What would be the reaction of the Jacobean audience when faced with the witches in Macbeth?

Answer 1

Although the people of that era believed in witches, the witches in Macbeth were very probably not portrayed as frightening. The very silly scenes involving songs and the headwitch Hecate (which were likely not written by Shakespeare, but were written also in the Jacobean Era) make the witches sillier than the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream, and although these scenes are never played nowadays, there is every reason to think that this was actually how the witches were played at first. This may have been the only way to get them onstage in a time when people would have been genuinely frightened of representations of real witches.