“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble” is the refrain of the witches’ spell in Macbeth, chanted as they throw gruesome ingredients into a boiling cauldron, and it prepares the double-edged prophecies that will lead Macbeth to his death.
Double, Double Toil and Trouble: The Full Spell
[First Witch] Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed.
[Second Witch] Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whined.
[Third Witch] Harpier cries “’Tis time, ’tis time!”
[First Witch] Round about the cauldron go;
In the poisoned entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweltered venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ th’ charmed pot.
[All] Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
[Second Witch] Fillet of a fenny snake
In the cauldron boil and bake.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
[All] Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
[Third Witch] Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravined salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digged i’ th’ dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat and slips of yew
Slivered in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-delivered by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab.
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron
For th’ ingredience of our cauldron.
[All] Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
[Second Witch] Cool it with a baboon’s blood.
Then the charm is firm and good.
Text based on the First Folio (1623), Macbeth, Act 4, scene 1, with modernized spelling and punctuation, and with each witch’s speech marked.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about “Double, double toil and trouble” for quick reference.
What “Double, Double Toil and Trouble” Means
The whole spell in plain English, before the line-by-line detail.
The three witches gather around a cauldron in a storm. Their animal spirits, a streaked cat, a hedgehog, and a spirit called Harpier, have given the signal: it is time. The first witch circles the pot and throws in poisoned entrails and a toad that has sweated venom under a cold stone for a month.
Together they chant the refrain: “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” “Double” means to double or multiply, “toil” means work or labor, and “trouble” means harm and disorder. They are asking for their efforts to be doubled and their mischief to multiply, while the fire burns and the pot boils.
The second witch adds a swamp snake, the eye of a newt, the toe of a frog, bat’s fur, a dog’s tongue, a viper’s forked tongue, a slowworm’s sting, a lizard’s leg, and a young owl’s wing, all to make a spell of powerful harm. The third witch adds even worse: a dragon’s scale, a wolf’s tooth, mummified flesh, a shark’s stomach, hemlock dug up at night, human body parts, and a tiger’s guts.
After the third chorus, they cool the brew with a baboon’s blood, and the charm is complete. Moments later, one of them feels a prickling in her thumbs: “Something wicked this way comes.” It is Macbeth.
Double, Double Toil and Trouble, Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Where the Spell Comes in Macbeth
What comes before and after the spell explains why it matters.
By Act 4, Macbeth has murdered King Duncan to take the throne and has had his friend Banquo killed. At a royal banquet, Banquo’s ghost appeared to him, and Macbeth, shaken and afraid, decided to seek out the witches who first promised him the crown: “I will tomorrow / (And betimes I will) to the Weird Sisters.”
The spell is the witches’ preparation for his visit. When he arrives and asks what they are doing, they answer, “A deed without a name.” Then they call up three apparitions. The first warns him to beware Macduff. The second tells him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” The third says he will never be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Finally, they show him a line of kings descended from Banquo.
Macbeth leaves feeling safe, but not safe enough. He decides to kill Macduff anyway, and when he learns Macduff has fled, he has Macduff’s wife and children murdered instead. For the whole story, see our full guide to Macbeth, and for the other plays, our guide to all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Themes
The three big ideas the spell turns on.
Evil and the Unnatural
Everything in the cauldron is poisonous, deformed, or torn from a body. The ingredients are gathered at the worst possible times, in the dark and during an eclipse. The spell turns nature inside out, the same way Macbeth’s murder of a king has thrown Scotland’s whole natural order into chaos. Our guide to the themes of Macbeth follows this idea through the play.
Fate and Temptation
The witches never order Macbeth to do anything. What they brew here is not a curse on him but a set of prophecies, and it is Macbeth who decides what to do with them. The spell is a preparation for temptation, not a command.
Disorder
“Toil and trouble” is exactly what the witches deal in: labor and chaos, work that produces harm. Their chant celebrates disorder, and by this point in the play Scotland itself is sinking into it under Macbeth’s rule.
Form and Language
How the spell is built, and why it sounds the way it does.
The Witches’ Own Rhythm
Macbeth and the other human characters speak mostly in iambic pentameter, ten syllables with the stress on every second beat. The witches speak differently: short lines of seven or eight syllables with four strong beats, stressed on the first syllable, “DOU-ble, DOU-ble, TOIL and TROU-ble.” The rhythm is hypnotic and chant-like, and it marks the witches as creatures outside the human world.
Rhyming Couplets
Every pair of lines rhymes: “go” and “throw,” “frog” and “dog,” “trouble” and “bubble.” The rhymes make the spell easy to remember, which is one reason it has lasted so well in popular memory.
A Catalog of Horrors
Most of the spell is a list, and the list grows darker as it goes. The second witch adds animal parts; the third adds human ones, including the finger of a strangled baby. Some ingredients also reflect the prejudices of Shakespeare’s England, which cast Jews, Turks, and Tartars as outsiders and enemies of Christianity. Their body parts appear here as marks of the witches’ evil, and modern readers rightly notice that ugliness.
“Bubble, Bubble” or “Double, Double”?
The refrain is “Double, double toil and trouble,” not “Bubble, bubble.” The misquotation probably comes from the word “bubble” at the end of the next line, “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
A Closer Reading: Why “Double”?
The first word of the refrain is the key to the whole scene, and to everything the witches do.
On the surface, “double” simply means “multiply”: let our work and our mischief grow. But doubleness is the witches’ nature. From their first scene, they speak in phrases that point two ways at once, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The spell they brew here produces prophecies with exactly that quality. “None of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” is true, and utterly misleading. Birnam Wood will come to Dunsinane, but not in the way Macbeth imagines.
Macbeth even catches the word himself. Reassured by the second prophecy, he decides to kill Macduff anyway: “But yet I’ll make assurance double sure.” He thinks he is doubling his safety; he is doubling his crimes. Only at the end does he understand what “double” meant. Facing Macduff, who was not born in the natural way, he curses the witches as “juggling fiends” who “palter with us in a double sense, / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope.” The refrain every schoolchild knows is, in the end, a description of how the witches destroy him: with double meanings.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about “Double, double toil and trouble,” answered briefly.
What Does “Double, Double Toil and Trouble” Mean?
It is a spell asking for the witches’ work and mischief to multiply. “Toil” means labor and “trouble” means harm, so the line calls for double the effort and double the harm as the cauldron boils.
Is It “Double, Double” or “Bubble, Bubble”?
“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” “Bubble, bubble” is a common misquotation.
Who Says “Double, Double Toil and Trouble”?
All three witches, chanting together, in Act 4, scene 1 of Macbeth. The refrain comes three times, after each witch adds her ingredients.
What Is “Eye of Newt”?
Just what it sounds like: the eye of a newt, a small amphibian. It is one of many animal parts the second witch adds to the cauldron, along with a frog’s toe, bat’s fur, and a dog’s tongue.
Did Shakespeare Write All of the Witch Scene?
The spell itself is generally accepted as Shakespeare’s. But the lines that follow it, spoken by Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, together with an earlier Hecate scene, are widely believed to have been added by another writer, probably Thomas Middleton.
Related Reading
Three pages that take “Double, double toil and trouble” further.