How does Shakespeare Exploit the Supernatural for dramatic Effect in Macbeth

The play begins in a 'desolate place' as the stage directions tell us. Shakespeare uses the pathetic fallacy of 'Thunder and Lightening.' This creates an atmosphere of dark and evil and anticipates something frightening. There are three witches, casting a spell, as Shakespeare shows through the use of rhyming couplets at the end of lines. In addition to this, he uses the syntatic parralelism to suggest that everything is not what it will seem. 'Fair is foul and foul is fair.' This warns the audience so that they can make predictions of what will happen in 'Macbeth.'

A Jacobean audience and Shakespeare?s contemporaries believed in the supernatural very strongly, including the king of that time, King James I of England. They would be intrigued by the witches? predictions in ?Macbeth,? as well as the witches? costumes on stage being scary to them. Nowadays, witches aren?t thought of as an avatar of the devil, so it would take a different kind of witch to interest a modern audience, one that challenges stereotypes.

In the next scene Macbeth is shown to be fighting agaisnt the Norweigen army single handedly, showing imense bravery. Therefore, the juxtaposition between Scene I and Scene II, in Act I, is evil and good, the complete opposites. The opening scene of the play is a future prediction about the battle between good and evil and ?Fair is foul and foul is fair.?

In Act I Scene III Macbeth meets the witches upon a heath. The witches predict that Macbeth is going to become Thane of Cawdor and they ?hail Macbeth, that shalt be King Hereafter!? Later on in the scene Ross and Angus enter to tell Macbeth he is to become Thane of Cawdor. This instance of dramatic irony encourages Macbeth to...

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...is leads up to Lady Macbeth falling to her death. The hallucinations of blood on her hands driving her to the point of insanity so much so that she had to commit suicide.

The supernatural element of the play still has an effect on a modern audience. For example, ?Fair is foul and foul is fair.? It gets the audience guessing. When the audience meets a character that appears to be ?good? on the outside, it keeps them wondering what they are really like. After all, ?Macbeth? is a play designed to be performed for and to involve the audience. Although the supernatural nowadays take on a more friendly prevalence-than in the 1600?s- such as in TV programmes like Buffy or Sabrina, and aren?t considered as gruesome, evil characters, the supernatural in ?Macbeth? still have great dramatic impact on a 21st century audience.