The Three Cooke Sisters: Were They the Real “Witches” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth?

Or, What the Learned Ladies of Gidea Hall Were Really Cooking Up

It’s that deliciously eerie time of year when bonfires smolder, ravens croak from the bare trees, and from across the centuries, you can almost hear the rustle of long, black silk skirts.

It’s the perfect time to chant the cauldron chorus from Shakespeare’s

Macbeth: “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and Cauldron bubble…”.

🐦‍⬛But here’s Well-Kept Elizabethan Secret #1: Were Mildred Cooke Cecil, Anne Cooke Bacon, and Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell the three hags on the Scottish heath?

Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The eldest Cooke sister brewed no charms. As Lady Burghley, Mildred Cooke Cecil managed England’s most formidable household and kept her cauldron bubbling with Latin, Greek, Puritanism, logic, and power brokering that benefitted the Cecils.

Those three hags on the Scottish heath known as Macbeth’s “witches” bear remarkable resemblances to three politically influential Elizabethan sisters who themselves were known for making prophesies, wreaking revenge and cooking up strange recipes in their kitchen cauldrons.

Shakespeare not only identified the three prophetic cauldron-stirrers as “witches” in the 1623 First Folio’s Macbeth, the earliest surviving text of the play, he called them “wayward” and “weyard” “Sisters”. Later editors thoughtlessly flattened those two adjectives into just plain “weird”.  

Why does that matter? Because who Shakespeare’s manipulative “witches” really were can be explained through the Bard’s very precise word choices. Personal characteristics can perhaps identify the real historical women behind Macbeth’s all-knowing power-trip trio.

🪶 Well-Kept Elizabethan Secret #2: “Weird” and “Wayward” Were Two Different Things

In the First Folio text of Macbeth, the sisters are called “weyward” three times and “weyard” three times. For example:

Banquo: “I dreampt last Night of the three weyward Sisters.” (Act II, Scene 1)

Macbeth: “I will to morrow (and betimes I will) to the weyard Sisters”. (Act III, Scene 4)

The two-syllable wey-ward means contrary, self-willed, capricious, obstinate—a perfect fit for ladies who hang out in fogs, throw toads and dead dog parts into a pot, and prophesy royal murders for sport. But it also describes women who are self-directed, unpredictable, and dangerously intelligent --  not the idealized compliant Tudor female. The word “strong-willed” comes to mind.

In contrast, weyard echoes the Old English wyrd, meaning, not “strange” as it does today, but “fate”—as in the three Fates from classical texts who spun and snipped the threads of humans’ lives, determining whether someone lived a little longer, or died. The concept of cutting off someone’s life bears within it the chilling concept of . . . murder.

So in Acts I and II, before their prophecies come true, Shakespeare’s “wayward” sisters are unbridled and intelligent women. After their predictions prove correct, they also evolve into “weird” sisters—sisters who are arbiters of destiny, of fate, and perhaps of life and death. In other words, to Shakespeare these three women are both individually strong-willed and very influential in matters of state and the health (or death) of others.

Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577), Shakespeare’s source,  describes three females that Macbeth encounters as the “Goddesses of destinie”, echoing classical myth. It’s Shakespeare who made them considerably less physically attractive, more strategic and, well, scarier – like he had a personal vendetta against them.

Lewis Theobald, an editor of Shakespeare’s works two centuries later not only had the chutzpah to feud with Alexander Pope over editorial choices, but to insist  that “my emendation must be embraced.”  Theobald declared that both “weyward” and “weyard” “must be” from that day forth spelled “weird.” (Or what happens, Lewis?  You turn Pope into a newt?)

Thus, the true identities of the three “witches” in Macbeth may have been erased by one man’s editorial swagger.

🪄 Well-Kept Elizabethan Secret #3: The Cooke Sisters—Real Tudor Alchemists

Anne Cooke Bacon. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”  Anne Bacon’s conscience quivered with divine warnings. Translator of Protestant texts, mother of Francis Bacon, and scourge of prelates, she predicted moral corruption long before it arrived, mimicking the prophesies of Macbeth’s three witches.

Once you realize Shakespeare’s “sisters” weren’t just witches but wayward/strong-willed and weird/ fate-defining women with recipes, another mystery bubbles up. Could Shakespeare have been teasing three very real Elizabethan women of his acquaintance?

Let’s ever so briefly introduce the Cooke Sisters—Mildred Cooke Cecil, Anne Cooke Bacon, and Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell—three of the five brilliantly educated daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall. These women were well known in the Elizabethan court for wielding influence in lucrative preferments, religious appointments, wardships, politics and Protestant doctrine.

They were particularly famous for their strict Calvinism, their fluency in ancient Greek and Latin, and the sophistication with which they brewed medicinal “waters” and “elixirs”. In a century when most women couldn’t read, these sisters translated Cicero, Galen, and the Church Fathers’ texts with ease—and then mixed herbal medicines worthy of Paracelsus himself in their kitchen cauldrons.

Here is a pricking thumbnail sketch of each:

• 🧙‍♀️ Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley, mother of my third heroine, Anne Cecil, could flay an opposing argument and its maker as deftly as she could distill an herbal cordial. Her husband, William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Treasurer and Secretary of State, recorded that she exercised excessive control over their daughter and wished their son-in-law “dead”. Let’s just say that Mildred Cooke Cecil defines the words “intimidating” and “uncompromising”. Banquo’s description of the witches as “wither’d”, “skinny-lipped” and “choppy” fingered describes Mildred physically to a “T”, even on her best day. 

  
  

• 🧙‍♀️ Anne Cooke Bacon, a brilliant translator and highly successful intermediary for those seeking promotions at court, was wife to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal, and mother to Francis and Anthony Bacon. In her later years, she became prophetic, outspoken and highly argumentative, leading some to opine that she had gone mad, aligning her perfectly with “weyward” and “weyard”.  After her death, she was identified as the ghost of Gray’s Inn where both her sons had  studied and rumored to stalk its corridors protesting “Call Night” revels. 

  
  

• 🧙‍♀️ Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, twice widowed, was famously outspoken and confident enough to style herself “Countess of Bedford” although her husband died before he inherited the Earl of Bedford title. She was later styled “Wicked Lady Hoby” by others.  Her ghost reportedly still haunts Bisham Abbey, where she once beat her too-slow-to-learn-for-her-taste son for blotting his copybooks. Some rumors say she killed him.

  
  

If that isn’t the stuff of Shakespearean legend—three formidable, educated, potion-mixing sisters with reputations as intimidating ghosts plagued with moral uncertainties—what is?

🐈‍⬛ Recipes from the Elizabethan “Cauldron”: Real-Life Witchcraft in the Kitchen

Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell. “Double, double, toil and trouble.” Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell stirred up family feuds and a fight over a Blackfriars theater. Twice widowed, she stitched together her own legend from wit, connections and ambition – styling herself  “Countess of Bedford” even though she wasn’t. Whatever her sisters threw into the political pot, Elizabeth brought it to a boil.

To see how close the line between kitchen and coven could be, consider these genuine Tudor remedies:

Shingles? Take of doves’ dung that is moist & of barley meal alike… mix with good wine vinegar to make a plaster.

Sore throat? Mix this up over the fire in an earthenware pot with a wooden spoon and a feather: verjuice, water, syrup of mulberries, sal prunella, and oil of vitriol. Gargle often; touch the lump with the oil on a feather.

Bitten by a mad dog? Mix onions stamped with salt, rue, and honey and apply to the bite.

No fillet of fenny snake or root of hemlock “digged in the dark” required. Just household ingredients, herbs, live animals and nerve.

The Cooke Sisters—and women like them—stood at the blurred frontier between science and superstition. Their medicines could heal, harm, or, as we will see in a future post, end a pregnancy.

🎭 Revenge of the Witches and the Cookes

The three Cooke sisters operated closely and used their collective networks to foil anyone who crossed one of them. Take the extensive campaign Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell waged against Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (also her nephew by marriage) and his first theater in her self-proclaimed London bailiwick of Blackfriars. Elizabeth summoned her network and that of her sisters and their powerful husbands to make her case that the theater was too noisy and brought undesirables (players and musicians) into chic Blackfriars.

Likewise, in MacBeth, all three sisters send winds to “Tempest-toss” the ship of the sailor whose wife refused to share her chestnuts with one witch. Here’s their chant:

The wayward Sisters, hand in hand,

Powers of the Sea and Land,

Thus do go, about, about,

Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,

And Thrice again, to make up nine.”

        Act I, Sc. iii

Notwithstanding the 18th century foot stomping of Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare moved his “wayward” and “weird” Sisters from brewing highly-effective political influence and cordials in their kitchens onto a supernatural heath where their “Powers” over “the Sea and Land” toyed with the fates of kings.

It’s a sly, biting joke from a playwright who seems to have had little fondness for the Cooke sisters and their circle -- exactly the type of thing you might write about your potion-brewing mother-in-law who wanted you dead, for example. (Just saying.)

What better revenge than to immortalize the three formidable, influential and elixir-concocting Cooke Sisters as the three wayward and weird witches whose potions upend a kingdom?

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