Three Witches and Macbeth - 2956 Words

The opening scene in Macbeth is a compact exposition. Everybody knows that a play is more restrained than a novel because it is written to be performed in less than three hrs. That is why it should attract the viewer and engage his or her attention from the beginning. That makes the opening scene of any play of such a great importance. The opening scene in a play acts as an expository scene that introduces the audience to the background of the play, its hero, and hints at the main theme. Shakespeare is one of the greatest dramatists who wrote the best expository scenes ever. They are known for their greatness and their capacity to attract the audience or the reader from the very beginning. One of Shakespeare s great opening scenes What†¦show more content†¦At the points in the play mentioned, the witches’ role is to provide Macbeth with authenticity and to gain respect from the Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare also uses the witches in Macbeth as the main vehicles for his verse and imagery and throughout the play these linguistic devices echo the continuous, underlying themes. In Act 1 Scene 1, Shakespeare’s skilful poetry is immediately illustrated in the oxy-morons, ‘When the battle’s lost and won’ and ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’. These absurd paradoxes demonstrate the unnaturalness of the witches, their role in reversing God’s natural order and they echo the theme of abnormality. The play constantly explores the opposing forces, for example, how can a battle be both lost and won? This apparent contradiction is stressed further with ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ – in this good is becoming evil, which is what happens to Macbeth and his wife gradually throughout the play. The rhyming couplets spoken by the witches contrast starkly against the iambic pentameter that is voiced by the other characters. Iambic pentameter or ‘blank verse’ is an unrhymed line containing five iambs, for example in Act 1 Scene 3 where Macbeth says, ‘And Thane of Cawdor too: went it not so?’ A verse couplet is a pair of rhymed lines of any metre, for example the openingShow MoreRelatedEssay on The Three Witches in Macbeth984 Words   |  4 PagesThe three witches in the tragedy Macbeth are introduced right at the beginning of the play. The scene opens with the witches chanting three prophesies: Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor, Thane of Glamis and King. These prophesies introduce Macbeth to his plan of defeat and to over power. Macbeth will eventually follow through in killing king Duncan. Some people believe that the witches had the ability to reverse the order of things. 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