What do we learn from Macbeth about the contemporary attitudes to witchcraft and the supernatural and what are their functions in the play?

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What do we learn from Macbeth about the contemporary attitudes to witchcraft and the supernatural and what are their functions in the play?

During the Elizabethan era belief in the supernatural was not only commonplace but unconditional, although a fundamentally Christian society; people of the period were convinced that the actions of the paranormal had significant effects on their own existence. Macbeth itself is entangled with numerous mysterious endeavours, for example, the forebodings of the witches, Macbeth’s hallucinations and the mystical healing powers of King Edward the Confessor all add to the play’s abnormal yet, for the time, acceptable atmosphere.

There are four powerful, unrelenting, incessant forces of witchcraft and the supernatural at work in the play. These paranormal influences have three main functions focused on achieving the writer’s intent. They explain the transformation of Macbeth’s character, showing his vulnerability without evoking pity, invent an atmosphere of exhilaration and agitation, similar to the car chase kitsch of modern cinema yet they also promote the deeper message Shakespeare wishes to convey, that ‘if you dance with the devil’ you will have to ‘pay the piper’.

Elizabethan society believed that to have one didactic model of how society should be organised was perfectly logical and, for the vast majority, this power structure was unquestionable. Along with Christianity, witchcraft and the supernatural provided the necessary social control to maintain the unequal status quo. This play demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt the cataclysmic consequences of tampering with the monarch’s god given right to rule in this way.

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Shakespeare uses verisimilitude through Macbeth’s hallucinations and the supernatural manisfestations, thus helping an Elizabethan audience to make the extremely evil and unpleasant acts seem plausible. Macbeth’s killing of Duncan is condemned as a sin against god. The taunting images of the dagger and Banquo’s ghost, to the Elizabethan audiences, would be seen as divine justice for Macbeth’s earlier unholy acts. The king could not have been killed with out the supernatural manifestations that occurred; it simply would not have made sense at this time. The reports of Duncan’s horses committing cannibalism, the falcon being killed by the owl and ...

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