ORIENTALISM IN "NOSE OF TURK AND TATAR'S LIPS"

 Liver of Blaspheming Jew

As I mention in the episode, Jewish people had been expelled from England in 1290 by King Edward the First. For Shakespeare and his audience, the idea of a Jewish person was about as alien as a dragon. Even if there were Jewish people in Macbeth’s Scotland in the 11th century - and there wouldn’t have been many - the sense here is more one of exoticism than anti-Semitism. The blasphemy that the witch mentions is that Jewish people would have denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. 

Nose of Turk and Tatar’s Lips

After the Jew’s liver, now we have an Ottoman's, or Turk’s nose and the lips of a Tatar, who could have come from anywhere from Siberia to Kazakstan. The combination is interesting because it combines a Jewish person, a Muslim and potentially an Eastern Orthodox Christian. These were all equally alien to Shakespeare’s London, and their inclusion in this horrific spell is an excuse for exoticism, cruelty and a kind of global power on behalf of these witches, the Weird Sisters. (There’s also the important point that the spell rhymes, and so Jew rhymes with yew, and eclipse with lips…)

The Protection of Baptism

The body parts harvested from non-Christian, non-Catholic bodies would all have lacked Christian anointing. So, all of these ingredients would have been all the more powerful for black magic since they have not been anointed or annealed.