Chestnuts vs Masculinity

        In the beginning of act 1 scene 3, the witches appear. One of the witches proclaims how a women was sitting eating chestnuts and when the witch asked if she could have one the women told her to get away. The witch then proclaims how her husband is off at sea to Aleppo as the master of a ship called the Tiger. The women with the chestnuts reflects Lady Macbeth.

       In order for Macbeth to become king he must first kill King Duncan. When Macbeth tells his wife Lady Macbeth about what the witches told him, she asks, "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the tow top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood." She is asking evil spirits to help her to become evil so she can help her husband kill the king.

       When witches make potions and conjure evil spirits they have to give something to get what they want. Such as in act 4 scene 1 the potion calls for a witch's mummified flesh, the gullet and stomach of a ravenous shark, a root of hemlock that was dug up in the dark, a Jew's liver, a goats bile, and so on and so forth. All the things that the potion asks for are extremely hard to get. When Lady Macbeth asks for the evil spirits to come forth and help her, she doesn't give anything for a trade, or in this case she doesn't give her chestnuts. When the witch says, "Her husband has sailed off to Aleppo as the master of a ship," it seems as if the chestnut woman and the sailor are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The witch says that she will take the sailors wind so it seems that she is going to take his life or it could be his throne.