'Double, Double Toil and Trouble' Painting

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and howlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good. Song of the Witches: “Double, double toil and trouble” (Macbeth) Source: poetryfoundation.org The Three Witches, also known as the Weird Sisters or Wayward Sisters, are characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth (c. 1603–1607). They hold a striking resemblance to the three Fates of classical mythology, and are, perhaps, intended as a twisted version of the white-robed incarnations of destiny. The witches eventually lead Macbeth to his demise. Their origin lies in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Other possible sources, aside from Shakespeare's imagination, 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 predict his ascent to kingship. Upon killing the king and gaining the throne of Scotland, Macbeth hears them ambiguously predict his eventual downfall. The witches, and their "filthy" trappings and supernatural activities, set an ominous tone for the play. Artists in the eighteenth century, including Henry Fuseli and William Rimmer, depicted the witches variously, as have many directors since. Some have exaggerated or sensationalised 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. The name "weird sisters" is found in most modern editions of Macbeth. However, the First Folio's text reads: The weyward Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the Sea and Land... In later scenes in the First Folio the witches are called "weyward", but never "weird". The modern appellation "weird sisters" derives from Holinshed's original Chronicles. However, modern English spelling was only starting to become fixed by Shakespeare's time and also the word 'weird' (from Old English wyrd, fate) had connotations beyond the common modern meaning. The Wiktionary etymology for "weird" includes this observation: "[The word] was extinct by the 16th century in English. It survived in Scots, whence Shakespeare borrowed it in naming the Weird Sisters, reintroducing it to English. The senses "abnormal", "strange" etc. arose via reinterpretation of "Weird Sisters" and date from after this reintroduction." One of Shakespeare's principal sources for the Three Witches is found in the account of King Duncan in Raphael Holinshed's history of Britain, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587). In Holinshed, the future King Macbeth of Scotland and his companion Banquo encounter "three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world" who hail the men with glowing prophecies and then vanish "immediately out of their sight". Holinshed observes that "the common opinion was that these women were either the Weird Sisters, that is… the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science." Another principal source was the Daemonologie of King James published in 1597 which included a news pamphlet titled Newes from Scotland that detailed the infamous North Berwick witch trials of 1590. Not only had this trial taken place in Scotland, witches involved confessed to attempt the use of witchcraft to raise a tempest and sabotage the very boat King James and the Queen of Scots were on board during their return trip from Denmark. The three witches discuss the raising of winds at sea in the opening lines of Act 1 Scene 3. The news pamphlet states: Moreover she confessed that at the time when his Majesty was in Denmark, she being accompanied with the parties before specially named, took a Cat and christened it, and afterward bound to each part of that Cat, the cheefest parts of a dead man, and several joints of his body, and that in the night following the said Cat was conveyed into the midst of the sea by all these witches sailing in their riddles or Cues as aforesaid, and so left the said Cat right before the Town of Leith in Scotland: this done, there did arise such a tempest in the Sea, as a greater has not been seen: which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a Boat or vessel coming over from the town of Brunt Island to the town of Leith, of which was many Jewels and rich gifts, which should have been presented to the current Queen of Scotland, at her Majesty's coming to Leith. Again it is confessed, that the said christened Cat was the cause that the King Majesty's Ship at his coming forth of Denmark, had a contrary wind to the rest of his Ships, then being in his company, which thing was most strange and true, as the King's Majesty acknowledges – Daemonologie, Newes from Scotland The concept of the Three Witches themselves may have been influenced by the Old Norse skaldic poem Darraðarljóð (found in chapter 157 of Njáls saga), in which twelve valkyries weave and choose who is to be slain at the Battle of Clontarf (fought outside Dublin in 1014). Shakespeare's creation of the Three Witches may have also been influenced by an anti-witchcraft law passed by King James nine years previously, a law that was to stay untouched for over 130 years. His characters' "chappy fingers", "skinny lips", and "beards", for example, are not found in Holinshed. Macbeth's Hillock near Brodie, between Forres and Nairn in Scotland, has long been identified as the mythical meeting place of Macbeth and the witches. Traditionally, Forres is believed to have been the home of both Duncan and Macbeth. However, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed that the three weird sisters should be seen as ambiguous figures, never actually being called witches by themselves or other characters in the play. Moreover, they were depicted as more fair than foul both in Holinshed's account and in that of contemporary playgoer Simon Forman. Macbeth /məkˈbɛθ/, fully The Tragedy of Macbeth, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It was probably first performed in 1606. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book, and is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. Macbeth is a Scottish general who has been fighting for King Duncan. Three witches tell Macbeth that he will become king of Scotland. Macbeth is spurred by his ambition and his wife, and he murders Duncan and accedes to the throne. His reign is bloody and tyrannical and ended by the combined forces of Scotland and England. Shakespeare's main source for the story was Holinshed's Chronicles, particularly its accounts of Macbeth and Macduff and Duncan, but events in the play differ extensively from events involving the historical Macbeth. Events in Shakespeare's play are usually associated with Henry Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In theatre Macbeth has been associated with a curse. People have avoided speaking its title, calling it "The Scottish Play". However, it has attracted some of the most renowned actors to the leading roles and has been adapted for multifarious other media. It has been continuously in production since the 1660s. Macbeth is an anomaly among Shakespeare's tragedies in certain critical ways. It is short: more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear, and only slightly over half the length of Hamlet. This brevity has suggested to many critics that the received version is based on a heavily cut source, perhaps a prompt-book for a particular performance. This would reflect other Shakespeare plays existing in both Quarto and the Folio, where the Quarto versions are usually longer than the Folio versions. Macbeth was first printed in the First Folio and has no Quarto version – if there was a Quarto version, it would probably be longer than the Folio version. The brevity has also been connected to other unusual features: the fast pace of the first act has seemed to be "stripped for action", and the comparative flatness of characters other than Macbeth is unusual, and the strangeness of Macbeth himself when compared with other of Shakespeare's tragic heroes is odd. A. C. Bradley, in considering this question, concluded that the play "always was an extremely short one", noting that the witch scenes and battle scenes would have taken up some time in performance. He remarked: "I do not think that, in reading, we feel Macbeth to be short: certainly we are astonished when we hear it is about half as long as Hamlet. Perhaps in the Shakespearean theatre too it seemed to occupy a longer time than the clock recorded.” William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[8][9][10] Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.[2][3][4] In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hailed Shakespeare in a now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time”. Source: Wikipedia

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:36 W x 72 H x 1.5 D in

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