The Supernatural Aspects Of Macbeth
The Supernatural Aspects Of Macbeth
What are the main sources of evil in the play? How does Shakespeare get this across to an audience?
The witches are the main evil in the play even though they only appear 4 times in the story, but each time they appear they always create an evil atmosphere. When I say 'the main evil in the play' this is my opinion, I feel they are the main because they are pure evil incarnate and they are what trigger the whole thing of. I feel when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth he meant it to be on two levels, one level being that the witches are real and there to be seen, this was for the less educated. The other level being that the witches are just a figment of his imagination or hallucinations as he does go on to hallucinate later on in the play when he says "Is this a knife I see before me…" he sees a knife covered in blood also Banqouos ghost could also be a hallucination as his guilty conscience gets to him for killing his best friend.
Shakespeare makes a clever choice in putting the witches in to the play at all as without them 'Macbeth' would be about a man who thought he could be king and so went around slaughtering people to get to where he wanted to be. It still would have been a play but it wouldn't have been as good because the spooky, eerie effect wouldn't have been created.
The old hags are supposedly really ugly, as Banquo says in 'act1 scene3' "so withered, and so wild in their attire, that look not like th'inhabintants o'th'earth, and yet are on't? Live you? Or are you aught that man may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her choppy finger laying upon her skinny lip: You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." This suggests that they are old, wrinkly hags with beards, which are not nice things to see. In a way you could call them freaks, and people are afraid of freaks. They've got strange powers and can tell the future as they predict that Macbeth will be king and that a man born of a woman cannot kill him, these are the powers that...