How does Shakespeare use the Supernatural in 'Macbeth'?

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Emily Shallcross

How does Shakespeare use the Supernatural in ‘Macbeth’?

Throughout ‘Macbeth’, Shakespeare refers to the supernatural to create an atmosphere of fear.  By doing so, the audience’s imagination is preyed upon and this gives greater depth to the play.  The supernatural takes many forms in the play and guides the audience through various different emotions.  With constant references to the supernatural, this enhances the play’s sense of foreboding.

Shakespeare instantly creates a mood of terror and unearthly evil in the first stage direction, ‘Thunder and lightning.  Enter three witches’.  By starting the play with the witches and thunder and lightning, Shakespeare is telling you what the whole play is going to be about.  It is going to be about the struggle between the forces of good and evil.  It clear that the witches are the centre of the forces of evil, by making an appointment with Macbeth to lure him to destruction.  By chanting ‘Fair is fowl, and fowl is fair.  Hover through the fog and filthy air’, this tells the audience that it is going to be difficult to determine between good and evil.  The way things appear may not be all that they seem. Things that look good may turn out to be evil, evil things might turn out to be good.

The witches’ distinctive style of verse and their convincingly evil spells have a powerful effect upon Macbeth.  Their rhyming speech echoes through Macbeth’s mind constantly.  They strike a chord in his mind, especially the prediction of him becoming king.  To add more to the sinister atmosphere in the meeting with Macbeth and Banquo (Act 1 scene 3) the witches miraculously disappear.  The witches start off Macbeth’s obsession for ambition and also Lady Macbeth’s hunger for it too.

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Lady Macbeth is very superstitious.  She calls upon the spirits of darkness to take away her natural womanliness and to fill her instead with bitterness, wickedness and cruelty.

        ‘…unsex me here, And fill me…Of direst cruelty..’ Act 1 scene 5, p63 line 39

This unnerves the audience, as she has changed from being normal to being possessed by the devil.  Not only is Macbeth intimidated by her power over him but also so is the audience.  She wants no natural feelings of guilt or conscience to get in the way of her plans.  Although when the time comes to ...

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