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Summary GCSE GRADE 9 ESSAY MACBETH SUPERNATURAL
GCSE GRADE 9 ESSAY MACBETH SUPERNATURAL
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How is supernatural presented?Shakespeare presents Macbeth and Banquo’s attitudes towards the supernatural as
fear tinged with tentative credulity. In the extract, Banquo warns Macbeth about the
devious mannerisms of supernatural beings. Macbeth, by contrast, is seemingly
excited about the prophecies, and feels an unavoidable longing for their promising
words. Elsewhere in the play, Shakespeare presents the way in which Macbeth is
guided towards regicide by supernatural influences. By the end, Macbeth, poisoned
and enthralled by the supernatural, believes himself to be invincible and dies a
extensive, traitorous death. Performed in an era of witch trials, the plays suggests,
just as the witchfinders did, that the world of the supernatural is existential, yet
should too be rejected and disregarded.
In the extract, Shakespeare presents contrasting attitudes to the supernatural.
Although Banquo is seemingly irresolute in the honesty and sincerity of the witches,
he portrays a sense of discomfort and recommends that he and Macbeth be wary of
the witches’ intent, who long to ‘win us to our harm’ after initially beguiling and
intriguing them. He then immediately moves away from where the witches appeared,
thus showing that Banquo attains sense and sensibility, refusing to be hypnotised.
Macbeth, now completely isolated on stage, thereby emphasising the stark contrast,
has a completely different attitude. Whispering to himself, which already highlights
delusionality, he imagines himself as king, considering the ‘happy prologues… of the
imperial theme’, a metaphor which seems to show Macbeth’s spiral into irrationality
and loss of facts and reason as he clearly imagines the myths that will be told after
his death. In fact, he then attempts to reason with himself, wondering that these
supernatural mortal beings ‘cannot be ill, cannot be good’ yet his arguments create a
battle between varying contradictions, and he remains ‘smothered in surmise’. This
metaphor hints at the all-encompassing and suffocating nature of the witches, who
have evidently ‘won’ him. This depiction of the witches matches Jacobean attitudes
in which women were considered to be real beings capable of utilising majestic
influences to enthral and destroy.
Later, Shakespeare presents Macbeth and Banquo continuing to respond in the
same tone of contradiction towards the nature of the supernatural. Moments before
killing Duncan, Macbeth envisions a bloody dagger. He questions it’s existence
stating ‘is this a dagger which I see before me?’, and resolves to dismissing its
existence as a ‘false creation’. Despite this apparent scepticism, however, Macbeth
proceeds to murder Duncan and as a result, fulfilling the Witches second prophecy,
which suggests that Macbeth is ready to succumb to and be guided by the
supernatural. On the contrary, after Macbeth’s coronation, Banquo’s scepticism
increases as he wonders, to himself, if Macbeth ‘played’st most foully’ to attain his
reign, hence depicting Banquo’s rightful acknowledgment that Macbeth acquired
power through regicide. Although, he withholds a sense of faith within the witches,
hoping that the prophecy that his will become a ‘father of many kings’ will prove itself
to be accurate, thus showing that even Banquo cannot fully dismiss the witches.
Through this representation, Shakespeare highlights the controlling and influential
mannerisms of the witches, and further reveals an essence of intrigue and interest
within supernatural beings within the Jacobean era, despite their known associative
of chaos and evil. This perhaps reflects the contradictory relationship many in
Shakespeare’s time would have aroused around the supernatural; they strongly
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