BANQUO: Were such things here, as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten on the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner?
— from ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ by William Shakespeare, written circa 1605.
I’ve been coming across the word “weird” in the news lately, applied to a certain political party, by a competing political party.
Which is weird, because I’ve never before heard a political party described as “weird”. I’ve heard a political party described as “dumb”, or as “dangerous”, or as “a nest of vipers.” But never as “weird”.
I have, however, heard of witches described as “weird”.
A version of The Tragedy of Macbeth published online by the Folger Shakespeare Library, includes a list of over 40 characters.
At the very top of the list are the Weird Sisters.
And the Sisters are, indeed, weird. For one thing, they speak a form of English that hardly anyone can understand. Take, for example, this little conversation:
Scene 3
Thunder. Enter the three Witches.
FIRST WITCH: Where hast thou been, sister?
SECOND WITCH: Killing swine.
THIRD WITCH: Sister, where thou?
FIRST WITCH: A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched.
“Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do…
Do we understand any of this conversation? I sure don’t. And according to my casual research, no one currently living knows what “Aroint thee” means.
But maybe that’s the essential meaning of the word “weird”. People saying things what don’t make any sense, but that sound vaguely like English. Lots of that going on during an election campaign.
In order to become King, as predicted by the Weird Sisters, Macbeth has to arrange the assassination of Duncan, the reigning King. What Macbeth may not have understood, was that this was eventually going to have a bad outcome for him.
The moral of the story being: he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
After predicting that Macbeth would become the King of Scotland, the Weird Sisters vanish — apparently, into thin air. Macbeth’s fellow general, Banquo, remarks:
Were such things here, as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten on the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner?
Macbeth and Banquo have recently been victorious in a battle against invading Norsemen, primarily as the result of inviting the invaders to an ale-soaked treaty negotiation and secretly spiking their ale with a certain root that caused the invaders to become loopy.
I sometimes wonder if this same “insane root” plays a current role in America’s weird politics.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.