(Act one Scene three, line 106)
The witches told Macbeth the prophecies where Macbeth would succeed and be great, but they didn’t tell him the price he would have to pay.
The audience are later introduced to Hecate, the Goddess of Witchcraft. She is angry with the witches for talking to Macbeth without her. The witches then prepare a spell:
Your vessels and your spells provide
Your charms, and every thing beside.
(Act three Scene five, lines 18-19)
Macbeth again meets the witches after they have prepared the spells. The witches ask Macbeth if he wants them or his masters to tell his future. Macbeth tells the witches to show him the ones from their master. The first apparition is of an armed head, and tells him to beware of Macduff. The first witch warns Macbeth:
He knows thy thought.
Hear his speech, but say thou nought.
(Act four Scene one, lines 69-70)
The second apparition was an image of a bloody child and it said that no man born of woman shall harm him. The third apparition was a child crowned with a tree in his hand and told him that he will not be beaten until Birnham Wood moves to Dunsiname. This fills Macbeth with confidence because he thinks these things will never happen. Macbeth now trusts the witches for what they have told him so far, all came true. But so far everything that has happened to him has been good and he feels that evil is on his side. This is where it turns for Macbeth as people have started to realise that Macbeth is the murderer and in the end he has to fight alone. The evil has misled him and these apparitions made Macbeth so confident, that he has blocked out the possibility that something could go wrong or be interpreted differently. Macbeth then asks the witches if Banquo’s descendants will be kings, then he was shown eight kings with Banquo following.
Through the play the audience watch as Macbeth is led by the supernatural. At first he meets the witches and when all their prophecies about him come true, he becomes more interested in supernatural happenings. As Macbeth becomes more interested he starts to not notice the natural world around him and before he can stop himself, he falls into the temptation of evil. Macbeth goes on to believe more of the witches prophecies and as he does this, he sees more of the supernatural, for example Banquo’s ghost. The witches are very important in the play and without them, Macbeth may not have killed Duncan and become king. At the end of Macbeth he has grown a cold heart, relying on the supernatural to bring him what he wants.
Macbeth is not the only one changed by the supernatural. Lady Macbeth wants to have her womanliness taken from her so she can murder, she calls on the evil spirits to fill her:
make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’effect and it.
(Act one Scene five, lines 43-47)
After the murders Lady Macbeth walks and talks in her sleep. Her conscience haunts her as she goes through the events of the night Duncan was murdered:
Out damned spot, out I say!
(Act five Scene one, line 35)
The doctor, watching her recognises that her mind is troubled with unnatural guilt and she needs a priest rather than a doctor. She eventually is driven to commit suicide.
As Lady Macbeth is dragged into the supernatural world with Macbeth she is affected so much that her old character which was able to hide from the world her thoughts, has now been so overpowered that she has gone mad.
Other people who had not even met the witches noticed out of the ordinary things happening, since the night of Duncan’s murder. Macbeth kills Duncan at night, and before the murder is announced people talk of how strange the night has been:
The obscure bird
Clamoured the livelong night.
(Act two Scene three, lines 57-58)
All of these out of the ordinary happenings could be supernatural and powered by the witches. This shows that it was not all just in the mind of Macbeth, other people were noticing these unnatural things happening too. When an old man meets Ross and they are outside the castle, they discuss the unnatural events of the nights before. For example Duncan’s horses eating each other and:
A falcon towering in her pride of place
Was by a mousing owl hawked at, and killed.
(Act two Scene four, lines 12-13)
Evil is like a disease, while Scotland is under Macbeth’s rule it is spread and strange things happen:
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health
(Act five Scene three, lines 51-52)
It’s almost as if there is a curse over Scotland:
…: by th’ clock, ‘tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
(Act two Scene four, lines 6-7)
The supernatural in Macbeth affects everyone and without it Macbeth may not have committed any of the deeds he did. I think Shakespeare wrote the play with supernatural happenings to make it magical and imaginative. The supernatural links each event up as it is the supernatural that first gives Macbeth the evil thoughts of murder and then his final decision is made by supernatural happenings, for example the witches telling Macbeth he will one day be king and then the dagger before Macbeth to kill Duncan.
