Simply put, as a classically trained actor, I can testify that "Fair is foul and foul is fair/ Hover through the fog and filthy air" means multiple things, obviously. Firstly, the witches are not necessarily evil. Manipulative, somber, eerie, dangerous, without a doubt. But not necessarily evil. This is proven in their sense of fear when encountered by Hecate, their queen. Fear is a very human emotion... Secondly, the witches are not referring to the weather- that's poop. The witches are greeting MacBeth with a paradoxical chiasmus in order to immediately reveal a possible universal theme, but principally to grab his attention. "Fair is foul and foul is fair" is also a reference to the falsity behind people. As an actor, heck, as a human, we deceive daily. Take a con man, he looks great, knows his shpiel, but in the end, he will con you. If that doesn't get the point across, take any soccer mom in their friend groups. You can be beautiful and likeable yet harboring some disgusting thing, like the devil- who according to the Bible, was the brightest star- and yet you can be awful to the eye and filled with goodness. The is also a reference to MacDuff who has continually been, for lack of a better word, ignored, yet has this amazing destiny to make things right once more; whereas MacBeth, the brightest star, brings about his own destruction. The Weird Sisters merely prophesize and change the feeling of the show with these lines.
For the record, I've been in professional renditions of MacBeth three times now. I've played Angus, a Weird Sister, understudied Lennox, and recently played Lady MacBeth.
No comments:
Post a Comment