It is difficult to understate the lasting impact that the works of William Shakespeare have had on the world. One can scarcely go through a day without hearing a line from one of his sonnets or a quote from one of his plays. Indeed, many people (myself included) spout his prose verbatim without even realizing the source of the words they speak. Shakespeare's plays have been the subject of films from the earliest days of movie making, and the body of his work has been dissected, studied, argued and analyzed for literally hundreds of years. Not surprisingly, the plays of The Bard are finding a more and more prominent place in our entertainment venues as the millennium draws to a close.

A more cynical mind would point out that 400-year-old writings are free of the burden of royalty payments, and therefore provide an automatic profit margin for the producers of films and plays, but such cynicism overlooks the timeless nature of Shakespeare's subject matter. Love, lust, tragedy and comedy are what all entertainment ventures are concerned with in the final analysis, and no one has ever illustrated these primal states of being better than has William Shakespeare.

This year's Shakespeare in the Park presentation at Southmoreland Park in Kansas City, Missouri, will feature the tale of Macbeth, the warrior who, by taking a decidedly proactive role in the fulfillment of his predicted fate, becomes king of nothing. This play features a trio of witches, often referred to as "The Weird Sisters", who take it upon themselves to reveal Macbeth's future to him, and their revelations ultimately lead him to ruin. But who are these three? Are they mere harbingers of fate, or something more sinister? More importantly, how does Macbeth view them, and why on Earth did he take their cackling predictions so deeply and dreadfully to heart?

Macbeth is a man to be reckoned with. He is a leader of men, and a successful leader at that. King Duncan has relied on Macbeth heavily in a war with Norway, and Macbeth rewards that trust with a victory over what had been feared were superior forces. Macbeth and his friend Banquo first encounter the three witches (who seem to appear out of nowhere) as they return from the decisive battle. The two men think them merely odd until the three begin foretelling their futures. Macbeth is to be king, but will bear no kings, they say; Banquo shall bear kings, but shall not be king himself. As the pair puzzles over these oddities, the trio of women vanish, leaving Macbeth and Banquo to ponder the strangeness of it all.

The two friends are not privy to the nature of the witches when first they appear, but *we* are already taken aback, having been present when the weird sisters are first seen at the beginning of the play. One of them speaks of having met a woman, the wife of a sailor away at sea, who was "mounching chestnuts". The witch asks her for some and is rebuked. The witch is angered by this, and so makes a magical trip to sea to find the woman's husband, returning "with the thumb of a pilot" as a prize. Thus are we shown that these witches are the stuff of frightening fairy tales, a literary embodiment of the hunkering, dark, malevolent caricatures which Christianity foisted upon the world; an image which remains in the Halloween silhouettes of witches that you see at Wal Mart every October, warty hooked noses and all. The "double, double, toil and trouble" incantation which is so inextricably linked to evil witches going about their baleful work comes from Macbeth. It is perhaps a sad tribute to the impact of Shakespeare that this image has been so thoroughly stereotyped into the public consciousness. Sadder still is the fact that modern practitioners of witchcraft must battle this slanderous image day in and day out.

Very shortly after their meeting with the witches, Banquo and Macbeth meet others who immediately confirm one of the witches' predictions, namely, that Macbeth is to be Thane of Cawdor. This is curious to Macbeth because he is already Lord of a considerable amount of property, and the current Thane of Cawdor was thought to be a steadfast supporter of King Duncan. As it turns out, the man has been accused of aiding and abetting the Norwegian enemy, and he is stripped of his lands (and life, for that matter). Macbeth does indeed become the new Thane of Cawdor. It is at this point that Macbeth begins to take the witches' predictions a little more seriously, and even allows himself to wonder about how he might become king.

Macbeth tells the tale of his meeting with the weird sisters to his wife, and Lady Macbeth is greatly excited at the prospect of becoming Queen. She is so excited, in fact, that she hatches a plot to kill King Duncan under the assumption that Macbeth will be the only person above suspicion and will be a likely choice to be the new king. Of course, Duncan's sons must be framed in order for this to happen, and so Macbeth's downward spiral begins. It is intimated that Macbeth doesn't really feel very good about all the treachery, but he seems to be able to accept it as his fate. After all, didn't the witches say he was going to be king?

Macbeth visits the three, seeking clarification of his future, but he is intentionally misled by them (even though much of what they tell him eventually comes to pass). The ponderously annotated version of the play which I reviewed for this article states that the witches are symbolic of The Fates, or perhaps even faeries or nymphs, but frankly, I didn't see anything of the sort. From my point of view, the witches are the primary antagonists of the play; without their meddling, Macbeth probably goes on to lead a wealthy and comfortable life as a member of the inner circle of his land. But this would have made for a rather boring tale, so Macbeth deliberately goes about the murderous treachery which fulfills the predictions of the weird sisters.

In the end, Macbeth seems to use the witches' predictions as justification for his insane acts. His wife is all too ready to push him further and further down this ill-chosen path, and he does nothing to dissuade her apart from some vague musings about whether or not he should be killing people who love and trust him.

Perhaps Macbeth suffers from that intellectual malaise which affects everyone from time to time...rationalization. His pride won't allow him to accept that he will be king but bear no kings himself, so he sets out to kill his best friend and the sons of his friend, the friend who the witches said would bear kings. Macbeth ceases to reason, believing instead that his fate can be changed, because he has been misled by the witches. This is an odd paradox if one is supposed to accept that the evil acts were set in motion by the rationalization that the future was set and he was only making sure that the witches' predictions came true.

In the end, Macbeth is a victim, but he is a victim of his own pride and the greed of those whom he trusts. This may have been obvious to others who have evaluated the play over the years, and perhaps it is this obviousness that produced the view of the witches as The Fates or other representational beings rather than simply as antagonistic meddlers. Whatever the case, Macbeth clearly failed to fear the weird sisters and the predictions they made, and lack of fear in a warrior leads to incautious behavior, and ultimately, to failure and misery.