Layers of meaning

I originally wrote the post below in April of 2019, but this past week I reread Macbeth for a class I’m teaching in Medieval cosmology and something new occurred to me this time through.

The story of the woman with the lap full of chestnuts can be looked at it from a different angle. A witch came to her wanting to take her blessings, and the woman, recognizing the evil creature, told the witch to leave, and she left. The witch attacked the husband’s ship, but she couldn’t do any permanent harm:

Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.

Evil influences can be refused. Macbeth and his lady could have rejected their evil impulses, but they chose not to.

And in Medieval and Renaissance literature, those two meanings (this one, and the one in the post below) can both be true at the same time. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye calls this the “principle of manifold or ‘polysemous’ meaning.”

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First impressions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act I, Scenes 1-5

That’s an awfully boring title, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of anything clever. :-p

The kids and I are reading Macbeth for our Medieval and Renaissance Literature class with Angelina Stanford, and I had some random things I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so here they are.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, c. 1783

First Witch:
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

This sailor must be must be quite a man, given the trip he’s on, the ship he masters, and the fact that the Witch says she can’t sink his ship. She can, however, curse the husband of this foolish woman.

I’m saying she’s foolish because here she is with her lap full of blessings gobbling them so greedily that she won’t even share when an old woman asks for some.

If you know anything about fairy tales, you know that’s a huge mistake, a mistake of wicked stepmother proportions.

The chestnuts caught my attention though because so often the chestnut tree is used in literature as a symbol of happiness and prosperity. If you know anything about Macbeth, you know that this most definitely isn’t a story about happiness and prosperity.

Let me go back to the beginning.

The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with the stage direction, “Thunder and lightening. Enter three Witches.” These three make a plan to meet with Macbeth before the day is over (to tell him he will be king, as we later learn), and saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they exit, and Scene 1 ends.

Given that the story begins with upheaval in nature, I’m going to assume that whatever disorder that set off this tragedy has already happened.

They reappear in Scene 3: “Thunder. Enter the three Witches.” The First Witch tells of her encounter with the sailor’s wife, which Asimov says has nothing at all to do with the play—it’s just there to please King James I, who “considered himself a particular expert on the matter of witchcraft,” and had “written a book called Demonology, in which he advocated . . . the severest measures against witches.” [Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: The English Plays, page 151]

Asimov, you’re a genius and I love you dearly, but you completely missed the boat on this one. Shakespeare wasn’t just a suck-up. He was an artist and he knew exactly what he was doing here.

(Before going on, I want to point out that these three are elsewhere in the play called the weyward/weird/wyrd sisters, so I think we’re supposed to think of them as being similar to the Fates of classical mythology, or the Norns of Norse mythology, priestesses who told the future.)

Now back to the chestnuts. Chestnuts provide a lot of nutrition and calories in a tiny little package, so they’ve always symbolised things like prosperity and fertility. Because they fall in such abundance during the harvest season, they also symbolise foresight and long life. Here’s something new I learned: They also symbolise the ability to receive ancient wisdom.

So, we have a prosperous woman (that she’s “rump-fed” tells us this) enjoying the bounty of nature, who refuses an old woman’s request for food, resulting in her husband being cursed. In Scene 5, we meet Lady Macbeth, who is as unnatural a woman as it’s possible to be.

I don’t have any conclusions exactly, mostly questions and guesses. Was Macbeth already corrupted before he met the Weird Sisters? I tend to think so, since good people don’t jump head-first into evil. CS Lewis talks about this regarding Mark Studdock’s descent in That Hideous Strength. Macbeth does briefly seem to accept that if he’s meant to be king, it’ll happen without his taking action. But Lady Macbeth must have long since fallen since she’s so quick to push her husband into evil action in order to bring about the prophecy.