The supernatural in hamlet and macbeth

Willard Farnham, Shakespeare’s Tragic Frontier (on Macbeth)

Willard Farnham in Shakespeare’s Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final Tragedies gives a great deal of historical background about witch beliefs in Shakespeare’s time and earlier in order to support his idea that the Witches in Macbeth are not simply old women who have bargained with the devil for supernatural powers. They are, he says, supernatural beings themselves, “fiends in the shape of old women” (99), “woman devils” (95), “fairy demons” (101), “superhuman” (100). Yet though he thinks that the Witches are supernatural beings with supernatural powers, and though the “weird” in Weird Sisters is the Old English word for “fate” (Shakespeare took the name from his main historical source for Macbeth, Holinshed’s Chronicles), Farnham insists that the Sisters do not have the power to determine events like the Fates of classical and Norse mythology, as some earlier critics had claimed (100-102). If they did have such power, Farnham points out, it would make no sense for them to defer to “our masters” as they do in IV.1 to call up the three Apparitions and the show of kings. “In fact, any argument that they are directors of fate rests on the fact that Shakespeare brought the term ‘weird sister’ into the play” (101).

Farnham makes a surprising claim about the Witches’ intentions, although he makes it only in passing and cites no hard evidence to support it. He says that besides being supernatural agents of general evil, the Sisters are also agents of particular evil: the murder of Duncan as well as the destruction of Macbeth. In fact, the way he puts it--“the contriving of murder through the use of a susceptible man” (99)--makes the destruction of Macbeth sound secondary to the murder of Duncan. Farnham does not actually state that the Sisters intend to being about the destruction of Macbeth by getting Macbeth to kill Duncan, but that is the logic of his remark.
This claim that the Witches want to bring about Duncan’s murder is surprising because I have not seen it made by any other writer on Macbeth and because, as far as I can see, there is nothing in the play that even hints at such a purpose. In fact, the Witches never mention Duncan at all, either directly or indirectly. What is more, if Shakespeare had set things up in this way he would have seriously weakened the audience’s sense of Macbeth’s tragedy. We would have to see Macbeth as less of a free agent and more as an instrument of supernatural forces outside his control, and so not fully responsible for his choices and his actions. There seems to be a contradiction between Farnham’s insistence that the Witches do not control events and his suggestion that in some sense they do, between stating that Macbeth “has free will so far . . . as the choice of good or evil is concerned,” and in the next sentence stating that “the witches show themselves to have a power over [him]” (81). You cannot have it both ways.
Farnham has interesting things to say about a supernatural appearance in Macbeth that I have only mentioned: Banquo’s ghost. The ghost appears at Macbeth’s banquet “not only because Macbeth is guilty of Banquo’s death,” but also in ironic response to Macbeth’s “hypocritical effrontery” in expressing before the assembly a wish that Banquo were there when he himself has arranged for Banquo’s murder. “He actually challenges Banquo to appear and prove him guilty,” and his unintentional challenge “is also a challenge to the divine power, which, as Shakespeare’s age firmly believed, could work justice upon murderers by supernatural means” (122). And while most critics have been convinced that the ghost of Banquo has to be a hallucination of Macbeth’s since, like the dagger in the air, only Macbeth sees it, Farnham is just as certain that it is “a real ghost,” and that Shakespeare meant his audience to take it for a real ghost. “Ghost lore has always allowed that ghosts might appear to one person and not to others in a company” (123). Of course if this is true, it applies with the same force to the boudoir scene in Hamlet, where many critics have argued that, as real as the Ghost may be in the play’s opening scenes, it has to be a hallucination of Hamlet’s feverish brain.