Macbeth Act 1 Scene 1

Welcome to the second of Crom’s Deep Dives. I was touched by some of your comments on the first of this series and found they motivated me to find the time to commence this second article more quickly than I would have done otherwise. As per Deep Dive 1, the same caveat applies: I’ve no formal learning in the analysis of language so observations are mostly my own. Any criticism is of course welcomed along with highlighting any mistakes or inconsistences. As are, too, any questions that you may have: precede your comment with @Cromwell’s Codpiece and Disqus should notify in its dashboard.

This week’s Deep Dive is on a text that you are likely to have studied or read or seen or even acted at some point during school: Macbeth. Such is the power of the words themselves it does not need to rely on stage effects or visuals to unnerve the audience or reader. This article will concentrate on the opening scene alone – an opening scene of only 13 lines (coincidence?) in which only the infamous witches are present.

Macbeth needs little introduction. It is the source of wonderful expressions including ‘blood on one’s hands’; ‘to be a laughingstock’; and more widely is synonymous with the eerie, occult and supernatural. This is in no small part to the role of the “the weird sisters”, the witches who open the play and later meet and tell Macbeth and Banquo of their respective fates.

Much of the original meaning of weird/‘wyrd’ has been lost in its journey to the modern ‘weird’. Which is frankly a real shame. The modern meaning, of something uncanny or odd or queer, is quite a dilution of its Elizabethan and earlier use. Wyrd has a complex history and meaning but is consistently tied up with the idea of control, fate and the passing of time in multiple earlier languages. Probably most significant and influential here is the idea of the Norns in Norse mythology: the concept of there being three women who weave the fate of men on a loom made of bones with skulls of weights. The idea, of course, is also present in Greek mythology as the Moirai along with representations in other cultures around the world.

Act 1, scene 1 is the shortest opening scene of any of Shakespeare’s plays and comprises, as mentioned above, thirteen lines. The sinister symbolism of the number 13 was present in both Norse mythology and later Christianity in uncannily similar scenarios. In Norse mythology, the mischievous god Loki attends a feast as the uninvited thirteenth guest and plagues the other gods throughout, causing upset and harm and a long-lasting rift. In Christianity, Judas was, of course, the thirteenth guest at the Last Supper. The symbolism of thirteen then is fairly robust and it could, therefore, be argued that from the outset Shakespeare is introducing disharmony and strife by opening a play with thirteen lines. If so, it’s a very bold move in a culture of superstition and suspect.

MACBETH Act 1, Scene 1

FIRST WITCH
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

SECOND WITCH
When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.

THIRD WITCH
That will be ere the set of sun.                        5

FIRST WITCH
Where the place?

SECOND WITCH
Upon the heath.

THIRD WITCH
There to meet with Macbeth.

FIRST WITCH
I come, Graymalkin.

SECOND WITCH
Paddock calls.                    10

THIRD WITCH
Anon.

ALL
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

 

FIRST WITCH
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Most of Shakespeare’s verse (i.e.: non-prose speech) is written in what’s termed iambic pentameter: each line comprising ten syllables with an alternating stress pattern (that typical de-dum-de-dum-de-dum etc). The witches, though, speak something very different.

The witches employ a trochaic tetrameter: eight syllables comprising four sets of two leading with an unstressed syllable. To an Elizabethan audience it would have had the effect of an unnerving disconnect – linguistically separating the witches through their speech patterns from the mortal characters of the play and the audience’s expectations. It would introduce a subtle but sinister discomfort – it just wouldn’t sound right. But that wasn’t enough for the Bard. He goes further by occasionally dropping a syllable from a line – it increasingly halts any comfort in rhythm and regularity that might be found.

And what of the words themselves? Well, they’re beautiful aren’t they. The alliteration of the Ws; the rhyming couplet of again/rain; the long vowels with the meter give it a ponderous tone. It’s probably stretching it a bit but the digraph of wh could be said to be mimicking the howling wind upon the heath the witches are met upon and further increase their disconnect from a mortal world.

An aside: there is dispute about the originality of some scenes in Macbeth’s (as there are many of the plays). Part of the discussion for Macbeth is whether parts of the witches’ dialogue are later, non-Shakespeare inserts (for example the ham-fisted paint-by-numbers rhyming of Hecate shows little of the subtlety of genuine Shakespeare throughout the text). This opening scene is clearly authentic, though.

SECOND WITCH
When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won

Eerie words. The repeated interrogative when (opening three of the four lines so far) creates a rhetorical dissonance and introduces a core tenant of the play: one of questioning rather than answering. Again it’s unnerving in its insistence, particularly as we’re forced to question: what hurly-burly; what battle? The couplet, usually so comforting to us in its sing-song familiarity, sounds hollow from the meter and the internal vowels.

Hurly-burly has a wonderful toing-and-froing sound to it. It pitches this way and that and heightens the uncomfortable, unnatural air produced so far. Hurly-burly isn’t too far removed in Elizabethan use from modern use, derived from hurl “to throw”. An actor on stage has wonderful broad scope on how to deliver this: elongating the inner vowel (u) and then throwing themselves in to the plosive “b” of burly; or with a superior sneer focused on the assonance of the repeated “ur” within hurly-burly.

The third line really throws open the door to the questioning nature of the play, the idea that not all is as it seems: the audience, placed in their uncomfortable state so far, are left querying: how can the battle be paradoxically both lost and won? Again, it further disconnects the witches from the mortal realm and introduces the contradictory dual state consistent throughout the play (“lesser than Macbeth, and greater,”; “not so happy, yet much happier”). Antithesis extraordinaire.

THIRD WITCH
That will be ere the set of sun.                5

There is genius in this line.

It picks up the dropped syllable from line four (seven) and, rather than carry it forward to complete the meter with eight syllables, pushes through with nine. Further, it continues the couplet to a triplet rhyme with a sibilant sun. This is Shakespeare using the meter to give absolutely no comfort of regularity to the audience through consistency but still keeping them on a leash of some familiarity with the triplet.

The line falls flat though and culls the whatever frivolities the previous two witches were having. There is an assertiveness to the third witch, consistent throughout this scene, which leads us to see her as the elder and leader of the group. One can imagine a producer having much fun at this point: at the ending of the line having a long, unnerving silence giving the audience time to soak up the atmosphere and visuals on stage and further isolating them from any temporal familiarity they might have had with the witches.

Sibilant Ss are generally used to introduce a sinister and uncomfortable tone and here they do that very well. There’s a parallel too between the sibilance and the imagery of a setting sun. To quote Banqo in a later scene: good things of day begin to droop and drowse | While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse [3:2]. Contextually, it tells the audience, too, that there is a battle currently ongoing and that, before the sun sets, its outcome shall have been determined.

FIRST WITCH
Where the place?

SECOND WITCH
Upon the heath.

THIRD WITCH
There to meet with Macbeth.

To business! Brought in to check, the first witch commences the order of the day with the third witch boldly declaring, and informing the audience, the intent: to meet Macbeth out on the wily, windy moor. Gone is the vague language, now it is purposeful, succinct and direct.

Showing familiarisation between the witches through the language we have a further rhyming triplet of place/heath/Macbeth (heath in Elizabethan pronunciation having a more open vowel). The meter here is seemingly abandoned to disconnect from the audience once again and to introduce further irregularity: nothing here is predictable with now-clipped and shortened lines. The final line, being curtailed two syllables, is somewhat foreboding with its air of incompleteness.

‘the heath’: wild, barren, uncivilised. It seems entirely natural that it would be the meeting place of these supranatural beings and a mortal man. It introduces, to an Elizabethan theatre-going audience, an air of desolation and unworldliness. It’s only a short etymological throw from heath to heathen and all the connotations that carries with it.

FIRST WITCH
I come, Graymalkin.

SECOND WITCH
Paddock calls.                          10

THIRD WITCH
Anon.

This is something I had to look up. Greymalkin and Paddock refer to the witches’ familiars or ‘guardian spirits’. The term stems from “grey” (the colour) plus “malkin”, an archaic term with several meanings (a low class woman, a weakling, a mop, or a name) derived from a hypocoristic form of the female name Maud. Scottish legend makes reference to the grimalkin as a faery cat that dwells in the highlands.

Paddock: Pad, pade derived from Old English pada (“toad”).

Therefore, the witches ‘familiars’ calling them away.  Again, it is to the third witch to assertively instruct: anon!

ALL
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;  7
Hover through the fog and filthy air.  9

The allegorical twelfth line of Fair is foul… is a succinct summary of the play as a whole or aught not being as it seems. It’s a summary of the illusion versus reality which is a common thread throughout. What is clear too is the paradox and confusion and the inversion of values throughout the play. Consistently, immoral acts are justified; seemingly impossible acts occur; mortal beings are visited by those not of this realm. The fair Macbeth commits foul deeds justified by his fair but foul ambition. It’s antithesis used fanastically.

The alliteration is not subtle and is wonderfully used with the meter: it’s paradoxical nature contrasts with the meter; the conjunctive falls unstressed beautifully. The dropped syllable from the first line is picked up in the last. As a couplet overall there are the sixteen syllables but they’re out of balance individually: a nice, tidy image of the witches perhaps.

The last line could be stretched metaphorically here: that the witches fly unaffected through the filthy air of somebody’s character to direct their fate. It could simply be read as an instruction for them to fly through the filthy air of the battle to meet Macbeth. It’s perhaps stretching it somewhat and, to be frank, I think over-analysis of this line is to the detriment of it overall.
 

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