FIRST WITCH            Speak.

SECOND WITCH                    Demand.

THIRD WITCH                                   We’ll answer.

FIRST WITCH            Say if thoud’st rather hear it from our mouths

Or from our masters’.

MACBETH      Call ’em. Let me see ’em.

FIRST WITCHPour in sow’s blood that hath eaten

Her nine farrow. Grease that’s sweaten

From the murderer’s gibbet throw

Into the flame.

ALL WITCHES            Come high or low,

Thy self and office deftly show.       (4.1.60-67)

There’s a surround-sound effect in the witches’ dialogue with Macbeth, as they speak with one voice, in effect, rapidly picking up cues, responding as one, circling, circling. Speak. Demand. We’ll answer. Tell us what you want to know. Then a complication which slightly tilts the control of the scene towards the witches: we may be complying with your demands, answering your questions, but there are other powers at work here. Do you want your questions answered from our mouths or from our masters’? This is the first mention of other powers, other masters—demonic, it might be assumed; it could refer to the apparitions (spoiler!) which are about to appear. It makes the scenario bigger, and darker, that this new layer of supernatural intervention might be enabled. Call ’em. Let me see ’em. Macbeth is adamant, emphatic, and bravely defiant. Just do it.

So there’s a bit more spell-making, some refinement of the contents of the cauldron, in peculiarly horrible ways. Pour in sow’s blood that hath eaten her nine farrow. The blood of a cannibal mother, a pig that’s consumed her own young (and nine is both a horrifically excessive number, and a magical one: three times three). Not to be added to the cauldron, in fact, but rather thrown into the flame, adding fuel to the fire, is grease that’s sweaten from the murderer’s gibbet, some kind of exuvial substance that’s been produced by the body of an executed criminal either at the point of death, or from the corpse hung up, gibbeted, after death. (There were wide-spread beliefs that substances taken from executed bodies, or the touch of a hanged man’s hand, could have magical or curative powers.) A sly glance at the Macbeths themselves, perhaps, in these final additions: Macbeth the murderer, Lady Macbeth the monstrous mother (even if not a cannibal one), the mother (perhaps) of dead children, now nursing evil spirits at her breast.

Come high or low, thy self and office deftly show. Spirits summoned, in rhyme—and in a play where the things of darkness have so often been evoked and invoked, this time something is actually going to appear.