The Future in the Instant: How Jacobean attitudes to the supernatural were shaped and reflected in popular print and early modern drama, with specific reference to Browne’s A New Almanacke and Prognostication and Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Sharon O'Connor

This article explores a prevalent discourse of the supernatural in Jacobean England including James I’s influence on cultural assumptions, as seen in the widely-disseminated Daniel Browne’s ‘A New Almanacke and Prognostication for the yeare of our Lord God 1621’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. Prognostication thrived in the space between a contemporary Protestant narrative officially dismissive of the supernatural, James I’s own complex relationship with magic and a long legacy of folklore and superstition. Browne’s mix of common sense and astrological prognostications and the ambiguity in Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural and prognostication in Macbeth reflected a society yet to fully accept the Reformation’s strictures on superstition.