Drum within
Third Witch
A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come.
ALL
The weird sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about: Thrice to thine and thrice to mine And thrice again, to make up nine. Peace! the charm's wound up.
The witches’ talk of the sailor is interrupted by the sound of a “drum within”, a noise used on battlefields to communicate and command, due to their unmistakable, clear sound and deafening output. It is a noise which would be instantly recognised by the Jacobean audience, regardless of instrumental knowledge, even though it is obscured from view (“within”). This creates an ambiguity similar in effect to the setting of the heath; it becomes an almost strangely surreal image, particularly when set alongside the already cryptic circle of witches. The impact of the third witch’s exclamation of “a drum, a drum!” depends upon the director’s choice of whether or not to play a drum altogether and some interpret the stage direction to be describing a drum only the witches can hear within their minds. The latter interpretation confirms the weird sisters as transgressive entities, meddling with the audience’s perception of reality. The image of the war-drum also contrasts the world of Macbeth – militaristic and ordered – with the world of the witches – vague and chaotic. For a brief moment, the two are merged: the sound of the drum acts as an imagination of Macbeth’s reality within the witches’ reality of fantasy. The effect of the witches’ now-familiar trochaic talk and unnerving unison is amplified by repetition, as “the charm’s wound up” in sets of threes. The number three is inextricably linked to the witches: three sisters, meeting three times, telling three prophecies, with more triplets cropping up within the metre and repetition in their lines. Here, we see “thrice” multiplied to “make up nine”, the multiples of three (as numbers affected by witches) reinforcing the supernatural character of the witches and the layering of them increasing the intensity of the spell-like chant as it reaches its climax. The way the speech draws the audience’s attention to the significance of the number three also seems to link the witches to the number’s significance more broadly, positioning them as an inversion of the Holy Trinity or as the three fates from Greek mythology, spinning the threads of destiny.
- Ken