ACT I
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.
The play begins with the stage directions for “thunder and lightning”. Not only does the weather create a sense of foreboding and build an ominous atmosphere, but it also starts the play with stage effects (a rolled cannonball across the Heavens, a firecracker producing sparks across the stage) which would have awed the Jacobean audience. This fear and fascination continues with the introduction of three women in a “desert place” in the middle of a storm. There is here a discrepancy between the experience of watching the play and reading it. The women are clearly identified as ‘witches’ in the script, and yet – for an audience – there is ambiguity, as this is not uttered until the third scene. The women’s speech marks them as different, with their rhyming couplets and (albeit incomplete) trochaic tetrameter creating a chant-like effect. The quick pace of their questioning in the repetition of “when” similarly unsettles the audience, and the opening lines build a sense of disorder. This concern with order and chaos is reflected in the witches’ own conversation; they agree to meet once the (brilliantly onomatopoeic) “hurly-burly” is done. Their decision to meet “when the battle’s lost and won” appears almost oxymoronic. On the one hand, it suggests the witches’ neutrality and lack of concern in the “hurly-burly” of men; on the other, it hints at the way Macbeth’s win will also set up his loss. There is something unsettling, too, in the fact the witches are meeting “again”, with the suggestion that Macbeth is not the first to meet with them. This is a beginning which hints at other endings, and sets up an instability which will continue throughout the play.