The hurlyburly’s done, and just as they promised, the Witches are back in 1.3 to wait for Macbeth. The actors can hardly have been off the stage for more than a couple of minutes, but the Witches have been busy. And notice how we’re carried along by the action to feel that they have been wreaking havoc all over the world in just those few minutes. We don’t really know how much dramatic time 1.2 takes, but it is so short that we feel the Witches have been gone only for minutes in dramatic time as well as real time. This is the first example we’ve considered of how Shakespeare plays with time for dramatic effect. We’ll see many more, and more famous examples, as we continue through the plays.
The Second Witch has been “killing swine” (1.3.2), and the First Witch has been rebuffed by a “rump-fed” woman whose chestnuts she coveted (several interpretations of “rump-fed” have been offered; I like “fat-assed” myself), and plans to take revenge on her sea-captain husband: “But in a sieve I’ll thither sail/And like a rat without a tail/I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do” (1.3.7–9). The other Witches offer their help: “I’ll give thee a wind . . .And I another” (10, 13). I can’t help but think this is a fart joke. As they finalize their plans, a drum sounds: “Macbeth doth come” (31), and they recite a little chorus:
The Weird Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace!—the charm’s wound up.
(32–37)
I quote this to give you the flavor of the Witches’ language—singsongy, in tetrameter (four beats rather than the pentameter, or five beats, of blank verse) couplets, distinguishing them from any other character. This seems to be one of the reasons some scholars regard much of the Witches’ scenes as spurious—as if Shakespeare would never conceive of varying his language to suit his characters, or perhaps as if he would never write about anything so infra dig as witches. (The influence of the folk and fairy tale traditions on Shakespeare is greater than I see generally recognized; I’ll be pointing it out throughout.)
* * *
The previous scene opened with a bloody man, a soldier literally covered in blood. This scene gets going with the entrance of a man metaphorically covered in blood; a man whose soul is bloody and who soon will have blood on his hands in more ways than one.
Enter Macbeth.
Note well his first line:
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
(1.3.38)
Nobody could possibly miss this callback to the Witches’ first appearance, but what does it mean? One scholar’s suggestion that Macbeth refers to the foulness of the weather contrasted with the fairness of his day of victory is surely accurate; it’s certainly what Macbeth must be thinking. But it is too literal to exhaust the meaning.
Shakespeare must have had a reason for making this first line a callback. The most obvious reason is to signal that we are back in the realm of the uncanny, where everything is turned on its head. But why does Macbeth rather than his comrade-in-arms Banquo make this observation? There is plainly some connection between Macbeth and the Witches. But what is its nature? Should we agree with the nineteenth-century critic Edward Dowden, who wrote that “although Macbeth has not yet set eyes upon these hags, the connection is already established between his soul and them. Their spells have already wrought upon his blood”? That would imply that he is already lost. (Those of you who are reading this to write your term papers on whether Macbeth is evil or just weak, take note. But I’m not writing that paper for you.) But that seems to me to go too far.
Think yourselves back, once again, into the world premiere audience. No more than Macbeth do you have any idea what is about to happen, apart from one huge advantage; you know what the Witches said earlier. Macbeth doesn’t. He doesn’t know he is echoing what you heard them say. He does not know they are specifically waiting for him (not Banquo); you do. You, as an attentive listener in the Jacobean audience, can already sense that this is going to end in tears. If Macbeth did, he would run the other way.
Macbeth is shot through with the form of situational irony that perhaps made its first, most memorable appearance in Western literature in Oedipus Tyrannos. Oedipus flees Thebes to thwart the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, and ends up unknowingly doing both. Irony flourishes in the gap between the audience’s knowledge and the character’s ignorance. The famous examples in Macbeth, as we’ll see and you probably already know, relate to Macbeth’s trust in the Witches’ prophecies; here we see it at work even before he meets them.
shakesyear 