SECOND WITCH        I’ll give thee a wind.

FIRST WITCH            Thou’rt kind.

THIRD WITCH           And I another.

FIRST WITCH            I myself have all the other,

And the very ports they blow,

All the quarters that they know

I’th’ ship-man’s card.

I’ll drain him dry as hay.

Sleep shall neither night nor day

Hang upon his penthouse lid.

He shall live a man forbid.

Weary sennights nine times nine

Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine.

Though his barque cannot be lost,

Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.                     (1.3.9-21)

 

The idea that witches could control the winds and raise storms was a familiar one in the period; here there’s a parodic courtesy in the second and third witches offering to give the first witch a wind each. (Some editors suggest that this could be played for laughs with, um, flatulent sound-effects and gestures.) But the first witch herself already has all the other. She has control, she says, of all the winds, blowing from every port, every direction, from every quarter in the ship-man’s card, from every corner of the map or chart, every point of the compass. (A vision of a map, with the puffing faces of the four winds in each corner.) I’ll drain him dry as hay, an image—of a straw blown in the wind—not just of dryness but of fragility. All flesh is grass. Tactile too. And he won’t sleep either, this ship’s captain, tossed about on the waves; sleep won’t ever hang on the lid of his penthouse, his eyelids (but also, perhaps, the creepy image of Something on the roof). The curse of insomnia is going to return in this play; the ill-fated sea-captain here is just a dry run. He will be unable to sleep, forbidden to sleep; he’ll be wide awake for weary sennights nine times nine, eighty-one weeks (a week is a seven-night). Nine times nine weeks seems unimaginable here, more than eighteen months straight—but nine times nine is a magical witchy number, as is three. He’ll dwindle, peak, and pine, fade away and go mad from lack of sleep. The ship won’t ever be wrecked, or sunk, just endlessly blown about by the storm, tossed on the waves. The witches are keen on acts of cruelty and violence—killing swine! but perhaps even more, they like altering the states in which people exist, inflicting ongoing, unsettling shifts in being and understanding. A perpetually stormy sea. An inability to sleep.