"The most fertile force in the play"To any unprejudiced reader -- which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audience, and almost all literary critics -- it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. The witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honours. It is their riddling, ambiguous speech (they 'palter with us in a double sense') which promises to subvert this structure: their teasing word-play infiltrates and undermines Macbeth from within, revealing in him a lack which hollows his being into desire. The witches signify a realm of non-meaning and poetic play which hovers at the work's margins, one which has its own kind of truth . . . . In this sense the witches figure as the 'unconscious' of the drama, that which must be exiled and repressed as dangerous but which is always likely to return with a vengeance. That unconscious is a discourse in which meaning falters and slides, in which firm definitions are dissolved and binary oppositions eroded: fair is foul and foul is fair, nothing is but what is not. Androgynous (bearded women), multiple (three-in-one) and 'imperfect speakers', the witches strike at the stable social, sexual, and linguistic forms which the society of the play needs in order to survive . . . .As the most fertile force in the play, the witches inhabit an anarchic, richly ambiguous zone both in and out of official society; they live in their own world but intersect with Macbeth's. They are poets, prophetesses and devotees of female cult, radical separatists who scorn male power and lay bare the hollow sound and fury at its heart. Their words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed positions, unhinging received meanings as they dance, dissolve and re-materialize. But official society can only ever imagine its radical 'other' as chaos rather than creativity, and is thus bound to define the sisters as evil. Foulness -- a political order which thrives on bloodshed -- believes itself fair, whereas the witches do not so much invert this opposition as deconstruct it. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 1-3. |