The Supernatural, Magic and the Witches in Macbeth

The Supernatural, Magic and the Witches in Macbeth

The supernatural plays a major role in the plot and structure of Macbeth.

The opening stage direction notes "Enter three Witches". These "weird sisters" (surely in the Old English sense of the fates) prophesy Macbeth's kingship, Lady Macbeth prays to "spirits" and talks of "metaphysical aid", a spectral dagger appears to Macbeth as he goes to do the murder, the ghost of Banquo appears at the banquet and Macbeth returns to the witches to hear further prophecies from "unknown powers". Even the English king has magical powers to heal disease.

But Shakespeare's use of the supernatural is not confined to this play.

Caesar's ghost appears to Brutus; Hamlet's father's ghost speaks to Hamlet; magic rules the hearts and eyes of lovers and fools in A Midsummer Night's Dream; and Prospero's whole "art" is a matter of supernatural control of the laws of normal physics. One might be embarrassed to acknowledge that Shakespeare "believed" in such things as witches. Surely he was too sophisticated to accept such primitive nonsense. For Dr Johnson, writing in 1765, already 160 years after Macbeth was written, had no doubt that "the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting" (Wain, 1968, p.54), and that the moral point of the play was that "in Shakespeare's time, it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and delusive predictions" (Macbeth, 1962, introduction p. XLVI).

If Shakespeare did believe seriously in witches and the supernatural

he was in good company, for James I, before he became king of England, had written a treatise on Daemonologie in 1597. Our knowledge of this has some bearing on our view of the play, or at least its purposes. James claimed his inheritance back to Banquo, who is seen in the second witches scene (IV, i) displaying his descendants, some of whom carry "two-fold balls and treble sceptres" (IV, i, 121) which indicate the union of the Scottish and English monarchies. James also claimed the power to cure "the Evil" (IV, iii, 146) with his touch, and the whole discussion of the qualities of the good and bad king in IV, iii sounds like it is written with a royal audience in mind.

The king and the general population may have taken the supernatural seriously, and this may well have been a feature of the times, but in the end this hardly matters. Shakespeare's plays are human dramas, and it is clear that his supernatural moments are all imaginative devices to explore human motives and responses. Caesar's ghost is in Julius Caesar because it is in Plutarch, but the real interest in Shakespeare's use of it is in the way the over-rational Brutus tries to explain it away in material terms. He asks Lucius if he cried out in his sleep, then asks Varro and Claudius if they cried out or saw anything, refusing to accept that this is really the spirit of the murdered man ranging for revenge. The much less confident (but rather more human) Cassius is all too ready to believe in the omen of the disappearing eagles at Philippi. Similarly Hamlet's father's ghost (who does not really appear in Belforest) tells Hamlet exactly what he wants to hear - "O my prophetic soul, my uncle!" - surely reflecting Hamlet's own hysteria at the start of the play. The lovers' enchantments in A Midsummer Night's Dream accurately suggest the instability of youthful affection, and in The Tempest, Prospero's magic is a device which reveals true and concealed motives, and allows judgment to be made. In II, i, for example, Alonso shows his openness to redemption by responding to the sleep enchantment, while Antonio and Sebastian remain awake - "my spirits are nimble" (II, i, 197) - to declare their disbelief in the basic human sanctions.

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