The witches also represent chaos inasmuch as they represent earth they are the wild, untamed wildernesses, while the State, under the rule of the king and of subjects each in proper places works like a farm, a place of growing and plenty, but more importantly, of order. Banquo and the king represent the natural order, whereas the Macbeths’ ambition and the lengths they will go to realize it overturn that order, and create anarchy, chaos, and entropy. When asking the witches of his future, he asks if they can “look into the seeds of time and see which grains will grow and which will not” when they meet up with the king, he and Duncan have an exchange in which Duncan uses plant metaphors. “Into the air, ” Macbeth answers, “and what seemed corporal melted as breath into the wind.”įrom that same beginning, Banquo is associated with the earth. When the witches disappear, Banquo asks, “the earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them. They leave with the words, “fair is foul, foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air, ” and in the second opening, on the heath after the battle has been won, Macbeth echoes their words with his opening lines, “so foul and fair a day I have not seen.”įrom the very start of the play the witches are associated with the air and with the supernatural elements in fact their very first line reflects this: “when shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” while Banquo and the King, as well as many other minor players, including the King’s son, Malcolm, are associated with earth and the natural order Macbeth and his wife’s place is uncertain, but aligned more with air and the supernatural than with the ground. In the first opening, with the witches, we learn that there is a battle that will be “lost and won” and that they will meet Macbeth, the protagonist of the play, on a heath. The play has two beginnings, though one is more like the prologue, and each of them mirrors the earth/air, natural/supernatural divide.
It reads like a horror story with supernatural elements in which the order of nature is overturned when the rightful king is murdered, and the confusion of order, both personal and nature-wise, persists until the end of the play when a rightful king returns and takes up his crown. The tale uses nature as a reflection of the emotional inner events of the characters and uses it to illustrate Shakespeare’s meaning that draws on the Elizabethan worldview in which all things have their proper place and order, and character and fate is quite predetermined. The play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, is a story about how a man, Macbeth, and his wife tried to meddle with order and fate, and how this backfired tragically. Order and Disorder in Macbeth: Nature Reigns