Understanding Shakespeare: Macbeth by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

THE SUPERNATURAL ASPECT

1. James I believed in witchcraft. He believed that witches had blocked his effort to marry Anne of Denmark
2. James I held trials against women accused of witchcraft. James I actually participated in the interrogations and tortures of these women.
3. One of these tortured women confessed to being one of 200 women who had gone to sea, each in a sieve, in order to wreck a ship that was coming to England from Denmark
4. Reginald Scot in 1584 wrote The Discoverie of Witchcraft and said that the belief in witchcraft was a foolish superstition.
5. King James I in 1597 wrote Daemonologie and asserted a belief in witchcraft.
6. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the words witch, fairy, and hag were synonyms. All of these words could mean female demon in Shakespeare’s day.
7. Shakespeare’s witches fit the common conception or belief of his day. People thought witches were creatures that had sold their souls to the devil
8. Macbeth – as James I would see it – is guilty indirectly of associating with Satan because he associates with the witches.

9. In the play, the witches never tell Macbeth what to do, but they never predict Macbeth’s evil either.
10. Other supernatural elements in the play include the following:

1. omens (II, 4),
2. King’s power to cure scrofula (IV, 3)
3. Banquo’s ghost