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Notes and Glossary
Act I Scene I In the Elizabethan theatre the witches would have entered on a bare stage, perhaps through the trap, with the 'fog' and 'filthy air' suggested by smoke from burning resin and by the audiences imagination. In film, the director controls how the scene is to be imagined. Orson Welles' film (Mercury Films and Republic Pictures, 1946) of Macbeth, begins very dramatically for Welles' believed that film should start at a peak. Naturally, every director on both stage and screen has a different interpretation. Jeremy Freeston (Cromwell Productions, 1996) begins his film with seemingly benign, laughing witches which seem perhaps all the more chilling. The opening scene, though brief, sets the action of the play, and introduces the forces that control its action. Each theme of the play is stated in the first act, every word in the first scene strikes a single dominant chord. ACT1 Scene 1 Line 3 The hurlyburly's done. Henry Peacham, in his "Garden of Eloquence" (1577), explains the word "hurlyburly" to mean 'an uprore and tumultuous stirre'; in More's "Utopia, " translated by Ralphe Robinson, 1551, we find- "All this busy preparance to war, whereby so many nations for his sake should be brought into a troublesome hurlyburly, when all his coffers were emptied, his treasures wasted, and his people destroyed;" and in Holinshed- "There were such hurlie burlies kept in every place, to the great danger of overthrowing the whole state of all government in this land." ACTl Scene 1 Line 9 Graymalkin ...Paddock calls. Greymalkin was an old name for a grey cat, as "paddock" was for a toad. In Scot's "Discoveries of Witchcraft" ( 1584 ), there is a passage that serves to illustrate the one in the text -"Some say, they (witches) can keepe devils and spirits, in the likeness of todes and cats. " ACTl Scene 1 Line 12 Fair is foul. To be spoken by the three witches in concert; and certainly there seems great probability that only the concluding couplet was intended to be said by them all, as a type of chorus. The witches' doctrine of disorder is summed up in their last couplet. Just before Macbeth meets the witches in 1.1.3 he too comments on the unusual and oddly foreboding weather: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen".