The Witches’ Cauldron

Gustave Doré, the famous engraver, exercises here his taste for fantasy by illustrating a scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth, one of the great sources for the representation of witches in the Western imagination. At the beginning of Act IV, the three women are singing incantations around a cauldron, filling it with exotic and repugnant ingredients, as Macbeth joins them in their cave, asking to be told his future. The verses of Shakespeare's witches (Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble … Something wicked this way comes…) have inspired many titles and episodes of contemporary popular fantasy — such as the song sung by the choir in the great hall of Hogwarts at the beginning of the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.