As you read Act I, Scene iii of Macbeth, you noted the techniques Shakespeare used to indicate that witches belong to the realm of the supernatural.
The chart below includes three of the techniques that you may have identified. For each technique find a quotation from the text and offer an explanation of how this shows that the witches are supernatural.
Remember that meter is the rhythm of language. The two most common meters in Macbeth are iambic pentameter and trochaic tetrameter. Iambic pentameter creates a rhythm where an unaccented syllable is followed by an accented syllable. It sounds like: ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM. This famous line from Shakespeare’s Richard III is written in iambic pentameter:
a HORSE, a HORSE, my KINGdom FOR a HORSE!
Trochaic tetrameter has the opposite rhythm, starting with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: DUM-da, DUM-da, DUM-da, DUM-da. The fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream often speak in a form trochaic tetrameter, including in this couplet spoken by the character Puck:
SHALL we THEIR fond PAGeant SEE?
LORD what FOOLS these MORtals BE.
Rhyme describes similar sounds at the end of words. Shakespeare often rhymed in couplets with an aa bb cc pattern, where each letter represents the sound of the final word in a line. Here is an example of this pattern from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126:
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power (a)
Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour; (a)
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st (b)
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st; (b)
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, (c)
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, (c)
Shakespeare used meter and rhyme to create certain effects and to distinguish between characters and settings.