When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?
Macbeth, Shakespeare
*****
I studied this play twice in high school (two different schools) and never understood the political side. Only the witch rhymes stayed with me; my friend and I often cited them at relevant moments, especially when cooking:
Double, double, toil and trouble: Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.
In recent years I’ve tutored students who were writing about Macbeth, and so… I forced myself to read it to the point of understanding.
Right now I’m translating a French fairy tale in which the words chats and chaudière evoke my Macbeth textbook cover with its etching of three hags on a bleak plain waiting for the cauldron to boil. But while in Shakespeare’s cauldron there boils the fillet of a fenny snake, in the French fairy tale cauldron there is nought but milk. For the cats.