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.

Contents
I. 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
4

J.D Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet....19

R.H.West, Skakespeare and the Outer Mystery..22

III. 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....39

IV. CONCLUSION...............40
V. 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
5

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
6

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.
8

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
9

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, 116117). 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).
10

Supernatural appearances in Hamlet

The 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.

11

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 gape
And 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.

12

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 nature
Are 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
God (76-77).
13

with

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 be
A 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 (174175). 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
14

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

good

ghost

or

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,
15

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 visitation

Is 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

lot

of

mental

gymnastics

on

16

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
17

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).

18

John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet

has 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
19

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
20

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
21

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).
22

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),
23

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
24

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 Sisters

Shakespeares 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
25

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

26

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 Macbeth

Just 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
27

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.

28

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
29

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
30

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.4.121122 (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 fear
Thou 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

31

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 horrorfilm 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
32

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 mouths
Or 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
33

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 until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall 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 heart
Throbs to know one thing. Tell me, if your art
Can 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 bloodboltered (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)

34

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).
35

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 the world 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 web of 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
36

(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
37

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.

38

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 bind his play to
this basic pattern 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
39

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

40

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 CITED

Bradley.

A.C.

Shakespearean

Tragedy

(1904).

London:

Macmillan,

1920.

Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Ed. Ian Ousby. Cambridge:

Cambridge University 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.

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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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