The very first line of the Shakespeare play Macbeth, spoken by the First Witch, is:
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
And somehow in 15 years of caring a frankly stupid amount about Macbeth, noted Best Play Ever Written In The English Language1, I never noticed…………. What the fuck is up with the “or”????
I have always taken this line to mean “we’re gonna meet in a spooky storm”, but the most straightforward scan of the line implies (in contemporary English at least) a three-way choice: will we meet:
in thunder, [or in] lightning, or in rain?
Three choices, pick one!
And at first thought, how is that possible? How can you have thunder without lightning or rain, or lightning without thunder or rain? Rain is totally possible without thunder and lightning, but the line scans as a three-way choice: which one of these should we pick? Implying that a valid answer would be “thunder but no lightning or rain.”
How do we resolve this?
Well, it is scientifically possible for there to be thunder and lightning without rain (on a quick googling, there’s both the possibility for thunder/lightning to happen before or after the rain, as well as “dry lightning” where the static charge happens absent any rain at all.) So maybe the way to read it is:
in thunder [and] lightning, or in rain?
The Witches speak in trochaic tetrameter (eight syllable lines) so the “and” could just be cut to make the meter work.
But that feels weird, in that the thing that changes the meaning of the question is the thing being cut. I’m sure there are examples of that sort of sloppiness somewhere in the canon, but it’s unsatisfying. I always think it’s more fun to try and presume intention than presume a mistake. Plus, if that was the intended read, you could make the line something like “thund’rous lightning” and preserve both the meaning and meter.
It’s also still unclear? Is it meant to be asking for, I guess, an exclusive “or”:
thunder [and] lightning, or rain [and not thunder and not lightning]
Or something more inclusive:
thunder [and] lighting [and not rain], or rain [with or without thunder or lightning]
Or various other mixes and matches of ands and ors and nots?
My initial solve was that maybe this is implying some difference in how the Witches perceive time; that perhaps they can exist in the moment between the thunder crack, lightning strike, and rain drop, and so the distinction between the three would be a meaningful difference. But that seems too-clever-by-half. It could be a fun read to run with and explore, but probably not what’s actually intended.
Then Som-Mai reminded me of a key thing I’ve been obsessing over for the last few weeks, ever since learning it in a series of Harvard lectures from Paul Cantor I was watching over the course of 20242. She asked, “what if this is a riddle, like the apparitions?”
Brilliant!
If you need a Macbeth refresher, in act IV scene i, Macbeth visits the Witches, and at his insistence they show him prophesies through three apparitions they conjure. The first is straightforward, saying:
Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! beware Macduff;
Beware the thane of Fife. Dismiss me. Enough.
Easy!
Then the second:
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
Macbeth takes this to mean he is invulnerable:
Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee?
And later in the play says stuff like:
I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,
To one of woman born.
and:
What's the boy Malcolm?
Was he not born of woman?
Then the third apparition says:
Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
Even better! To quote Macbeth:
That will never be
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! good!
If you’re familiar with the play, you know that the latter two are riddles, and their ironic twist dooms Macbeth. Malcolm has his soldiers cut down branches from Birnam Wood to disguise their numbers, and to people in the castle3:
As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.
And then once Macduff is face-to-face with Macbeth for their final showdown, he tells Macbeth to:
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp’d.
Aka, Macduff was born via c-section.
All well and good, but the key thing that Paul Cantor pointed out, that I somehow also never noticed despite literally being a Witch in a production of Macbeth, is that the stage directions show that the Witches give Macbeth the answer to the riddles!!!!
The apparitions are described in the stage directions as, respectively:
First Apparition: an armed Head
Second Apparition: A bloody Child
Third Apparition: a Child crowned, with a tree in his hand
Aka…. The second apparition is a child born of a c-section, and the third the child king (Malcolm) holding a branch!! Aka exactly the solution to the riddles!!!!!!!!!!
Paul also points out how much Macbeth’s language focuses on “hearing” the words and never on what he sees, saying stuff like (emphasis mine):
Had I three ears, I'ld hear thee.
And
Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow'd my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope
Anyway, when I got to that part of the lecture I literally screamed because it’s so cool…….but what about that pesky “or”? Well, when Som-Mai mentioned this, I started looking at stage directions. And when the Witches do in fact meet again on the heath, the stage directions say:
Thunder. Enter the three Witches
As opposed to when they first meet at the start of the play, it’s (again, emphasis mine):
Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches
Which is to say, I think the first reading is right. This time they meet only in thunder, not in lightning or rain. It can be read as a three-way choice. And in context, we know that they are traveling through “fog and filthy air.”
And so, my new read of this is that the First Witch is asking a genuine question, and the answer is that they’ll meet at the heath when the storm has passed over, but you can still hear the thunder through the dense fog.
And I love it not just because it’s neat, but because in the very first line, it’s teaching you how to understand the Witches, as “the fiend that lies like truth,” and that the solution is to trust your eyes4.
For example, last night I stumbled on a Youtube version of a DC version of the play of which I saw a Chicago version in 2018, and I was planning to just remind myself how the special effects were done, but got so enraptured by the fact that almost every line is an absolute banger that I basically watched the whole thing (though, to my shame, as the world’s biggest act IV scene iii defender, I did skip most of it because I thought the Malcolm and Macduff were both pretty meh.)
These lectures are outstanding, I highly recommend the whole lot of them. In particular, they’ve single-handedly like doubled my appreciation for Coriolanus, Henry V, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.
Specifically, the Messenger
As a total side note, the idea of the Apparitions being clues to help Macbeth makes me interested in a read where the phantom dagger is a warning, not a temptation. I don’t totally buy this yet or have a strong argument, I’d probably need to read the scene a bunch more times and do some research, but it’s definitely an interesting idea (same could maybe be said, I think less controversially, for the Banquo Ghost)