The stage history of Macbeth is a horror story in which the role of the witches keeps expanding, and frantic attempts are made to restrain their magic power. Even by the time of Macbeth's first publication, in the First Folio of 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare's death), someone seems to have spliced into Shakespeare's text a new witch, or witchmaster, Hecate (3.5 and 4.1.39–43). In both her scenes, Hecate is associated with music: the stage directions instruct the witches to perform songs, Come away at the end of 3.5, and Black spirits at 4.1.43. The folio doesn't give the text of either song, but each can be found both in Thomas Middleton's The Witch (ca. 1609) and in the Davenant version of Macbeth (1663–64, publ. 1674). It is possible that the Hecate scenes and songs are the work of Middleton; in any case they greatly distend the spatial range of the witches. Hecate, above all, loves to fly:

The authentically Shakespearean witches were also capable of rapid movement to distant places—one of them sails in a sieve to Aleppo to waste a stingy woman's husband. But Hecate and her minions seem more exhilarated by the flying itself than by any mischief to be done at the destination.