O p e n i n g s1 7is a central issue in Shakespeare. Rarely has there been so much ado
about nothing in the annals of world literature.
The witches will turn out to be prophets who can foresee the
future. Perhaps this is already clear from these opening lines, when
the second witch declares that the three of them will meet again
when the battle is over. But maybe this involves no pre- vision at all;
maybe they have already arranged to meet then, and the first witch
simply needs reminding of the fact. The third witch remarks that
the battle will be over before sunset, but this, too, may require no
precognitive powers. Battles are generally over before sunset. There
is not much point in fighting an enemy you can’t see. One might
expect the three weird sisters, as Macbeth will later call them, to be
able to predict the outcome of the contest, but they do not. ‘Lost
and won’, which is true of almost all battles, may be a canny way of
hedging their bets in this respect. So it is not clear whether the
women are prophesying or not. Their foretelling of the future is
not to be trusted, as Macbeth will discover to his cost. Their
prophetic utterances are ridden with paradox and ambiguity, but so
also is the question of whether they are making such claims.
Ambiguity can be enriching, as all students of literature are aware,
but it can also be lethal, as the hero will discover.
Next in line is the Almighty. The first line of the Bible reads:
‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ It is
a magnificently resonant opening to the most celebrated text in
the world, simple and authoritative at the same time. The phrase
‘In the beginning’ refers, of course, to the beginning of the world.
Grammatically speaking, it would be possible to read it as
concerning God’s own beginning, meaning that creating the world
was the very first thing he got up to. The Creation was the first item
on the divine agenda, before God went on to organise dreadful