Response: The Witches of Macbeth were, we believe, taken seriously by the generality (although not the entirety) of Shakespeare's audience. Their credence was notably absent in the Restoration audience when "improvements" of Macbeth in the matter of Witches titillated these coterie playgoers. Even in today's world numerous persons proclaim themselves to be witches. Witches in Shakespeare's day were also called by other names, such as "nimphes," "feiries," "weirds." Unlike the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream they were associated with darkness and evil. The description "weird" in "weird sisters" came from Anglo-Saxon wyrd, "fate," although there is no evidence that Shakespeare knew this. He took the term "weird sisters" from his principal source for Macbeth, Holinshed's Chronicles, wherein they are called "goddesses of destinie." Shakespeare uses this conception of his Witches in I.ii, thereby lending them stature far above ordinary witches and assisting in deluding Macbeth to his downfall. When his destruction is at hand, Macbeth realises that the Witches are "juggling fiends," creatures through whom the Devil works. Interestingly, the great American Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge wrote: "The Weird Sisters, then, are the Norns of Scandinavian mythology. The Norns were goddesses who shaped beforehand the life of every man." If this view of Macbeth were credited, Macbeth would be deprived of free will, and so be different from Shakespeare's other tragic protagonists (except, perhaps, Romeo). In fact, the Witches never indicate that they control Macbeth's destiny; at most they predict it. No one in the play claims that they ordain human life. On the other hand, if the Witches are regarded merely as figments of imagination (there is also the matter of Banquo's imagination), the play loses the idea that something in the universe is correspondent to something in the human soul: the Witches are not simply objectifications of Macbeth's evil desires and...