Macbeth Supernatural Quotes

It is also significant that the play opens with the objective presence of supernatural forces. The witches are not the figment of someone else’s imagination because there is nobody else present to witness them. They are alone, and therefore they stand alone, utterly independent. We are in the real presence of evil, an evil that really exists whether we like it or not, an evil that is not merely the product of our fetid fetishes or our fevered imaginations. In its formal structure, therefore, Macbeth places us unequivocally in a supernatural cosmos, rendering implausible all materialistic interpretations of the play’s intrinsic meaning.

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good: —if ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor: 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? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise; and nothing is But what is not.

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good: — if ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor: 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? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise; and nothing is But what is not.