Macbeth 4: the supernatural

This is the fourth in a series of essay on Macbeth for pupils studying the play. The first is on the crucial soliloquy ‘If it were done’, the second is on ‘The real Lady Macbeth’, the third on Malcolm the hero?; the fifth on the ending.

For such an action-packed drama, full of thunder and lightning, blood and guts, murder and massacre, the play Macbeth is peculiarly theological.

The deepest concern Macbeth has is his soul, the horrifying thought of the deep damnation of Duncan’s taking-off, and the tragedy is located precisely in the inevitable and relentless debasing of that soul. As the Doctor puts it in the sleepwalking scene, Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles, and this is nowhere more catastrophically so than within Macbeth’s own spirit. The play Macbeth plants itself firmly in the middle of the clash between good and evil. 

When we settle into our seats to watch this drama for the first time, without knowing the plot, we are confronted with this concept in the most extraordinary way. To the background of thunder and lightning, three rather shabby female creatures (or are they female? they have beards) are muttering a series of obscure rhyming couplets. They are the sort of people that most of us would move quickly past on the street, keeping our eyes firmly fixed ahead while holding our breath. As the first characters we see in the first scene of the story, they have an immediate and powerful influence on us (imagine the lesser impact they would have if, for instance, the play began with Act I scene ii and the Captain’s words, and we only saw the witches for the first time when they met Macbeth on the heath).  The first scene defines the mood of the play.

Here is the challenge for candidates in writing an essay on the witches and the supernatural. We live in a largely post-religious society, and certainly one in which the idea of active evil is distinctly unfashionable. In a production, the danger is that the witches are more likely to provoke giggling than fear, figures like the Young Crone of Putney visited in the second series of Blackadder by Edmund as he searches for the Wise Woman. If you are writing about the supernatural in your examination, the key thing to get right is your understanding about the relationship between the supernatural and the human, specifically and vitally the influence on Macbeth himself. [Aside: In Selina Cartmell’s 2008 production at Dublin’s Empty Space, Olwen Fouéré was chilling as the sole witch. No giggling at her.]

A reading that lays blame on the witches or other supernatural forces is one which diminishes or even eradicates the tragedy. This is similar to the influence of Lady Macbeth, dealt with in the second essay in this series: if she controls her husband, then he is not a proper or even interesting object for our attention.  So I will here argue that the witches are catalysts rather than puppet-mistresses, and that the full focus of the tragedy has to be on Macbeth’s own actions and thoughts. The witches are not of course the only elements of the supernatural, and I will also look at others, such as Banquo’s ghost and the Apparitions.

The witches appear in just three scenes, or rather the ‘weird sisters’ do, since they neither call each other witches, nor are referred to as such by anyone else in the play.  ‘Weird’ or ‘wyrd’ is Old English for ‘fate’. From the first scene they are associated with darkness and confusion, encapsulated by the famous final two lines: Fair is foul, and foul is fair; / Hover through the fog and filthy air, and we should take this as a warning. Nothing about them will be clear, and Macbeth finds this out to his cost later.

An hour or two later, in Act I scene iii, they place themselves on the heath in Macbeth and Banquo’s way on their way home from the battle. Before Macbeth arrives, the First Witch has significant words, in which she talks about the tormenting of the master of the ship the ‘Tiger’. She is going to drain him dry as hay and Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his penthouse lid. / He shall live a man forbid; / Weary seven nights nine times nine / Shall he dwindle, peak and pine. / Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.’  The parallels with what happens to Macbeth later are obvious. He too is a man for whom sleep becomes impossible in his post-murder nightmare, and who by the end of the play dwindles to nothingness. But although this Sister can prompt the conditions for the sailor’s misery, she cannot destroy his ship. 

Macbeth’s first words startle us in their echo of the first scene : So foul and fair a day I have not seen, and as an audience we know already that his fate is deeply bound up with them. Banquo’s words emphasise again just how confusing these figures are, how uncertain their identity is: they look not like inhabitants of the earth, / And yet are on’t, apparently women yet disconcertingly hirsute: You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.

Then comes the most catalysing statement in the play, the one that sets everything off, the one without which we would not have the story we do. It is given to the third witch : All hail Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter. Macbeth says nothing for 20 lines, but inside him, as we soon learn, his life has just taken its definitive turn.  

Tony Nuttall, in his 2007 book Shakespeare the Thinker, calls this

the most economical feat of dramaturgy ever, the place where most is done in least time … It lasts less than a second. Shakespeare makes sure we don’t miss this minute bodily reaction by making Macbeth’s companion say ‘Why do you start, and seem to fear / Things which sound so fair?’ What does the start mean? Some say that it simply signifies surprise. Others more shrewdly say ‘No, it means recognition’. If he had been merely surprised, Macbeth would have said, in Jacobean English, ‘Why on earth do you say that?’  The companion, Banquo, is himself puzzled, as he would never have been by simple amazement, and detects a note of fear. Macbeth’s start means ‘How do they know that I have already thought about this happening?’

Nuttall contrasts this play to Othello, in which Iago drives the hero towards a jealousy he would not otherwise develop:

this time, the crucial element, ambition, clearly pre-exists the moment of external activation. The effect of the prophecy of the Weird Sisters is simply to translate thought into action. They are a trigger. A gun is fired that might have remained safely in the cupboard.

More from Nuttall:

It all started with the babble of the Weird Sisters. One could imagine a version of the play in which there were no witches but Lady Macbeth as ‘prompter’ worked on her husband until she made him murder Duncan. But Shakespeare makes the movement start from a humanly unrelated external stimulus. The Weird Sisters are not political experts pursuing a certain design. They are primitive organisms, grinning and chattering, witlessly rhyming out their habitual predictions.

He goes on to make the point that

the Weird Sisters trigger a pre-existing tendency in Macbeth’s mind. They are telling a man to do something he had already considered doing, something he partly wants to do in any case.

After this initial prompting, Macbeth gradually becomes 

a bloody, primitive organism. It is as if Shakespeare has become interested in how small a thing, how simple a thing, could impinge from outside and radically transform the sequence of events. When biologists speak of giving a stimulus to a developing organism, outsiders often assume some complex process must be involved and do not realise that a prod with a small metal object will do the trick. What the Weird Sisters do to Macbeth is oddly like what a practised hypnotist can do to a subject … The trigger can be trivial in itself. But its power is astonishing.

And so back to Act I scene iii. Macbeth calls the witches’ words supernatural soliciting in a soliloquy which shows us clearly that he is hyper-aware of the dangers at this moment. Despite this awareness, he still cannot control his excited fantasising: If ill, why hath it given me earnest of success?. It is left to Banquo to make the definitive statement on dabbling with the supernatural: Oftentimes, to win us to our harm / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequences.  These may well be the most perceptive words by any character in the whole play.

Lady Macbeth, the subject of the second essay in this series, certainly does not have these scruples or doubts. In the famous Act I scene v, she actively calls on the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, to unsex me here, / And fill from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty, encouraging the murdering ministers and sightless substances. I will not analyse the crucial Act I scene vii here, since that was the subject of the first essay, but you need to look carefully at it. Macbeth’s horror in that soliloquy is theological: he knows that his soul will be destroyed by the deep damnation of Duncan’s taking-off.

By Act II scene i the full terror of his impending act coheres in the opening dagger soliloquy ; he knows he is about to meddle with forces beyond the natural, and that o’er the one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep; witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate’s offering. There are no witches now to push him on. No catalysts are needed.

This sense of the unnatural taking a hold is developed further in Act II scene iii, in the surprising and rather unlikely figure of an irritated chatterbox looking after the gate to the castle. The Porter’s words are are soaked in theological significance, as he jokes about being porter of hell-gate, and saying that this place is too cold for hell. Have a look at his words about drink, how it provokes and unprovokes lechery, and how it equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him. This is just what the witches do too, provoking Macbeth’s own ambition, stirring him up, equivocating with lies, and leaving him to a life of disastrous disappointment as he acts on the initial excitement. 

In Act IV scene i he actively seeks out the witches, ready to hear only what he wants to hear. Finally, when told by Macduff of his own Caesarean section, he exclaims in Act V scene viii

Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, For it hath cowed my better part of man.  / And be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense; / That keep the word of promise to our ear, / And break it to our hope.

They did not truly promise anything of the sort to Macbeth, because it was not in their power to give it to him.

The supernatural appears in horrifying form (although only to Macbeth) at the celebratory banquet, in Act III scene iv, when Macbeth is confronted by the implications of his attempt to subvert the natural order: The time has been, that when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end. But now they rise again and as a result he determines to plunge recklessly on and to seek out the witches. After all, what more does he have to lose, now that he has lost his own soul?

I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

I am going to leave aside Act III scene v, the Hecate appearance, a scene most people accept was not written by Shakespeare, and move on to the most famous appearance of the Weird Sisters, Act IV scene i. It is known not so much for the appearance of the apparitions and the line of kings as for the opening 38 lines in which the witches gleefully fire all sorts of revolting things into their cauldron, and for the refrain Double double toil and trouble. Doubleness and trouble, and the way they feed off each other, are this play’s conceptual engine. 

As Fintan O’Toole points out in Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life:

If Macbeth is a man in transition, then the things that speed him to his doom are the transitional things of rituals: the witches are half-human, half-otherworldly, their brew full of those slippery, reptilian creatures that have altered significance because they are neither one thing nor the other, neither fish nor flesh, but slip between the categories – toads, snakes, newts, frogs, bats, adders, blindworms, lizards.

But by this stage, Macbeth is too far gone to be bothered by the slipperiness of the apparitions’ statements. He is like the second murderer, reckless what I do to spite the world. So he calls the prophecies sweet bodements and plunges further, heedlessly, into the abyss.

In the next essay I will look at the end of the play, but in any case by this stage there is not much more to say about the witches, or the influence of the supernatural. By now Macbeth is a runaway train.  In the words of the critic G.K.Hunter, 

Evil does not become alive or actual until it is endorsed by the will, say the moral theologians, and so it is in ‘Macbeth’.  The play begins with the Witches, and the Witches must be supposed to be evil; but the mode of evil they can create is potential only, not actual, till the human agent takes it inside his mind and makes it his own by a motion of the will.’ 

Macbeth has taken that potential and fulfilled it. He has no-one to blame but himself.