Shakespeare, the Supernatural, & Sexuality in Macbeth

Written by Aphra Jikiemi-Pearson

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Across Macbeth, it is clear that the supernatural - seen predominantly through the three ‘weird sisters’, who as frightening female figures represent a dangerous challenge to Jacobean patriarchal norms - play a hugely influential role in the tragic events of the play. However, whilst it can be argued that the supernatural provokes and catalyses the violent tragedy of the CMV play, Shakespeare ultimately warns us against human beings’ desire for power, susceptibility to corrupting influences, and violent ambition.

At the beginning of the play, the supernatural is immediately introduced through the witches as agents of chaos. They enter with ‘thunder and lightning’ which foreshadows the disruption they will bring to the rest of the text. Here Shakespeare shows how the supernatural represents disruption and corruption as they ‘hover through fog’ and air made ‘filthy’ by their presence. Shakespeare’s paradoxical antimetabole in ‘fair and foul and foul is fair’ perhaps suggests how these witches also represent an inversion of morality and lawfulness.The witches’ language is written in rhymed trochaic tetrameter, and here Shakespeare’s departure from the usual blank verse of other characters marks out the witches as unnatural, otherworldly, and different. They are described as ‘wyrd sisters’ which has immediate implications of fate and otherworldly control, and in turn suggests the lack of agency that the characters have. Shakespeare is showing here how the supernatural is an undertone to the entire play, as the witches imply the characters actions are predestined. This removes any semblance of control from these characters and forces us to question how much autonomy and agency characters like Macbeth do possess in the play.

Similarly, Shakespeare presents how the witches not only subvert morality, but also the expected gender norms of the jacobean period. The witches ‘should be women’, Banquo says, and here Shakespeare depicts these ‘instruments of darkness’ as figures who, by representing a potent, influential form of femininity, act as a dangerous threat to established Jacobean gender roles. Like Lady Macbeth, these women hold a huge sway over the play’s susceptible men. However, Banquo then says that their ‘beards forbid [him]’ from interpreting them as strictly women, and here Shakespeare uses the witches as a force which destabilises and blurs the very idea of gender, and of masculinity and femininity. The witches powerfully transcend those strict distinctions. 

The influential power of the witches is also shown through the effect that their poisonous prophecies have on Macbeth, in provoking his ‘deep desires’ for the crown. After hearing the initial prophecies, characters twice comment that Macbeth seems ‘rapt’, a word suggesting not only that he is captivated by what he has heard, but which also carries connotations of being bound or ‘wrapped up’ which suggests that Macbeth is somehow entangled and tied by the prophecies. The speed with which Macbeth seems to absorb the words of the witches is also seen in his calling the news that he is to be made Thane of Cawdor a ‘happy prologue’ to the ‘swelling act of the imperial theme’. Using theatrical imagery comparing future events to the unfolding of a play, Shakespeare seems to suggest that Macbeth views his future coronation as inevitable and determined - it’s already in the script, Macbeth says. Here then  Shakespeare again seems to suggest that the presence of the supernatural emboldens Macbeth, driving his transgressive ambition.

However Shakespeare also presents the supernatural as only a vehicle for ambition, something to help drive it rather than being the controlling force. Lady Macbeth induces the supernatural to help her carry out her ambitions, summoning them ‘come thy spirits’ and asking for them to ‘unsex her’ and ‘take [her] milk for gall’. Here, Shakespeare is showing how in order for Lady Macbeth to succeed, she feels she needs to rid herself of her femininity and maternal qualities. By calling upon the supernatural in this scene, it only reinforces the idea that they are a malevolent force who subvert common ideas and ideologies. Lady Macbeth is also the driving force behind Macbeth's sacrilegious actions, alongside his own ‘black and deep desires’. The witches' prophecy spurs them on, but the main factor in their action is their own dangerous and transgressive ambition. Shakespeare shows the danger of the prophecy, but it was lady macbeth who ‘pour[ed] [her] spirits in [macbeths] ear’ and so he is reinforcing that it isn't the prophecy that is the most dangerous, but actually human will and volition which can cause the most damage and disruption.

To further this, Shakespeare may suggest that the witches’ power has been only illusory, and deceptive. In Act V, when Macbeth realises that Birnam Wood has indeed come to Dunsinane, and that Macduff was ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripped’, he questions whether ‘these juggling fiends’ are to be ‘no more believed’. Like a performer’s tricks, the witches’ words mean nothing without the belief of an audience, and across the play the witches have only stirred Macbeth’s own ‘black and deep desires’. 

In conclusion, Shakespeare builds a complex ambiguity around the power of the witches and the supernatural. Whilst it could be argued that they are the shadowy, irresistible, driving force behind Macbeth’s sacrilegious disruption to the Great Chain of Being and the social order, Shakespeare may ultimately be showing us that what we must really fear are our own lurking ambitions and desires.