Air, Bubble and the Horrid Image: The Representation of Fear and the Supernatural in Macbeth

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.