They agree with the popular theories of witchcraft at the times. They have no power of their own, but gain it by selling their souls to the devil. They are only the ‘instruments’ of darkness. Shakespeare’s witches refer even to the apparitions that they raise as their ‘masters’ (IV. I. 63). According to Scotland, it was believed that the devil taught them to steal unbaptised children.
At the time, a Jacobean audience would have also thought it was the ‘fog and filthy air’ into which the witches vanish at the end of the first scene, which James had attempted to explain their invisibility by suggesting that the devil might thicken and poison the air … that the beams of any other man’s eyes cannot pierce through the same, to see them.
But this study of evil is more generalised by the way in which it is linked with the supernatural structure of the play. It had been suggested that the trance-like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth’s ‘raptness’ when the witches first tempt him and he sees Banquo’s ghost, would have indicated to a Jacobean audience they were the victims of demonic possession. They behaved selflessly, as if they were controlled by evil spirits rather than by their own conscious minds. Macbeth’s inability to pray (II. 2. 28-33) is another symptom of this condition, and Lady Macbeth’s ‘damned spot’ might have suggested the devil’s mark that was to be found on a witch.
The Jacobeans were less simple-minded about the supernatural than is often supposed; their psychological theory may have been more believable, but their psychological views were as acute as ours. The sleep walking is at least as true to twentieth-century theories of repression as it is to seventeenth-century beliefs in possession; the ‘spot’ that brands Lady Macbeth is, after all, in her mind, not on her body. For Shakespeare and his audience (Jacobeans) supernatural forces were not only external powers, but forces within the mind. Evil spirits could have no influence over human beings unless they had already admitted evil into their minds, just as in the play it appears that Macbeth has already entertained the murderous thoughts in which the witches encourage him. If he and his wife are possessed by evil, it is because they allow themselves to be possessed; the thought is psychological rather than supernatural.
A sharp contrast between these two parts in the play mis-represents it, for in Macbeth the one continually bonds with the other, what may be understood at one level as psychological may also be seen as supernatural ‘unnatural’ is a word that accepts both. The ‘spirits’ that Lady Macbeth would pour into her husband’s ear (I. 5. z5) are not so different from the ‘spirits that develop on mortal thoughts’ that she summons to herself. There is a continuous thought from the small metaphorical - ‘Pity, like a naked new-born babe’ or ‘heaven’s best angel’ through all the supernatural’s - the ‘air-drawn dagger’, which is certainly an illusion, but to an audience at the time of Shakespeare’s play this as well as Banquo’s ghost were signs that the evil doings Macbeth had committed had appeared back in front of him to haunt his poor distraught mind, which probably is from the witches, who clearly had an independent existence.: But even this distinction is blurred by the doubts of Macbeth and Banquo about the reality of what they have seen ‘ thou canst not say I did it: never shake thy glory locks at me’ , and it is a short step from a ghost that is imaginary because its appearance depends on Macbeth’s state of mind to real witches who can influence him only because his mind shares the evil that they represent. But this metaphor and reality in the play is a characteristic of his dramatic style, and, indeed, of the imagination of the time the play was written.
The witches are the ‘instruments’ of the darkness that Macbeth and his wife took. The instruments of their dark thoughts as of the dark powers of hell. A Jacobean audience would have been much more ready than we are to believe in their objective existence, but for them, as well as for us, the witches would have personified the unnaturalness of the evil in Macbeth’s mind. Its perversion is apparent in their own deformity - they ‘should be women’ but their beards deny it - and in the mutilated fragments of animals and men from which their charms are brewed and its sterility. On which they meet (I. 3. 4~7, 77). Their doctrine reverses the natural order of things: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ is the satanic principle of ‘Evil be thou my good’. It echoes in Macbeth’s first words (L -34 383; he goes on to adopt it in order to gain the throne then finds that he cannot escape from it.
Again there is more evidence that the Jacobeans at the time believed in the ‘Divine Right of Kings’. This meant that, although Macbeth had killed King Duncan to make space for his own reign, he was clearly disrupting the life of gods own representative. This is known as rejudice. Even after the murder of King Duncan, signs of gods own displeasure showed that God was angry and the weather represented this. Black dark thunder struck clouds also represented that something evil was to come, leaving people but with no option but to repent for any sin they had committed (catholics).
In conclusion, the Jacobeans saw events which occurred in the play differently from todays modern view. Life at the time was completely shaded with all the strong beliefs many people had on the topic of the two main subjects, witch craft and the supernatural. The majority believed in fate rather than the natural instinct which is to let life flow and see what was to come.
