Descent Into Madness: Orson Welles' Macbeth Anonymous 12th Grade

It is often debated as to whether the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth represent instruments of fate or whether they are simply manipulating and toying with Macbeth and influencing him to act in certain ways. However, Orson Welles, in his 1948 adaptation of Macbeth, uses the witches in a completely different sense, depicting Macbeth’s descent into insanity by leaving the witches in Act 4, Scene 1, out of frame while Macbeth toils onscreen, causing the audience to wonder whether, in this scene, the witches are truly present or are instead of Macbeth’s mind’s creation, thereby drawing parallels to the own turmoil and absolute paranoia of the times.

Though much is to be made for the argument that the witches truly were present, as Welles inserts a scene prior to Macbeth’s crowning that shows the witches placing a crown on top of a doll’s head (likely taking influence from his own groundbreaking 1936 production of Voodoo Macbeth), the purposeful absence of the witches seems to intentionally show his madness, since Act 3, Scene 4, in which Macbeth hallucinates both Duncan and Banquo appearing at his banquet makes him cause a fit. The purposeful cutting and pasting of these two scenes next to each other, removing the two in...