It’s not the word you’d expect — and it appears in this very sentence
Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.
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By saying “it was the owl that shriek’d”, Lady Macbeth is — in a quite deliciously creepy way — implying that everyone already knows what owl she’s talking about.
It is a collusively strange way for a character to talk. And it makes us, the readers, feel slightly alienated from our own sense of ourselves, and our own knowledge of the world. (Man, maybe I do know that owl? What the hell is going on???) It’s very subtle effect, but it sends a little shiver down your spine.
