with a modern audience. That may be too defeatist, but it is undeniable that the witches pose a unique challenge to anyone looking to portray the witches today. Despite that challenge, any actor playing one of the witches, or really any character in Macbeth, should be aware of the historical context around witchcraft. Macbeth is not Shakespeare’s cursed play by chance. Its subject matter is steeped in mystery and magic. If you are looking to perform a monologue or scene from Macbeth, it might be helpful to reflect on the environment in which the play was written and initially performed. How could one approach “Is this a dagger…” or “Out damned spot” differently when considering the role of the supernatural in the events of the story. When Lady Macbeth says, “hell is murky,” is she going mad, or is she actually glimpsing something beyond our world?
Whatever you do, knowing the historical background of your text can help inform your choices and open up the path to new and exciting discoveries.
Wesley Hayes
Wesley is a Student Ambassador at Stagepunch and a current History Major at Skidmore College with a background in the performing arts. Wesley is also an alumni of the New York Teen Shakespeare Intensive, a summer program run by the team behind Stagepunch.
Interested in becoming a Student Ambassador at Stagepunch? Get paid to write blogs, contribute ideas to make the site even better, and share from your experience through consultations with subscribers. We’d love to hear from you!
Revisiting the Witches
About a year before William Shakespeare’s birth, Queen Elizabeth I passed a law titled “An Act against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts.” The law stipulated that using witchcraft to “kill or destroy” an individual was punishable by death. This law was a less severe version of one enacted by Elizabeth’s father: the Witchcraft Act, which essentially made witchcraft for any purpose a death sentence for the practitioner. No matter the intensity, the law’s mere existence implies a “regime of truth” about witchcraft in Elizabethan England. Witches were not tools used to scare young children or urban legends believed by a select few. For the Elizabethans, witchcraft was a real and dangerous threat, to the extent that multiple English monarchs felt the need to enact legislation targeting witchcraft.
It can be hard in the modern era to wrap our heads around this. We exist in an environment where lots of information, especially information we take for granted, is verifiable with a staggering level of redundancy. Everything from genes to political systems is codified and generally understood, and while we don’t go through the work ourselves, there is an established trust in the truths of our lives. Witchcraft, at least in the way that Elizabethans pictured it, would not take hold as a popular belief today. After all, when we have video evidence, photos, articles, and accounts delivered in milliseconds over vast distances, it becomes more difficult for “the unknown” to dominate our imagination and fears.
But if you take a step back and imagine life in Elizabethan England, witchcraft’s solidification into the zeitgeist becomes far clearer. There are two main reasons why witchcraft (and indeed many other fictional concepts like sea monsters and men with faces on their chests) came to be considered fact. The first is the complete lack of information available to the average person in Elizabethan England. One generally had to take what they were given in terms of information about the unknown. Stories and concepts turned into a grotesque game of telephone as people relayed their experiences to others. Circumstances and fine detail became lost. This is how a description of a cotton plant by an Elizabethan explorer was later illustrated as a plant that sprouted live sheep, which was then taken as fact. The second reason is far simpler: life in the Renaissance was hard. While it was a scientific and humanistic revolution, the benefits were mostly conferred on wealthy men. For most of the population, uncertainty, hunger, disease, and death still dominated. With so much strife, it may have been easier to believe in the existence of the supernatural, especially if you could blame your failed crops on demonic intervention.
Whatever the combinations of reasons, witches were real for Elizabethans; no if’s, and’s or but’s. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes Western Society at the time as one that “believed in the reality of witches as much as modern society believes in the reality of molecules.” Not only did they believe in witches, but they were also terrified of them. Witches came to be personifications of all things evil, unnatural, and unknown, and when your “unknown” encompasses most of the world, that can be frightening; frightening enough that practicing witchcraft was outlawed by England’s rulers. It was even seen to be worse than other “natural” crimes, like murder or theft. James I, Elizabeth’s successor, argued for the allowance of a child witness in the trial of the Pendle Witches, something that was not normally allowed. He also wrote, “children, women, and liars can be witnesses over high treason against God.” There is a whole article’s worth of sexism to unpack here, but I’ll have to move on for now. The quote at its core shows that witchcraft was at a different echelon than other crimes, and Elizabethans seemed willing to do anything to punish it.
Around 1606 (only a few years after James I enacted his new, harsher anti-witch law), Macbeth is first performed at the Globe Theatre in London. Macbeth features three witches prominently. The show opens with their conversation. They serve as the main instigators of the story’s conflict and are also seen performing rituals and communing with Hecate (the Greek goddess of magic). While Macbeth is often portrayed as a flawed protagonist – a war hero who descends into madness and ravages his morals for the sake of power, the witches are more of a force than distinct characters. They represent chaos, unrest, and destruction.
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Wesley Hayes
Wesley is a Student Ambassador at Stagepunch and a current History Major at Skidmore College with a background in the performing arts. Wesley is also an alumni of the New York Teen Shakespeare Intensive, a summer program run by the team behind Stagepunch.
Interested in becoming a Student Ambassador at Stagepunch? Get paid to write blogs, contribute ideas to make the site even better, and share from your experience through consultations with subscribers. We’d love to hear from you!