Challenges to the reading
Did the witches have power over Macbeth?
Did the witches have power over Macbeth?
https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/manhood-and-the-milk-of-human-kindness-in-macbeth
But it’s not just the androgyny of the ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’ (4.1.48) that throws the masculine contours of Macbeth’s tragedy into relief. It’s also the uncanny way they anticipate his aspirations and anxieties, which are the products of the martial culture that moulded him. It’s important to stress that Macbeth’s fate is not dictated by the witches. None of the malign spells cast by the bearded handmaids of Hecat, as they dance round their bubbling cauldron with its gruesome ingredients, has any power over Macbeth. The Weird Sisters ‘can look into the seeds of time’ (1.3.58) and foretell his future in deceitful language, whose full meaning emerges only in retrospect. But they can’t compel Macbeth to do anything. Shakespeare makes that clear from the outset, when the grim trio greets Macbeth with titles he has yet to acquire, and Banquo sees him ‘start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair’, and then become strangely ‘rapt withal’ (1.3.51–2, 57). Before the scene is over, Macbeth’s first soliloquy leaves us in no doubt that what has startled and struck fear into him is the witches’ open voicing of the ‘black and deep desires’ (1.4.51) already brewing secretly in his heart. Like the spirits that Lady Macbeth commands in the next scene to ‘unsex’ her and purge her of compassion, the witches ‘tend on mortal thoughts’ (1.5.41; my emphasis): they serve the evil thoughts they find in mortal minds, they don’t plant them there.
But it’s not just the androgyny of the ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’ (4.1.48) that throws the masculine contours of Macbeth’s tragedy into relief. It’s also the uncanny way they anticipate his aspirations and anxieties, which are the products of the martial culture that moulded him. It’s important to stress that Macbeth’s fate is not dictated by the witches. None of the malign spells cast by the bearded handmaids of Hecat, as they dance round their bubbling cauldron with its gruesome ingredients, has any power over Macbeth. The Weird Sisters ‘can look into the seeds of time’ (1.3.58) and foretell his future in deceitful language, whose full meaning emerges only in retrospect. But they can’t compel Macbeth to do anything. Shakespeare makes that clear from the outset, when the grim trio greets Macbeth with titles he has yet to acquire, and Banquo sees him ‘start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair’, and then become strangely ‘rapt withal’ (1.3.51–2, 57). Before the scene is over, Macbeth’s first soliloquy leaves us in no doubt that what has startled and struck fear into him is the witches’ open voicing of the ‘black and deep desires’ (1.4.51) already brewing secretly in his heart. Like the spirits that Lady Macbeth commands in the next scene to ‘unsex’ her and purge her of compassion, the witches ‘tend on mortal thoughts’ (1.5.41; my emphasis): they serve the evil thoughts they find in mortal minds, they don’t plant them there.