How is the supernatural presented in Macbeth?

How does the supernatural shape Macbeth, act by act?

The play opens with three witches meeting in thunder and lightning, planning to find Macbeth. Their chant "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" sets up a world where things are not what they seem. In Act 1 Scene 3 they show their spite before he arrives. One witch plans to torment a sailor, sending storms to toss his ship, because his wife would not share her chestnuts. Yet she admits "his bark cannot be lost": his ship (his "bark") cannot be sunk. Their power has limits.

The witches then greet Macbeth with three titles, the last being king, and promise Banquo that his descendants will rule. In Act 1 Scene 5 Lady Macbeth invites the supernatural in herself, calling on "spirits" to fill her with cruelty. In Act 2 Scene 1 Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air. After Duncan's murder, nature seems to rebel: the next day stays dark, and Duncan's horses are said to eat each other.

At the banquet in Act 3 Scene 4, Banquo's ghost sits in Macbeth's seat, visible only to him. In Act 4 Scene 1 Macbeth goes looking for the witches. They conjure three apparitions, or magical visions: an armed head that warns him about Macduff, a bloody child that says "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth", and a crowned child that says he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Then they show him a line of eight kings descended from Banquo.

Act 5 shows the prophecies coming true in ways Macbeth never expected. The soldiers of Malcolm, Duncan's son, cut branches from Birnam Wood to hide their numbers, so the wood seems to move. Macduff was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped", cut from her body rather than born in the usual way, so he was never "of woman born" in the sense Macbeth assumed. Too late, Macbeth realises the witches spoke in a "double sense", with words that mean two things at once.

What are the key moments for the supernatural?

Act 1 Scene 1: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air." The first line is a paradox, a statement that seems to contradict itself, and it turns good and bad upside down. The alliteration, repeated sounds at the start of nearby words, in "fog and filthy" makes the witches' world feel murky. They speak in short rhyming lines with a strong beat, unlike the longer unrhymed lines most characters use, so they sound different from everyone else on stage.

Act 1 Scene 3: "This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good." "Soliciting" means urging or tempting. Macbeth's balanced phrases pull in opposite directions, which shows how torn he is. The speech also shows the witches' method. They never order him to do anything; they only put the idea in front of him.

Act 2 Scene 1: "A dagger of the mind, a false creation". In a soliloquy, a speech alone on stage, Macbeth sees a dagger pointing him towards Duncan's room, then wonders whether it comes from his "heat-oppressed brain". Shakespeare never says whether the dagger is sent by evil powers or made by Macbeth's own imagination. Either way, it leads him where he was already going.

Act 4 Scene 1: "By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes." A witch feels Macbeth approaching as a tingling in her thumbs. This time he has come looking for them, and the line shows how far he has fallen: even the witches now describe him as "wicked".

What context matters when writing about the supernatural in Macbeth?

Witchcraft was taken seriously when Macbeth was first performed. King James I had written Daemonologie (1597), a book arguing that witches were real and served the devil. In the North Berwick witch trials of 1590 to 1591, accused witches in Scotland were said to have raised storms against the ship carrying James home from Denmark, and James took part in questioning them. In 1604, soon after he became King of England, a harsher Witchcraft Act was passed. A witch plotting storms against a sailor's ship would have echoed stories many in the audience knew.

Equivocation is another key idea. To equivocate is to say something that sounds true but misleads. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the trial in 1606 of Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest linked to the plotters, made equivocation notorious, and the Porter's joke in Act 2 Scene 3 about an "equivocator" who "committed treason" is often linked to it. The witches equivocate all through the play, and in Act 5 Scene 5 Macbeth finally names "th' equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth".

The divine right of kings, the belief that God chooses the monarch, explains why nature goes wrong after Duncan dies. If a king is God's choice, killing him attacks the order of creation itself, so darkness and unnatural animal behaviour follow. The strange events are the universe reacting to a crime.

What might an exam question on the supernatural ask?

On AQA, the Shakespeare question in Section A of Paper 1 prints an extract and asks you to write about it and about the play as a whole. It is worth 30 marks, plus 4 for spelling, punctuation and grammar (AO4). A supernatural question rewards students who can move confidently between the witches and Macbeth's visions, and who take a view on how much blame the witches deserve. Most boards set an extract-based Shakespeare question, so check your own board's wording.

Two focuses to practise:

• Starting with the apparitions in Act 4 Scene 1, explore how Shakespeare presents the power of the witches.
• Starting with the dagger soliloquy in Act 2 Scene 1, explore how Shakespeare blurs the line between the supernatural and Macbeth's imagination.

What does a strong paragraph on the supernatural look like?

Here is an original model paragraph for the first focus:

In Act 4 Scene 1, Shakespeare presents the witches as powerful, but only because Macbeth wants to believe them. The second apparition's promise that "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" is true in a narrow sense, yet it is built to mislead, and Macbeth hears only the comfort. This is equivocation, a word Shakespeare's audience linked with the treason trials after the Gunpowder Plot. Even so, the witches never order Macbeth to act. He decides for himself to "make assurance double sure" by killing Macduff. Their prophecies work on a man already willing to be deceived, so Shakespeare places the blame on Macbeth as much as on the forces tempting him.

The context sentence is short and earns its place, because it explains why the audience would distrust the apparition's words.

Key quotations on the supernatural to learn

These six cover the witches and the visions, from the first scene to the last act.

• "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" (Act 1 Scene 1): a paradox that warns us appearances will deceive.
• "The instruments of darkness tell us truths" (Act 1 Scene 3, Banquo): the witches as the devil's tools, telling small truths to win trust.
• "This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good" (Act 1 Scene 3): Macbeth torn between hope and horror.
• "A dagger of the mind, a false creation" (Act 2 Scene 1): the vision may come from his own guilty imagination.
• "By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes" (Act 4 Scene 1): even the witches now call Macbeth wicked.
• "th' equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth" (Act 5 Scene 5): Macbeth finally sees the trap.