Abstract
This article examines the representations of the supernatural in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which served as a significant source for later horror literature. It shows that the play’s rhetoric of horror and of the supernatural depends on its shifting discourse of nature. Nature in Macbeth refers to an external, nonhuman nature of cosmic events and elemental figures (air, bubble and fire) as well as to an internal, human nature of “horrid” images and surmises. Supernatural elements derive from the ontological instability in both external and internal nature, and relate particularly to those actions or events, through which nature becomes disturbed and duplicated. As the imaginary dagger scene indicates, the most terrifying source of the supernatural in the play is the human-made image that duplicates nature internally.
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Notes
Danby discusses the contrasting views on the meaning of nature during Shakespeare’s time that may be attributed to Bacon and Hobbes as oppositional parties, and argues that King Lear displays both views simultaneously (1948, 20). In one of the few recent studies that may be said to address the question of nature in Macbeth, Poole attempts to seek parallelisms between the understanding of physical nature implicit in Shakespeare’s play and the philosophy of Calvin, who negates the idea of “stable nature.” Poole concludes her study with the following observation: “In Macbeth we encounter a fictional world in which multiple understandings of physics compete, contradict, and ultimately collapse upon each other” (2009, 148).
My distinction between external and internal nature closely follows the distinction made between Nature (with a capital N) and human nature in the secondary literature of the mid-twentieth century that studies the Elizabethan understandings of nature.
I would like to stress that I am using the word “sublime” not as a reference to its later conceptualization by Edmund Burke or the Romantics, but more in relation to its etymological root in Latin sublimis, that is, as a reference to being lofty, high and exalted as well as being of elevated standing and stature.
For Coddon, the witches are “figures of confusion […] signs of cognitive disorder as well as of ruin” and they “emblematize the disorder that misrules the body politic of the play” (1989, 491–492).
For an insightful discussion of the witches’ grotesquerie, see Albright (2005), especially pp. 230–232.
A brilliant account of the trope of the bubble is given by Marchitello (2013), who analyzes it in conjunction with the representation of temporality in Shakespeare’s play as well as with references to the philosophies of Bacon and St. Augustine. Particularly interesting in relation to my discussion is Marchitello’s remark that “Macbeth…refigure[s] the bubble as the hallmark of the supernatural” (2013, 437–438).
For an exhaustive formal analysis of the witches’ speech, see Kranz (2003).
Favilla also stresses the terrible emergence of Macbeth’s thought, which acts as a most significant source of horror in the play: “This thought, this ‘mortal thought,’ which unfixes his hair and knocks at his heart, should be murdered, erased, refuted, repressed. The very fact that he has yet to murder this thought, that he is still considering it, that he cannot get rid of it, is what keeps his heart knocking at his ribs” (2001, 9).
For other comments on the expression “single state of man,” see Liston (1989, 233).
Commenting on the same scene, Lueker notes that “thought and surmise, in this instance, become tremendous and tangible realities, capable of evoking fear and, more important, of paralyzing the mind’s powers. Fixed on itself, on its own operations, the will is unable to resist the influence of evil” (1983, 182).
My observations on Macbeth’s internal image, thought and surmise are diametrically opposed to Keller’s idea that “the evil of Macbeth arises from thoughtlessness” (2005, 56). I would contend that internal thought or surmise clearly functions as a significant source of evil.
Colston similarly mentions the prevalence of “proleptic thought” in the play, and relates it to “anticipatory guilt and the projective voice of conscience” (2010, 68). In the dagger episode, however, proleptic thought functions perversely to obliterate conscience.
For a study of the curious representation of time in the play, which at times amalgamates past, present and future, see Harris (2007). Harris foregrounds the notion of the palimpsest as a symbol of the play’s gestures towards polychronicity: “Rather than presenting time as an orderly progression, the palimpsest performs a polychronic coupling of nows and thens, allowing one to feel not just the future, but also the present and the past” (2007, 472).
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Süner, A. Air, Bubble and the Horrid Image: The Representation of Fear and the Supernatural in Macbeth. Neophilologus 103, 591–605 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09604-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09604-x