Day 25: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

So the witches in Macbeth may seem absurd or even a little silly today (why did they have so many ingredients in their brew? Surely some of those ingredients were much harder to get than the thing they were making the potion in order to get...) but they were serious business for Shakespeare's contemporary audience. Witchcraft in the early 1600's was scary and could get you killed. So seeing witches spewing curses on stage was, as Ben Crystal points out in Shakespeare on Toast, probably a little like seeing terrorists build a bomb on stage today. 

Sexy flapper witches, from Approaching Shakespeare's page about teaching Macbeth to middle-graders, which I think is a terrible idea because Macbeth is HELLA DARK!

Still, some of those witches' curses may have had some long-lasting effects. Apparently the infamous "curse of Macbeth" which causes amateur and professional theatre folk alike to refer to it only as "The Scottish Play" when in the vicinity of the theatre, may have its origins in the belief that Shakespeare cursed the play by including "real spells" in the witches' dialogue. So, silly or not, those witches still cause some fear, even if it is just in the form of theatrical superstition.