By the pricking of my thumbs,/Something wicked this way comes.

“By the pricking of my thumbs,/Something wicked this way comes.” (Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1)

My unessay, as you can see, is based around this line that has been living in my head rent free. I’ve been wondering about the Witches’ relationship with wickedness, and if Macbeth is truly the wickedness they claim. A large conversation in class was about whether Macbeth was the driving force behind the murders and madness, and my answer to that is: …eh. There’s a lot of people at fault, and it’s not fair to the story to just blame one person. 

Prophecies are weird and I’m decently sure all prophecies are self-fulfilling ones. Everyone is curious about the mysteries of life, some more than others. If you were told a grand prophecy about how you could one day be the most powerful person in all of Scotland, it would stick in your mind. Macbeth writing it in a letter to Lady Macbeth was probably a tamer response to being told that, as in other media, some people let it fester until they snap. Lady Macbeth was power hungry, and leaped at the chance for more power than she already had as Macbeth’s wife. As queen, she would be able to do a lot more without getting in trouble for it. Her guilty conscience got her in the end, even if her cause of death is ambiguous. The Witches are clearly a neutral party, not caring who lives and who dies. It doesn’t seem to matter to them or affect them, so why should they care? Witchcraft was and still is demonized, and while that does not make them completely at fault, it does not abolish them from creating the source of the chaos in the first place. 

This is a digital drawing. My first thought, for some bizarre reason, was to have Macbeth standing there ominously like he was about to compete in a cowboy duel, which would have been fun to draw but ultimately not what I wanted to turn in as a project. I then had the idea for the Second Witch to be looking over her shoulder in the first panel, to where Macbeth would be standing in the second panel. Macbeth still stands ominously in the second panel, but I changed the idea for the first panel from the Second Witch’s face to just her hands, as I was having trouble drawing someone looking over their shoulder. It just kind of looked like her neck had snapped, and that wasn’t what I was going for at all. 

The hands are based off of a picture of my own, as hands are hard to draw. I gave the Second Witch matching nail polish to her robes because the Witches are honestly iconic and even if they didn’t have nail polish in Macbeth’s time, I think the Witches could have magicked something up. Also, artistic liberties. There’s not a whole lot of character descriptions in the text itself, which I tried my best to incorporate by not including any actual features after discarding my previous idea. 

As for the setting, the text never specifies if this scene takes place outside or not. Artistic liberties, yay! What lended me to thinking they are inside is this quote: “Open, locks,/Whoever knocks.” (Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1) Which seems to allude to the fact that they are somewhere with a locked door. I didn’t actually include a door, as I didn’t want it to take away from Macbeth’s shadowy figure in the doorway. I’m not great at shadows or effects, especially for digital drawings, but I tried my best to make my piece look shaded and for the cauldron to be slightly glowing, as the witches had just finished making a charm/spell.