‘Fear of the Dark’: The Owl in Macbeth

Close Reading Criticism Macbeth Philip K Dick

New readers might find a barn owl an odd choice for a ‘mythological creatures’ themed-week.

Regular readers (and this is my 24^th consecutive Shakespeare Sunday, by the way) will know I treat the community’s theme as an invitation to think, and to have a little fun.

So, no – there’s no denying that an owl isn’t a dragon. It’s not a phoenix. It’s not a unicorn. It’s just a bird, right? In fact, one of over a dozen birds mentioned in Macbeth.

But whilst we, collectively, search for ways in which we can make Shakespeare relevant or (and I need to declare my hatred for the word) ‘relatable’, there are times when gaining a deeper understanding of the plays requires stepping into the time machine labelled (and colour-coded for my students) ‘AO3: Context’.

In other words, let’s look at the owl with fresh – Shakespearean – eyes.

Centuries before street-lighting, in a mostly agricultural country, the night-time world was a very different place.

People rose with the sun, settled for the night when it dropped below the horizon, and even fitful, smelly tallow candles were often a luxury. The nights were long, and the night-time landscape an uncertain, unfamiliar place. When it’s dark, we’re presented with other sensory inputs we can’t easily explain, especially because we’re biologically programmed to prioritise what our eyes tell us.

Anyone who’s been camping will have a sense of what I mean.

[side note: I think that’s why horror stories traditionally embrace darkness. Horror in daylight is almost unbearably graphic. At night, it’s what we can’t see which scares us.]

So what do we do, when we can’t make sense of what we’ve experienced? This is, I think where we parse the term ‘super-natural’, to mean something like ‘beyond our experience of the natural world’.

Shakespeare’s audience would have encountered the owl very differently from us.

A pale shape crossing the night sky.

A skull-like face suspended in darkness.

A cry that sounds more ghostly than avian. Is it a coincidence that children will tell you that ghosts go ‘woooooo’?

I’ll bring my ‘intellectual kitbag’ to the table, as I constantly invite students to. Living in a rural Wales, we hear owls frequently, especially as the nights draw in. There’s still a thrill, every time, to that unearthly sound, even when we can name its source.

So, I believe it’s easy to see how an ordinary creature might acquire an extraordinary, mythological reputation. When you can’t immediately explain it away, something can easily become ‘super-natural’.

To Macbeth, then.

Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night.¹

The owl becomes a herald of death, announcing Duncan’s murder before the deed is done.

I could happily riff for a while about the folklore surrounding owls. I’d probably even include a Bladerunner reference! [links for the curious ² ³ ⁴ ⁵]

But what interests me is not whether Shakespeare believed such things as his compatriots did.

It is that he understood why people do.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. Faced with something we do not fully understand, we rarely leave it unexplained for long. We create stories. Omens. Myths. Gods. Constellations.

A bird becomes a messenger.

A storm becomes a warning.

The stars are frequently blamed for our mistakes. See King Lear, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Richard II, and beyond – even those ‘star cross’d’ lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Perhaps mythology begins not with monsters, but with interpretation.

And perhaps, on a dark enough night, an owl is exactly where such stories start.

OK, you knew I wanted to talk about Bladerunner.

In Philip K Dick’s superb ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ (1968), the owls are the first birds to fall from the skies, signalling ecological collapse. Rick Deckard is offered an owl by the Tyrell Corporation to compensate him for being duped. But, of course, it is a replicant:

There are no owls.

Post Title: ‘Fear of the Dark’, Iron Maiden, Fear of the Dark (1992)

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) ↩︎
Sir A. Geikie, The Birds of Shakespeare (1916), at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73281/pg73281-images.html ↩︎
JE Harting, The Ornithology of Shakespeare (1871), at
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41860/41860-h/41860-h.htm#CHAPTER_III ↩︎
E Phipson, Animal Lore of Shakespeare’s Time (1883), (Glastonbury: The Lost Library, 2011) ↩︎
D Pickering, Cassell’s Dictionary of Superstitions (London: Cassell, 1995) ↩︎

Comments

2 responses to “‘Fear of the Dark’: The Owl in Macbeth”

K Wertheimer Watkins

15.06.2026

“Perhaps,” you say, “mythology begins not with monsters, but with interpretation.
And perhaps, on a dark enough night, an owl is exactly where such stories start.”

Perhaps. As a counter-instance to the owl, let’s consider another wild creature with a reputation of mythic proportions: the wolf. In ancient and medieval times wolves ranged the British Isles in large numbers; by the end of Shakespeare’s life they had been hunted to near-extinction, but still one could not trust to their absence, and their legend was very much alive.

Owlcry in the plays is often blood-chilling and emblematic of fatality, as you so vividly tease out. Owls also turn up in less fearsome form, representing foolishness with a false front of wisdom [1], a “merry note” when one is safe and warm indoors in winter [2], an audience to loud revelry in the wee hours [3], and a perfectly natural sound which one needn’t interpret as anything more [4].

I can well see that the fearsomeness of the owl, as you say, “begins not with monsters, but with interpretation”.

The wolf, however, cannot be taken lightly. It is pitiless, ravenous, relentlessly predatory. It IS a monster, a literal source of unpredictable and bloody disaster. It becomes mythic on the strength of that literal truth.

It’s from all this that I evolve my respectful suggestion to amend the close of your essay to:

” *Sometimes* mythology begins not with monsters, but with interpretation.
And perhaps, on a dark enough night, an owl is exactly where such stories start.”

_Footnotes_
1: like the owl by day, / If he arise, be mocked and wondered at. (Henry VI Part 3 V iv); Good night, my good owl. (Love’s Labors Lost IV i)
2: nightly sings the staring owl / Tu-whit to-who, a merry note (Love’s Labors Lost V ii)
3: Shall we rouse the night owl in a catch? (Twelfth Night II iii)
4: Pray draw near. The night to th’owl and morn to th’ lark less welcome. (Cymbeline III vi); and even Lady Macbeth shrugging off her sense of the owl as a fatal bellman a mere dozen lines later (Macbeth II ii) —
– Didst thou not hear a noise?
—I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.

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1. Abel Guerrero
  
  16.06.2026
  
  Thanks so much for your thoughts, K.
  
  I think that’s two really interesting points you’ve made. I confess, I overlooked other areas in which the owl is viewed somewhat differently, and your examples are excellent ones—not least Lady Macbeth’s apparent indifference to the owl only a few lines later.
  
  The wolf is a fascinating comparison. Of course, one difference between them is that the wolf could inflict physical damage on humans rather than psychological. Some sources I’ve seen suggest it may even have been extinct in England before Shakespeare’s birth, but I like the way you’ve phrased it: “one could not trust to their absence”. They certainly lived on in Scotland and Ireland.
  
  What interests me is whether the wolf represents a different route into mythology. The owl seems to acquire supernatural significance through interpretation; the wolf begins as a genuinely dangerous creature and then accumulates symbolic and supernatural meanings beyond that reality. Perhaps both end up in the same place, but by different paths.
  
  You’ve also led me to the edge of a precipice that tumbles directly into werewolf lore. I’ll try to save that for Hallowe’en.
  
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‘Fear of the Dark’: The Owl in Macbeth

In other words, let’s look at the owl with fresh – Shakespearean – eyes.

Anyone who’s been camping will have a sense of what I mean.

Shakespeare’s audience would have encountered the owl very differently from us.

To Macbeth, then.

And perhaps, on a dark enough night, an owl is exactly where such stories start.

OK, you knew I wanted to talk about Bladerunner.

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