According to Terry Eagleton, the real heroines of the play Macbeth, are the witches. Do you agree with this view? Justify your answer with your views on the role of the witches in Macbeth.

The Witches in Macbeth: Witches are some of the most intriguing characters in Macbeth and they have drawn a lot of attention.

Early criticism considers them as evil forces. Recent critical inputs have helped understand them in the context of the debates on witchcraft.

Debates around Witches and witchcraft

In 16TH century England, witchcraft was fiercely condemned. There were witch trials and executions. 

Examples included the St. Osyth witch trials of 1582 and the North Berwick trials of 1591. Elizabeth passed a statute against witchcraft in 1563.

Scotland also passed an act against witchcraft during that period. King James I introduced the Act as a new statute in 1604. This Act was revoked in 1736.

As per the Act, anyone who even invokes, consults or even covenants with the witches is liable to be punished. It implies that people had a belief in the supernatural and witchcraft.

The possible source texts for Macbeth mention the witches in varied ways. John Major does not mention the witches and Buchanan refers to them as part of a dream.

Holinshed’s Chronicles mentions Macbeth’s meeting with the “weird sisters.”

Faith Nostbakken mentions how Holinshed in the historical narrative of King Duff’s reign in Scotland tells of rebels trying to overthrow the king by seeking assistance from witches.

Nostbakken says Holinshed has two different views to the witches-the weird sisters are really three goddesses with supernatural powers over human beings”, but Renaissance England with its belief on demors saw the witches as related to them.

King James condemned them as evil in Daemonologie (1597). Reginald Scot dismissed this as superstition in The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584).

The witches in Macbeth should be read against such sixteenth-century debates that surrounded witchcraft. 

Scot wrote his book two years after the St. Osyth trials in which six were women were condemned to execution. Scot sees them as old women, poor women and rejects any Biblical mention of the same.

King James’ was concerned about witchcraft Scotland was more severe in its treatment of witchcraft and the laws were implemented with greater severity.

The Scottish Witchcraft Act was passed in 1563. The North Berwick trials qS 1591 caused a group of people for plotting against the king.

After the North Berwick trial and its relation to the plot against the monarch, King James Took stricter started Howard Witchcraft Learning

Terry Eagleton: “The Witches Are the Heroine of the Piece” (1986)

Eagleton considers the Witches in Vacreth as the real heroines of the play. He relates them with a positive value” and calls them exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honors”.

He says their “riddling ambiguous speech is another example of their subversion of the structure of power.

In that sense, he considers the witches as the ***unconscious of the drama”. They pose a threat to the normative society and thus they need to be repressed.

They challenge the monarch’s power and the ones in power exercise control through legislation.

Eagleton describes these women as “androgynous (bearded women), multiple (three-in-one) and imperfect speakers.

They undermine the “stable social, sexual and linguistic forms” which is essential for the working of the world in the play and even outside it.

Eagleton traces the transgression by the Macbeths within history and the subversive nature of the witches within cyclical time. The use of the moon, dance, verbal repetition is seen as “inimical to linear history”.

The Case of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth instigates Macbeth to become a man by killing Duncan and claiming his due on the grounds of valor.

In the sixteenth century world, Lady Macbeth can realize her ambition only viz-a-viz her husband. 

If Macbeth claims the throne, Lady Macbeth too makes a strange narrative of her own. She has often been called the fourth witch. It is because she uses one that does not follow the syntax of normative society.

The freedom in the choice of words that she makes her own is only seen in the supernatural world of the witches.

Terry Eagleton says Lady Macbeth is a bourgeois individualist for whom traditional ties of rank and kinship are less constitutive of personal identity than mere obstacles to be surmounted in the pursuit of one’s private ends.

She belonged to a world that was increasingly more mercantile than before, even as it continued under a monarch.

In the Cromwellian period, the monarch has been executed and the republic was established. Traders and merchants became more important in the seventeenth century.

Thus, calling Lady Macbeth a bourgeois individualist” would be appropriate. People were driven by their desires to acquire personal benefit. In doing so they also flout the existing social mores. 

Eagleton points out Lady Macbeth is akin to the three sisters in celebrating female power, but in modern parlance, she is a bourgeois feminist who strives to outdo in domination and virility the very male system which subordinates her.

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