Three Witches

Three Witches / Wayward Sisters / Weird Sisters
Scene from Macbeth, depicting the witches' conjuring of an apparition in Act IV, Scene I. Painting by William Rimmer
Creator	William Shakespeare
Play	Macbeth

The Three Witches or Weird Sisters or Wayward Sisters are characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth (c. 1603–1607). Their origin lies in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Other possible sources, aside from Shakespeare's imagination itself, include British folklore, such contemporary treatises on witchcraft as King James VI of Scotland's Daemonologie, the Norns of Norse mythology, and ancient classical myths of the Fates: the Greek Moirai and the Roman Parcae. Productions of Macbeth began incorporating portions of Thomas Middleton's contemporaneous play, The Witch, circa 1618, two years after Shakespeare's death.

Shakespeare's witches are prophets who hail Macbeth, the general, early in the play, and prophesy his ascent to king. Upon killing the king and ascending the throne of Scotland, Macbeth hears them ambiguously prophesy his eventual downfall. The darkly contradictory witches, their "filthy" trappings and supernatural activities, all set an ominous tone for the play.

Artists in the eighteenth century (e.g., Henry Fuseli, William Rimmer) depicted the witches variously, as have many directors since. Some have exaggerated or sensationalized the hags, or have adapted them to different cultures, as in Orson Welles's rendition of the weird sisters as voodoo priestesses. Some film adaptations have cast the witches as such modern analogues as hippies on drugs, or goth schoolgirls. Their influence reaches the literary realm as well in such works as the Discworld and Harry Potter series.