Macbeth
Extract from the play
Thunder and lightning
When shall we three meet again
When the battle’s lost and won
Graymalkin
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won
.
The rhyming phrase
hurly burly
is highly appropriate for the witches' iambic tetrameter rhythym, the chant-like symmetrical four beats used throughout this scene, which do not flow like the spoken prosody of Shakespeare's usual pentameter lines. According to Douglas Harper's
Online Etymology Dictionary
© 2010, the word
hurlyburly
originates in the 1530's, only a generation before Shakespeare's birth in 1564. It is "apparently an alteration of [the] phrase
hurling and burling
, [a] reduplication of 14c.
hurling
"commotion, tumult," verbal noun of
hurl
(q.v.)." The entry goes on to explain that "
Hurling time
was the name applied by chroniclers to the period of tumult and commotion around Wat Tyler's rebellion [otherwise known as 'The Peasants' Revolt']." This origin suggests that the phrase may also have been chosen by Shakespeare for its associations with rebellion and the turning upside down of social order celebrated by the witches, as well as the noisy chaos of battle.
The next line of the second witch's couplet rhymes on the oxymoronic phrase 'lost and won'. While it makes a logical sense - any battle whose outcome has been decided must have both a winning and a losing side - the juxtaposition of these opposites introduces the witches' recurring linguistic motif of punning double meanings, or 'equivocations' which culminate in the prophecies that trap Macbeth into a series of hubristic false hopes.