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

world not yet formed. Rather, let us give ourselves to the outstretched hand of desire that invites us
into the secret, fantastical places of the playwright’s soul to challenge the comfortable domains of
present time and place. Thus the other affect of this fearful prologue is the desire for more meetings
with what we fear so that we might know all the possibilities of our becoming. (That is why we attend
tragedies.) The word “more” is a ritual word in Macbeth, spoken frequently to further the action of the
ubiquitous “d” words: “do,” “dare,” “deed,” “done,” “dagger,” “death,” and “double.” “Double” is a
certain kind of “more” that we shall meet with the most.
The three alternating voices of the Sisters form three sections of three or five lines each, mostly
rhymed, each section addressing a nervous question we have: “when is this?” “where are we?” and
“what are the names of note?” They also speak a final rhymed couplet. Despite several obvious
deviations, Shakespeare’s sonnet form is discernible. The discipline of the sonnet helped to teach
Shakespeare the playwright how to present a complete world in the afternoon form of a five act play.
The distortions from regularity in the prologue make us wonder if this play will fulfill our expectations of
resolution according to form. The final couplet epitomizes this wonder: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”
When opposites serve to name each other, thought and speech are confounded, noble splendor is
forbidden by the fog, and filth loses its repugnance—“so, it will make us mad” (II.ii.33). The play thus
addresses in the concrete form of human action the greatest of all questions: the difference between
good and bad as they appear to the senses and feelings as fair and foul. Will the playwright clear away
the fog and the filth of this Scottish air to let the fair and the foul things distinctly appear and be known?
We shall see.
The Sisters’ next meeting is “ere the set of sun” “on the heath,” an uncultivated land that could
yet be planted in the last of the light. Macbeth calls the place a “blasted heath” (I.iii.77). “Blasted”
indicates something pernicious that keeps the heath blighted so that not even a king could garden it.
This blasted heath has inward dimensions. It is the soul of a childless, deeply introspective warrior,
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