Hedge-pig
There are few creatures cuter than a hedgehog, which Shakespeare here gives an older name, a hedge-pig. (Happily none are added to the witches’ brew…)
Harpier
We can assume that Harpier is the name of the Third Witch’s familiar. Much earlier in the play we heard mention of Graymalkin and Paddock, so it’s an easy guess that Harpier is hers.
Daemonology
Dæmonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into Three Books: Written by the High and Mighty Prince James was King James’ influential book on the subject of witchcraft. Written in part as a response to another book - The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot - King James’ book went through multiple printings and was a major national endorsement of witch-hunting. Many of the characteristics and activities that Shakespeare gives his witches can be seen to have been drawn from the king’s book on the subject.
Toads
The witches use a lot of ingredients that have required preparation and timing. First of these is the venom of a toad that was left to sweat out its poison for a full month (thirty-one days and nights). There’s a long-standing assumption that toads are poisonous, and the idea crops up in several Shakespeare plays. Most of the toads found in the British Isles are not actually venomous.
Fenny Snake
A snake from the marshes, or the fens. There’s something ironic about the witch choosing the fillet - usually the best cut of meat - from so meagre a creature as a snake from a Scottish marsh.
Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog
Again, these are choice cuts from rather miserable creatures. These witches don’t harvest their ingredients from magical animals like the unicorn or the phoenix, but from tiny, marginal beasts that live in wet, dark places.
Wool of Bat
Another tiny animal that lives in dark and obscurity - catching a bat would be hard enough, and then getting enough bat fur for this “wool” would be hard work indeed.
Tongue of Dog
The ingredient most likely to distress us, since dogs are so much a part of domestic and family life. A witch cutting out a dog’s tongue for her spells sounds like a savage act indeed.
Adder’s Fork and Blind Worm’s Sting
The adder and the slow worm (aka the blind worm) are two more snake-like creatures. The witch has cut out the adder’s forked tongue - that’s two tongues in a row - and the sting from the slow worm, another creature that was believed to be poisonous.
Howlet’s Wing
We spoke before about owls in Shakespeare - there’s a whole page of notes about them here. The witches’ recipe is just that little bit nastier because it’s not just that they take a wing from an owl, but from a baby owl, or (h)owlet.
Flowers
As mentioned within the episode, some interpretations of the scene like to suggest that all of these wretched ingredients are actually drawn from botany. I am not at all convinced, but if you’d like to see such a version, you’ll find one here.
Scale of Dragon
The Third Witch brings the real excitement, since her ingredients are considerably more exotic and shocking. Where she might have procured the scale of a dragon isn’t really the point - what’s important is that she’s mysterious enough to have some.
Mummy
This was a substance made from the embalmed flesh of a corpse, often supposed to have extraordinary and even miraculous properties. The ancient Egyptians famously embalmed their dead, and that’s why they are called mummies - mummified bodies. It was a capital offence to use an exhumed body for witchcraft - and the text of King James’ Dæmonologie mentions how witches are notorious for messing around with bodies and making powders (like mummy) from them.
Hemlock
Hemlock is one of the most famous poisons in the world. It’s been used since the ancient world - Socrates the Greek philosopher died after drinking it. Again we get a sense of how important timing is here - this hemlock was dug in the dark, at night.
Blaspheming Jew
As I mention in the episode, Jewish people had been expelled from England in 1290 by King Edward the First. For Shakespeare and his audience, the idea of a Jewish person was about as alien as a dragon. Even if there were Jewish people in Macbeth’s Scotland in the 11th century - and there wouldn’t have been many - the sense here is more one of exoticism than anti-Semitism. The blasphemy that the witch mentions is that Jewish people would have denied the divinity of Christ.
Gall of Goat
Goats are nowadays frequently associated with The Devil (thanks to a 19th century association with Baphomet and the more recent film The Witch) but the association wasn’t always that strong. What’s more interesting in this image is that the witch has removed the gall, believed to be poisonous, from the goat’s innards. (Remember Lady Macbeth prayed earlier in the play to have her milk turned to gall…)
Slips of Yew
Yew trees are often associated with death, and their branches were often carried at funerals. The leaves of the yew tree are also poisonous. So, for a witch to harvest branches of a poisonous tree associated with death - and then to do so during a lunar eclipse - would be as likely to have dangerous magical properties as any other ingredient in this recipe.
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s Lips
After the Jew’s liver, now we have an Ottoman, or Turk’s nose and the lips of a Tartar, or Tatar, who could have come from anywhere from Siberia to Kazakstan. The combination is interesting because it combines a Jewish person, a Muslim and potentially an Eastern Orthodox Christian. These were all equally alien to Shakespeare’s London, and their inclusion in this horrific spell is an excuse for exoticism, cruelty and a kind of global power on behalf of these witches. (There’s also the important point that the spell rhymes, and so Jew rhymes with yew, and eclipse with lips…)
Finger of Birth-Strangled Babe
This is an even more ghastly ingredient - the finger of a child that was strangled at birth when it was born in a ditch, delivered by a prostitute. (This is surely the most time-specific of all the items these witches produce, given the number of variables at play here.)
The Protection of God
A great many of these horrifying ingredients could be said to have been damned, or at least ignored or abandoned by God. The body parts harvested from non-Christian bodies would all have lacked Christian anointing, and likewise a baby strangled at birth would not have had time to be baptised or “saved” in this manner. So, all of these ingredients would have been all the more powerful for black magic since they have not been anointed or anealed.
Chaudron
Not to be confused with the French word for cauldron, which is chaudron, this word - also sometimes spelled chawdron - is a foodstuff made from the entrails of an animal. So, this recipe seems to begin and end with such body parts - poisoned entrails and now the chawdron of a TIGER. Wherever they got that from…
Baboon’s Blood
As a parting shot, the witches fling in enough baboon’s blood to cool the pot. It’s a horrific thing to be carrying around, and no more than all these other shocking ingredients, I think Shakespeare includes them for the sake of this shock. Gall of goat was one piece of fun alliteration, but baboon’s blood is irresistible.
Black Spirits
There has been much written about how the text of this play seems to suggest a full quotation of a song from another - “Black Spirits” from Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch. I won’t quite the entire play - or even its entire Hecate scene - here, but there’s plenty of crossover between the two. There are echoes and similarities between the two scenes of witches at work, but Shakespeare’s remains substantially more famous. Middleton’s song goes as follows:
HECATE: Black spirits and white, red spirits and grey,
Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may.
Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in.
Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky.
Liard, Robin, you must bob in.
Round, around, around, about, about,
All ill come running in, all good keep out.
FIRST WITCH: Here's the blood of a bat.
HECATE: Put in that, oh, put in that.
SECOND WITCH: Here's libbard's bane.
HECATE: Put in again.
FIRST WITCH: The juice of toad, the oil of adder.
SECOND WITCH: Those will make the younker madder.
HECATE: Put in; there's all, and rid the stench.
FIRESTONE: Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd wench.
ALL: Round, around, around, about, about,
All ill come running in, all good keep out.
