Triple Threat: An Explanation of 'Witchiness'

‘Witching hour’ is a common phrase in my household — three daughters under one roof often devolves into chaos. Usually, this critique comes from outsiders — we speak in incomplete tongues and cackle late into the night, utterly wicked, foreign to visitors. Thus began my interest in witches. However, I think the aversion to my beloved ‘witching hour’ runs deeper than surface-level fear. I turn to literature to understand this — beginning with Shakespeare’s iconoclastic, cauldron-hovering, ‘toil and trouble’-ing sisters, with whom I identify enormously. 

The shock-waves of the witches in Macbeth reach disparate corners of the literary canon: from Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters to the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, cutting back to the twentieth century in Margaret Atwood’s use of witches in almost all of her novels and essays, most notably in Cat’s Eye. Incessantly, we return to the motif of three women or girls, and spectators cannot help but be drawn in. What spell is being cast here?

Perhaps it is a perverse desire for the abnormal or an acknowledgement that bonds between women are best represented by a coven. Most convincingly, it reflects restriction in the portrayal of feminine characters, figures, and emotions. It is a risk to present a feminine character with any kind of power or superior knowledge, particularly where this trope is most recognisable, in seventeenth century England. The voice of a singular potent, often polemical, woman is not necessarily difficult to locate in literature (see Margery Kempe and the Wife of Bath’s Tale), limited though they may be by their male writers, groups of women are almost exclusively ridiculed or made malevolent so that they remain far from organised revolt. 

The witches in Macbeth, although early examples of this, are not actually prototypic. Shakespeare draws upon Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Ireland and Scotland for historical context. The ‘weird sisters’ encountered by ‘Makbeth’ and ‘Banquho’ are ‘goddesses of destiny’, ‘endowed with knowledge of prophecy’. This knowledge is key to the witches’ presentation and characterisation — but it is not what is taken with the audience when they leave the Globe.

The feeling that lingers is one of terror and unease. Lest the volume of women on stage spook Shakespeare’s contemporary (male) audience, the witches are made subjects of distrust and fear. The belief that women held supernatural knowledge threatened to topple society’s order: how is it that women have the power to create new life, to seduce men with their wiles, to predict the world turning? Something malign must be afoot. 

Shakespeare’s ‘weïrd sisters’ are terrifying in performance not only because of their foresight but also their rhyme. To a modern audience, the couplets the sisters speak in are unfamiliar and hypnotic. An RSC production I saw at the Barbican in 2018 involved primary school-age children playing the witches, invoking the audience’s repulsion. It put me in mind of the fossil sisters, a quasi-foil for the witches in their Christian simplicity. The girls make a ‘solemn vow’ in Streatfeild’s ballet-based novel, ‘hand in hand’ (just as the ‘weïrd sisters’ are in Act IV of Macbeth) and rhyme in their promise to not let their merits be the claim of the men in their respective lineages. The girls promise to strive for autonomy and to further their knowledge, thinking of the future; they are prophesying. Streatfeild invokes the image of the witches, fortuitously highlighting the contrasting emotions the audience feels towards each trio. For the witches, their malice and misconduct are emphasised; for the dancing sisters, their sisterly search for power and knowledge shines on in radiant beams. Women working together becomes inherently dangerous to male hegemony. 

Indeed, this presentation has been used to justify keeping women from positions of power or, in a medieval mode, from allowing them to form valuable networks of spoken word ‘spells’ and advice. Women cannot escape the associations that are attached to the image of the three witches.  Personally? I attempt to ensure that the triple threat thunders on. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons