In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, the witches chant the lines
that
Fair is
foul and foul is fair.Hover through the fog and filthy
air. (10-11)
These lines –
especially the first – are relevant in various ways to the action, tone, meaning, and
symbolism of the play. The first line, in particular, is relevant in some of the
following ways:
- Macbeth is
a play about ambiguity – about the difficulty of knowing anything for sure, either about
others or about oneself. Macbeth, for instance, is not sure whether he should kill his
king or remain a loyal subject; his lack of moral self-knowledge appears very quickly in
the play once he receives the witches’ prophecies. Macbeth is an ambiguous, ambivalent
character, and the same is true, in a different way, of his wife: at first she seems
quite determined that the king should be killed, but by the end of the play she seems a
tormented, almost pathetic
creature. - Macbeth is a play about
deception – particularly about Macbeth’s deception of the king, the king’s courtiers,
and even his friend Banquo. The idea that fair and foul are interchangeable, that
appearances can be deceiving, is obviously relevant to this
play. - In particular, the idea that what seems beautiful
and attractive may actually be ugly and disgusting is relevant to this work. This idea
is particularly relevant to Lady Macbeth, who at first seems uglier on the inside than
any other character in the play, but the idea is also relevant to Macbeth as
well. - The alliteration of the line – with its repeated
f sounds – contributes to the chant-like, musically haunting
quality of the witches’ speeches. - The fact that the
witches state such a paradox with such absolute assurance implies that they are highly
confident of the knowledge they possess (they do not chant “Fair may be foul, and foul
may be fair”). They are themselves mysterious figures, and they begin the play by
chanting mysterious but ominous messages.
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