Curtain up, it’s time for the only show that matters in Lancre—which brings us to the end Wyrd Sisters.
Summary
The play begins and the actors are having a rough time of it, so Hwel tries to pep talk everyone into their roles. Tomjon can’t find his usual costume crown and ends up having to fish the real one out of the prop box. Verence is upset to find that his son is playing an embellished and decidedly evil version of him. Granny sees what the play is doing to their town—it’s rewriting history in their minds and they’re losing the battle right before her eyes. After the first act, the duke tells his footman that the captain of the guard must arrest the witches because public opinion is now turning in their favor. The captain winds up arresting the actors who are playing the witches, while Tomjon tries to figure out why the play is trying to change around them. He goes to think on his own, and the ghost of his father tries to confront him with no luck. Granny, Nanny, and Magrat think that perhaps they could change the words of the play to fix this mess, are mistaken for their actors by Hwel, and told to go out on stage for Act Two.
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A real storm (from the start of the book) shows up, which is just as well because the foley effects aren’t working out anymore. The witches are on stage with the play’s tin cauldron and paper fire, and they’re causing a great deal of distraction. The duke finally realizes that it’s the real witches up on stage and the duchess motions to have them removed. Granny casts a spell and the play begins to change, the words reforming and showing the audience what actually happened to the former king. Death arrives to claim a soul and prepares for his cue, but arrives on stage to an audience that can see him because they are expecting to see Death within the play. He freezes in stage fright. The duke panics and climbs onto the stage insisting that he did not kill the king, but Tomjon is seized by the voice of his father and insists that he did. The duchess is about to have everyone on stage arrested or slain when the Fool comes out on stage and confirms that he was there on the night of Verence’s death and saw the duke murder him.
The duke takes the stage dagger and stabs the Fool, then proceeds to stab most of the company, his wife, and himself—but it’s a retractable stage dagger so no one is harmed. Then Felmet says that there’s supposed to be a comet when a prince dies and goes outside to check. The duchess demands that the guards arrest the witches as Granny declares Tomjon’s heritage. She shows the duchess her true self using some headology, but the duchess isn’t having it, so Nanny knocks her out with the cauldron. The duke has decided that he’s already a ghost, much to Death’s dismay, but he thankfully slips from the battlements and falls into the gorge, dying. A conversation is happening about how to coronate Tomjon, who adamantly does not want to be king. He asks Hwel to help him, and the dwarf tries, but of course the problem is that being king isn’t exactly something people get a choice in. Magrat has stared at him though, and brought a whispering conversation to the other witches.
There’s some commotion about the whole thing and a month later the witches meet on the full moon in their coven, the night following the king’s coronation. The Fool has been crowned King Verence II, and Nanny wonders why Magrat hasn’t made herself the queen at this rate. Tomjon is performing on the company’s way back to the city, and insisting that they save every pence to put back into the theatre. The new King Verence comes to Magrat’s home and his sergeant pounds upon the door, but the king thinks that’s far too much and orders him to leave, and to return his hat and bells to the Fools’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork. The king lets himself into Magrat’s kitchen and falls asleep, thinking of all he has to do. The duchess escapes her cell and runs into the forest, determined to get her revenge, only to have the land take its revenge on her. As the coven is talking, it is revealed that while the king and Tomjon are truly brothers, their father was not King Verence—it was his Fool. Magrat is mortified that they misled the public, but Nanny and Granny are adamant that everything has worked out all right. They bring their meeting to a close and agree to not schedule their next meeting just yet.
Commentary
At the end of the book, we come to the play-within-a-play portion. (Okay, it’s a play within a book, but most narratives within narratives have similar functions, so it’s still valid.) As usual, we get the parodies of Macbeth and Hamlet and Richard III and so on, but the real focus here is aptly a commentary on how art and politics and reality intermingle, and where those stitches fray.
There are references here to the fact that art has often been shaped by those in power; the talk about how Tomjon has been outfitted with a hump on his back and made into this loathsome figure is a direct reference to how Richard III was depicted by Shakespeare—not out of a desire for accuracy, but because that was what the current king commanded. Similarly here, Hwel has written the previous king this way because the duke is paying for this play and has demanded certain features in it.
There’s also an acknowledgement on how art (specifically political theater here) can reshape reality… and I found that bit particularly hard to read at the moment. Granny watching the town watch the play, everyone seeing an altered version of history and how easily they believe it. Theatre is certainly magic, but the real concern is that people will often believe anything that is repeated enough or presented to them with the right kind of gusto. It’s all played out hilariously—with the real coven on stage and Death getting a brief cameo (this theatrical asshole gets up in front of a crowd and freezes?) and the poor actors suddenly reciting lines they’ve never heard before—but it’s a reminder of how easily humans are taken in by lies. And not even well-constructed ones.
I find myself fascinated by the difference with which the duke and duchess meet their ends, even more for how it relates to the ending of Macbeth; pointedly, Duke Felmet gets a rather comical ending, and that could be put down to the fact that we’re dealing with an overall comical book, but it reads more like a direct commentary on how Pratchett views Lord and Lady Macbeth—specifically that the lord is a nothing muffin of an antagonist, and the lady should have been permitted the full breadth of her villainy. Because let’s be honest, the idea that Lady Mac loses her mind over guilt at her misdeeds is one of Shakespeare’s weakest writing choices.
I’m sorry, but it’s true—it’s one of those ideas that’s fun to play as an actor, but doesn’t bear out in the characterization we’ve seen. So instead, Pratchett has the duke lose touch with reality over his guilt (which he’s built upon the entire book), and goes a different route for the duchess. People who walk around advocating for callous murder are unlikely to make a turnaround so severe, so we get a far more chilling end at the hands (and hooves and antlers and hoppy feet) of the land. The land which has been so abused in this story finally gets its revenge on the person who cared about it the least. It’s fitting and much more frightening, and pointedly shakes a finger at villains who believe that acts of compassion are weakness, which is something that should be brought up more often in fiction to my mind.
And then the witches have got things sorted, and they have another meeting to discuss how it all went, and Magrat learns that the Fool isn’t really related to King Verence at all, but Granny and Nanny are certain that it doesn’t matter. Because, as I said before, this is a story about how people are many things, and how complicated it can be to find your path when even so. The story doesn’t tell us if Magrat is going to become the queen, and that’s just as well because not knowing is really part of the story. (Have you watched Soul yet? The endings are similar here, really, and I was thinking about it the whole time.)
There’s a thought here at the end that I’m curious about, dealing with the play about trolls that Tomjon is performing on his way home. Pratchett writes of the show “A hundred people would go home tonight wondering whether trolls were really as bad as they had hitherto thought although, of course, this wouldn’t actually stop them disliking them in any way whatsoever.” It’s a scathing indictment because people who make art and appreciate art like to believe that art can change hearts and minds. We even like to believe that art can better instill empathy in others. But the fact of the matter is, plenty of people will appreciate the same art that we love and not take away the lessons within it. It won’t reach them, not for long enough to make them reassess the aspects of their life that they’re comfortable with. And this is an extremely glib though apt way of noting this very problem.
To that end, Tomjon calls Hwel “lawn ornament” at the end of the book, and Hwel accepts it this time. Perhaps he believes the young man has earned it; he’s truly become his father’s son now, Vitoller’s heir of the stage. Perhaps the dwarf has decided it doesn’t make that much of a difference when Tomjon is going to use all their earnings to make the Dysk the kind of theater Hwel is dreaming of. But it still sits awkwardly coming after that quote.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Getting all petty in the footnotes, about the alderman not being punished for using the phrase “commence to start” which, I’m not usually all in for pedantry, but I’ve got to give him this one.
- Death quoting “There’s No Business Like Show Business” made me suddenly wonder if that’s not one of the most reappropriated songs on record. It’s not as though there aren’t other songs about show business, but anything sung by Ethel Merman is gonna have a certain kind of staying power in the public consciousness.
- At the end, you’re forced to reconsider the title, particularly the label of “wyrd” as forces of fate. Because as Nanny and Granny insist, fate and destiny are pretty nonsense overall. But then again, they do sort of act as agents of fate. But then again…
Pratchettisms:
The castle was full of people standing around in that polite, sheepish way affected by people who see each other all day and are now seeing each other again in unusual social circumstances, like an office party.
He uttered the stage manager’s traditional scream of rage.
This was real. This was more real even than reality. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.
This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.
It had spent ages learning its craft. It had spent years lurking in distant valleys. It had practiced for hours in front of a glacier. It had studied the great storms of the past. It had honed its art to perfection. And now, tonight, with what it could see was clearly an appreciative audience waiting for it, it was going to take them by, well… tempest.
Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.
Alone, in the gray shadows, Death tapdanced.
“That doesn’t matter. A king isn’t something you’re good at, it’s something you are.”
And that’s the end of Wyrd Sisters! Which means that we’re starting next week into Pyramids, which is helpfully split into four parts. So we’ll get all the way through Part I.
I doubt that Shakespeare was commanded to portray Richard III as a villain by the king – not least because England was ruled by a queen at that point:) – but was following the historical belief of the period. Basically, when Richard was defeated and killed in battle by Henry Tudor (Henry VII), Henry’s claim to the throne was a bit wobbly and so a major propaganda campaign was set up to vilify Richard as a murderous and physically deformed tyrant who was not worthy to be the king. By the time we get to Shakespeare’s play this had become the accepted truth and even if Shakespeare had not believed it, no play could be performed without the permission of the Lord Chamberlain, a royal official, and so he had to show the character as that.
As to the Duke being Macbeth and the Duchess being Lady Macbeth, I actually think it’s the other way round. It is the Lady Macbeth (and Felmet in the play) who expresses remorse and becomes obsessed with washing her hands, while it is the Macbeth (and the Duchess) who ends up embracing his evil and accepting his character before meeting her death.
@1: King, queen, whatever… England was ruled by a queen, but as far as Elizabeth herself was concerend, that made no difference:
“I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” and the princes of Europe had best remember that!
But yes, by the time that Shakespeare wrote Richard III, Sir Thomas More’s version of Richard’s character had become canon (although you could say it’s nothing more than Tudor fanon) and as long as Tudor monarchs were on the throne, so it would be.
Macbeth, on the other hand, was written for, or about, a king, James the Sixth of Scotland and the First of England, who inherited because he was the son of his mother, and who survived a dramatic assassination-and-usurpation plot (with gunpowder in it).
Suitable ending:
Wyrd Sisters was a fun book that I’ve read before, but it was nice to revisit it. It’s been a few years since I read it the first time. I do like the twist at the end that the Fool and Tomjon are brother’s but not because of the King being their father but the Fool. I’m looking forward to Pyramids since I’ve never read this one before.
I don’t see Death as being at all theatrical; he’s the one who is matter-of-fact when people start emoting over their deaths — and here he’s already off his stride because he’s being seen by ordinary people while he’s on duty. (Pratchett tells us wizards, monarchs, and such are the only ones who usually see him — but also has him visible to bar owners, Foreign Legion commanders, etc. when he’s not on the job.) Worse, when he appears he’s used to being in control — and here he isn’t.
I don’t see the part of the epilog that follows Tomjon as being scathing about either art or artists; ISTM that sudden conversions and mass movements are traits of bad art, where good art is subtle. If Pratchett is being scathing about anyone, it’s people who can’t be dislodged from their small viciousnesses.
Pratchettism:
cf many versions of “culture must be hard”, e.g.
(The Threepenny Opera I,ii.)
I always thought Lizzie of England [there is no need for a numeral, Lizzie of the United Kingdom is the first Queen Brenda of the whole lot, so Lizzie Tudor is just Lizzie Tudor. All Hail Francis the Second, the true King; O’er the Watter anyway] had the heart and stomach of a concrete elephant? And the tolerance level of a particularly enraged honey badger. Old Wullie Wagglestick didn’t need commanded to write propaganda, he knew what was good for him. I’m not all that sanguine about James VI letting him away with Macbeth either, but that was his own line of propaganda. Royalty really is rotten bunch in reality, that is why we need fiction to give us true, just, and noble kings as alternatives. We really need it.
Correcting myself: IIRC, Death usually isn’t seen by anyone living.
The comment about people thinking trolls mightn’t be so bad after all but still disliking them is one that I’ve always had trouble with, mostly because I want Art to change lives and thinking. Pratchett would love it to as well, I think, but he knows what people are like. He sums up most people’s interactions with Art beautifully with that one sentence though (Similarly,David Gemmell had a character in one of his novels say something along the lines of “Read your Homer, but don’t base your life around it” despite having every single protagonist in his novels do just that). I love the ending of this book: we get closure and also the sense that life goes on. And the Duchess, I think, may have been a good witch in a different story. I did love her final scene, though: Pratchett talks good cynicism but he does love his just desserts.
Richard III was not technically a hunchback but he had quite a scoliosis as we learned when we dug him up. His Y chromosome also didn’t match the modern samples taken from male line plantagenet descendants. Now the ringer(s) could have snuck in at any stage but it’s interesting that Isabella of Castile, wife of Edmund 1st Duke of York, had a reputation for getting around and contemporaries expressed certain doubts about the paternity of her second son, Richard III’s grandfather…
@8: ” the ringer(s) could have snuck in at any stage” – that’s any stage after Richard III. What the research suggested was a break in the male line somewhere between Richard and the 18th century Henry Somerset, so the living people who thought they were Richard’s descendants may not be after all.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/25/richard-iii-dna-tests-uncover-evidence-of-further-royal-scandal
We digress, but it’s never too late to combat fake news about Richard III… :-)
Ridcully: – that’s any stage after Richard III.
Only if you assume Richard is the standard, and why should we? BTW Richard of Conisburgh being a little accident of Isabella of Castile wouldn’t effect his descendants’ claim to the throne as it came through Anne Mortimer from Lionel of Clarence.
One things first. Let me rise in defense of Death, one of my favorite characters. He is one of the least theatrical characters in the books. His stagefright is perfectly reasonable because he is used to adults not seeing him and uncomfortable with children who can see him. He is here to do a job and isn’t expecting an audience.
I share your discomfort with art as a political tool. In thinking about it, and considering the passage on the troll play, I think what Pratchett is saying is that words can change history but have much less of an effect on the future. People don’t want a particular king, they just want a king. In the present time I hope that’s true because the effectiveness of words creating false history is far too clear.
The Lancre Witch books (Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum) are my favorite Discworld subseries and would be four of my five favorite Discworld books if I had to choose, with Jingo edging out Wyrd Sisters. Despite not making the latter cut, Wyrd Sisters is a jewel among the early Discworld books. Outside this subseries and the Tiffany Aching subseries, most Discworld books don’t have more than one or two strong and dynamic female characters, and a few have none.
“The cauldron’s all full of yuk!” I think “yuk” is a good word for gross but unidentifiable substances, as in “I went beachcombing and found a bottle full of yuk.” (True story)
“So I set fire to a few cottages. But everyone does that. It’s good for the building industry anyway.” Uh, Verence, that’s the kind of thing the Fool counseled your usurper to say.
This is where Granny’s gift to Tomjon comes back to bite her, and she doesn’t realize it until the end. LET HIM BE WHO HE THINKS HE IS, YOU SAID. You didn’t know at the time that he’d someday be called on to become a king, but now that he has been, WHY ARE YOU SO SURPRISED THAT HE ONLY WANTS TO BE AN ACTOR? Nice Job (Almost) Breaking It, Heroes.
So Tomjon and Verence II look similar to each other — but if the witches are to be believed, they have no reason to look especially like Verence I. Yet they must happen to look enough like him to fool the public. Luckily. (New crack theory: their mutual father was secretly sired by Verence I’s father, making them Verence I’s second cousins, and the royal look has resurfaced a little.)
The Annotated Pratchett File doesn’t say this, and I might be wrong, but I imagined The Troll of Ankh as a counterpart to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Magrat feeling she should be able to equitably share food with the mice in her cottage reminds me of the health-food store cashier I once heard saying “I’m such a hippie I planted a garden for myself and one for the animals. They didn’t get it.” I love my town.
Call-forwards to later books:
The showdown in this book is rather like the one in Maskerade. But I enjoy that one more. It will even involve a villain thinking a prop weapon is real…but with rather more consequences. Incidentally, Wyrd Sisters in particular demonstrates why theaters should use prop weapons. When some of my college schoolmates made a production of Macbeth, they used a real dagger. The guy playing Macbeth accidentally gashed his hand on the dagger during the performance, had to bandage it more and more between scenes, managed to make it look like part of the play (destroying the guilty hand, I presume), then went to the hospital afterward and got eight stitches.
“The standing stone was back in its normal place, but poised to run if any auditors came into view.” Running would be a good reaction to the Auditors who will cause disasters later in the series.
Granny showing the Duchess her “inner self” reminds me of Susan’s similarly effective attempt, in Hogfather, to show Teatime his “inner child.”
The body horror of Duke Felmet’s hand will be surpassed only by the body horror of Cosmo Lavish’s hand.
Pratchettisms:
“Very well, my theatrical witches. You’ve done your show and now it’s time for your applause. Clap them in chains.”
“I went and bent the thunder, Hwel. Now it just goes clonk-clonk.”
@13 As America’s own play wraps up today, I can’t help thinking that this is Granny’s low point. She comes off as someone who feels that rules don’t apply to her. She is a bully. She is petty. She distrusts everybody, even her allies, and especially foreigners. And the heir is fake news. OTOH, just so we don’t carry the Orange is the New Black analogy too far, she has a deep respect for nature and she is capable of changing her views (although she is reluctant to admit it) and throughout the series she gets better.
Let me also say that this is the funniest part of the book because, despite all the comments focused on The Scottish Play, this is the much more the play within a play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And I like the fact that we are denied an epilogue as in Pyramus and Thisbe because the fate of Magrat and Verence II being left unresolved is far more satisfying.
This just in.
If you live in the UK and have £800,000, the house where Sir Terry (mayherestinpeace) wrote Wyrd Sisters (and all of his early books through Soul Music or Interesting Times) is for sale.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-55739271