Filthy Air
This is a close reading of the very beginning of Macbeth, where 'close' may also mean wayward, exuberant, delirious. It is about 3900 words – the first longer upload to my new newsletter/blog HORSES NOISE!. I will upload to it every other Friday, at 5pm, as 'finished' as possible, to give myself some routine in weird lockdown times, and to practice longer-form writing, of which I have done very little. This is a new endeavour for me, so I decided to begin by writing about a favourite beginning. Unexpectedly I found myself comparing it to an even more famous beginning.
Three witches appear. The things they say are destabilizing from the very first line; after a little tuning-up, some fateful ingredients introduced, we encounter what must be a spell, chanted by all three. When the spell ends, we are in a new reality, one which is absolutely and inescapably cursed. This reading finds the creation of that evil new reality in a single moment, suggests how the explosion is prepared for, and imagines how the spark may be conjured.
SCENE I. A desert place.
Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches[first witch]
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?[second witch]
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.[third witch]
That will be ere the set of sun.[first witch]
Where the place?[second witch]
Upon the heath.[third witch]
There to meet with Macbeth.[first witch]
I come, Graymalkin![second witch]
Paddock calls.[third witch]
Anon.[all]
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.Exeunt
And so the world of Macbeth is made manifest. I will concentrate on these lines (alone: they form the entirety of Act I, Scene I), barely referring even to the rest of the play. However, here are two pieces of enormously extraneous context.
First: standard-model physics predicts that with 'the big bang', the creation of our universe, matter and anti-matter should have been created in equal proportions, but matter prevailed. It is one of the great mysteries of science that anti-matter appears to have all but vanished.
Second: the identity relation is symmetrical: if a = b, then b = a. I mention this only to remark on its similarity to the first line of the spell, and it is not too absurd to suggest that in the contours and inversions of these chants the witches are laying out the axioms of a world; a kind of dark logic by which the entire play is haunted. 'Fair is foul and foul is fair', whether it suggests simply an inverted morality or a symmetrical identity relation (or both) seems to imply that order does not matter – especially when things are, or are saying, the same. The witches in their next scene flagrantly play with order, in particular with reversibility: 'So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo!' / 'Banquo and Macbeth, all hail!'
This introduction seems to fall neatly into sections:
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly's done.
When the battle's lost and won.
That will be ere the set of sun.Where the place? / Upon the heath.
There to meet with Macbeth.I come, Graymalkin! / Paddock calls. / Anon.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Line-by-line, or almost, I will trace the shapes and sounds of these structures. Numbers are important to this reading: for instance, all of those lines have four heavy stresses except for the eighth and last, which each have five. There may be found in this scene a repeated pattern of formal alchemy – of what seemed to be a structure of four becoming a structure of five. In the last line, the third time it happens, all hell breaks loose.
[first witch]
When shall we three meet again?
This is not, or not only, intended to fix a time. It is a strange question, one which commonly occurs at the end of a meeting: when will the next one be? There is no sense, though, that we are encountering this meeting halfway through, since the witches have only just appeared – so it is slightly uncanny that the question that could have come last has come first.
There is nothing ambiguous about the rhythm: the first witch speaks in a texture of alternating heavy and light stresses, four of them heavy, a tetrameter. The vowel of the word 'again' is ambiguous; it could rhyme exactly with the 'rain' which follows it; or could be the same as the vowel of 'When', giving the line an arch-like symmetry (stressed beats on the vowels 'e, 'ee', 'ee, 'e'). 'Again' as rhymed with 'When' would be indeed the same vowel as the equally important question 'Where', and the same vowel as 'fair' and 'air', the end-rhymes of the couplet which ends the scene.
[first witch]
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Even if 'again' had been pronounced to rhyme with 'when', the strength of the word 'rain' affects it retrospectively. Over and again in this scene does the most recent item in a sequence cast what came before in a different light, disrupting and subverting our sense.
Repeatedly too do questions seem to morph into other questions: after the question of when they will meet, there are three suggestions of what it is they will meet in. These suggestions, presented as if three separate options – thunder, lightning, rain – are not really distinct, and some imply or require each other. 'Thunder' and 'lightning' in fact are two accounts of the same event, split apart in time to us observers by the different speeds of elemental things. This list subtly begins a focus on the separability, or distinctness, or otherwise, of constituent substances. ('Thunder', 'lightning', and 'rain' is the first instance here of a pattern of 2,2,1 – in this case in the number of syllables they have.)
The question, then, was not about the timing of their next meeting, but the purpose of the current one – and the events or conditions about to be given in answer to the question are not merely prophesies, but magic words: the sounds they make and the manoeuvres they perform are charging, gathering energy, for the chant or spell at the end of the scene. The sense is of a kind of repeated checking-in on fate, as if the witches' every meeting occurs only when certain inexorable things have happened, things which, with their magic, they can fine-tune or re-energize as necessary, and as they will.
[second witch]
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
The focus on separation into complementary parts is heightened here. These two lines seem to mean very close to the same thing. They each intensify the energy of the 'When' which starts the play, by repeating it, twice, though they answer rather than ask; and the repeated word serves to bolt the lines together just as powerfully as do the end-rhymes. There is no doubt these are ritual words, rather than conversation.
The 'hurlyburly' of the first line is halved in length when it is sharpened into the harder synonym 'battle'. Conversely the single stress of 'done' is doubled when it is rearticulated as 'lost and won' (and those two things seem very different to someone in the hurlyburly, as different – though the same thing – as thunder is from lightning). This moment is a key ingredient in the spell – a preparation and foreshadowing of 'Fair is foul and foul is fair'. Supposed opposites which together comprise a single thing. It is as if the description 'done' is made more accurate by bifurcating it into those opposites.
The formal symmetries – not just those inherent to this line, but the larger ones completed by it – are remarkable. Both of these lines echo the 'when' which opens the play, and the tidily-bipartite 'lost and won' ends the exchange. The word 'won' is also very much an echo of so many 'when's. However, everything changes now:
[third witch]
That will be ere the set of sun.
This, from a third witch, is destabilizing. It's still not really an answer, even if it narrows it down: the second witch specified their meeting would be after something; we now know that something will occur before something else. This perhaps is as close as they get to a fixed time: a set of parameters, which happen also to be conditions as well as prophesies.
The word 'sun' undermines, mocks, and tramples, the cadence of 'won', as well as the symmetry of the quatrain. We are in a slightly changed world: the hitherto exact clattering of the tetrameter chant is disrupted. The emphasis has really to be on 'That' and 'ere', making 'That will be' into a fast triplet. We also hear a brand new sound, an 's' at the start of a word; and we hear it twice in quick succession: 'set of sun' appears from nowhere and harshly overrides the now-gentle-seeming 'won', with which 'sun' unexpectedly rhymes. And that rhyme is significant: it might have been that the witches would speak to each other in rhyming couplets, each witch rhyming only with herself, but here the third witch continues the rhyme of the second. It's as if a couplet has become a tercet.
Or even more: the fact that both the A-rhymed and the B-rhymed lines end in the sound 'n' is, I think, a kind of quiet super-rhyme, connecting all 5 lines together: not just a couplet into a tercet, but a quatrain magicked into a quintet; a square into a quincunx. The effect is uncanny, rather than spectacular. The witches make 4 into 5 twice more in this brief scene: next, even more inscrutably; but the last time they do it, it is spectacular.
Indeed the energy which swirls together in preparation for that spectacle is first foregathered here. The forceful sound of immediate alliteration on an unvoiced syllable (here, the sibilance in 'set of sun') is the blueprint for an intensification of ritual fervour. When the witches join voices to chant the couplet which ends the scene, a heavy alliteration, a doubling on the letter 'f', is heard three times in succession: and the climax of this scene explodes through the very last 'f'-sound.
It may not be used or flagged as such, but it is nevertheless true that the word 'ere' is a homonym, a buried pre-echo, for the word 'air', which, accursedly, ends the spell and ends the scene.
[first witch]
Where the place?[second witch]
Upon the heath.
The sound 'w' continues to the be first sound of a line, and, as if her question is tinctured by immediately echoing 'ere' – it even collapses 'will be ere' into 'where': sonically, an answer of timing has melted (or been subject to some other transformation) back into a question of location. Here the first witch almost satirizes herself: while 'thunder, lightning or in rain' seemed to confuse her first question, here she instantaneously specifies that 'where' is indeed to be answered with a place.
The reply is speedy – and, for the first time, a line-unit is bisected, the tetrameter is distributed among the witches.
[third witch]
There to meet with Macbeth.
With 'There', the third witch seems to reinforce an answer to the question 'where', but it is elided immediately into an answer to the question 'Why?'. These questions all shimmer into each other: when metamorphosed into what (weather/prophesies/outcomes/conditions) in the first few lines, just now the sound of an answer to when echoed in the word where, and now an answer to where has melted straight into an answer for why.
The strangeness of a line of only six syllables invites several emphases, assuming it is continuing a tetrameter. One is a heavy symmetrical thud:
THERE to MEET, WITH macBETH
Another could insert a pause on what would have been the third stress:
THERE to MEET with [beat] macBETH
(Given all the questions already swirling around, this rendering leaves exactly room for an imaginary 'Who?' to be heard, if you like. It would make a camp kind of sense there.)
All of those suggestions are flippant, though, and the line most likely simply hovers out as spoken, with the pulse as a ghostly presence: we know that rhythm is behind it somewhere, whatever its delivery. The tetrameter is as present, and as absent, as the rhyme between 'heath' and 'Macbeth'.
[first witch]
I come, Graymalkin![second witch]
Paddock calls.[third witch]
Anon.
This seems to be a moment of scattering and dispersal. The witches are responding to their familiars, and likely when they leave, it will be in three different directions.
Here again the witches make a structure of 4 into a structure of 5: with the third witch's 'Anon', the rhythm of tetrameter has been extended into pentameter. In this, there is some self-similarity – it is a compression of the 2-2-1 structure of the first five lines – and it is also a fragmentary, ghostly foreshadowing of the coming explosion. (It is in fact an almost exact compression of the first five lines: earlier, the first two witches each have a couplet, and the third with a single line makes the shape fivefold. Here, the first two witches have two stressed beats each, and the third makes a fivefold shape by adding just one stress.)
There is a sense of closure, of the moment having come to and end, perhaps distantly reinforced by 'Anon' rhyming with the first word of the scene, 'When', as well as the end-words of the first five lines. If 'When shall we three meet again?' is a disarming, uncanny opening, which feels just a little like it ought not be an opening, then it is strange that this line, which would make a lot of sense as an ending – it even ends with a valediction – is not the closing line. The witches do not leave immediately, and they become somehow even more powerful just as they are making their exit:
[all]
For the first time, the three witches speak at once. How they speak is a surprise, even before you register what they are saying. They were scattering, physically, and yet now, they are somehow more as one than before. It could be a sinister inversion of what Ariel claimed to do while made of fire in The Tempest, 'meet and join': what dark magic are these witches working that they can part and join?
[all]
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
The heavy alliteration of 'set of sun' is recalled and reconfigured now on the sound 'f', insistently, chillingly, and (as is possible with plural voices) simultaneously. It is a very powerful sound – a frightening moment, and it forcefully reasserts the tetrameter which is about to be so drastically warped.
One straightforward reading may be: what others consider fair, these witches consider foul, and that what others consider foul, the witches consider to be fair. We can alongside that reading hold another one, which is that the witches, rather than a symmetrical subversion, are asserting an identity. 'Fair' and 'foul', rather than being two oppositional descriptions, are one and the same thing. Not that they are fungible: that they are the same. Something can be simultaneously both, just as the battle, being done, must be both lost and won. In fact, we later in the play hear combinations of opposites almost taking on the feel of adjectival phrases: 'such welcome and unwelcome news together', for one, and of course 'So fair and foul a day'. The fact that one thing can contain opposites, and therefore in different contexts have opposite effects, is literally demonstrated when Lady Macbeth finds herself energized by a sleeping draft: 'That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold'.
The two 'f' sounds which end the next line are in fact not opposites – even 'fair is foul' contains a lighter side – but there is no lightness in 'fog and filthy air': where are the opposites they must contain? Things are much darker. Along with this absence, there is simultaneously a more drastic change.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Count the stresses – five of them, and in a single, unambiguous, unfragmented line-unit. This is the new reality: specifically, this is pentameter verse, such stuff as plays are made on. The line begins with a vivid imperative, leaping out of the initial 'h', a sound only heard previously as the start of 'hurlyburly' and 'heath'; and it is as if the power source behind the redoubled 's' and 'f' sounds – by now the sure engine of the hex – is briefly revealed, a pure exhalation unimpeded by tongue, lips or teeth. The word is a kind of point-source, being not just the last line of this scene but the first line in the prevailing dramatic rhythm. With the perhaps contradictory imperative 'hover through' there are senses of stasis, of something being held ungrounded, yet also of travel, of willed flight, of permeation. (The fog being hovered through is a constant feature of the play, and can contaminate even that which shines through it: Macbeth later uses the vivid phrase 'light thickens'.)
If the presence of the terminal 'n' sound in lines 1-5 in a contour which corroborates the early warping of a quatrain into a 5-stanza, then here, at the very last moment of the witches' chant, a more violently deployed 'f' sound, the third pair of intense 'f's in a row, provides the energy by which primordial tetrameter erupts into familiar pentameter. It is not a scattering, as with the broken, spectral pentameter that saw the witches whirling off to their familiars. Here, the incantatory rhythm of four is magicked – as if one stress cracked open into two – into the rhythm of five which will sustain the rest of the play.
What has happened? Right at the start, three forces of the same weather conditions (with 2, 2, 1 syllables each) were arranged in a list and made distinct from each other, by the power of words. Continuing the focus on subdivision into different, even oppositional parts, 'done' was re-articulated as, bifurcated into, 'lost and won'. The rhythm of 'lost and won' found a rhymed intensification in 'set of sun', which also bent a quatrain out of shape (into 2-2-1). The alliterative energy latent in 'set of sun' manifested again in 'fair is foul', and then the symmetry of that identity was asserted in 'foul is fair', which further energizes the alliteration:
Fair is foul and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and ...
By the time we hit the third stress of this final line, two conditions seem to have been imposed: 1) the last word must rhyme with 'fair'; 2) after all that alliteration, given that the stressed word is 'fog', another 'f' sound simply has to come next. So a contradiction, a tinder-spark, arises: those two conditions applied together only have one (ridiculous) solution:
f + air
– unless the witches repeat their manoeuvre a third time (after all, there are three of them) and once again turn 4 into 5: this line has to be wrenched out of shape, and so it is, not with a whimper but a bang. The brief vowel of the first word of the play, plus the sound of the word 'ere' which earlier was so twilit, attached to 'set of sun', resurfaces as the word 'air': a speck which we may imagine being split apart into its imaginary opposites by the forced addition of an initial 'f'. The opposites it explodes into are provided by the formula of the previous line:
fair air / foul air
and in the creation of this universe, which moiety prevailed? – and which vanished like anti-matter? As if to emphasize which, instead of just 'foul', we hear, bursting through and over it, the triumphant, brand-new shriek of 'filthy'. Even worse! If we imagine even briefly a sort of anti-matter ghost, the very idea of 'fair air', then that substance is not to be found in any of the action which follows. Since 'filthy' is what shatters tetrameter into pentameter, that pentameter is evilly-tinctured from its very origin – the vocal fabric of the entire play is contaminated. (The very next sound we hear, King Duncan's question, might be the warping and splitting of 'Who is that?' into 'What man is that?', the evil of everything immediately remembered to us by the insertion of the adjective confirming what we may already have seen, that the soldier is ripped to shreds: 'What bloody man is that?') Said another way, and no more or less extravagantly than anything else in the last few paragraphs – everything hereafter is witchy: their spell conjures, and then cleaves in two, a stage-universe of which only the evil half survives. The 'filthy air' of doubling and paradoxes and contradictory identities in this brief scene glows through the entire play, rendering lines such statements as 'Nothing is but what is not' more than just contradictory, but utterly haunted.
After all this, a great deal of bad things happen. Toward the play's close, Macbeth, on learning of his wife's death, begins a speech with an incomplete list:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
This either refers to the same day three times (it definitely doesn't do that) or it is a short series which elaborates on, or demonstrates, the eternity already implied by the single word 'tomorrow'. On a planet where the sun sets and rises, the word 'tomorrow' is a bolt to eternity, just as '+1' is a sliproad to infinity, as encountered by every child who suddenly realises that there isn't a biggest number. (There is a quiet but immense acknowledgement that civilization can never reach eternity in Macbeth's very precise reference to 'the last syllable of recorded time', some time after which there will eventually, too, be no creature left capable of designating something 'tomorrow'.)
The pentameter line-unit with which the witches conjured the world of his tragedy is here divided by Macbeth – not exactly, by word, and not rhythmically, but still into three distinct yet identical ideas, each of them 'tomorrow'. At last there is something in the universe of this play which is not uncannily reversible, has an ordering which is fixed: it is a fact that there is an eternity of tomorrows; it is a fact that one tomorrow can never be swapped for another. It is strange that strings composed of such different words and ideas as 'fair is foul' or 'Banquo and Macbeth, all hail!' should prove demonstrably reversible, but 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow' is a statement involving three identical words which are, despite that, not the same thing, and whose referents have to go in the order they happen in.
Or, maybe, swapping one tomorrow for another was the spell, was exactly what the witches did at the very start of the play. I would not make any dangerous claims about what witches can or cannot do.