Portrayal of the Supernatural in Macbeth

A modern audience has a lot in common with a Jacobean audience. We all want, or wanted I suppose, to watch an interesting story that can hold our interest for a few hours and maybe inspire a few laughs or a little philosophical thought if we are up for it. For a play to do this, it is important that it feels relevant to us as a viewer

You could say that belief in the supernatural has gone out of vogue. Although there are many who still hold that there might be “more things in Heaven and Earth” than we can readily observe in our universe—whether those things be literal ghosts or a simple refusal to say the name of a play while in a theatre—modern popular belief is following a clear trend towards science above magic. It is true this trend can be traced back to the Renaissance and further, but while the idea that pixies might be responsible for spoiling the milk began to fade, the notion of witches and witchcraft remained firmly, darkly rooted in the minds of all classes; even King James I was known for his fear of witches, a subject on which he wrote a book, and during his reign witch hunts grew rampant across the British Isles, throughout Europe, and over the sea to America. Those contemporary thoughts had a clear influence on Shakespeare’s portrayal of the witches in Macbeth. In earlier versions of the Macbeth story, they were known as “nymphs” or “fairies”, two ideas with very different connotations than the hag-like creatures in the play. Fairies may have been good enough for a comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, causing trouble and dancing about, but to pull a story to the depths that Macbeth goes, Shakespeare needed something dark, gritty, and current for peak dramatic impact. While, to most, the idea of witchcraft today...

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...The limp arm and the noose alike become representations of real events and emotions that serve to pull you into the story. On the opposite end of the spectrum are productions that leave any trace of realism behind. One of my personal favorite witch portrayals comes from a 2008 show directed by Teller, which uses stage magic techniques to create a world blood, violence, and magic that closer resembles a dream (or a nightmare) than anything found in reality. Inhuman, primal creatures, they deliver their opening lines over the pounding of a drum while Macbeth slaughters him enemies before you. One can be seen kissing a dying man in a way that resembles drawing the life out of him. These are not quietly unsettling crones making you squirm in your seat, they are powerful, demonic, nightmare visions that force you out of reality and into that fantastical and bloody world.