ALL WITCHES Double, double toil and trouble.
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
SECOND WITCH Fillet of a fenny snake
In the cauldron boil and bake.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth, boil and bubble. (4.1.10-19)
How to make this fresh, let alone frightening? Perhaps by focusing first on the sounds, the onomatopoeic urgency of the double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn, and cauldron bubble, rather than all-too-easily ridiculous double-bs. Something simmering, hot, dangerous—and the rhythm drives with urgency and ritualistic intensity. It’s the metre of the Dies irae from the Latin Requiem, the mass for the dead, a text describing ‘the day of wrath’, the day of judgement, full of anguish, torment, and pleading. (Other texts use the same trochaic tetrameter, obviously, not least many of the fairy passages in Midsummer Night’s Dream; as in that play, the witches’ chant here is frequently catalectic, missing the unstressed syllable of the fourth and final foot in the line. It’s a metre of enchantment.)
The cauldron is bubbling, and now it’s on to the ingredients, which can be either thrown in as they’re named, or are presumed already to be in the cauldron (which gets over the problem of either making them ghoulishly realistic, one by one, as they go in (and produced from where? tupperware?) or coming up with some non-representational alternative). It starts out as a reasonably straightforward mix, unpleasant but not especially exotic. The fillet of a fenny snake, muddy from its fenland home; the eye of newt and toe of frog, quite delicate, like the bat’s wool, from its fluffy underbelly, and the two or three tongues, of dog, adder, and blind-worm, a slow-worm, like a snake but not. Implicitly poisonous, the snaky things. The leg of a lizard and the wing of a baby owl. There’s a hinterland here not just of dead animals, but maimed, dismembered ones, all the bits that aren’t being added to the cauldron, and the cruel violence that has been done to them. It’s not wildly witchy yet, though, merely a bit Heston, Masterchef, foraged, even as the Second Witch concludes her contribution: for a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth, boil and bubble. There’s much more to come in this concoction, and it will be a hell-broth, not just in its heat and its ingredients, but truly in its properties and its effects.
