‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’: Macbeth's first words invoke, from the start, a coextensiveness of benefit and harm that will dominate the remainder of his foreshortened life. The ‘day’, a semi-objective correlative for his own destiny, will be foul and fair in equal measure. What will make him will also destroy him, giving him advantage only to the degree that it scuppers him too. As Macbeth is magnified, so he disintegrates, like a photographic blow-up.

Within seconds the Thane of Glamis finds himself swept into the orbit of suggestion. The witches appear. The third witch cries, ‘All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!’ Prophecy and suggestion hold hands like witches, collusive and indistinguishable. Are the witches revealing to Macbeth a truth, a transcendental knowledge of which they are the medium, known out there in the cosmos but as yet undelivered to Macbeth himself? Do we see here a trope or topos of revelation? Or, by contrast, are the witches giving voice not to an exterior verity but to Macbeth's own inner thoughts? The witches might be Manichean projections from Macbeth's mind, hallucinations like that of the fantasmatic dagger later on, or they might be independent or hired agents with a remit to expose his secrets, but in either case the ‘truth’ they announce will not be new, not an invention but a discovery, a truth, therefore, that lay already within Macbeth.