Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches (1.1.1-10) #DaggerDrawn #SlowShakespeare

Posted on 6 September 20215 September 2021 by Hester

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

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.

FIRST WITCH Where the place?

SECOND WITCH Upon the heath.

THIRD WITCH There to meet with Macbeth.

FIRST WITCH I come, Grey Malkin.

SECOND WITCH Paddock calls.

THIRD WITCH Anon!

ALL WITCHES Fair is foul and foul is fair

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Exeunt (1.1.1-10)

Well. It’s one hell of an opening, quite literally, a bang and a crash, drums and thunder sheet, cannon balls in the thunder run. But the lightning—that suggests fireworks. Fireworks mean a bit of smoke at least; the air is filthy indeed, and it’s also filthy because fireworks and gunpowder stink. Macbeth begins with the smell of sulphur, the stench of hell, and it’s going to linger. It’s going to become engrained in the witches’ costumes, perhaps, and possibly in Macbeth’s too. (But let’s not get ahead.) At the beginning of King Lear, there’s a nice, sedate expository conversation (albeit fraught with tension, at least in retrospect) between Gloucester and Kent, but this is a rewind to Hamlet and that jumpy, terrified ‘who’s there?’ Except worse: this is what’s there, really there, out in the storm, under cover of darkness. No names, but a well-rehearsed three-hander, that old archetype of three women, a triple threat. They might be mother, maiden, and crone; they might look like your next-door neighbour, goodwives all. (Wait until you see the recipes.) Some recent productions (to excellent uncanny effect) have made them children, or nurses.

But this is routine: when shall we three meet again? Not, oh no, when are we going to see each other again? But more, same time, same place? Yes, when things quieten down, or seem to, when the hurly-burly’s done. When the battle’s over, either way. (To lose is to win; to win is to lose.) That’s not going to be long now: that will be ere the set of sun. It’ll be dark soon. And the meeting place will be the heath, barren, desolate, unlocated, in-between. Implicitly where they are now—and also (of course) the stage. They already know what’s going to happen—all of it? Certainly the next move. On the heath, they’ll meet with Macbeth. He has no idea… but we do, now. And so we wait.

In the meantime, exit witches, summoned by the calls of their unseen familiars. Anon! yes, I’m coming, right now, there in a minute. Greymalkin – usually imagined as a cat, and Paddock as a toad. The language has been incantatory, not the accustomed rhythms of blank verse, but something older, with a ritual quality. So there’s a spell to finish, it seems, but it’s also an anticipation of one of the play’s central motifs, the way in which fair can be, is, foul, and so foul is, or seems to be, fair. They hover, fly? dissolve, disappear into the darkness. But they’re still there really, we just can’t see them for now. The sulphur lingers, as a reminder.

This is the first post in a (mostly) daily reading of Macbeth #SlowShakespeare. Posts go up around 9am; follow @starcrossed2018 on Twitter for updates and also production images.

View 11 comments on “Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches (1.1.1-10) #DaggerDrawn #SlowShakespeare”

Carl Atkins says:

6 September 2021 at 4:33 pm

Interesting. I had never thought about how the effect of lightning was produced. But must it have been by fireworks? Would that have been the most realistic representation? Chambers (in “The Elizabethan Stage”) does not address lightning, but he does mention the use of lamps, lanterns and candles for lighting. Might not a lantern fitted with a shade that could be opened and closed and perhaps a mirror or two have been used to project the effect of lightning across the stage? I wonder.

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1. Carl Atkins says:
  
  6 September 2021 at 5:33 pm
  
  My wife (a soprano) says in 17th and 18th C. opera, they represented lightning by having stage hands dart across the stage carrying lightning bolts! But that seems a bit too silly for the opening scene of Macbeth, doesn’t it?
  
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  1. Hester says:
    
    6 September 2021 at 9:44 pm
    
    Interesting! It wouldn’t work on a stage in 1606, though – no wings to run between, and a completely different spatial dynamic – not pictorial at all. But I know exactly the idiom and aesthetic that you mean.
    
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2. Hester says:
  
  6 September 2021 at 9:47 pm
  
  Lanterns and candles are used to signal darkness when playing on an outdoor stage in daylight (and indeed in the indoor theatres, where the auditorium has to be lit). And any effect involving candles or lanterns simply wouldn’t be visible on an outdoor stage by daylight. I’ve never heard of any effects using mirrors. Fireworks were used quite often – they were particularly used for devils – so lightning (and its smell, as I’ve suggested here) already have a hellish association. The bright flash of gunpowder would be far brighter and more effective than any more subtle effect using candles, I think.
  
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Pen Woods says:

9 September 2021 at 2:38 pm

This is great.. thanks for the close consideration of this opening Hester. I’ve been preoccupied with this bit of real and dramatic filthy air. The summoning of air into perceptibility here, directing attention to its “filthiness”- performatively via fireworks as well as narratologically and morally- reverberates the 17th C. urban anxiety of what was contained and shared in air in the playhouse. It is again acute in ways that Corbusier’s “exact air” had temporarily, perhaps, erased- https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/sep/07/the-equivalent-of-shouting-fire-coughing-in-theatres-is-new-taboo. I’m reminded of the echo of this idea and dramaturgy in the description Hazel offers in Lucy Kirkwood’s post-nuclear event play, *Children*, of the radiation “hanging in the air… a sort of filthy glitter”.

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1. Hester says:
  
  9 September 2021 at 9:11 pm
  
  Oh that sounds so cool! (and yet not, the way in which we are all now thinking of theatres as pits of miasma 🙁 ) You have thought about this much more than I have! It does seem to me that the play right from the start is interested in experiences which are palpable without necessarily being visible or even perceptible – air and light have a kind of mass and texture. (This might just be because I think that ‘light thickens’ is one of the best short lines anywhere, ever. I have many, many thoughts about the qualities of darkness in the play but I mustn’t get ahead of myself.) It’s interesting that there is the possibility of real filthy air in this moment, absolutely – it’s not just linguistically thickened, it’s not just a collective imagining. It’s been summoned, by the witches, by the audience, and it’s actually THERE….)
  
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  1. Carl Atkins says:
    
    24 September 2021 at 6:18 pm
    
    I found a blog, “Theatrical effects and staging” (“a project in fulfillment of course HSS F337 [English Literature Form Art Movement] under the guidance of Dr William Henry Spates”) that says: “Lightning flashes were made by throwing a powder made from resin into a candle flame. It lit with a flash. The companies could make lightning bolts, too. The machinery for this was called a swevel. They fixed a wire from the roof to the floor of the stage. They fixed a firecracker to the wire and lit it when they wanted the effect. The firecracker shot from the top of the wire to the bottom, making sparks all the way.” (Annoyingly the blog is devoid of references.) OED has a tiny entry for “swevel” that says it is a rocket attached to a cane. Also found an interesting chapter on Lightning (Ch. 3) in a book by Gwilym Jones, “Shakespeare’s Storms” (2015, Manchester U. Press), 50-58, in which she discusses the Early Modern concept of thunder as having different forms, especially the lightning flash and the “fire from heaven.” Perhaps this affected the choice of resin in the candle flame (flash) vs. swivel (fire from heaven). Macbeth 1.1. would definitely seem like the fire from heaven type!
    
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    1. Hester says:
      
      25 September 2021 at 12:21 pm
      
      Fascinating, although boo at not having references… (I suspect it might be slightly later? because that kind of effect, with a wire, would work on a proscenium stage with wings where you can have all sorts of effects going on behind the actors, but it wouldn’t be very practical to have a fixed wire on a stage where all the entrances are at the rear, and where the acting area has to be extremely flexible). My reading of the swevel is that it’s the kind of rocket that’s still familiar, with a thin stick on it that helps to stabilise its flight? I haven’t come across the resin device. Gwilym’s book (NB he is a he!) is excellent!
      
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Carl Atkins says:

9 September 2021 at 8:40 pm

Of course!

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Pen Woods says:

10 September 2021 at 11:57 am

I’m so glad this post “worked”! I had a funny message when I clicked “post” that said

COMMENT IS SPAM..

which I thought was either an unfortunate judgment on longform discursive online academia more generally.. or a harsh but arguably fair response to my own post 😉
I think the epistemological ambiguities of sensory apprehension are such fascinating features of this play, Othello, Winter’s Tale, perhaps particularly, and in the cultural moment of political, theological, moral suspicion really acute and heightened. The concern with “palpability” is a really brilliant way to put it. The playing with dramaturgical practices of “immersivity” in this play since the logics (and politics) of this work so differently in the early seventeenth and 21st centuries is a really important thing to have the opportunity to attend to. I’m really enjoying this, Hester, thank you!

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1. Hester says:
  
  10 September 2021 at 9:52 pm
  
  It’s weird, it thought this comment was spam as well. (And your email address is nothing like the bots that send reams of spam to my other blogs…) I love your comments here too, and your ideas – much more sophisticated than my thinking, which tends to be at the level of, cooooool! (That said, I’m thinking a lot about what it means for an audience to imagine touching and being touched in R&J at the moment.) Do you think that this might be a bit of a turning point moment, a post-Hamlet (maybe?) shift in how these particular epistemological concerns might be performed? (And, I’m thinking already about how we think of this play as the-one-with-the-blood when actually it’s mostly the-play-with-very-little-real-blood-but-lots-of-imagined-blood? So the work of immersion is devolved to us…)
  
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