ALL WITCHES            Double, double toil and trouble.

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

THIRD WITCH           Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf

Of the ravined salt-sea shark,

Root of hemlock digged i’th’ dark,

Liver of blaspheming Jew,

Gall of goat, and slips of yew

Slivered in the moon’s eclipse,

Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,

Finger of birth-strangled babe,

Ditch-delivered by a drab,

Make the gruel thick and slab.

Add thereto a tiger’s chawdron

For th’ingredience of our cauldron. (4.1.20-34)

 

The refrain again; it’s the refrain that makes the cauldron boil and bubble, the sound in chorus and perhaps the synchronised movement or dancing of the witches. The ingredients now shift into something stranger, more exotic, more magical and grisly. A dragon’s scale and a wolf’s tooth, and the mummy of a witch; mummia, dried and powdered human flesh, actually or purportedly made from Egyptian mummies, was a common ingredient in medicines and alchemical preparations. (The silk thread embroidering Othello’s handkerchief is said to be dyed in mummy, ‘conserved of maiden’s hearts’; it makes it especially magical and exotic.) This is either the mummified flesh of a witch, or that used by witches. Enjambment starts to increase the tension and the suspense, as the ingredients become more complex and more sinister: maw and gulf, the gaping gullet (of what?!) of the ravined salt-sea shark, ravenous, glutted, a creature of nightmare. The root of hemlock, a straightforward poison—but this must be digged in the dark, to have the right powers, increase its strength. The first human ingredient, nastily, the liver of blaspheming Jew, a casual anti-semitic slur, blaspheming because of denying the divinity of Christ. A goat’s gall, bile, and slips or twigs of poisonous yew, like the hemlock picked at a propitious moment, slivered, carefully cut away at an eclipse of the moon, apparently in total darkness. And, after that familiar plant, easily able to be pictured, more casual cannibalism, the nose of a Turk and a Tartar’s lips, both pagan and other. The lips a particularly horrible detail, I think, the suggestion of the grinning lipless face. More homely but no less horrifying, the finger (just the tiny, pathetic, delicate finger) of a baby strangled at birth, an illegitimate child born in a ditch, its mother dismissed as a slut, a whore, ditch-delivered by a drab. (The dead baby perhaps points to the childless Macbeths, or to horrors still to come.) A brutal conclusion, and again a homely one: make the gruel thick and slab, boil it down, so that it’s properly foul, nearer solid than liquid, before the final, casual flourish: a tiger’s chawdron, its entrails. That’s everything, in the cauldron, bubbling away.