The many faces of the witch: a mythical analysis of the sorceress on the Macbeth play written by Shakespeare and on the cinematographic adaptation by Welles

Abstract

The narrative is one of the most common and ancient ways of understanding the world, the history has pervaded humanity since immemorial times and helped the human being to understand itself. This paper aims to analyze the witches’ mythical components of one the most consecrated narratives, Macbeth. For that, it will be analyzed the written play of Shakespeare (1623) and of the film adaptation of Welles (1963), both responsible for popularizing the story of the king. The choice is made to perceive the symbiotic relationship between literature and cinema, a relation that permeates the questioning of how witches are represented in each narrative. This work counts on the contributions of Bazin (1991), Bulfinch (2002), Carrière (2006) and Prieto (2003) and search, from the theorists who speak about the relations between literature and cinema or about myth, to demonstrate how the mythology corroborates with a more complete reading on the divine component present in both narratives. This proposal is justified by contributing to the studies about the relations of cinema and literature, which have stood out in the last decades, making available new tools for the art analysis in both environments, besides reflecting on the myth and the figure of the witch represented on both platforms.