84.  The first critic whose comments upon this subject call for notice is the eminent Gervinus.  In evident ignorance of the history of witchcraft, he says, “In the witches Shakspere has made use of the popular belief in evil geniuses and in adverse persecutors of mankind, and has produced a similar but darker race of beings, just as he made use of the belief in fairies in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’  This creation is less attractive and complete, but not less masterly.  The poet, in the text of the play itself, calls these beings witches only derogatorily; they call themselves weird sisters; the Fates bore this denomination, and the sisters remind us indeed of the Northern Fates or Valkyries.  They appear wild and weather-beaten in exterior and attire, common in speech, ignoble, half-human creatures, ugly as the Evil One, and in like manner old, and of neither sex.  They are guided by more powerful masters, their work entirely springs from delight in evil, and they are wholly devoid of human sympathies....  They are simply the embodiment of inward temptation; they come in storm and vanish in air, like corporeal impulses, which, originating in the blood, cast up bubbles of sin and ambition in the soul; they are weird sisters only in the sense in which men carry their own fates within their bosoms."[1] This criticism is so entirely subjective and unsupported by evidence that it is difficult to deal satisfactorily with it.  It will be shown hereafter that this description does not apply in the least to the Scandinavian Norns, while, so far as it is true to Shakspere’s text, it does not clash with contemporary records of the appearance and actions of witches.

[Footnote 1:  Shakspere Commentaries, translated by F.E.  Bunnert, p. 591.]

85.  The next writer to bring forward a view of this character was the Rev. F.G.  Fleay, the well-known Shakspere critic, whose ingenious efforts in iconoclasm cause a curious alternation of feeling between admiration and amazement.  His argument is unfortunately mixed up with a question of textual criticism; for he rejects certain scenes in the play as the work of the inferior dramatist Middleton.[1] The question relating to the text will only be noticed so far as it is inextricably involved with the argument respecting the nature of the weird sisters.  Mr. Fleay’s position is, shortly, this.  He thinks that Shakspere’s play commenced with the entrance of Macbeth and Banquo in the third scene of the first act, and that the weird sisters who subsequently take part in that scene are Norns, not witches; and that in the first scene of the fourth act, Shakspere discarded the Norns, and introduced three entirely new characters, who were intended to be genuine witches.

[Footnote 1:  Of the witch scenes Mr. Fleay rejects Act I. sc. i., and sc. iii. down to l. 37, and Act III. sc. v.]