In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the natural world is disrupted by the unnatural actions of Macbeth. Macbeth is a great warrior, and seems to have a promising future before him; however the influence of the three witches provoke and bring out the evil in his own nature, and he ends up committing a horrible and unnatural act; the murder of his own king. King Duncan’s death is the catalyst for other abnormal occurrences in the play, including the killing of children, the visitation of ghosts and other apparitions, and a forest that seems to march upon Macbeth’s castle. By disrupting the natural order of events by abusing hospitality, disregarding lineage, and seizing the kingdom of Scotland for himself, Macbeth brings Nature itself down upon him. The contrast between what is natural and unnatural in the play is sometimes ambiguous, however, or rather unnaturalness as a sign of evil is not always the case. Macduff, being “not born of woman”, had an unnatural birth, yet he is the victor at the conclusion of the play, and is generally seen as a more moral character than Macbeth. What is unnatural as well is called into question, for the unnatural in the play can also be seen as the natural in flux, adapting, and shifting its very definition. The woods that appear to move are an anomalous unnatural horror to Macbeth, but are in fact a positive sign to the audience that his tyranny is nearing its end, and that his evil will be eventually overthrown. The fact that it is not actually a forest moving, but instead a military tactic used by Macduff, gives a certain liminality to what is of nature’s will and what is not. Shakespeare uses certain images, sounds, and impressions to convey emotion to the audience, however unconscious we might be of it. Thus, he is manipulating our own human natures in our reaction to what is occurring in the play. Shakespeare in Macbeth illustrates the clash between the natural and the unnatural through action and reaction; the actions of one provoking an equal reaction from the other, and each influencing the other in often uncertain and equivocal ways.
Macbeth’s natural inclination is not to kill Duncan, and his first reaction upon hearing the witches’s prophecy is strongly ambivalent. If their supernatural soliciting of him is “ill/Why hath it given me earnest of success…if good why do I yield to that suggestion/Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair/And make my seated heart knock at my ribs/Against the use of nature?” (Shakespeare 1.4. 130- 37). Macbeth’s own heart is unnaturally beating as he considers what his future may hold. Even when the plan to kill Duncan is already formed and about to be carried out, Macbeth at the last minute tries to back out of it. “We will proceed no further in this business” (1, vii, 31) he says, before being remonstrated to by Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is the agent of chaos in this situation; she is perfectly willing to overturn the natural order, as given by her example of the hypothetical murder of her child. Macbeth is eventually convinced to carry out the murder, and immediately nature rebels against his act, as seen by the shrieking of an owl and the cry of a cricket.
The natural landscape and the people of Scotland are affected by Macbeth’s deed and what results from it. The evil pervades like a sickness throughout the land, as ill events beget more ill. Macduff says that “Each new morn/Widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows/Strike heaven on the face” (IV, iii, 3–5). In these statements there is a clear gap in the natural order created either directly from Macbeth’s actions, or from the ripple effect his affront against nature creates. Macbeth, with the murder of Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s family, has certainly directly created widows and orphans, but what Macduff says implies that the whole land is stricken by evil, and that now the evil is perpetuating itself, even without Macbeth’s help. Soon after, when Macduff asks for news of Scotland directly from Ross, Ross echoes Macduff’s utterances: “Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself!…Where sighs and groans, and shrieks that rent the air are made not marked” (IV, iii, 164–69). The country is filled with unhappiness under the rule of Macbeth. Which exactly are the bad policies that King Macbeth puts into place are not clear, but the very fact that a murderer has taken the throne is enough to spread horror throughout Scotland. Often in Shakespeare, the state of the surroundings reflects the interiority of the characters; for instance the witches meet “upon the heath”. A heath is an area of often course and infertile ground, where only withered shrubs can grow; also characteristically damp and wet from the climate. The witches meeting upon acidic soils matches their sour purpose for Macbeth. Similarly Macbeth’s immoral takeover of Scotland affects the land much as a drought or famine would.
That it is by unnatural means that Macbeth first comes to truly consider evil is clear enough; the witches or the “Weird sisters”, weird meaning “Fateful” in this context, serve as the bearers of prophecy to Macbeth. Even before he first meets them he unwittingly echoes their earlier statement that “fair is foul and foul is fair” (1, i 10) when he says “so foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1, iii, 38), showing that his train of thought is already parallel to their words, and that it will not be difficult to influence him. As David Kranz suggests: “What is repeated in Macbeth’s iteration is obviously morphemic and semantic, a matter of individual words and their juxtaposed contrary meanings. But the repeated words “foul and fair” are part of a line that has distinct rhetorical and rhythmic properties as well.” (Kranz 2). The structure and syntax of many of the phrases in the play reflects, contrasts, and compares the unnatural characters with the human ones, and this is especially important in regard to Macbeth and the witches. Thus Shakespeare uses language and “verbal sameness” to show the similarities between Macbeth and the supernatural powers at work.
Banquo’s ghost is another unnatural occurrence, however it is seen only by Macbeth himself. This suggests the possibility that it is in fact simply a hallucination brought on by Macbeth’s guilt, for the witches were seen by both Macbeth and Banquo, which goes a ways in proving their material existence. Contextualizing the ghost within the play, it does seem more likely that the ghost is “real” as there are already other provable supernatural elements at work within the play. The apparitions that Macbeth sees on his second visit to the witches are more disturbing examples of the magical powers present in the play. The irony is that though these ghosts foretell his doom, Macbeth is heartened and given confidence by what they say. Despite the influence of unnatural forces on him, he is unable to entertain the thought of unnaturalness leading to his own downfall. The final apparitions being the succession of kings does more to disturb him, yet after his final meeting with the witches he still believes he is invincible up until his death.
This leads us to the ambiguous and malleable nature of the supernatural in the play. The witches in Shakespeare’s time would have been considered evil, and as such their powers over the weather, matter, and character’s actions are clearly of wicked intent. However, the ghost of Banquo is less clearly motivated by evil, and appears as a morally neutral presence, almost as if the spirit of Banquo had just unwittingly left its corpse and continued on to the banquet. The effect on Macbeth is notable; all his feelings of remorse and guilt come to the surface, and to the people at the banquet it is clear that their king is guilty of something horrible. Shakespeare using the unnatural as a way of unravelling the mind of Macbeth is prevalent especially during the later half of the play. This could be looked on as the dichotomy of the “good unnatural” versus the “bad unnatural”. If the bad unnatural elements are the witches and Macbeth’s disruption of societal norms, the good unnatural would be the later scenes of the walking forest and Macduff’s reveal that he was a cesarean, thus not “naturally” born. Both of these types of abnormalities act as conveyors of doom to Macbeth. Macbeth’s accession to the throne was influenced by the supernatural and his overthrow is likewise the result of events that are out of the common realm of sense; even if there is a logical explanation for the trees moving, to Macbeth’s subjective sense they are just as uncanny as the ghost of Banquo.
Something Shakespeare does that Thomas De Quincey commented on was manipulate the emotions of the audience subconsciously through unsettling noises. In his famous essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” De Quincey notes the unexplainable feeling of dread he encountered at the knocking at the gate scene which follows Duncan’s murder. The effect, says De Quincey, “was that it reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity” (De Quincey). How Shakespeare achieved that effect is something that De Quincey could not answer for many years until its relevance finally dawned on him. In his essay, De Quincey points out several particulars in regards to the scene at the gate. Firstly, it makes the audience associate with Macbeth. One of the key points De Quincey makes is that though Macbeth is a villain, he is also the protagonist of the play and thus “our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension…by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them- not a sympathy of pity or approbation)”. Murder is one of the most alienating subjects for an audience, yet we do feel a kind of sympathy with (not for) Macbeth. Secondly the relevance of the De Quincey essay in regards to the subject of nature is seen in how he describes the before and the after of the murder as deeply contrasted. We are, he says “to be made to feel that the human nature… was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place”. It is the change in Macbeth’s nature, but it is also reflected in the change of the world into a sort of nightmare realm during the key moments of the murder. It is at the liminal moments during the murder but before the discovery of it that life seems to slow, cease, stand in a dream, and then, as suddenly, restart with the knocking at the gate. After the knocking “the re-establishment of the goings- on of in the world… first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them”. The change of nature (both the world’s and Macbeth’s) during the murder, and the subliminal effect upon us, the audience, is the core of De Quincey’s argument.
J. Lyndon Shanley, some hundred a fifty years after De Quincey, mentions that “Many who are deeply moved by the action of the play cannot satisfactorily explain their feelings. The doctrine of Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner leads them to think (most of the time) that there is not guilt, that there should be no punishment” (Shanley 2). This reflects back on how Shakespeare affects us by confusing our understanding a character with excusing them. We can comprehend the reasons for Macbeth doing the things he did; that does not absolve him of the blame of them, but our natures makes us want to nevertheless.
To conclude our study of the natural and the supernatural in Macbeth, it is relevant to look at the final scene of the play, where Macbeth and Macduff fight and Macbeth’s doom is revealed to him. The old word fey comes to mind in this scene. The Scottish meaning of fey is “fated to die”. The word also implies that the subject has self-knowledge that they are near death, and the other possible meanings of the word are “otherworldly”, “under a spell”, “marked by death”, or “supernatural”. This perfectly fits Macbeth, as both natural and unnatural fate have marked him for death. Nature is asserting itself back to the order that he threw into disorder. What the unnatural’s motives are remain nebulous and impossible to ascertain, but after ordaining Macbeth’s rise, they are now causing his fall. Macbeth says “I bear a charmed life”, (Shakespeare V, viii, 13) charmed here probably meaning “magical” or protected by fate, as Macbeth believes that he is protected or at least insulated from his doom. Macduff replies “Despair thy charm” and reveals that he did not have a natural birth. Now Macbeth knows that his fate is sealed, he is fey, and he finally understands that the witches were paltering with him “in a double sense” (V, viii, 20). Macbeth has already condemned life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing” (V, v, 27–8) but up until his confrontation with Macduff he still had a sort of faith in the significance of prophecy. Now even that deserts him, yet he still insists on fighting to the death and “damned that be him that first cries “Hold, enough” ” (V, viii, 34) are his last lines in the play, giving a semi-heroic conclusion to this mostly immoral and disillusioned character. The fey connotations explained beforehand suggest that Macbeth, by finally knowing his fate and having the supernatural knowledge of it, could be joining the ranks of the otherworldly and eldritch characters in some degree.
The unnaturalness in Macbeth comes partly from Macbeth’s actions and partly from external forces. There are three main types of unnaturalness in the play. Firstly, the overthrow of the natural order that Macbeth facilitates and its subsequent impact on Scotland and its people; secondly, the supernatural elements that include the witches, the ghost and apparitions, and the prophecies; and finally the artificially created unnaturalness of the moving wood and Macduff’s birth, both of which could be seen as nature reasserting itself by shifting its definitions and undermining the unnatural by becoming the unnatural, if only for a short period. The last notable unnaturalness in regard to Macbeth is exterior to the play itself. It is our reaction to it, our unnatural inclination to sympathize with Macbeth, and our gut sense of dread at certain moments and scenes provoked, for instance, by the persistent knocking at a gate. The action and reaction of the natural and unnatural cause much of the tension and conflict in the play, as meanings and denotations shift, reshape, and clash with each other. Which prevails in the end is cause for debate; Macduff winning would presume that nature gains the upper hand, albeit from unnatural means, but the morally cryptic goals of the unnatural lead one to the assumption that this outcome was perhaps what the witches had intended all along.
Works Cited
De Quincey, Thomas. On the Knocking At the Gate in Macbeth, The University of Adelaide Library, 2015. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/de_quincey/thomas/on-the-knocking-at-the-gate-in-macbeth/.
“Fey.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fey.
Kranz, David L. The Sounds of Supernatural Soliciting in “Macbeth”, Studies in Philology, Vol. 100, №3, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Signet Classics, 1998.
Shanley, Lyndon. The Tragedy of Evil, College English, Vol. 22, №5, National Council of Teachers of English, 1961.
