Abstract

Hamlet and Macbeth stand out from Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, and from almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, by the key role that the supernatural plays in them. This paper explores that role. The plays are taken up in chronological order. For each, there is first a description of the general supernatural beliefs of Shakespeare’s original audience, for Hamlet, their beliefs about ghosts, for Macbeth, their beliefs about witches. The next section describes which supernatural material Shakespeare took from his sources and which he added of his own. Then comes a critical summary of the scenes in each play in which the supernatural appears. Finally, there is a survey of the differing views that several leading critics have expressed about the role of the supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth. The paper began with the conviction that a modern audience for the two plays cannot experience them as Shakespeare intended without an informed and sympathetic understanding of what he and his contemporaries believed about ghosts and witches. It arrives at a conviction that those critics who recognize a presence of unexplainable mystery at the heart of the plays do them more justice than those critics who think that everything in them can be explained. …moreless