In Shakespeare’s original text, the sisters may have been morally ambiguous creatures who do nothing more than give voice to mysterious and equivocal “solicitings,” oracular prophecies. Middleton may then have converted them into the kind of overtly evil singing and chanting witches who had appeared in Jonson’s Masque of Queens and about which he wrote his own The Witch. He also doubled their number and brought on Hecate and assorted attendant spirits, including one in the shape of a cat. Crude practitioners of black magic, they are unequivocal almost to the point of comedy. This said, we
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