THE SUPERNATURAL IN HAMLET AND MACBETH

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MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Departement of English Studies

Supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth

Bachelor thesis

Brno 2007

Author: Jana WENDROFF Supervisor: Lucie PODROUKOVA, Ph.D.

Bibliography

WENDROFF, Jana. Supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth; bachelor thesis. Brno: Masaryk University, Faculty of education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2007. 42 pages. The supervisor of Bachelor thesis is Mgr. Lucie Podroukov, Ph.D.

Annotation

Hamlet and Macbeth stand out from Shakespeares other great tragedies, and from almost all of Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares 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.Keywords

Supernatural, ghost, witches, belief, Shakespeare, Hamlet, Macbeth

Declaration

I proclaim that this bachelor thesis was done by my own and I used only the materials that are stated in the literature sources.

I agree with the placing of this thesis in the Masaryk University Brno in the library of the Department of English Language and Literature and with the access for studying purposes.

Brno, 16 May 2007

Jana Wendroff

..............................................

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor Lucie Podroukov, Ph.D. for her help and giving

advice connected with the thesis.

ContentsI. INTRODUCTION..6

II. SUPERNATURAL IN HAMLET

ELISABETHAN BELIEF IN GHOSTS..8 SHAKESPEARES SOURCES FOR THE GHOST10

SUPERNATURAL APPEARANCES....11

SELECTED CRITICAL APPROACHES ON HAMLET

A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy....18 J.D Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet....19 R.H.West, Skakespeare and the Outer Mystery..22III. SUPERNATURAL IN MACBETH

ELISABETHAN BELIEF IN WITCHES.....24

SHAKESPEAREAN SOURCES FOR THE WITCHES....26 SUPERNATURAL APPEARANCES ..27 SELECTED CRITICAL APPROACHES ON MACBETH

A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy...35 William Farnham, Shakespeares Tragic frontier....37 R.H.West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery....39IV. CONCLUSION...............40V. WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED.........41 INTRODUCTION

Hamlet and Macbeth are two of Shakespeares greatest tragedies. They are great in theme, in dramatic power, and in poetry. In a less abstract way, they also have much in common. Both open in the country in which the action takes place, an elective monarchy, threatened by foreign invasion, and the threat comes from Norway. The murder of a king is at the center of the plot of both plays. In both plays, the kings murderer, who is a kinsman of his, occupies the throne, but at the end of the drama is punished for his crime by death. Both plays are psychological dramas: the central conflict in each takes place in the mind of the leading character. The action of is based on historical events set in the distant past and somewhere else than England, Hamlets in medieval Denmark, Macbeths in medieval Scotland. In both plays, bloody violence is a prominent ingredient: Horatios description at the end of Hamlet of the events the audience has just witnessed on stage could just as truly apply to Macbeth: carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, . . . accidental judgments, casual slaughter, . . . death put on by cunning and forced cause, . . . purposes mistook falln on thinventors heads (V.2.363-368). But what these two great tragedies have most strikingly in common, and what more obviously than anything else sets them apart from Shakespeares other major tragedies, is that, in both, the supernatural plays a key role. The ghost of the old king in Hamlet and the Weird Sisters in Macbeth are central to the plays plots, they are a major force in determining the two heroes actions, and from the plays opening scenes they are an important element in establishing the plays atmosphere.

One reason why it can safely be said that Hamlet and Macbeth are two of Shakespeares greatest tragedies is that they have been written about more than any other of the tragedies, or even of all of Shakespeares plays. It has been said that Hamlet is the most written-about work in all of Western literature. Given the great interest, the fascination, even, which the two plays have had for scholars and critics down through the years, it is not surprising that every important character, every turn of plot, and every aspect of theme in them has been subject to different interpretations, sometimes wildly different interpretations. This is certainly true of the supernatural elements in the two plays.

The purpose of this paper will be to explore the forms and the roles of the supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth. I will take up the plays in chronological order, first Hamlet, first published in 1603, then Macbeth, first published in 1606. For each of the plays, I will begin by setting out the general beliefs about the supernatural held by Shakespeares original audiences (and, it is reasonable to suppose, probably by Shakespeare himself), for Hamlet, what they believed about ghosts, for Macbeth, what they believed about witches. Then I will describe which material on supernatural Shakespeare took from his historical sources and which he added of his own invention. Taking up the plays themselves, I will briefly summarize and comment on the scenes in each play in which the supernatural makes an appearance of some kind. Finally, I will survey the various and often differing views that several leading scholars and critics have expressed about the role of the supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth, and I will suggest which ones I think more persuasive and why. In all of this, I will be guided by the conviction that a modern audience for the plays, whether reading at home or watching in the theatre, cannot experience them as Shakespeare intended without an informed and sympathetic understanding of what he and his contemporaries believed about ghosts and witches and daggers mysteriously floating in the air.

SUPERNATURAL IN HAMLET

Elizabethan belief in ghosts

Most modern audience of Hamlet probably casually assume what I

casually assumed when I read and saw the play for the first time: that Shakespeares original audience, and probably Shakespeare himself, believed in ghosts. We automatically tend to think that people four hundred years ago were a great deal more superstitious than we ourselves are. Our gypsy fortune tellers, endless appetite for ghost movies, and the horoscope columns of our newspapers and magazines by themselves suggest that maybe they were not. We probably never stop to wonder what

believed in ghosts really means.

John Dover Wilsons book What Happens in Hamlet suggests, however, that to ask what the Elizabethans believed about ghosts is like asking what modern Europeans believe about God. The answer in both cases is, not one thing but a number of things. Spiritualism . . . formed one of the major interests of the [Elizabethan] period, Wilson says (65). It is not, therefore, surprising, that where there

is a lot of interest there is also difference of opinion.

Wilson says that in Shakespeares time, and for a century before and after, there were basically three schools of thought . . . on the question of ghosts (61). English Catholics, who were a minority of the population but an important (and persecuted) minority, generally believed that ghosts actually existed and were the spirits of the dead. They believed that such spirits came from Purgatory, the vaguely located place between heaven and hell where the souls of those who in life were not good enough to go directly to heaven, and not bad enough to deserve hell, went to be cleansed of their sins and so made fit to enter heaven. Purgatory comes from Latin purgo, which means to cleanse or purify. It was a place of temporary suffering and expiation (Concise Oxford Dictionary). Catholics believed that ghost spirits coming from Purgatory were allowed to return . . . for some special purpose, which it was the duty of the pious to further if possible, in order that the wandering soul might find rest (Wilson, 62).

English Protestants, who were the countrys religious majority and belonged to its established or official Church, generally believed like Catholics that ghosts of the dead actually existed. But since, as Protestants, they did not believe in the existence of Purgatory, they believed that ghosts came either from heaven or from hell. Those from heaven came with good intentions and those from hell with bad intentions. While some ghosts might be angels in spirit form, Protestants thought that ghosts were in general nothing but devils, who assumed . . . the form of departed friends or relatives, in order to work bodily or spiritual harm upon those to whom they appeared (Wilson, 62). The king of England himself, James I, in 1597 (six years before he came to the English throne) published a learned treatise, Daemonologie, that set out this orthodox Protestant view of ghosts and that helped to prolong its life in England for another hundred years.Although just about every English man and woman of Shakespeares time was a Christian, either Protestant or Catholic, not everyone believed in the real existence of ghosts. James Is Daemonologie was in fact written as an orthodox Protestant rebuttal of the ideas put forward in two works published thirteen years earlier, in 1584, Reginald Scots Discoverie of Witchcraft and Discourse upon Devils and Spirits. Scot believed in the existence of spirits but dismissed ghosts as either the illusion of melancholic minds or flat knavery on the part of some rogue (Wilson, 64). The fact that King James felt the need to rebut Scot, and that Scots books were publicly burned by the hangman at the kings order (Wilson, 64), suggests that enough people found his ideas attractive to cause the authorities concern. Scholars agree that Scots books on spirits and witches were one of Shakespeares sources for both Hamlet and Macbeth.

Those who believed in ghosts, whether they were Protestant or Catholic, also generally believed that ghosts were insubstantial, that though they were real and not hallucinations, they only seemed to have a bodily form that could be sensed by touch. (How ghosts could be insubstantial and real at the same time is something that maybe the Elizabethans were no more clear about than I am.) They further believed that ghosts could not speak unless addressed by some mortal, and that they could be safely addressed only by scholars, since only scholars would know the Latin formulas that would protect them from harm if the ghost were an evil one (Wilson, 75-76). And, according to Wilson, all those of Shakespeares time who wrote about ghosts, whether they believed in them or not, agreed that melancholics, people suffering from depression, were especially likely to be visited by one.Shakespeares sources for the Ghost

The basic Hamlet story was known to Shakespeares time, although not necessarily to Shakespeare himself, through two works: the Latin Historia Danica (History of Denmark) by the Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus, which was written around 1200 but was first printed in 1514; and the Histoires Tragiques (Tragic Histories) of 1574 by Francois de Belleforest, which had been translated into English by 1608 but may have been known to Shakespeare some time before that in the original French (Kenneth Muir, Shakespeares Sources, 110-112). Whether Shakespeare knew either of these works or is not known. Nevertheless scholars agree that his immediate sources for Hamlet were two: Thomas Kyds bloody revenge tragedy from around 1589, The Spanish Tragedy (first published in 1592), which was one of the most popular plays of its time and started a fashion of revenge drama that lasted for several decades, and a lost play from the 1590s on the same subject as Hamlet, which scholars refer to as the Ur-Hamlet (original Hamlet) and which may have been written by Shakespeare himself but more likely was written by Kyd (Muir, 110). Whoever the author was, he got his basic plot from either the Historia Danica or the Histoires Tragiques or from

both (Muir, 111).

There are no ghosts in the story of Hamlet in either the Historia Danica or the Histoires Tragiques, but there is one in The Spanish Tragedy, so that we may be sure that the author of the Ur-Hamlet, imitating The Spanish Tragedy, invented . . . the ghost for his telling the Hamlet story. He also invented The Mousetrap and the madness and death of Ophelia(Muir, 112). It is known from popular jokes of the time that the ghost in the Ur-Hamlet cried out like an oyster-wife: Hamlet, revenge! and although it is not known for certain whose ghost it was or what was its role in the play, probably they were very much like what they are in Shakespeares Hamlet (Muir, 110).

The plot of The Spanish Tragedy is the reverse of the Hamlet plot, a father revenging the murder of his son, and the ghost in the story is not the ghost of the murdered son but of a Spanish nobleman. This ghost, accompanied from the underworld by the Spirit of Revenge, is a spectator of the plays bloody events and not an actor in them (Muir, 116-117). Shakespeares great innovation was to give the traditional stage ghost vitality (West, 65). He accomplished this by making it recognizably Christian--the Ghost comes from Purgatory and not from the classical Hades, like Kyds ghost and many others before and after--by involving it in the plays action, and by creating a spirit that is an epitome of the ghost lore of his time as described by the ages leading ghost authorities, Reginald Scot in his Discovery of Witchcraft with its Discourse upon Devils and Spirits (1584), and Ludwig Lavater in his Of Ghostes and Spirites walking by Nyght (1572, 1596) (West, 64-65; Muir, 121; Wilson, 53, 63). What Wilson calls this unique creature of [Shakespeares] imagination is not a bystander but a character in the play in the fullest sense of the term (Wilson, 53, 52).

Supernatural appearances in HamletThe supernatural is not only a key element in the plot and atmosphere of Hamlet and Macbeth; it is a key element even though it appears in each of the plays only a very few times and most of its appearances are not for very long. One way Shakespeares skill as a playwright could be measured is by how much he makes each of those appearances count in the action and in the audiences imagination. He gets the most out

of them dramatically.

In Hamlet, the supernatural makes even fewer appearances than in Macbeth and it takes only a single form, as the ghost of the dead King Hamlet, Prince Hamlets father. Out of the plays total of twenty-two scenes, the Ghost appears in just four (I.1, I.4, I.5, III.4), and in two of them (I.1and I.4) it does not even speak. Of the plays almost four thousand lines, the Ghost speaks just ninety-one, which does not seem like much for such a key figure until you remember that it is speaking from the dead, whose words by their nature generally carry more weight than the words of the living, especially when spoken by a king.

In the opening scene of the play, set at midnight on the ramparts of the kings castle at Elsinore, it appears to the two sentinels, Barnardo and Marcellus, and to Hamlets friend and fellow-student Horatio, who has been asked to come to witness what the other two had witnessed on two previous nights. At first, Horatio is skeptical about the sentinels report of a ghost looking like the dead king, but the Ghosts sudden appearance shocks him into belief. The two sentinels urge Horatio to speak to it. This is what Shakespeares audience would have supposed him better qualified to do than they are since, as an educated man, he would know what kind of language to use in addressing a spirit and the verbal formulas that will protect him in case it is a spirit from hell that can harm him. Horatio calls on the Ghost to speak--what art thou that usurpst this time of night . . . Speak, speak. I charge thee, speak (46-51)--but instead of

answering, the ghost disappears.

The three men agree on the Ghosts exact resemblance to the dead king, Horatio gives his opinion that this bodes some strange eruptions to our state (69), and then, in answer to Marcelluss question why the country is mobilizing for war (70-79), he explains that Denmark is threatened with invasion by Fortinbras, a Norwegian prince who aims to win back territory that his father had lost to King Hamlet some time before in single combat (80-107). It is hard to believe that two professional soldiers, Marcellus and Barnardo, should not know of the reason for their countrys mobilization, and therefore Marcelluss question is nothing more than a clumsy device of Shakespeares to get in some important plot information. Horatio suggests that the ghosts appearance

is to warn Denmark of the threat.

At this moment, the Ghost suddenly reappears. Horatio confronts it and, agitated, asks whether he can do anything to comfort it, if it is trying to warn the country of danger, or if it is restless because it buried treasure during its lifetime as Shakespeares contemporaries thought this was one of the reasons why a ghost might come to haunt people. The cock crows and the Ghost vanishes without answering. Horatio advises Barnardo and Marcellus that they tell young Hamlet what they have just experienced, and expresses his belief that this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him (170-171).

The resentment and bitterness towards his uncle--and now his stepfather and his king--and his mother that Hamlet expresses in the following scene (I.2) prepares the audience for the Ghosts shocking revelations in its next appearance on stage. In Act I., scene 4, Horatio has brought Hamlet to the castles ramparts to see if the Ghost will reappear. He has told Hamlet of what he and the sentinels had witnessed the night before (I.2.189-243), and Hamlet has vowed that

If it assume my noble fathers person,Ill speak to it though hell itself should gapeAnd bid me hold my peace.(I.2.244-246)

To himself he has expressed a belief that All is not well and a suspicion of foul play (I.2.255-256). The way hell enters Hamlets thoughts here shows that from the very first he recognizes the possibility that the Ghost may intend to do him harm rather than

good, that it is a bad ghost.

I.4 opens with Hamlet commenting scornfully to Horatio on the kings noisy and vulgar partying (it is a custom / More honored in the breach than the observance [15-16]). His hostility towards Claudius and his contempt could not be plainer. Just as he comes to the end of his long and bitter denunciation, the ghost appears. Hamlet is immediately struck by its resemblance to his dead father, but at the same time shows that he is aware that it can be a spirit of health or goblin damned, that its purpose in coming can be wicked or charitable, that it may be accompanied either by airs from heaven or blasts from hell (40-42). He does not mention the Catholic Purgatory, so that up to this point at least he seems to be taking the Protestant view of ghosts, that they may come either from heaven or from hell and from nowhere in between.

Hamlet frantically calls on the ghost to tell why it has come and what should we do? (57) The Ghost beckons him to follow (stage direction, 57) and, showing a great deal of courag , as it takes courage to follow a ghost, especially when you know that it may be a spirit from hell, Hamlet does. All of this in spite of Horatio and Marcellus effort to hold him back and Horatios warning that it may intend to lead him to his death or to drive him mad. Horatio and Marcellus follow after Hamlet, with Marcellus famously remarking that Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (40).The Ghost commands Hamlets attention, saying that it must shortly return to sulphrous and tormenting flames, which at first sounds as though the flames must be the fires of hell. But then it goes on to identify itself as thy fathers spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires,Till the foul crimes done in my days of natureAre burnt and purged away.(I.5.9-13)

and this sounds just like a description not of hell but of Purgatory.

Abruptly, the Ghost orders Hamlet to avenge his fathers foul and most unnatural murder (25). To Hamlets horror, it goes on to relate how Claudius first seduced Gertrude (my most seeming-virtuous queen [46]) and then poisoned his brother: Thus was I sleeping by a brothers hand / Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched (74-75), all this without King Hamlet having had the chance to confess his sins and receive the churchs last rites that would have helped settle his account with

God (76-77).

The Ghost again commands Hamlet to revenge (81), but this time puts the emphasis not on the murder but on the adultery:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark beA couch for luxury and damned incest.(82-83)

And it goes out of its way to warn Hamlet not to harm his mother in the process but to leave her to be judged by heaven and her own conscience (84-88). This seems to suggest that the Ghost does not believe that Gertrude was a party to her husbands murder and was only guilty of adultery. Urging Hamlet to Remember me (91), the

Ghost vanishes.

Hamlet passionately agrees to fulfill the ghosts commandment (105). When Horatio and Marcellus catch up with him, he first confuses them with wild and whirling words (133), then declares that it is an honest ghost (138; that is, a genuine spirit and not a devil), and finally makes them swear to keep the events of the night secret, with the Ghost echoing from Beneath (that is, from the cellarage [154], the space underneath the stage), Swear (158). The scene, and Act I, ends with Hamlet swearing Horatio and Marcellus not to give him away even if he perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on, that is, to pretend to be mad (174-175). The ghosts echo from beneath the stage, Swear by his sword (164), is the last he is heard from until III.4, the scene in Queen Gertrudes boudoir, fifteen hundred lines later. A great many things happen between this scene and the Ghosts next appearance in the play, which is also its last. There is the meeting of Hamlet and Ophelia which Polonius has arranged in order to demonstrate to Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is, literally, mad with love for his daughter. It is hard to know whether Hamlets strange behavior at this meeting is really part of his earlier announced antic disposition, or is at least partly genuine and the result of real disturbance of mind, it is very convincing. After all, he has had a lot of upsetting things to deal with and he is depressed. There is Claudiuss anxious setting-on of Hamlets former friends and schoolmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on Hamlet to try and discover what is behind his stepsons transformation (II.2.5). There is Hamlets arrangement with the troupe of visiting players to perform The Murder of Gonzago, whose plot mirrors the Ghosts account of King Hamlets murder. Hamlet suggests that he inserts some dozen or sixteen lines so that, by watching Claudiuss response, he will know whether or not the Ghost was telling the truth. Whether it was a good ghost or a bad ghost. Most important of all, there is Claudiuss guilty reaction at the moment when the Player Lucianus Pours the poison in [the Player Kings] ears (stage direction, III.2.256), and Hamlets moment of certainty: O good Horatio, Ill take the ghosts word for a thousand pound (III.2.281). At this point, the many members of Shakespeares audience who would have fully understood Hamlets doubts about the Ghosts nature, and shared them, would also have been satisfied that it is in fact an honest ghost. And of course a modern audience, ignorant of Elizabethan ghost beliefs,

is satisfied, too.

The Ghosts last appearance comes in the middle of Hamlets feverish interview with his mother in her boudoir (III.4). It is different from the others because only Hamlet sees and hears the Ghost. His mother does not, and she understand the speech he addresses to the Ghost as further proof of his madness. Is the audience supposed to think that this appearance is a hallucination, a product of Hamlets melancholy, and the spirit of Act I, which Horatio, Barnardo, and Marcellus also see, a real ghost? Or has Shakespeare simply been careless?

The stage time between Hamlets confirmation of Claudiuss guilt and the Ghosts appearance in the boudoir scene is short but it is filled with drama. Hamlet has been called to see his mother, first by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (III.2.324-325) and then by Polonius (III.2.367-368). Claudius, who is now aware of the danger Hamlet represents, has called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort Hamlet to England (III.3.1-7), making it sound as though the reason for his order is the threat of Hamlets madness to his own safety and not Hamlets knowledge of his crime. Polonius has gone off to hide behind a tapestry in the queens apartment so that he might overhear her meeting with her son. And the audience witnesses Claudius kneeling in solitary prayer, trying to atone before God for his sin and knowing that he fails, and Hamlet, who has happened to enter, passing by the chance to kill his uncle and revenge his father out of concern that Claudius, unlike King Hamlet, would die confessed and so go to heaven (III.3.36-98). There is even more drama than this when Polonius overhears Hamlets threatening speech to his mother and from behind the arras echoes her cry of alarm, causing Hamlet, who thinks it is Claudius and that his life is in danger, to thrust his sword through the tapestry and kill the old man (III.4.21-33). Before the audience can catch its breath, Hamlet processes into a fit of bitter accusation against his mother over her adultery (41-88). It is at the height of this outpouring of accusation and verbal abuse, and as a kind of climax to the series of dramatic events that have just taken place on stage, that the Ghost suddenly enters. The long span of time since it last appeared makes its entrance seem that much more explosive.

This time it is dressed not in battle armor but in his nightgown, that is, in a dressing gown (stage direction, 101).What this change in dress is supposed to signify is hard to guess. Does the Ghost dress according to the occasion and setting, with armor being thought as much out of place in a wifes boudoir as a dressing gown would be on the castles ramparts? And this time it speaks only a very few lines. The first two reproach Hamlet for not yet having carried out the Ghosts command to revenge his fathers murder:

Do not forget. This visitationIs but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.(III.4.110-111)

Clearly the Ghost has been keeping an eye on things. The Ghosts unhappiness with Hamlet here may strike an audience as unfair. So far as the audience knows, the only opportunity for revenge that Hamlet has had, once he became convinced of the truth of the Ghosts story, was when Claudius was praying. The Ghosts rebuke of Hamlet must be based on its knowing of Hamlets failure to take advantage of that opportunity. But the audience knows that Hamlet had a very good reason for not avenging his fathers murder at that moment, a reason which the Ghost would have to have approved of (just as, earlier, Hamlet had a very good reason for testing the truth of what the Ghost said). Hamlet, who is depressed, may blame himself for being slow in carrying out the Ghosts dread command (III.4.108), but the audience knows better. He has, in fact, been very active, while taking sensible precautions. To make sense of all this, the Ghost, from Purgatory, knows what Hamlet does or does not do but, unlike the audience, cannot enter into Hamlets mind to know why he does or does not do it. Admittedly, this calles for a lot of mental gymnastics on the part of the audience. No sooner has the ghost chided Hamlet than it directs him to observe his mothers bewilderment and to comfort her:

But look, amazement on thy mother sits. O step between her and her fighting soul!Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. Speak to her, Hamlet. (III.4.112-115)

Is Gertrudes bewilderment over Hamlets speaking to vacancy [III.4.117] or over his bitter accusations, or both? These are the Ghosts last words in the play and its last appearance, if it is an appearance and not a hallucination. It remains on stage, though (or, if the director has chosen to have it speak from the cellarage again, at least before the eye of Hamlets imagination), for another few minutes, first glaring (Look you, how pale he glares [125]) and then by its expression calling on Hamlet to be merciful to his mother (127-129). For the rest of Hamlet it will not even be mentioned.

Selected critical approaches to the supernatural in Hamlet

A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy

A.C. Bradleys Shakespearean Tragedy, a study of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, was first published more than a hundred years ago, in 1904, and its importance can be judged by the fact that in the Cambridge New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, first published in 1971, the two essays on Shakespeare criticism over the centuries are titled Shakespeare criticism: Dryden to Bradley and Shakespeare criticism since Bradley. M.A. Shaaber, the author of the first of the essays, speaks of Bradleys influence as very great and deserved (247). Stanley Wells, the author of the second, calls Shakespearean Tragedy a great book and a landmark (249)

Shaaber describes Bradley as a critic whose strength was the psychological analysis of Shakespeares characters, and who assumed"that everything in a play is explicable, that Shakespeare knew all the answers, and that we can discover them too if we apply our minds with sufficient discernment and sympathy. He assumes that Shakespeare would allow no part to inconsistency or chance or unreason in the scheme of a play and labours to eliminate them wherever he finds them. When Shakespeare offers insufficient explanation Bradley supplies what is wanting" (247). In this respect, Bradley sounds like just the opposite of Robert H. West, who regards unreason and the inexplicable as part of the essence of Shakespeares tragic effect in both Hamlet and Macbeth.

While Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy has a great deal to say about the Witches in Macbeth, his discussion of King Hamlets ghost is short. It is based on his recognition of what he calls some vaster power that lies behind all that happens or is done in Hamlet (140). We do not define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it (140-141).Bradley suggests that this feeling of a supreme power or destiny is religious in some way, and he thinks that it is as much a part of Macbeth as of Hamlet (141). It is another reason why, he ways, the two plays top the list of Shakespeares plays in general esteem (143). In Hamlet, he thinks that one of the principal ways Shakespeare creates this feeling is by making the Ghost so majestical a phantom (142). With its grave, impersonal manner and its measured and solemn speech,"the Ghost affects the imagination not simply as the apparition of a dead king who desires the accomplishment of his purposes, but also as the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice . . . a reminder or a symbol of the connection of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance (141).

Carrying through his idea of Hamlets religious character, Bradley sees the action of the play framed in a way that is an intimation . . . that the apparent failure of Hamlets life is not the ultimate truth concerning him: a soul in torment coming from Purgatory (Bradley seems to accept without question that the Ghost does come from Purgatory) opens the play, and in the plays last scene a soul at rest is accompanied by angels to heaven (142).

John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlethas been reprinted many times. Like Bradleys Shakespearean Tragedy, it still seems to be an influential book. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English describes it as an academic best-seller. Wilson accepts that the ghost of King Hamlet comes from Purgatory and so is Catholic, though he believes that otherwise the world of Hamlet is a Protestant world. An established Protestant Church was a feature of [Shakespeares] Denmark, just as it was a feature of Shakespeares England (69-70). Wilson does not try to explain this inconsistency, which Shakespeares original audiences of believing Protestants and Catholics probably noticed more than a modern one does. The only obvious explanation seems to be that the inconsistency did not bother Shakespeare and that Shakespeare did not think it would bother the people in the theatre enough to matter. He could not have guessed how much it might bother academics hundreds of years later.

Wilson emphasizes the powerful impression that Hamlets first meeting with the Ghost would have made on the members of Shakespeares audience, all of whom, as believing Christians of their time, lived on much more familiar terms with the supernatural than most of us do (72). Of course the Ghost makes a powerful impression on Prince Hamlet too, though Wilson does not seem to think it worth pointing out that Hamlets hysterical exclamations as soon as the Ghost leaves the stage in Act I, Scene 3 (92-106) are prompted by what the Ghost has revealed to him and not at all by the amazing fact that he has just seen and spoken with a spirit from the dead. Even when he first meets the Ghost earlier in the scene, Hamlets only expression of wonder or fear is a single line: Angels and ministers of grace defend us! (I.4.39). Can it be supposed from this that the average Elizabethan, who was used to thinking of the supernatural as only next door to everyday reality, would have reacted to meeting a ghost with as little amazement?In the first part of his discussion of the Ghost, Wilson wants to show that Hamlets doubts about whether it is from heaven or not at least partly explain the procrastination that many critics before thought Hamlet is guilty of (73-75). Hamlet assuredly has more excuse than any critic has yet perceived, and the excuse at least provides a strong motive for the introduction of the Gonzago play, which previous critics had seen as a clumsy device of Hamlets to put off acting decisively (75). Wilson bases his argument on the fact that Hamlets actions follow step by step what contemporary experts recommended for dealing with ghosts. In delaying his revenge until he knows from Claudiuss behaviour at the play that the Ghosts story is true, Hamlet is only showing common sense

Wilson pays special attention to what he calls the cellarage scene in Act I, where the Ghost, from under the stage, echoes Hamlets command to Horatio and Marcellus to swear to keep what they have witnessed secret. Wilson argues that until this point Hamlet has had no doubt that the ghost is what it claims to be and that what it has told him about his fathers murder is true. It is when the Ghost starts behaving like a conventional Elizabethan underground demon, Wilson says (83), that Hamlet begins to have doubts, doubts which would have been shared by Shakespeares audience who would have known all about ghost behaviour and ghost identification. At the end of the first act, the Elizabethan audience could be no more certain of the honesty of the Ghost and of the truth of the story it had related, than the perplexed hero himself. Thus for the first half of the play the character that was on trial with them was not Hamlets but the Ghosts (84).

Wilson has several ideas about the Ghosts appearance in the bedroom scene. He thinks that by this point in the play Hamlet is guilty of procrastination and that the Ghost is right to scold Hamlet for thy almost blunted purpose (III.4.111; 250). But this makes sense only if what Wilson himself calls one of the minor points of contemporary ghost theory (250, note 2) is true: that angels and spirits cannot read the minds of humans. Because if they can (and it seems to me that a modern audience automatically assumes they can), the Ghost would know that when Hamlet in the prayer scene let pass the only opportunity he had of killing Claudius after making certain of his guilt, he did so for a very good reason that the Ghost would have to have approved of (A villain kills my father, and for that / I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven. / Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge, I.3.77-79)

The Ghost appears in Gertrudes bedroom when it does not just Your tardy son to chide (III.4.106), Wilson says, but because at that very moment Hamlet in his hysterical verbal attack on his mother seems about to attack her physically, in direct violation of the ghosts command in Act I (Leave her to heaven, I.5.84-88). Wilsons really interesting idea (though one that does not persuade me) is that the Ghost appears at that moment not only to keep Hamlet from physically attacking his mother, but to keep him from blurting out to her that her second husband was the murderer of her first. Hamlets stinging words have already reduced the Queen to a pitiable condition (250). The Ghost fears, Wilson says, that the truth of King Hamlets death would be too much for Gertrudes weak constitution to bear (Conceit [imagination] in weakest bodies strongest works, II.4.114).

His tender solicitude for the Queen who has so greatly wronged him is already evident at his first interview with Hamlet; and the pathetic line

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,

is an epitome of all the excuses that blindly chivalrous husbands have found for erring wives since the beginning of time. (251)

Wilson himself seems to have very little pity for the queen. He allows that it is impossible that she knew of the murder all the time (252), but he also says that had she not consented to adultery with Claudius, King Hamlet might still have been alive and the bed of Denmark undefiled (251). And I suppose this is true, but then we would not have had Hamlet either.

Robert H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery Whether the ghost of King Hamlet is a Protestant ghost and comes either from heaven or hell, a Catholic ghost coming from heaven, hell, or Purgatory, or is neither Protestant nor Catholic but a hallucination of Hamlets troubled mind, are questions that many writers on Hamlet have tried to answer. Robert H. West in Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery thinks that King Hamlets ghost is an ambiguous ghost (56). He argues that, according to Elizabethan ghost beliefs and to what Shakespeare actually wrote, there is equally good evidence for claiming that the Ghost is a Catholic ghost, a paganesque ghost or a devil (61). What is more, West says, Shakespeare intended the Ghosts nature to be ambiguous. Shakespeare knowingly mixed the evidence and did it for the sake of dramatic impact (63).

West sets out the ambiguities of King Hamlets ghost. It says that it comes from Purgatory, but the convincing evidence of Claudiuss guilt (his behavior at The Mousetrap) is not necessarily convincing evidence that the Ghosts claim of where it has come from is true. To tell a truth as part of a wicked and deceitful design was, as Banquo and innumerable pneumatologists [ghost experts] warn, a thing devils often did. So perhaps the ghost is a devil (61).

West points out that the Ghosts pleas to Hamlet to be merciful to his mother are consistent with orthodox Catholic belief of Shakespeares time about how spirits from Purgatory behave, but that the Ghosts commands of revenge are not. Orthodox Catholic belief did not allow for a ghost from Purgatory to call for vengeance, and in other Elizabethan plays there are no ghosts that may be supposed saved souls that behave in anything like this bloodthirsty way (60). On the other hand, West says, although it was believed that the devil might, as Banquo says in Macbeth (I.3.124-126), tell us truths . . . to betrays . . . In deepest consequence, no spirit expert of Shakespeares time thought that one of the devils tricks was to prescribe Christian forbearance and an untainted mind, as the Ghost does(61). So maybe the Ghost is, after all, a good spirit. Wests point is that an audience in the theatre just does not know the truth about the Ghost with any certainty, and that Shakespeare did not want it to know.As a dramatist, Shakespeare recognized that making things too clear works against dramatic impact and mystery. Decisive explanation of supernatural figures tends to reduce their effect of awe and mystery; the indecisive answers Hamlet provides to the standard questions it raises tend rather to create awe and mystery (65). The way West sees it, scholars and critics have generally taken the wrong approach. By trying to see how Shakespeares representation of the Ghost fits with the various ghost beliefs of his time point for point, they have been working at the puzzle of the Ghost (66) and are fairly certain to end with a confusing failure (57). What they should be doing instead of treating the ghost as a puzzle is to recognize that we cannot rationally fathom the ghost (68), and that the Ghosts dramatic power comes from that very fact. Like the real-life ghost experiences claimed by some of Shakespeares contemporaries, the great and the not so great (65), and believed by many to be true, the Ghost of King Hamlet is never explicable (66). It is not an intellectual puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be dramatically experienced. It is one expression of what West calls the outer mystery, the ultimately unknowable world that exists apart from human thoughts and feelings and which is the indispensable background to tragedys exploration of the inner mystery, the ultimately unknowable human heart (1, 4-5).

SUPERNATURAL IN MACBETH

Elizabethan belief in witches Like the rest of the world that is now Christian, England believed in witches and practiced witchcraft long before it believed in and practiced Christianity. After Christianity came to England in the sixth century, witch belief and witchcraft practice were forced underground, but the old faith did not at all die out. Although witchcraft was treated by the authorities as a crime, it was treated as a relatively minor crime, a crime against man, committed, for example, to get even with an enemy or to get possession of a neighbors property. It was not regarded by the Church as a serious threat to itself (Rossell Hale Robbins, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, 160-161). In the later sixteenth century, witchcraft in England started to be looked on differently and to be punished more severely, as a crime against God (Robbins, 161), just as it had for some time before been regarded and treated on the Continent by the Catholic Inquisition. It has been estimated that at least 200,000 supposed witches were put to death [in Europe] during the witch hunt between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, and many more badly tortured, all in the name of the Christian Church [Moore, 141]. During Shakespeares lifetime, witchcraft accusations in Protestant England reached a peak, and those found guilty were regularly punished by torture or death or both, though the scale and cruelty of punishment, bad as they were, were not nearly as bad as in France and Germany. Even if someone believed to be a witch was not prosecuted and punished under the law, he or she often suffered intense persecution within the community.

Severe punishment was justified because a convicted witch was believed to have made an agreement with the Devil to deny the Christian God (Robbins, 550). But witches were believed to engage in and were found guilty of all kinds of other wickedness and mischief: raising a storm to ruin crops; casting a spell to make someone sick; traveling great distances on what was called a familiar spirit that might take the form of a pig or a goat or a cat (this was a specifically English and Scottish contribution to witch theory) or, like the First Witch in Macbeth (I.3.8), traveling in a sieve; sucking the blood of a neighbors child or causing the child to behave strangely. There are many parts of the world today where people still believe things just like this and where cruel punishment for supposed witchcraft is not always restricted by law.

Much of what is true of the Elizabethans beliefs about ghosts is also true of their beliefs about witches: the attitude toward witchcraft in Shakespeares day was anything but single, and anything but overwhelmingly credulous (Moore, 153). As with ghosts, probably the majority of Elizabethans from all ranks of life did believe in the actual existence of witches; there were some who did not, and the skeptics tended to come from the educated classes. As with ghosts, even among those who did believe, not everyone believed in the same way. The word witch had a . . . double meaning (Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier,97).

Some believed that witches were essentially tragic beings who had sold themselves to the devil and had the demonic powers which they claimed to have, the power to command nature, to see into the future, to harm people or livestock by the use of magical charms (Curry, 61), but who themselves were human and not supernatural beings (Farnham, 97). Others believed that witches not only had supernatural powers resulting from their bargain with the devil, but were themselves supernatural, devils or fiends or demons or furies from hell who were able to take on human form in order to deceive and harm their victims (Farnham, 97)

Although witches could be of both sexes, the worst kind of witch was thought to be female, and there were many more women accused of witchcraft than men. And although female witches could be young or old, in the popular mind they were traditionally pictured as old women, ugly and wrinkled (Robbins, 542-543), as they still are today, probably at least in part because of how Shakespeare represents them in Macbeth. (In a somewhat similar way, by his representation of fairies in A Midsummer Nights Dream as diminutive, merry sprites, Shakespeare single-handed altered the whole tradition of the English fairy, which until 1594 had been of fairies as full-sized mischiefmakers and evildoers, sometimes indistinguishable from witches [Moore, 144, 146; Farnham, 94].)

Shakespeares sources for the Weird SistersShakespeares source for the Weird Sisters was Raphael Holinsheds historical Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which was his basic source for almost everything else in Macbeth. (It was an important factual source for most of his history plays as well.) The Chronicles was first published in 1577 and was one of the leading historical works of its time. Shakespeare is believed to have used an enlarged edition published in 1587 (Muir, 168; Cambridge Guide, 470).

Just as he did with other characters and events in Holinsheds chronicle of early Scottish history, Shakespeare freely combined various parts of Holinsheds account of the weird sisters (Holinshed did not capitalize the name) and just as freely made changes for dramatic effect (Muir, 175). In Holinshed, the Sisters are not called witches and are not disgusting old women (Farnham, 82). In Shakespeare, of course, they are. Holinshed calls the women the weird sisters but he leaves open the question of whether they are supernatural beings or not, whether they are good or evil, and whether they are the voices of destiny, as weird (Old English fate) suggests, or else some nymphes or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophecie by their necromanticall science, because everie thing came to passe as they had spoken (Farnham, 82-83).

The prophecies Shakespeares Weird Sisters make to Macbeth in Act IV, Scene 1, in Holinshed are told to him by certeine wizzards, in whose words he put great confidence and whom he has consulted throughout his reign as king, and by a certeine witch, whom hee had in great trust (Farnham, 83). Shakespeare does away with all of these characters and gives their roles to the Weird Sisters. Shakespearesshow of eight Kings that climaxes the Weird Sisters Act IV prophecies is based on a long genealogy in Holinshed that unhistorically traces Fleances descendents down to King James himself, whose claim to have descended from Banquo and whose interest in witchcraft are both thought to have turned Shakespeare to the story of Macbeth in the first place (Muir, 167).

Scholars have identified other likely or possible sources for Shakespeares conception of the Weird Sisters. One is King Jamess Daemonologie, published in 1597 when James was still king of Scotland only. Kenneth Muir in Shakespeares Sources says of Daemonologie that it has clearly left its mark on all those scenes in which the weird sisters appear (178). As examples, he cites its telling of how witches can foretell the future, but in strictly limited ways, and how witches are the devils means to creepe in credite with Princes by telling half-truths, and then deceiv[ing] them in the end with a tricke once for all; I meane the everlasting perdition of their soul and body (178). Muir suggests that Shakespeares ideas about witches may also have been shaped by Reginald Scots Discovery of Witchcraft of 1584 (178), just as his ideas about ghosts were influenced by Scots Discourse upon Devils and Spirits.Another possible influence was a short play in Latin and English, Tres Sibyllae (Three Prophetesses), by an Oxford University scholar named Matthew Gwinn, written in honor of a visit by King James to the university in the summer of 1605 (Muir, 167-168). In the play, which is based on Holinsheds Chronicles, three boys dressed as sibyls in turn hailed the king by all his titles as a member of a royal house which, as was foretold to Banquo by prophetic sisters, should never come to an end (Farnham, 86). It is believed that Shakespeare either attended this royal performance or at least had heard about it, and modeled the Weird Sisters greeting of Macbeth in Act I, Scene 3 on it (Muir, 167-168). Here as everywhere else, Shakespeare took the raw material of history and experience and, like every imaginative writer worthy of the name, freely shaped it to suit his entertainment and artistic purposes.

Supernatural appearances in MacbethJust as with Hamlet, the supernatural appears from the very beginning of the action of Macbeth and, even more than in Hamlet, it sets the tone and atmosphere for the whole play. But while in Hamlet it takes just one form, the Ghost, in Macbeth it takes several. The three Weird Sisters are by far the most prominent, and I will be concentrating on them. But there is also the dagger floating in the air that appears to Macbeth just before he enters King Duncans bedchamber to murder him (II.1.33-44); there is the voice that cries to Macbeth: Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep (II.2.38-39); and there is the ghost of the murdered Banquo that appears to Macbeth at the banquet in III.4, but to no one else. As with the ghost of King Hamlet that appears to Hamlet in the boudoir scene but not to his mother, it is possible to argue that the floating dagger, the voice out of the dark, and Banquos ghost are not real but hallucinations, products of Macbeths overactive imagination and guilty conscience. But as with the Ghost of the opening scenes of Hamlet, the Weird Sisters, who are seen and spoken to by Banquo and Macbeth and are known to the world for their more than mortal knowledge (as Macbeths letter to Lady Macbeth shows), are really and truly there.

If the Hecates scene is not counted (III.5), which most scholars agree was written into the play by someone else than Shakespeare, the Sisters are in just three scenes of Macbeth, I.1, I.3, and IV.1, they speak altogether just sixty-three lines out of the plays total of two thousand. (Macbeth is by far the shortest of Shakespeares tragedies, is half the length of Hamlet, and except for The Comedy of Errors is the shortest of all of Shakespeares plays [Orgel, xxx].) Yet it is impossible to think of Macbeth without thinking of them.

They are the first characters on stage in the play. Even before they speak, the audience recognizes that they are not good witches because it is storming, with thunder and lightning (stage direction, I.1.1), and when they do speak they speak of cats (I come, Graymalkin! [9]) and toads (Paddock calls [10]) and of fog and filthy air (13), all of which are associated with black magic. Their entrance and exit from Shakespeares stage, which did not make use of a curtain, was probably under the cover of some special-effect smoke device (Banquo: Whither are they vanished? Macbeth: Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted / As breath into the wind [I.3.80-82]), so that they would appear much more spooky to an audience that had a stronger belief in witches than theatregoers do today. What the audience is not aware of at the moment but will come to appreciate by the end of the play is that what all three Sisters chorus as they seemingly vanish into the air, Fair is foul, and foul is fair (12), sums up what Macbeth is about to experience in the next five acts, very much to his grief. Act I, Scene 3 opens on a wild and wasted landscape, what Macbeth later in the scene calls this blasted heath (77), and, like every other appearance of the Sisters, with thunder. We know that scenery was not used in Shakespeares theatre, but still it is a set worthy of Hollywood. Once again it is only the three Witches on stage. They make themselves seem that much more frightful by talking of how they will cruelly punish the sailor-husband of a woman who had been rude to one of them. The punishment they are planning, loss of sleep, is what Macbeth will later suffer owing to his guilty conscience. A reader cannot help wondering why the Sisters do not simply punish the woman who committed the offense rather than her husband. If their evil power can reach from Scotland to Aleppo in Syria, where the sailor-husband has gone, and if, as they claim, they can control the winds, it seems a bit strange that they should not be able to get even with the offender directly and without delay.

Just as the First Witch gruesomely takes out a pilots thumb to show to the others, and as the three of them chant a spell that turns on the magical number three (Macbeth is full of threes), Macbeth and Banquo enter. They are coming directly from the bloody battlefield (Macbeth is also full of blood) and are on their way to King Duncans camp after their double victory over the invading Norwegians and the Scottish rebels led by the traitorous Thane of Cawdor. Their meeting with the Witches is not a coincidence, at least not for the Witches, since in Scene 1 the Witches have spoken of its taking place ere the set of sun (I.1.5).

Macbeths first words in the play echo the Witches Scene 1 chant: So foul and fair a day I have not seen (I.3.38). Banquos first words are in the form of questions. He is startled by the Witches sudden presence and by their strange and unnatural appearance:

What are these, So withered and so wild in their attire, That look not like th inhabitants o th earth And yet are ont?(I.3.39-42)

He remarks on the choppy finger and skinny lips of each and on the beards that make their gender seem uncertain, all of which must have been the conventional features of bad witches in Shakespeares time as much as they are today. In fact, it could be that the popularity of Macbeth for four hundred years has done a lot to make these features conventional today.

Macbeths command is : Speak, if you can. What are you? (47). Instead of answering his question, the Witches in turn hail him by the title he presently has (Thane or Lord of Glamis) and by the title which the audience knows, but which Macbeth does not yet know, has just been given to him in his absence by King Duncan (Thane of Cawdor). The Third Witch then hails Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter! (48-50). It is clearly this prophecy that causes Macbeth to start and betray the guilty uneasiness which Banquo remarks on:

Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear Things that do sound so fair?(51-52)

The alarm Macbeth expresses when he hears the Witchs prophecy and that Banquo finds puzzling suggests that even before this meeting with the Weird Sisters, before, the play began, he had allowed himself to think wicked thoughts of becoming king one day. He starts and seems to fear because it seems to him that the Witch has, by some magical means or other, read his guilty mind.

A few lines earlier (39-43), Banquo wondered out loud whether the Witches were inhabitants o th earth or supernatural beings, whether they were living or not. Now he questions them directly--are they real or hallucinations? (52-54)--and then, without waiting for an answer which he never gets, demands that they prophesy for himself as they have just hopefully prophesied for his noble partner (54). The openness of his manner and evenness of his voice--Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear / Your favors nor your hate (59-60)--stand out in contrast to Macbeths nervous demand and guilty start.

The Witches reply to Banquos frank demand first by hailing him one after the other and then, in turn as with Macbeth, by giving out a series of prophecies. Unlike the ones they have just given Macbeth, these prophecies are not explicit and are as much riddles as prophecies. Banquo will be Lesser than Macbeth, and greater; he will be Not so happy, yet much happier; he will beget kings though will not be one himself (65-67). They round out their prophesying by again hailing Macbeth and Banquo! / Banquo and Macbeth! (68-69), and without answering Macbeths urgent questions concerning the source of their prophetic knowledge or why / Upon this blasted heath you stop our way / With such prophetic greeting (76-78), they vanish.

There is a long gap before the Weird Sisters next appear on stage, in IV.1 (again not counting the Hecate scene, III.5), just as there is a long space between the appearance of King Hamlets ghost in Act I of Hamlet and its reappearance in Act III. But that does not mean that they and their prophecies disappear from dramatic sight. The next scene, I.5, opens with Lady Macbeth reading out loud the letter her husband has sent her in which he describes his meeting with the Witches and their prophecies. He says that he has received thoroughly reliable information that they have more in them than mortal knowledge (2-3). This, even if it is true, does not necessarily mean that the Sisters are themselves more than mortal. But Macbeth goes on to describe how, When I burned to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished (3-5) and this does sound supernatural, manifesting some agency above the forces of nature (Concise Oxford Dictionary). Since Shakespeare gives no hint that the Witches got their information in a rationally explainable way, their greeting Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor also strongly suggests supernatural agency. Macbeth and Banquo are certainly both convinced that the Witches soliciting is supernatural (I.3.130).

The next two times the Weird Sisters are mentioned before they reappear in IV.1 is when they are spoken of by Banquo. What he says shows clearly that meeting with them has left just as deep an impression on his mind as it has on Macbeths. The difference is maybe only that Banquos mind was not stained beforehand in a way that Macbeths was. In II.1, at Macbeths castle of Inverness where Duncan is staying the night he is murdered, before going to bed, Banquo acknowledges that he is struggling to suppress the cursed thoughts (9) that the Witches predictions have inspired in him. What these cursed thoughts are, the audience can easily guess

. When Macbeth joins him, Banquo remarks, I dreamt last night of the three Weird Sisters, and pointedly observes that part of their prophecies concerning Macbeth have come true (21-22). In reply, Macbeth tries to make it sound as though I think not of them, but nevertheless suggests that the two of them get together some time to talk over that business (22-25). He uses code language to further suggest that Banquo will have much to gain if he supports his (Macbeths) interests at the right time (26-27). Banquos reply shows that he is prepared to go along, but also shows that he has doubts about the honesty of Macbeths intentions, doubts he had expressed as early as I.4.121-122 (That, trusted home, / Might yet enkindle you unto the crown). He was, after all, a witness to shalt be king hereafter, and he knows enough about his fellow generals character to suspect it. The Witches prophecies may have taken as deep hold of his mind as they have of Macbeths, he may even be almost as tempted as Macbeth is to act in order to fulfil them, but his strength of character is greater than Macbeths (Macbeth later speaks of his royalty of nature [III.1.50]) and he will not overstep the line of loyalty and honor. His refusal is by itself a persuasive argument against the view that the Witches and their prophecies determine the events of the play.

The second time the Witches are spoken of before their reappearance is in III.1. Duncan has been murdered by Macbeth and Macbeth has been crowned king of Scotland. Banquo, who is the only person besides Lady Macbeth who knows of the Witches prophecies and how they affected Macbeth, reflects on how they have now all been fulfilled and voices a strong suspicion of foul play:

Thou hast it now--king Cawdor, Glamis, all,As the weird women promised; and I fearThou playdst most foully fort.(III.1.1-3)

At the same time, he sees in the fulfilment of the prophecies some hopes for himself: if what the Sisters predicted about Macbeth has come true, there is reason to believe that what they predicted about him, that myself should be the root and father / Of many kings (5-6), will also come true. Banquos thoughts have not been spoiled the way Macbeths were, but they certainly have been stimulated. It is part of Shakespeares art to be able to dramatize Banquos conflicting feelings at this point so convincingly and so economically.

Macbeths first meeting with the Witches was arranged by them; he arranges the second meeting (IV.1). At this point, he has two murders on his conscience, Duncans and Banquos; he has learned that Banquos son Fleance escaped safely from the murderers who killed his father, so that the Witches prophecy to Banquo, Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none (I.3.67), can still come true; he has been deeply shaken by the appearance at his court banquet, to him only, of Banquos bloody ghost; he is aware that people suspect him of having murdered Duncan and of being behind the murder of Banquo (III.6); and he is also aware that resistance to his tyrannical rule is beginning to build, led by Macduff, so that he has found it necessary to plant paid spies in every Scottish noblemans household (III.4.132-133). He is growing desperate; as he himself says, he is gone so far in blood that there is no turning back (III.4.137-139). He is determined now to seek out the Weird Sisters in order to learn By the worst means the worst that the future holds (III.4.133-136).

It is completely in character for Macbeth to want to face his reality head-on like this. Not only has the audience known from the very beginning of the play that he is a man of great physical courage (brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name [I.2.16]), but he has never pretended that his ambition and his actions were anything but wicked. He may be a great criminal, but he is great in more than one sense of the word. He has always been totally honest with himself. That is one reason why the play is truly The Tragedy of Macbeth.

In his desperate state of mind right after seeing Banquos ghost, Macbeth had expressed to Lady Macbeth his determination to go tomorrow, / And betimes (that is, both speedily and early) to find out the Weird Sisters (III.4.133-134). (Shakespeare gives no hint of how he knows where to look for them.) For their last appearance in the play, the Witches are once again alone on stage when the scene (IV.1) opens. This time they are chanting their spells as they stand around a cauldron bubbling with a stew made up of the body parts of a disgusting and even horrifying assortment of animals and humans: Eye of newt, and toe of frog, . . . Nose of Turk, and Tartars lips, / Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab [whore] (IV.1.12-34). Like any horror-film writer of today, Shakespeare wants to thrill his audience with fear and disgust and a sense of the uncanny. He wants the audience to feel that beings who engage in such horrific rituals, even if they themselves are not supernatural, really do have supernatural powers, including the power to see into the future. The audiences of Shakespeares time were generally more ready to believe in the supernatural and witchcraft than audiences now, so their theatrical experience of the witch scenes (and of the ghost scenes in Hamlet) was probably a lot more intense than ours.

Maybe on the principle that it takes one to know one, the Second Witch welcomes Macbeths entrance on stage with the words: Something wicked this way comes (IV.1.67). It is clear from this that the Witches know all the truth of Macbeths hidden criminality, just as the Ghost in the boudoir scene knows how far Prince Hamlet has gotten in carrying out its command of revenge. Addressing the Sisters as you secret, black, and midnight hags (70), Macbeth demands that they answer me . . ./ To what I ask you, even if the destruction of all of Nature and mans works is the price (72-83). The measure of his desperation is shown by the way he piles the items of imagined universal destruction one on top of the other for nine powerful lines. In fact, Macbeth does not demand, he conjures (72), which, in the sense of to constrain (spirit) to appear by invocation (Concise Oxford Dictionary), is exactly what witches and magicians do. It is as though Macbeth is turning the Witches own magic on themselves.The Witches declare to be ready to meet Macbeths demand. They even present him with a choice:

Say if thoudst rather hear it from our mouthsOr from our masters.(IV.1.84-850)

Macbeth again shows fearlessness by choosing to hear his fate directly from the mouths of the Witches master spirits, who in the nature of things could be even more dangerous to deal with than they are. A spell is pronounced (86-90) and the first of three Apparitions appears, like each of the following ones, accompanied by thunder. It is an Armed Head and it warns Macbeth to beware Macduff, / Beware the Thane of Fife (93-94), confirming Macbeths fear from that source (96). The Second Apparition, a bloody Child and More potent than the first (98), declares to Macbeth that none of woman born can harm him (102-103), and the momentary effect is to cause Macbeth to withdraw the death sentence he had in his mind passed on Macduff after hearing the first Apparition. But the softening effect is only momentary: But yet Ill make assurance double sure, he considers; Thou shalt not live (105-106).The Third Apparition is described in a stage direction (108) as a Child Crowned, with a tree in his hand. It pronounces that

Macbeth shall never vanquished be untilGreat Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane HillShall come against him. (114-116)

This Macbeth declares to be impossible, and he is again reassured by these Sweet bodements, good (118). He sees himself in the third person, our high-placed Macbeth, living out a full span of life (120-121). But like the character in the fairy tale who is not content with having his three wishes granted and has to add a fourth, Yet, he tells the Witches,

my heartThrobs to know one thing. Tell me, if your artCan tell so much: Shall Banquos issue ever Reign in this kingdom?

(122-125)

Again he shows courage to confront his fate directly, for in spite of the Witches caution that he should Seek to know no more (125), he violently insists: I will be satisfied (126).

It is always a mistake to push the gods. A show of eight Kings and [a blood-boltered (145)] Banquo, last [King] with a glass [mirror] in his hand (stage direction, 133) at one stroke undoes all the comfort Macbeth has taken so far in the spirits showings. He is shattered. He curses the hour, the witches, and all those that trust them! (161), in effect, cursing himself. He has good reason to, since now he knows for certain what before he had only feared: For Banquos issue have I filed my mind . . . And mine eternal jewel / Given to the common enemy of man (III.1.65-69). The Witches' work is done.

A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (on the Witches)

Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy begins his discussion of the Witches in Macbeth by observing that they have a more powerful effect on the imagination of a reader of the play than on a spectator (430, note 6). This sounds surprising at first, since Shakespeares plays were certainly not written to be read but to be performed on stage as live public entertainment. But if you are prepared to recognize that the imagination often produces more vivid images and effects than real life (consider, for instance, fear of the dark or sexual fantasies), it does make sense. It is a well-known principle of writing that you can frighten or titillate your reader much more effectively by suggestion than by spelling things out.

Bradley calls the Witches the most potent agency in Macbeth for exciting the vague fear of hidden forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence (271), forces that sound very much like the vaster power he identifies behind the events in Hamlet. He grants that the Witches contribution to the atmosphere of Macbeth can hardly be exaggerated, but he thinks that they are generally given far too much credit for influencing the action of the play, especially, of course, of Macbeth (271). He also sees a contradiction between the credit the Witches are given for influencing the action and the often-made claim that they are not real beings but merely symbolic representations of the unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself (272).

Bradley wants to do two things. He wants to show that although the Witches prophecies do influence Macbeth, they are not the decisive influence (any more than Lady Macbeth is [301]), and that the decisive influence comes from within Macbeth himself. Bradley also wants to show that the Witches cannot be taken merely as symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered in Macbeths breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him (275-276). They are an objective outside force that Shakespeare wants the audience to feel combines with forces from inside Macbeth to produce his tragedy.

In showing that the Witches prophecies are far from being decisive in influencing Macbeths actions, Bradley begins by arguing that although Shakespeare drew on contemporary witch lore like Reginald Scots Discoverie of Witchdraft and King Jamess Daemonologie for his conception of the Witches, he chose to emphasize only those things that could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious attraction, and disregarded everything else (272). The result is that the Witches are nothing more than poor and ragged, skinny and hideous, spiteful old women (272). But while they are old women and not goddesses, or fates, or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings, they are old women who have received from evil spirits certain supernatural powers, including the power to see into the future (272). They are instruments of darkness (273), not darkness themselves.

They can see into the future but, within theworld of the play, Bradley argues, what is foreknown is not fixed. That is because, in spite of what Macbeth misleadingly refers to as supernatural soliciting (I.3.130), none of the things the Witches foreknow is an action, and the responsibility for the choices that lead to the actions that bring about the fulfilment of the prophecies is entirely Macbeths (274, 275). Without Macbeths freely-willed choices and actions, for all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have fulfilled the prophecy any day (274).

Are the Witches only symbolic representations of the dark side of Macbeths soul? Bradley answers no, and for two reasons. First, such an explanation does not match with prophecies that in no way can be thought of as projections of Macbeths desires (shalt be king hereafter!) or fears (beware Macduff), prophecies like the ones about Birnam Wood and none of woman born which answer to nothing inward (276). Secondly and even more importantly, the creation of a sense of vaster powers from outside conspiring with the dark forces operating on Macbeth from within to push him in the direction he takes is essential to the plays overall tragic effect of fear, horror, and mystery (277). "The words of the Witches are fatal to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the webof Fate" (277).

Willard Farnham, Shakespeares Tragic Frontier (on Macbeth)Willard Farnham in Shakespeares Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final Tragedies gives a great deal of historical background about witch beliefs in Shakespeares time and earlier in order to support his idea that the Witches in Macbeth are not simply old women who have bargained with the devil for supernatural powers. They are, he says, supernatural beings themselves, fiends in the shape of old women (99), woman devils (95), fairy demons (101), superhuman (100). Yet though he thinks that the Witches are supernatural beings with supernatural powers, and though the weird in Weird Sisters is the Old English word for fate (Shakespeare took the name from his main historical source for Macbeth, Holinsheds Chronicles), Farnham insists that the Sisters do not have the power to determine events like the Fates of classical and Norse mythology, as some earlier critics had claimed (100-102). If they did have such power, Farnham points out, it would make no sense for them to defer to our masters as they do in IV.1 to call up the three Apparitions and the show of kings. In fact, any argument that they are directors of fate rests on the fact that Shakespeare brought the term weird sister into the play (101).

Farnham makes a surprising claim about the Witches intentions, although he makes it only in passing and cites no hard evidence to support it. He says that besides being supernatural agents of general evil, the Sisters are also agents of particular evil: the murder of Duncan as well as the destruction of Macbeth. In fact, the way he puts it--the contriving of murder through the use of a susceptible man (99)--makes the destruction of Macbeth sound secondary to the murder of Duncan. Farnham does not actually state that the Sisters intend to being about the destruction of Macbeth by getting Macbeth to kill Duncan, but that is the logic of his remark.

This claim that the Witches want to bring about Duncans murder is surprising because I have not seen it made by any other writer on Macbeth and because, as far as I can see, there is nothing in the play that even hints at such a purpose. In fact, the Witches never mention Duncan at all, either directly or indirectly. What is more, if Shakespeare had set things up in this way he would have seriously weakened the audiences sense of Macbeths tragedy. We would have to see Macbeth as less of a free agent and more as an instrument of supernatural forces outside his control, and so not fully responsible for his choices and his actions. There seems to be a contradiction between Farnhams insistence that the Witches do not control events and his suggestion that in some sense they do, between stating that Macbeth has free will so far . . . as the choice of good or evil is concerned, and in the next sentence stating that the witches show themselves to have a power over [him] (81). You cannot have it both ways.Farnham has interesting things to say about a supernatural appearance in Macbeth that I have only mentioned: Banquos ghost. The ghost appears at Macbeths banquet not only because Macbeth is guilty of Banquos death, but also in ironic response to Macbeths hypocritical effrontery in expressing before the assembly a wish that Banquo were there when he himself has arranged for Banquos murder. He actually challenges Banquo to appear and prove him guilty, and his unintentional challenge is also a challenge to the divine power, which, as Shakespeares age firmly believed, could work justice upon murderers by supernatural means (122). And while most critics have been convinced that the ghost of Banquo has to be a hallucination of Macbeths since, like the dagger in the air, only Macbeth sees it, Farnham is just as certain that it is a real ghost, and that Shakespeare meant his audience to take it for a real ghost. Ghost lore has always allowed that ghosts might appear to one person and not to others in a company (123). Of course if this is true, it applies with the same force to the boudoir scene in Hamlet, where many critics have argued that, as real as the Ghost may be in the plays opening scenes, it has to be a hallucination of Hamlets feverish brain.

Robert H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery

Robert H. Wests view of the Witches in Macbeth is very much like his view of the Ghost in Hamlet. West does not think that Shakespeare tried to make the Witches embody in any consistent, coherent, complete way the popular Elizabethan beliefs about witches and demons, any more than he tried to embody in King Hamlets ghost popular beliefs about spirits. Not only didnt Shakespeare try, he purposely left out from Macbeth anything that would fix in the audiences mind either the Witches identity or the source of their power. West recognizes that More than any of the other plays of Shakespeare Macbeth seems pervaded by some kind of superhuman evil (69), and he says that beyond a reasonable doubt the Witches are the personification of that evil (69, 76). He allows that Shakespeares representation of the Weird Sisters conforms in a number of ways to the orthodox witch beliefs of his time, for example, to what King James set out in his Daemonologie. But as with Hamlet and Elizabethan ghost beliefs, he believes that The generous efforts of scholars to key [Macbeth] to demonology have . . . never quite succeeded for the very good reason that Shakespeare himself did not try to key it.

West contrasts Macbeth with Marlowes Doctor Faustus. The basic story of Doctor Faustus is the demonological commonplace that the devil to enlarge his kingdom and spite God tempts a man to make a bargain with him that damns the human signer to a fiery hell. "But Shakespeare, though he too is treating a mans fall and the superhuman powers that drew him toward it, does not bindhisplayto thisbasicpattern of the apostate angel as tempter, partner, and destroyer, nor to any other simple explanatory demonological scheme" (71). Shakespeare certainly does show the temptation and destruction of Macbeth but, according to West, he leaves out all the many details that belong to the routine Christian account of a souls damnation (for example, there is no pact with the devil; at the end, Macbeth is not carried off to hell). And he leaves the Witches ambiguous for the same reason that he made King Hamlets ghost ambiguous. By indefiniteness about the Sisters and the phenomena related to them Shakespeare preserves awe and mystery, the same awe and mystery he tried for and achieved with the Ghost. At the same time, also as with the Ghost, he brings home to us the unknowableness of the world outside ourselves, the outer mystery (79).

CONCLUSION Hamlet and Macbeth are two of the most written-about works in all of English literature. They have been written about so much because audiences, scholars, and critics have found them fascinating as theatre, as well as psychology, for what they say about the world of Shakespeares England, and for what they seem to say about the mind of Shakespeare himself.

When it comes to the role of supernatural in the two plays, I do not think it makes much difference what Shakespeare himself believed about ghosts and witches, even if we could know for sure what that was (which we cannot). What seems to me to be clear is what he believed about the members of his audience: that they thought of ghosts and witches as part of a supernatural order which was as real as anything in the natural order and which on occasion could intrude itself into the natural order and affect people and events there. For Christians who were able to believe in the miracles and mysteries of the Bible with a literalness that is no longer possible for most of us today, belief in the reality of ghosts and witches was totally consistent with their ideas about the world as a whole. An Elizabethan skeptic on the subject would also have to have been a skeptic about some of the central claims of Christianity, and there were not many such skeptics in Shakespeares audience. Those modernist critics who argue that King Hamlets ghost and the Weird Sisters are not real but only symbols and objectifications of the respective heroes troubled minds (Curry, 56) seem to me, therefore, to have no ground to stand on, and would have no ground to stand on even if Horatio and Marcellus and Barnardo and Banquo did not testify with the sensible and true avouch of their own eyes (Hamlet, I.1.57) that the supernatural is, literally, there.

Since it is almost impossible to write about Hamlet without writing about the Ghost and almost impossible to write about Macbeth without writing about the Weird Sisters, in collecting opinions about the role of the supernatural in the two plays I have barely scratched the surface of the huge bibliography of criticism for each of them. But though I have read only a very little of what professional scholars and critics have had to say about the supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth, I have formed an opinion of my own on what is the best way to approach the subject.

.Among the several critics I have sampled, Robert H. West in Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery is the kind of model I would want to follow if I were a professional critic of Shakespeare. West seems to be at the opposite pole from A.C. Bradley, at least if M.A. Shaabers characterization of Bradley that I have quoted earlier is true: someone who assumes that everything in the great tragedies can be satisfactorily explained; that there are no inconsistencies; that Shakespeare knew all the answers to the psychological and philosophical questions raised by the plays; and that the answers are all there in the plays if only you are clever enough and work hard enough to uncover them.This sounds very much like the puzzle-solving approach to Shakespeare that West thinks is not only certain to end with a confusing failure (57) but, more importantly, that misses exactly the thing which makes the great tragedies great by explaining away the mystery at the heart of the plays. It is like dissecting a body in order to locate the soul. West believes that Shakespeare purposely left the nature of the Ghost and the Witches uncertain and not fully explainable by critical analysis because he knew that uncertainty of this kind creates dramatic awe and mystery (79), and because he recognized that the awe and mystery created by tragedy reflect the awe which we feel before the mystery of life itself. And this seems to me a better way to explain why Hamlet and Macbeth appeal so powerfully to our imagination than by trying to dissect out every last muscle and blood vessel

.There is another reason why Wests general approach of leaving room for inconsistency or chance or unreason (Shaaber, 247) in the plays may make good sense. Shakespeare was a working man of the theatre, supplying popular entertainment week after week and year after year in his roles as company shareholder, actor, and playwright, and without any idea that his plays would outlive him as they have. It does not seem plausible that he could have had the time or the energy or the foresight necessary to pack into them as many subtle and different meanings as generations of critics writing in the leisure of their studies have been able to extract from them. Similarly, when it comes to the many inconsistencies that critics have discovered in Hamlet and Macbeth, I think that it makes at least as much sense to blame them on hasty composition by a busy and pressured playwright who knew that they would be overlooked by audiences in the theatre, as to try and make sense of them by engaging in elaborate intellectual gymnastics that only other intellectual gymnasts can fully understand or appreciate. Shakespeare is good enough not to have to be perfect.

WORKS CITEDBradley. A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). London: Macmillan, 1920. Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Ed. Ian Ousby. Cambridge:

CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988.

Curry, Walter Clyde. Shakespeares Philosophical Patterns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

Farnham, Willard. Shakespeares Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final Tragedies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963.

Moore, Mavor. Shakespeare and witchcraft. Stratford Papers On Shakespeare. Ed. B.W. Jackson. Toronto: W.J. Gage, 1962.

Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959.

Shaaber. M.A. Shakespeare criticism: Dryden to Bradley. A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books, 2000.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. A.R. Braunmuller. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001.

Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare criticism since Bradley. A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

West, Robert H. Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968.

Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.

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