Gothic Elements in Macbeth
These are some fairly basic ideas but they give you an idea of where you should
be going in studying this text. Remember, Macbeth is not a Gothic text but you
are being asked to focus on its Gothic elements. As Gothic literature focuses on
humanity's fascination with the grotesque, the unknown, and the frightening,
inexplicable aspects of the universe and the human soul, it actually fits in
very nicely with a study of Macbeth.
Act 1 Scene 1
The Witches in Macbeth
In sixteenth century England there were two concepts of witchcraft:
1. Maleficium is a Latin term meaning "wrongdoing" or "mischief" and is used
to describe a malevolent, dangerous, or harmful magical act intended to cause
harm or death to people or property. A witch was a person of either sex who
could mysteriously injure other people or bring about their death.
2. Adherence to the Devil – a later medieval idea, mainly due to the influence
of the Roman Catholic Church and more prevalent on the continent than in
England – this was the notion that the witch got her occult powers in return
from having made a pact with the devil – from this point of view the essence of
witchcraft was not the damage it did to others but its renunciation of God
Nearly all executions for witchcraft took place during the second half of the
sixteenth century and the first three quarters of the seventeenth. One reason why
the possibility of witchcraft seemed particularly menacing in the 120 years after
Elizabeth 1st’s accession could be that this is when the two separate concepts of
witchcraft merged together. Literary evidence suggests that in the sixteenth
century contemporaries felt that the witch problem had assumed new
proportions:
‘The land is full of witches. They abound in all places” Said Chief justice
Anderson in 1602. They would “in short time overrun the whole land”. (Note Macbeth was written between 1604-6)
 Setting – thunder and lightning creates an ominous tone right at the
beginning. As in other Shakespearean tragedies, Macbeth’s murder spree
is accompanied by a number of unnatural occurrences in the natural
realm. From the thunder and lightning that accompany the witches’
appearances to the terrible storms that rage on the night of Duncan’s
murder, these violations of the natural order reflect corruption in the
moral and political orders. Symbol of chaos and ill omen.
 Heath – wild landscapes and isolation are an important features of the
gothic
 The witches cast the mood for the entire play. Their sinister, nursery
rhyme sounding incantations stand out eerily from the blank verse spoken
by the other characters. Whenever they appear, the stage directions
deliberately link them to chaos and unease in the natural world. In
Shakespeare’s time witches were feared and people believed in them.
They are evil, they had the power of prophecy, they have
familiars/daemons. Audience expectation is that the supernatural will
play a big part in this play.
 Inversion of the natural order as evident in the witches’ language – fair is
foul and foul is fair .Shakespeare has the witches speak in language of
contradiction. Such speech adds to the play’s sense of moral confusion
by implying that nothing is quite what it seems. Macbeth’s first line in the
play is “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” which echoes the witches’
words and establishes a connection between them and Macbeth.
 Interaction between the natural and the supernatural world – the witches
straddle both worlds.
 The witches – supernatural forces or the forces of Macbeth’s own nature?
The darker, supernatural forces often represent the “dark side” of human
nature—irrational or destructive desires. Often symbolize conflicting
forces within the human soul. The hero may be tempted by evil spirits or
redeemed by good spirits that symbolize the hero's own potential for evil
or good.
Act 1 Scene 2
 In his description of Macbeth and Banquo’s heroics, the captain dwells on
particularly bloody images: “he unseamed him from the nave to th’
chops,” The bloody murders that fill the play are foreshadowed by the
bloody victory that the Scots win over their enemies. Blood is a
prominent symbol in Gothic works often intimating the paradox of the
human condition; blood can represent both life and death, or both guilt
(e.g., murder) and innocence (e.g., redemptive blood). Blood is
everywhere in Macbeth and once Macbeth and Lady Macbeth embark
upon their murderous journey, blood comes to symbolize their guilt, and
they begin to feel that their crimes have stained them in a way that cannot
be washed clean. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean
from my hand?” Lady Macbeth eventually comes to share his horrified
sense of being stained: “Out, damned spot; out, I say . . . who would have
thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
Act 1 Scene 3
 The witches are not completely in control of men; they still have free will
but we can see early on that they can wreak havoc on men’s lives: “I’ll
drain him dry as hay:/Sleep shall neither night nor day/Hang upon his
penthouse lid./He shall live a man forbid – and by the end of the play we
can see how Macbeth has been manipulated.
 Because of the witches’ appearance (grotesques) Banquo does not trust
them and so is not affected by them. His reaction to their appearance tells
us as much. “What are these/so wither’d, and so wild in their attires, /That
look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth, /And yet are on’t”
Banquo says, “you should be women, /And yet your bears forbid me to
interpret/That you are so” The witches are thus evil, ugly, and sexless and
their appearance and descriptions add to the evil mood of the play from
the beginning and throughout its action. They, like Lady Macbeth, are
unsexed by their evil nature.
Act 1 Scene 4
 Emphasis on darkness – stars hide your fires
Act 1 Scene 5
 The setting in the later scenes is Macbeth's castle, a typical element to a
Gothic novel which creates an air of mystery, suspense. The protagonist's
castle or home can reflect the protagonist's psychological character.
Hidden chambers, subterranean vaults, twisting corridors, and secret
passages can symbolize the hidden depths of the mind, unknown aspects
of the psyche that are beyond rational control. Gothic literature derives its
name from its similarities to the Gothic medieval cathedrals, which
feature a majestic, unrestrained architectural style with often savage or
grotesque ornamentation – think of Orson Welles’ film vision of
Macbeth’s castle – camera angles, the set he designed etc
 Ravens croaking on the battlements – Lady Macbeth takes this as a
harbinger of Duncan's death.
 Violent imagery used by Lady Macbeth 'I would...have plucked my nipple
from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn'. 'unsex
me here and fill me...of direst cruelty'
 Lady Macbeth – In Gothic literature the protagonist's fall is sometimes
accomplished through a relationship with a “demon lover” who acts as
the protagonist's double or alter-ego, leading the protagonist into
experiences forbidden by societal norms. The demon lover is frequently
female, a femme fatale (fatal or deadly woman) who seduces and entices
the protagonist to destruction. While in some cases, the femme fatale
seems indicative of the misogyny of patriarchal cultures, in others, the
masterful and destroying female seems to enact a fantasy of female
empowerment.
 Breaking of moral and social codes - masculine and feminine roles and
how they are reversed with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. And obviously
her 'punishment' for trying to change her role in society is her eventual
madness and suicide
Act 2
 Vision of the dagger - The dagger is the first in a series of guilt-inspired
hallucinations that Macbeth and his wife experience. Macbeth finds that
he is unable to utter the prayer word “Amen.” The inner world of the
psyche thus imposes itself on the physical world. Over the course of
Macbeth, dreams, symbols, fantasy, and visions impinge upon the real
world. The "dagger of the mind" points the way to a murder committed
with a real dagger. The same can be said for the voice that Macbeth hears
crying "Macbeth shall sleep no more" (II ii 41). An overwhelming sense
of guilt will prevent “innocent sleep” from giving Macbeth respite from
his tormented conscience. While he has consigned Duncan to eternal rest,
he himself lives now in eternal anxiety.
 The murder is kept off stage – apart from political sensitivity (Not a good
idea to suggest to the common folk that a king can be killed) the murder
can be made to seem more terrible by the power of suggestion.
 General ambience of terror, integral to the Gothic- look how Shakespeare
demonstrates this in the language – use of short lines, questions to show
how unnerved the two characters are. Tolling of bell supernatural origin?
 The motif of blood recurs here in Macbeth’s anguished sense that there is
blood on his hands that cannot be washed clean.
 Pathetic fallacy -The old man describes Duncan’s horses eating each
other and an owl eating a falcon--events that echo the slaughter of
Duncan by Macbeth. The audience is told about a number of unnatural
occurrences in the weather and the behavior of animals which cast a pall
over Macbeth’s ascension to the throne. The storms that accompany the
witches’ appearances and Duncan’s murder are more than natural events;
they are symbols of something seriously going wrong in the moral.
political and social world of men.
Act 3
 Who is the third murderer? Some believe that it is Macbeth himself, who
could not trust the murderers fully but in any case, introducing a third
murderer means the murderers balance the three witches. Macbeth meets
three witches, commits three separate murders, and sees three apparitions.
There is power in the number three. The number three recurs throughout
the play, adding to its mysterious and magic atmosphere.
 Banquo’s ghost - the boundaries between reality and the supernatural are
blurred as Banquo's ghost appears twice—at the moment s Macbeth
mentions him. It seems that the vision of Banquo accompanies the idea of
Banquo in Macbeth’s mind. The ghost thus seems more like the
manifestation of an idea—a figment of the imagination—rather than a
“real” ghost. Lady Macbeth says as much when she pulls Macbeth aside:
“This is the very painting of your fear; / This is the air-drawn dagger
which you said / Led you to Duncan" (III iv 60-62). Just like the dagger,
Banquo's ghost appears to be a realization of Macbeth's guilt although the
ghost is clearly very real to Macbeth. Ghosts are spirits that can represent
some aspect of the protagonist's experience that “will not die,” that
cannot be repressed or escaped so the ghost of Banquo returns to haunt
Macbeth, suggesting Macbeth's guilt over murdering his friend. Almost
all the supernatural elements in this play could be—and often are—read
as psychological rather than ghostly occurrences. Doesn’t work as a
concept with the witches though, since Banquo sees them too.
Act 4
 Gothic motif - forbidden Knowledge or Power – in this case Macbeth’s
return to the witches and demand to be told more – Prophecy- Forbidden
knowledge/power is often the Gothic protagonist's goal. The Gothic
“hero” questions the universe's ambiguous nature and tries to comprehend
and control those supernatural powers that mortals cannot understand. He
tries to overcome human limitations and make himself into a “god”. This
ambition usually leads to the hero's “fall” or destruction; however, Gothic
tales of ambition sometimes paradoxically evoke our admiration because
they picture individuals with the courage to defy fate and cosmic forces in
an attempt to transcend the mundane to the eternal and sublime.
 The courageous search for forbidden knowledge or power always leads
the hero to a fall, a corruption, or destruction, such as Satan's or Adam's
fall. Consequently, the hero in Gothic literature is often a “villain”. The
hero is isolated from others by his fall and either becomes a monster or
confronts a monster who is his double. He becomes a “Satanic hero” if,
like Satan, he has courageously defied the rules of God's universe and has
tried to transform himself into a god, in Macbeth’s case a king who can’t
die.
 The witches are deeply sinister creatures as they stand outside the limits
of human comprehension. The word weird comes from the Anglo-Saxon
word wyrd, which means “fate” or “doom,” and the three witches bear a
striking resemblance to the Fates in Greek mythology. In terms of the
Gothic, the sheer inscrutability of their prophecies is as important as any
reading of their motivations and natures. Macbeth is fooled and tricked by
them and in the Orson Welles film version at least is seen as something of
a plaything to the dark, unintelligible forces of the cosmos.
 Extreme behaviour- the murder of Lady Macduff and her young son
marks the moment where Macbeth kills out of sheer vindictiveness.
Act 5
Lady Macbeth, her nerves shattered by guilt, gives way to sleepwalking
and a delusional belief that her hands are stained with blood. “Out,
damned spot,” Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood is an
ironic reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that a “little water clears us
of this deed”. Like a Freudian psychoanalyst, the doctor observes Lady
Macbeth's dreams and uses her words to infer the cause of her distress.
Lady Macbeth's language is choppy, jumping from idea to idea as her
state of mind changes. Her sentences are short and unpolished, reflecting
a mind too disturbed to speak eloquently. Although she spoke in iambic
pentameter before, she now speaks in prose—thus falling from the noble
to the prosaic. (AO2)
Summary
Gothic literature pictures the human condition as an ambiguous mixture
of good and evil powers that cannot be understood completely by human
reason. Thus, the Gothic perspective conceives of the human condition as
a paradox, a dilemma of duality — humans are divided in the conflict
between opposing forces in the world and in themselves.
One moral of Macbeth is that the course of fate cannot be changed. The
events that the Weird Sisters predicted and set in motion at the beginning
of the play happen exactly as predicted, no matter what the characters do
to change them. This fits in nicely with the Gothic genre which creates
horror by portraying human individuals in confrontation with the
overwhelming, mysterious, terrifying forces found in the cosmos and
within themselves in the knowledge that they cannot win.
The Gothic themes of human nature's depravity, the struggle between
good and evil in the human soul, and the existence of unexplainable
elements in humanity and the cosmos, are prominent themes in Macbeth.