There is a version of Macbeth revision that goes something like this: the witches are evil, they make Macbeth kill Duncan, and the supernatural represents the presence of evil in the play. That reading is accurate enough to recall in conversation, but it will earn you middling marks in an AQA exam, because it describes what happens in the play rather than what Shakespeare is doing with the play.

The distinction matters because the AQA mark scheme rewards interpretation, and interpretation requires you to have a view on Shakespeare’s intentions, on why the supernatural is structured the way it is, why Macbeth responds to it the way he does, and what an audience in 1606 would have understood that a modern student might miss. When you can write from that position, your essay stops sounding like a summary and starts sounding like an argument.

This post gives you the essay plan, the quotes worth memorising, and the analytical moves that take you from a competent answer to a persuasive one.

What Shakespeare Is Actually Doing With the Supernatural

The witches do not cause Macbeth’s downfall in any direct sense. They speak four prophecies in Act 1, they vanish, and they return in Act 4 to offer more. Between those appearances, every murder, every political decision, every act of violence is Macbeth’s own. Lady Macbeth’s contribution is psychological pressure, and even that stops being relevant once Macbeth is ordering killings she knows nothing about.

Shakespeare builds the supernatural this way deliberately, because the interesting question of the play is moral rather than metaphysical. If the witches were genuinely controlling Macbeth, he would be a victim. As it stands, he is a man who heard what he wanted to hear, pursued it beyond any defensible limit, and found that the thing he wanted had already cost him everything he valued before he even had it. That is a tragedy in the classical sense, and the supernatural is its mechanism - the force that initiates his ambition without excusing what he does with it.

His ambition predates the witches. They do not create it; they give it permission.

This reading also changes how you approach the essay. Instead of writing about the supernatural as a theme in isolation, you write about it as the lens through which Shakespeare examines agency, responsibility, and the psychology of ambition. That is a more interesting essay, and it is also a more accurate one.

Context For Your AO3 Marks

King James I was on the throne when Macbeth was written and performed, around 1606, and his relationship with the supernatural was a matter of public record rather than private belief. He had personally overseen witch trials in Scotland, and in 1597 he wrote Daemonologie, a treatise arguing that witches were genuine agents of Satan whose methods included deception, half-truths, and the manipulation of human desire. He also believed in the Divine Right of Kings, which held that a monarch’s authority came directly from God, making regicide a theological transgression as well as a political one.

Shakespeare’s audience walked into the Globe carrying all of that. They would have recognised the witches as Satanic instruments without needing to be told, which means Shakespeare can do something more interesting than simply present them as frightening: he can use their ambiguity to put moral pressure on the audience. Are they real? Are they a projection of Macbeth’s own desires? The play never answers this, and the refusal to answer is where the intellectual weight of the supernatural lies. An audience who believed in witchcraft had to ask themselves whether Macbeth was damned by external forces or by his own character and that question is as uncomfortable for a 1606 audience as it is for a Year 11 student seven days before their exam.

For your essay, the useful move is to bring in James I at the point where you discuss why the witches are constructed the way they are, not as a bolted-on context point at the end of a paragraph, but as an explanation of Shakespeare’s dramatic choices. He made the witches ambiguous because ambiguity was more theologically and dramatically useful than certainty.

 

The Quotes, and What You Can Do With Each One

These six are selected because they are short enough to memorise accurately and flexible enough to apply across different question framings - whether the question asks about the supernatural directly, about ambition, about evil, or about the relationship between Macbeth and external forces.

1. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Act 1, Scene 1)

The witches’ opening line establishes moral inversion as the structural logic of the play before the first human character has spoken. The paradox - which works through chiasmus, the deliberate reversal of the phrase - tells you that in the world the witches inhabit, the normal rules of morality and appearance do not apply. It prepares the audience for a protagonist who will consistently mistake good for evil and evil for good, and who will use the witches’ ambiguity as a permission structure for choices he has already made.

In your essay, use this quote to argue that the supernatural’s function is to introduce disorder rather than to enforce a specific outcome. The witches do not tell Macbeth to kill Duncan. They tell him he will be king, and his interpretation of that prediction, his assumption that it requires action rather than patience, is where his tragedy begins.

2. “So withered and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants of the earth” (Act 1, Scene 3)

This is Banquo’s description of the witches, and it does two things simultaneously. First, it establishes them as physically outside every category a Jacobean audience would use to make sense of another person - human, female, living - which signals their association with the satanic in terms an audience in 1606 would read immediately. Second, it frames Banquo as a foil: he sees the witches as external and resistant rather than as a source of revelation, which is why he survives the prophecy morally intact even if he does not survive it physically.

Use this to discuss how Shakespeare differentiates between characters through their relationship to the supernatural. Banquo’s scepticism is contrasted with Macbeth’s appetite, and that contrast is where the question of moral agency lives.

3. “Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires” (Act 1, Scene 4)

This aside comes immediately after Duncan names Malcolm as his heir, and it is significant because it establishes that Macbeth’s ambition is already operative before the witches have said anything about what it might require of him. He is not a man being corrupted by the supernatural; he is a man whose existing desires have been given a shape and a direction. The command to the stars, an imperative verb directing the natural world to cover his moral state , also reveals that he knows what he is contemplating is wrong, which is precisely why he needs darkness to conceal it.

For your essay, this quote supports an argument about the supernatural becoming internalised. By Act 1, Scene 4, the external prophecy has already converted into internal desire, and Macbeth is managing that desire rather than being overwhelmed by it.

4. “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” (Act 2, Scene 1)

The dagger is one of the play’s most discussed moments because Shakespeare refuses to resolve whether it is supernatural or hallucinatory. Macbeth reaches for it and finds air, which suggests it is a projection of his own mind but the play never confirms this, and the ambiguity is the point. By Act 2, the supernatural is no longer something Macbeth encounters in a heath; it is something that appears in the space between his intention and his action. He experiences his own moral collapse as something happening to him, which is a psychologically acute observation about how human beings rationalise choices they have already committed to.

Use this to extend an argument about internalisation: the supernatural begins as external prophecy, becomes internal desire in Act 1, and by Act 2 has colonised Macbeth’s perception of reality.

5. “Never shake thy gory locks at me” (Act 3, Scene 4)

Banquo’s ghost appears at the banquet, the moment where Macbeth is working hardest to maintain the fiction of legitimate kingship. The ghost is silent, it does not accuse him or speak, and Macbeth fills that silence with guilt so overwhelming that it dismantles his composure entirely in front of every thane whose political loyalty he depends on. Lady Macbeth’s attempts to explain his behaviour as a momentary episode reveal how isolated he has become: she no longer has access to his psychology, which means the relationship that drove him to murder has already dissolved.

This quote works for questions about guilt, power, or the supernatural as a form of punishment. The argument to make is that the supernatural, which began by offering Macbeth power, has become the mechanism of its removal.

6. “Double, double toil and trouble” (Act 4, Scene 1)

The incantation is written in trochaic tetrameter - a rhythm that is deliberately different from the iambic pentameter Shakespeare uses for his noble characters - which creates an unsettling, almost sing-song quality that distances the witches from the rest of the play’s linguistic register. Their power, as the play has established, lies entirely in language: cryptic suggestions, ambiguous truths, predictions that are accurate in the most literal sense and misleading in every practical one. The apparitions they summon in Act 4 follow this same logic: each one tells Macbeth something true, and each one is designed to produce a false conclusion.

Use this to discuss Shakespeare’s dramatic technique in presenting the supernatural. Specifically, how form and rhythm are used to mark the witches as categorically different from every other figure in the play.

The Essay Plan

The AQA question will give you an extract and ask something along the lines of: “Starting with this extract, how does Shakespeare present [topic] in Macbeth?” The supernatural might appear as the named topic, or it might appear through questions about ambition, evil, or Macbeth’s psychology, in all of those cases, the framework below applies.

Introduction

Answer the question in your first sentence. State your argument, what Shakespeare is doing with the supernatural and why, rather than defining your terms or describing what you are about to write. A strong introduction for a supernatural question might argue that Shakespeare uses the supernatural to interrogate the relationship between external influence and individual moral agency, drawing on Jacobean beliefs about witchcraft to make that interrogation feel urgent rather than abstract. Then gesture toward the structure of your argument: you will move from the witches as external agents to the supernatural as internalised psychology to the supernatural as a source of punishment.

Paragraph One: The Witches as Linguistic Rather Than Physical Force

Use “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” and the Banquo description. Argue that the witches exert power through language - through the structure of their predictions, which are accurate in the most literal sense and misleading in every practical one - rather than through any direct compulsion. Bring in James I and Daemonologie here: a 1606 audience would have understood that this is precisely how Satanic forces were believed to operate. End the paragraph by returning to the question: Shakespeare structures the supernatural this way to hold Macbeth accountable for his choices while acknowledging the forces that shaped them.

Paragraph Two: The Supernatural Becomes Internal

Use the Act 1 aside and the dagger soliloquy. Argue that by Act 2, Shakespeare has moved the supernatural from the external world into Macbeth’s psychology, and the two have become indistinguishable from each other. Macbeth experiences his own ambition as something happening to him rather than something he is doing, which is a form of self-deception that the play treats as genuinely tragic. This paragraph is where you can push into more interpretive territory: some critics read the dagger as pure hallucination, which makes Macbeth’s tragedy entirely psychological; others read it as genuinely supernatural, which raises the question of how much responsibility he bears. Either reading is defensible in an AQA essay, as long as you commit to it and support it with evidence.

Paragraph Three: The Supernatural as Punishment

Use Banquo’s ghost and the Act 4 apparitions. Argue that in the second half of the play, the supernatural reverses its function: where it once offered Macbeth power, it now dismantles it. The ghost destroys his public authority at the banquet. The apparitions in Act 4 give him confidence built on false premises, which accelerates rather than prevents his downfall. This is the logic of Jacobean tragedy: the thing you pursued becomes the mechanism of your destruction. Connect back to James I - the apparitions function exactly as Daemonologie described Satanic deception, through truths that are designed to mislead.

Conclusion

Return to the question directly and offer one larger observation about what Shakespeare is arguing. The supernatural in Macbeth is designed to be ambiguous because moral ambiguity is the play’s subject. Shakespeare gives Macbeth every possible external explanation for his behaviour (the witches, Lady Macbeth’s pressure, the dagger) and then removes each one until what remains is a man who chose, repeatedly and with full awareness of the cost, to pursue power at the expense of everything that made his life worth having. That is the play’s argument about ambition, and the supernatural is the structure through which it is made.

Macbeth Masterclass: Tonight
(5pm–6pm)

Work through the full essay plan on an AQA question, live.

Tonight’s class takes everything in this post and puts it into practice on an actual AQA exam question - working through the introduction, each body paragraph, and the conclusion together, so that you can see how the analytical moves translate into exam writing under timed conditions.

What you get when you sign up:

• The full one-hour live class, with Q&A

• The complete recording, sent the same evening

• A cheat sheet of every quote and theme you need for any Macbeth question

• Exam predictions and a predictions table for Paper 1

• A free model answer to an additional past paper question

The class costs £20 and runs tonight from 5 to 6pm. If you cannot join live, the recording goes out to everyone who signs up.

SIGN UP HERE

Thereafter, Literature Week continues Tuesday through Friday. We will go through A Christmas Carol, An Inspector Calls, Power and Conflict, and Unseen Poetry, each at 5pm, each £20 with a recording and model answer included.

xxx,

Barbara
First Rate Tutors