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Three Witches Prophecies In Macbeth

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The three witches’ prophecies acted as a trigger that influenced and obscured Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition”, causing him to become presumptuous as they mislead him into falsely believing that he was invulnerable and unconquerable with their deceptive use of equivocation, thus leading him to his undoing. Though the witches don’t force Macbeth to do anything, they merely revealed the future and chose to confront Macbeth when he was most vulnerable, planting a ‘seed’ in his head that “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!” and that “none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth” which inevitably start dominating the way he acted. Initially, the witches’ deceptive tidings of their chiasmus “fair is foul and foul is fair” is imagery used to echo the notion of moral contamination whilst their impact on Macbeth’s already troubled mind contextually depicts them as agents of the devil. With their adoption of ambiguous language, they ‘palter with Macbeth in riddles and affairs of death’ and as a result he is ‘drawn into confusion’, which is used by Shakespeare to convey the danger of suggestion, that depending on the conditions, they may be harmless, delusive or insidious.

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