Thunder. Enter the three Witches

FIRST WITCH            Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed.

SECOND WITCH        Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.

THIRD WITCH           Harpier cries ‘’tis time, ’tis time!’

FIRST WITCHRound about the cauldron go.

In the poisoned entrails throw.

Toad that under coldest stone

Days and nights has thirty-one

Sweltered venom, sleeping got,

Boil thou first i’th’ charmèd pot.      (4.1.1-9)

Well, hello again witches, this is your big moment. Harder to stage than to write about, probably, but the challenge of making it serious, frightening, real remains. The crack of thunder signals entry into a different sound world, a different meter, relentless, ritualistic, even trance-inducing. Black magic. It’s time, this is it, and the witches’ familiars are telling them to get on with it: thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, tawny and stripy, perhaps a tabby (but that wouldn’t sound nearly so threatening, certainly not to modern ears: thrice the tabby cat hath mewed? I think not). The hedgehog is even more insistent: thrice and once the hedge-pig whined. Harpier cries ‘’tis time, ’tis time!’: it’s not clear what sort of animal the third familiar is, after the cat and the hedgehog, but the similarity with harpy suggests a bird, sometimes imagined as an owl; certainly its cry, ’tis time, ’tis time, recalls an owl’s hoot, sort of. Even the familiars are saying, do it, do it.

So the witches begin: in any kind of realist staging there is a cauldron (it could come up through the central trapdoor at the Globe or the Blackfriars, perhaps with smoke billowing from under it), and the witches must circle it, round about the cauldron go, throwing their ingredients in, tramping and chanting. (One of the many challenges of this scene is for it not to look like a cookery show.) Poisoned entrails, of unspecified origin, homely, easy to source, good base for a stew. The toad a little more complex: it’s been kept under a stone, coldest stone a full month, sweating, sweltering out its venom (toads were believed to exude poison). It’s been taken sleeping, and it’s the first significant ingredient: boil thou first i’th’ charmèd pot. (Worth keeping half an ear on the mesmeric patterns of assonance and near assonance—throw/toad/coldest/stone/one—as well as the rhymes and the alliteration in this scene.) But this is just the start…