The Creation of Suspense and Fear in

Macbethby William Shakespeare

Many scholars argue about the exact year in which Shakespeare

wroteMacbeth, but, with some certainty, it can be said that it must have been
around 1606. This date can be confirmed by various facts. Three years before,
James I, who was already King of Scotland, was crowned King of England, and it
is stated by scholars that the play was performed at court in 1606. The tragedy
is supposed to have been dedicated to James I, which can be taken as an
explanation why Banquo, being an ancestor of the king, is featured in the play.
Scholars (like Kenneth Muir) furthermore argue that the king was not too fond
of long plays, which may explain whyMacbeth,compared
withHamletorOthello,is the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies. In addition to
that, there is a report to be found of somebody who witnessed a performance
of the play in the London Globe Theatre in 1611, summarizing the contents of
the play in short words, although some important passages of the play are not
mentioned. This may hint at interpolations or changes in the original play and
the printed folio versions of the tragedy after Shakespeare's death in 1616.
Even though some historical events seem to have found their way
intoMacbeth, the play is a work of fiction and therefore should not be taken as
a source that discribes historical circumstances. Yet, with his choice of words
and the way suspense is created, Shakespeare offers the modern reader a wide
range of topics with the help of which he may find out about the things that
frightened people during the Elizabethan Age and the early years of the reign
of James I. A close analysis of the play may reveal the symbols which may have
been experienced as frightening or upsetting and still may be perceived
shocking today.

Although the first scene has been discussed controversially by scholars

because it appears too un-Shakespearian to have been written by Shakespeare
himself, it effectively shows one of the fears that people of the early 17th
century were facing. Three witches gather to hatch a foul plot against the
protagonist of the play. The audience could too quickly assume that the Weird
Sisters are responsible for Macbeth's fate and the deeds he is to commit after
he has encountered the witches "upon the heath" with Banquo, even though a
spectator of today knows that only Macbeth, incited by his wife, is responsible
for his actions. Yet, it seems indubitable that the appearance of the Weird
Sisters had a strong effect on an audience at a time when most people
supposed that witches were channels through which the malignity of evil
spirits might be visited upon human beings. The scene must have seemed very
real for a contemporary audience, and it would quickly have created an
atmosphere of evil, which is the key note of the play. Historians point out the
fact that not very long after Macbeth was written and performed, the hunt for
and the burning of witches reached a dramatic climax in Europe. This may have
been because people were afraid of anything alien to them, which is nicely
depicted in Act I, Scene 3, ll. 80ff.:

Banquo. The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them. -
Whither are they vanished? Macbeth. Into the air; and what seemed corporal,
Melted as breath into the wind.

After she has been informed about that incident by a letter from her husband,
Lady Macbeth herself takes on the features of a witch when she tries to
conjure up the evil "spirits" that are to help her commit regicide. Out of greed,
she implores them to fill her up "from the crown (which implies that the deed
has already been committed in her fantasies) to the toe, top-full of direst
cruelty;". The entire monologue strongly reminds the spectator of an
incantation that is uttered by a hag.

Witches were thought to be malign because they were commonly believed to

stand in league with the ultimate evil. The devil himself offers them their
magical powers, while the witches have to sell him their souls in return. This
does not only explain why the devil is mentioned rather often throughout the
play, but also why he furthermore can be seen as the initiator of the rise and
fall of Macbeth. The drunken porter, who is on guard at the gate of Macbeth's
castle in the night King Duncan is murdered, hears a knocking on the door and,
hurrying to it, curses the person who wakes him from his slumber (in the scene
that preceeds the so-called "Porter-Scene", Macbeth wishes that the knocking
would wake the king, whom he has already murdered). As he inquires, who
may be responsible for the noise, he shouts: "Who's there, i' th' name of
Belzebub?" When the knocking goes on, he asks again: "Who's there i' th'
other devil's name? - Faith, here's an equivocator ..." Other stylistic means
describing the devil can be found in Act II, Scene 3, which deals directly with
the death of the king. After MacDuff finds the king stabbed in his chamber, he
rushes to Macbeth to tell him about the gruesome deed the king's servants are
supposed to have done. He cries out: "Confusion now hath made his
masterpiece!" It was a common belief, not only in mediaeval times, that,
whenever something appears to be illogical or contradictory, it must have
been the work of the devil himself, which obviously applies to this most
horrible crime. That is why confusion must be seen as a personification of the
devil himself. Consequently, the reader is led to believe that the apparitions
the Weird Sisters conjure up later in the play truly are the "masters" of the
witches, which means that they are devils in three different shapes. This shows
that the devil is a confuser, a creature which is not trapped in one corporeal
appearance and, thus, can easily fool the human eye.

Shakespeare does not create tension only by letting the characters talk about a
murder or by using witches as foreboders of evil, but also by showing how dark
and gloomy the night is in which the murder takes place (ll. 21-31.):

Lennox. The night has been unruly; where we lay, Our chimneys were blown
down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' th'air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible Of dire combustion and confused events
New hatched to th'woeful time.

It was a common belief among contemporaries of Shakespeare that strange

upheavals both in nature and in society accompanied the violent death of
important men. Modern film producers with all their technical tricks and
special effects still make use of bad weather when they want to put some
tension to a scene. This may be because of the fact that the weather cannot be
controlled by man and must therefore stand under somebody else's power
who shows his will and his favour by using the weather. During the "rough"
night, several characters talk about the fact that they hear an owl hoot. This
proves the superstitious thought that, when "the obscure bird" cries,
somebody has to die the same night. Both young and old, Lennox as well as an
old man, state that neither of them has ever experienced a comparable night
before in their entire lives.

Certainly, one of the most important means by the help of which Shakespeare
creates tension is the use of supernormal or supernatural occurrences, such as
visions or images that appear before the characters' eyes.. The witches seem
to be of flesh and blood, but they are able to vanish into the air, which shows
that the audience cannot be sure of their existence. Before the murder of King
Duncan, Macbeth imagines the dagger with which he is to kill his liege. He
states that he is not really sure whether the dagger is a real one that he can
hold in his hand or just "a dagger of the mind", which he sees owing to a "heat-
oppresséd brain". During this monologue, Macbeth's plan to commit regicide
takes on a clear shape because after he hears a bell ring, he states that "it's a
[death-]knell" that is to summon the king "to heaven, or to hell", which makes
the reader assume that the entire vision finally motivates Macbeth to commit
the crime. Later, the witches conjure up apparitions with which to foretell
Macbeth what is going to happen to him and who may bring him to his fall. He
sees the ghost of Banquo again, whom he murdered earlier, and who appears
at Macbeth's banquet where the ghost sits down on Macbeth's chair, so that
"the table is full." Only Macbeth is able to see the ghost. These apparitions
incite Macbeth's wickedness, but apparently reveal to him his own demise and
must have had a truly shocking effect on the audience during the reign of
James I.

The examination of the means by which suspense is created in the tragedy can
in some respect be taken as a source for the fears the people really had during
the reign of James I. The topic of regicide, combined with the work of ill-
disposed witches, who hatch a foul plot, and the use of images that appear
before the characters' eyes, must have had a very disturbing effect on the
audience. By his choice of words, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of
extreme tension in Macbeth that does not leave the audience even long after
the performance is over.

The playwright does not only show that he is, indeed, familiar with the things
that would frighten his contemporaries but also reveals some of his own fears.
Owing to the generally known pictures and topics, everybody in the early
modern English society must have been shocked and frightened by a plot that
takes place in an atmosphere so full of evil both supernatural and created by
human beings.

Macbeth as Film Noir Thriller

In a sharp essay at the Weird Fiction Review, critic Matthew Pridham makes
the case for placing William Shakespeare’s Macbeth into the horror genre of
fiction. Beginning with Titus Andronicus, Pridham argues, Shakespeare was
fascinated by ways to “show humanity at its worst. These visions depended on
depictions of cruelty, agony and alterity.” Pridham then quotes Shakespeare
scholar Harold Bloom, who argued that some Shakespeare is so gothic and
bloody and occult that it is “the Shakespearian equivalent of what we respond
to in Stephen King and in much cinema.” Witches, murder, hallucinations,
ghosts—Macbeth has all the elements of the horror genre.

In its newest film adaptation, the Scottish play also has another influence: film
noir, the postwar style of filming that featured crimes, shadowy, morally
compromised characters—including nasty, duplicitous women known as
femme fatales—and often violent, bloody endings. Directed by Joel Coen in a
rich black-and-white that seems to have come from the 1950s, Macbeth uses
the sharp angles, intense close-ups, and geometric lighting of noir to tell the
story of the ambitious 11th-century Scottish warrior who killed his own king in
order to take the throne. Macbeth’s mind unravels as he tries to control the
fallout from his evil act. He is militarily defeated, then beheaded and replaced
on the throne. It’s like a medieval precursor to Double Indemnity or Body Heat.

It also has a lot in common with All the President’s Men. When thinking of
modern, Washington-based political thrillers, the mind often conjures images
of Congress, the White House, and contests over power, but what is arguably
the best D.C. political movie, All the President’s Men, is pure noir. Many scenes
in the film are absolutely saturated in shadow. The Watergate burglars are like
the ever-shrinking loyalists to Macbeth, who in this case is Richard Nixon.

Macbeth is brilliantly played in the new film by Denzel Washington. A proud

Scottish general, Macbeth is encouraged and outdone in his ambition by his
wife, Lady Macbeth (a strong Frances McDormand). After the King, Duncan,
hears the news that his best generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated
two invading armies, Macbeth is named the thane of Cawdor. Yet—as is the
case with most politicians—it’s not good enough. Macbeth has heard a
witches’ prophecy that he himself will be king and becomes possessed by
reckless ambition. The Macbeths plot to murder Duncan in his sleep so that
Macbeth himself can gain the throne. The sets on this Macbeth are very spare,
like a modernist stage mounting of the play. There is an intentional artificiality
to the sets, which ironically intensifies the realism. Just as the more abstract
film noir settings can tap into an archetypical consciousness with sharp lines
separating good and evil, Macbeth seems to live in a world outside of any
particular time but deep within the human soul and its primal knowledge
about evil.

At first, Macbeth has doubts about the plot, but when he expresses them, he is
taunted, belittled, and ridiculed by his power-hungry wife. Lady Macbeth
taunts her husband, telling him he’s not a man unless he murders the king:
“When you durst do it, then you were a man; And to be more than what you
were, you would be so much more the man.” When, after the regicide,
Macbeth begins to imagine he is seeing ghosts, Lady Macbeth attacks: “You do
unbend your noble strength, to think so brainsickly of things.” Then she calls
him a coward: “My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so
white.”

Many of Shakespeare’s female characters are strong-willed, witty, and able to

match language with their male counterparts—yet they are also imperfect,
flawed, and fully human.

In film noir, bad guys are often women: Phyllis Dietrichson in Double
Indemnity, Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past, Gilda Mundson in Gilda, Brigid
O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. The 1960 noir Gun Crazy was originally
titled Deadly is the Femme Fatale. These women are not the sinless saints of
modern #MeToo movies. They are brilliant, conniving, sarcastic, and
sometimes downright evil. In other words, much more like real people.

This is an especially necessary tonic given the current “Mary Sue” issue in
Hollywood. A Mary Sue is a female character in film who has no flaws or
weaknesses. It is a problem in the Marvel superhero movies, particularly the
film Captain Marvel, so much so that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU,
has been dubbed by some critics the “M-SHE-U.” The most glaring example in
recent years was Rey, the young female hero of the new Star Wars movies,
who was so adroit at every task she was presented that it made the films dull.
Earlier in the Star Wars saga, Luke Skywalker himself lost a hand in a bloody
battle he loses. Rey never struggled with such failures. Making a female
protagonist a Mary Sue is ironically infantilizing, rendering the character more
innocent and virtuous than any normal adult.

Although written five centuries earlier, many of Shakespeare’s female

characters are strong-willed, witty, and able to match language with their male
counterparts—yet they are also imperfect, flawed, and fully human.
Considering the atmosphere of Elizabethan England, when women were much
more restricted than they are today, it’s remarkable how complex these
female characters are. There is Rosalind from As You Like It, who dominates
the play and surpasses the male characters in terms of intelligence. Or Beatrice
in Much Ado About Nothing, who won’t marry because she doesn’t think
anyone can measure up to her, and who verbally spars with her lover Benedick
throughout the play. (The film version of this play also features Denzel
Washington as Don Pedro.)

In the new Macbeth, Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is sneaky, conniving,

and ultimately evil. Yet she also shows affection and love for her husband. She
is after power, of course, but McDormand also plays the role of a fearless
partner to a man whom she wants to achieve the crown that he is worth. She
is, as played here, more than one-dimensional.

Still, as good as Frances McDormand is, in this Macbeth, it is Denzel

Washington who is the center of the action. One of the most charismatic
movie stars of all time and one of our greatest actors, Washington shrewdly
underplays in the lead role. Some critics have not liked that, arguing that
Macbeth is a scene-eating part. Yet as he has shown in films like Training Day
and Fences, Washington is fantastic at conveying an outwardly calm demeanor
while a spiritual and psychological volcano slowly builds to eruption
underneath. He is absolutely magnetic here, equal parts child, monster, and
modern politician. Washington’s understated delivery of the “life is a tale told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing” soliloquy conveys the
dread of someone who has sold his soul for a chance at power—who, like
characters in most noir and horror films, has listened to bad advice from occult
sources. It’s the despair of someone being dragged into hell.

Such stories will always be necessary, but they are rarely told today.