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Allusions Of Animals In Macbeth

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In the same way that many people today might perceive crickets as “lucky”, or of black cats as “unlucky”, most people in 16th and 17th century England, when William Shakespeare was alive and writing his plays, had commonly held beliefs about what certain animals represented or symbolized. Shakespeare is still read, performed and loved today because of his seemingly very deep understanding of human nature, as well as his solid grasp on what his audience knew, understood, and could relate to. He used this understanding when writing the play Macbeth, when he utilized allusions to commonly known animals such as owls, ravens, and bears, to convey the creepy tone of the play as well as the impending sense of dread that builds throughout the story. In this way, Shakespeare displays his ability to use commonly held perceptions of different types of animals to convey his tone to people in all classes of society in 16th and 17th century England. One of the animals that Shakespeare alluded to heavily in Macbeth is the owl. While Macbeth is off killing King Duncan, Lady Macbeth says, “It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st good-night,” and then later, in the same scene, Lady Macbeth tells Macbeth, “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry,” (Shakespeare Act II, scene ii). This animal based imagery evokes a sense of creepiness and evil, even in a modern audience, despite the fact that most people think of owls in a more positive light now than they did back then. In Shakespeare’s time, the allusion would have been even more powerful. Although the owl was praised as a symbol of Athena in Ancient Greece, the people in Europe in the Middle Ages thought of it as sinister and shady, due to the fact that it only comes out to hunt in the dark, and its feathers and wings are constructed so that it can fly completely silently. That sort of mindset carried into the 16th and 17th centuries, where the owls still carried a deceitful and wicked connotation (Rijks 1). Since owls were widely perceived in such a way in that time period, people in the audience would assume, possibly even subconsciously, that bad and evil things were happening onstage if there were references being made to owls, the

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