'When Shall We 3 Meet Again' is the opening line of William Shakespeare's corking tragedy, Macbeth. Spoken by the Start Witch, the line immediately ushers us into a earth of witches, prophecy, and black magic, elements which Shakespeare probably chose to include because the new King of England, James I, had written censoriously about witchcraft in his volume Demonologie.

The best way to analyse the pregnant of the opening 'When Shall We Three Encounter Again' scene is to summarise it, stage by stage. But first, here's the scene:

Thunder and lightning. Enter 3 WITCHES

FIRST WITCH

When shall we 3 meet once again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second WITCH

When the hurly-burly'due south done,
When the battle'due south lost and won.

THIRD WITCH

That volition be ere the gear up of sunday.

FIRST WITCH

Where the place?

SECOND WITCH

Upon the heath.

THIRD WITCH

There to come across with Macbeth.

FIRST WITCH

I come, Graymalkin!

SECOND WITCH

Paddock calls.

Tertiary WITCH

Anon.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is off-white
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Exeunt

Now, let's go through the scene, flake by chip, and summarise what's going on, offering some words of assay as we go.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES

This scene, co-ordinate to the stage directions, takes place in 'an open place'. Immediately, Shakespeare establishes an temper of foreboding: the tempest which begins Macbeth heralds the turbulent events which are going to follow, all of which the Witches take prophesied. From the outset, things are foreign, out-of-kilter: off-white is foul, and foul is fair, as the Witches will later (collectively) say.

FIRST WITCH

When shall nosotros three encounter again?
In thunder, lightning, or in pelting?

The First Witch asks her two boyfriend Witches when they will adjacent become together. Not how the 2nd line, 'In thunder, lightning, or in rain' is – every bit Frank Kermode noted in his vivid Shakespeare'southward Linguistic communication – non really a option, since thunder unremarkably accompanies lightning and vice versa, and pelting tends to back-trail both.

Every bit Kermode goes on to discover, such a deceptive and subtle line, which seems to offer choice that is in fact no choice, nicely introduces one of the recurrent themes of Macbeth, which is the extent to which the characters – and most of all, the championship character himself – are in command of their own actions.

2nd WITCH

When the hurly-burly'due south done,
When the battle'southward lost and won.

As Kermode also notes, battles which are lost by 1 side are also won past another: every battle is both lost and won. More choices which turn out not to exist choices, or mutually exclusive outcomes. Of course, the terminal boxing between Macbeth and Macduff, which will come across Macbeth defeated, will be both lost by Macbeth and won by Macduff, so this line is another which prefigures the play to come up. Merely the 'boxing' more than straight referred to hither is the one which Duncan and Macbeth discuss shortly after this scene – the boxing at which the traitorous insubordinate, the Thane of Cawdor, is defeated and Macbeth wins the praise of the King, Duncan.

'Hurly-burly' means tumult or uproar: the word may imply here the tumult of insurrection or revolt (the Thane of Cawdor who is executed for his treason confronting the King), but also suggestions that change is in the air and the kingdom is about to be plunged into trigger-happy chaos.

The word 'done' ('When the hurly-burly'due south done') volition resonate throughout Macbeth: it will recur in Macbeth's own speeches ('If information technology were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / Information technology were done rapidly') and it is at that place as a homophonic presence in both Duncan and Dunsinane. Hither we have the word's first appearance, but it will return again and again throughout this short play.

THIRD WITCH

That volition be ere the set of sun.

Things are moving swiftly: the Third Witch believes that the battle will be over before sunset.

FIRST WITCH

Where the place?

2d WITCH

Upon the heath.

Third WITCH

There to encounter with Macbeth.

The Witches have already decided to arroyo Macbeth afterward the battle, then they tin tell him well-nigh the prophecy which foretells that he will be King of Scotland after Duncan.

FIRST WITCH

I come, Graymalkin!

Graymalkin or 'Grimalkin' in some versions literally means 'grayness Mary', and is the proper name of the Commencement Witch's cat. Witches' familiars are often cats in accounts of witchcraft, although 'gray' suggests something slightly unlike from the usual clichéd black true cat. This is one of the earliest uses of Graymalkin/Grimalkin in literature, although non quite the first: we can find a Grimalkin in the remarkable 1550s work Beware the Cat, a London-set narrative which might be described as the first English novel. (Meet my AMAZON for more on this fascinating proto-Gothic text.)

SECOND WITCH

Paddock calls.

Paddock is another witches' familiar – in this case, a toad. The discussion 'paddock' is an old English language dialect term for the toad.

THIRD WITCH

Betimes.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Exeunt

The line 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair' is almost proverbial, and was already so when Shakespeare wrote this line. In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene from the 1590s, for instance, nosotros find the line, 'And then faire grew foule, and foule grew faire in sight'.

Once again, here, nosotros take the natural society existence overturned and inverted, with the pair of opposites dissolving into one: fair has been rendered foul, and foul has become fair. Good and evil appear to have swapped places. Just as that battle is both lost and won, then fair and foul are indistinguishable.

'When Shall Nosotros Three Meet Again' is among Shakespeare's more famous opening lines, and for many it immediately conjures the globe of witchcraft and prophecy in which the events of Macbeth have identify. But, perhaps surprisingly, the scene has not proved universally popular with critics. The actor Harley Granville-Barker, an influential critic of Shakespeare's plays, went so far every bit to draw information technology equally a 'pointless scene'.

Withal others have seen how the Witches' opening commutation sets the tone and mood for the play itself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out that this opening scene establishes an 'invocation' which is 'fabricated at once to the imagination'. And so it is a powerful opening scene, even though it works quite differently from many other opening scenes we find in Shakespeare.