“To Meet with Macbeth,” given by tutor Louis ... - St. John's College

counterpoint to rising internal storms. The thunder of this Scottish world comes suddenly, proof that
our exquisite senses that we rely upon to prepare us to meet the world are inadequate informers of
what comes to inhabit our world. There is no way to close the gates of hearing to this thunder, as we
can close or turn away our eyes from ugliness, and no shields will serve as defense. Its loudness is an
unavoidable blow that upsets our confident repose in civilization, and its lightning is no sign of a link to
heaven that we would like to believe holds us in its hands.
Three strange forms are summoned into our presence three times in this play, not by human
action or voice, which serve as cues to summon the other characters, but by the thunder. Thus they are
not under the causation of the human mind— there are no human minds yet on this stage; whatever
they are, they are already out there. They call themselves “Weird Sisters,” as do Macbeth and Banquo,
the only characters to meet them. This word “Weird” can be mono- or disyllabic as in “weyard” (similar
to our “wayward”). This word occurs nowhere else in Shakespeare’s plays, and thus the ambiguity of
their identities and purposes is authoritative. We may be tempted to call them “witches,” as does the
sailor’s wife, who has chestnuts in her lap:
1. And mounched, and mounched, and mounched.
”Give me,” quoth [the first Sister].
“Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger:
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.
(I.iii.4-10)
The big-butted, scabby sailor’s wife names what she does not know, while denying the outstretched
hand of the first Sister. (This is the signature gesture of the play, as we shall see.) The chestnuts that
she guards in her lap (and “mounches” greedily) are her seeds of future potential that she keeps secure
in her most personal place by pronouncing an easy moral judgment on the owner of the hand: “witch.”
Let us not make her mistake by keeping safely to our sedentary reading laps our seeds of becoming in a
2