ALL WITCHES            Double, double toil and trouble.

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH        Cool it with a baboon’s blood;

Then the charm is firm and good.

Enter Hecate and the other three Witches

HECATE         O, well done! I commend your pains,

And everyone shall share i’th’ gains.

And now about the cauldron sing

Like elves and fairies in a ring,

Enchanting all that you put in.

Music and a song. [Exeunt Hecate and the three other Witches]

SECOND WITCH        By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.

Open locks, whoever knocks.           (4.1.35-46)

A final refrain, all the witches together, and one last exotic ingredient (perhaps this one is added on the spot, if the others have been imagined as being in the cauldron already): cool it with a baboon’s blood; then the charm is firm and good. It’s done, ready and waiting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hecate here, let alone the other three witches (who appeared in the previous Hecate scene) and certainly not a song and dance number, all the witches dancing together around the cauldron, like elves and fairies in a ring. The song interpolated (and not included here, or in many modern editions) was taken directly from Middleton’s play The Witch; it includes references to spirits or familiars called Titty, Tiffin, Firedrake, Pucky, Lyard and Robin, and a few more ingredients added to the brew (the blood of a bat! three ounces of the red-haired wench!) It is no great loss… It makes much more sense for the completion of the charm, firm and good, to be followed more or less immediately by the Second Witch’s announcement that by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. They’ve got it ready just in time. Pricking means tingling: she feels it in her hands that something wicked—which is rich, coming from a witch—is about to appear. Is it shocking, assuming that we know it’s Macbeth arriving—to hear him described unambiguously as wicked? I think it should be. The mid-line assonance of pricking and wicked continues the charm-like quality of the scene, as does open locks, whoever knocks, especially if the witch gives the command before there’s any knocking at all, merely sensing that Macbeth is there. (A  reinvention of the porter scene…) And if there’s a door, it might open independently, by magic.

For all its possibility of spectacle with the witches and their charm-making, it’s a hard scene to pull off, for which to find the right idiom. It also has to create a context for the stranger and more frightening events which are about to unfold…