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SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS

Stanley Wells (essay date 1994)

SOURCE : "A Scottish Tragedy: Macbeth" in Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994, pp. 282-99.

[Wells is an English educator and critic whose books include Shakespeare: The Writer and His Work (1978) and Shakespeare: An Illustrated Dictionary (1978). In the following essay, Wells discusses Shakespeare's politics, characterizations, and portrayal of the supernatural in Macbeth.]

Macbeth has a well-deserved reputation as one of Shakespeare's most sheerly exciting plays, a fast-moving murder story laced with witchcraft and offering the theatrical pleasures of a ghost, apparitions, a sleepwalking scene, and climactic battles culminating in a hand-to-hand combat in which the villain-hero is killed by his virtuous adversary. Macbeth himself is more like Richard II I than any of the intervening tragic protagonists. Both men are great...

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1. Introduction
2. Language And Symbolism
3. Supernatural Elements
4. Gender Issues
5. Macbeth
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright