The Buckley School's founder, Reid Buckley, believed that all speakers should hone their speaking skills by reading poetry out loud. Each month in our magazine, we'll keep that worthwhile practice alive by including a poem for you to read aloud.
Even children know some of the lines uttered by Shakespeare's spooky sisters in the play Macbeth. Across the centuries, the roles have been played to frighten—and at other times, for laughs.
Here's one way Oxford professor David Taylor recalls encountering them:
What’s the most scared you've ever been in the theater? For me, that moment came 20 years ago, during a performance of Macbeth by the Royal Shakespeare Company. At the start of the show, the house lights went all the way down, plunging us into complete darkness. Then came the unsettling scurry of footsteps in the aisleways around us before, finally, the light of a dim flame center-stage enabled us to see – just – the hunched bodies of three figures: "When shall we three meet again…" Here were the weird sisters, the witches. The stuff of nightmares.
Taylor also notes how perceptions of the witches have changed as people's beliefs about the supernatural have changed, with the witches becoming gender-bending or comic figures in other stagings of Macbeth.
What did Shakespeare intend? See Taylor's thoughts on that here. And work up your own delivery—scary or silly—by reading these famous lines out loud.
Song of the Witches
From Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
