Macbeth’s three witches chanting double doube toil and trouble Cool it with a baboon’s blood, Then the charm is firm and good. Double, double toil and trouble įire burn and cauldron bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,įor the ingredients of our cauldron.
Double, double toil and trouble įire burn, and cauldron bubble. They have a steaming cauldron on a fire and they are cooking their ingredients, chanting as they do so: Round about the cauldron go īoil thou first i’ the charmed pot. They know he’s coming and Shakespeare gives us a wonderful scene as they prepare a potion for him to drink. When Macbeth is at his wits end, sleepless with guilt, hated by everyone, his marriage broken, he goes to find the witches to try and find out how it’s going to end for him.
Add to that things like the alliteration of, in this instance, the ‘d’ and ‘t’ sounds, and you get the message Shakespeare is sending. Whereas the iambic pentameter is flexible and imitates everyday speech, rhyming couplets are artificial, and nothing like everyday speech. The way Shakespeare does that is to abandon his usual blank verse iambic pentameter and make the witches speak in rhyming couplets, which produces a weird, mesmeric effect, hence the unreal quality of the lines, ‘double double, toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble’. It is almost as though they are talking a different language. Shakespeare distinguishes them from the other characters by making them speak in a distinctive way, different from the way that human beings in the play, and in all his other plays, speak. They are not real characters, and, indeed, they can be seen simply as the voice of temptation in the mind of Macbeth. It is among the most quoted lines from Shakespeare, mainly because of its sing-song rhythm and its rhyming. ‘ Double double toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble‘ is a rhyming couplet from Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, chanted by the supernatural three witches. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.
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