We encounter this quote twice early in the play. The witches chant "what's fair is foul, what's foul is fair / hover through the fog and filthy air" when they leave to meet Macbeth after the battle. Shortly before meeting the witches in Act I, Scene 3, Macbeth says to Banquo that he has never seen "so foul and fair a day." He means, essentially, that they have won a great battle, but at a horrible cost, with blood and death all around them. The witches' meaning is less clear, but their rhyme (reinforced by Macbeth's observation) establishes a crucial theme for the play. Appearances will be deceiving, and what appears to be good will in reality be evil. We see this in several instances. Lady Macbeth, for example, plays the dutiful hostess to Duncan, who she and her husband are plotting to kill. Macbeth's rise to the throne is made possible by a trail of murder. The witches' prophecies, while apparently very fortuitous to Macbeth, in fact lead him largely unsuspecting down a path to his own destruction. So the idea that what is "fair" is "foul" runs throughout the play.
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