Which play by William Shakespeare has the line: "When the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost and won"?

"When shall we three meet again" is the opening line of William Shakespeare’s well known tragedy "Macbeth". Spoken by the First Witch, the line immediately ushers everyone into a world of witches, prophecy, and black magic — elements which Shakespeare picked. Literary scholars say he did it probably because the new King of England, James I, had written censoriously about witchcraft in his book "Demonologie". The witches in "Macbeth" have now come together in Act 1, scene 1.

With their opening exchange, it is setting the tone and mood for the entire play. The opening scene here is said to establish an ‘invocation’ which is ‘made at once to the imagination’.

At the start of this play, the witches are establishing an atmosphere of foreboding: the storm which now begins in "Macbeth" heralds the turbulent events which are going to follow, all of which the witches have prophesied. From the very outset, things are strange, out-of-kilter: fair is foul, and foul is fair, as the witches will later (collectively) say.

In Shakespeare's time, a hurly-burly was a violent conflict, an armed battle. The witches have now agreed to meet up again after the battle, when the "hurly-burly is done, when the battle is lost and won".

In "Macbeth", there are several explicit paradoxes. Some are specifically made by the three witches in Act 1: 'When the battle's won and lost', points to and means Macbeth will be victorious but each victory will lead him to more losses.