Edited by Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky
![](https://www.yanb.eu/wp-content/uploads/cover-shakespeare-supernatural-MUP-9781526109071.jpg)
Manchester University Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-5261-0906-4
Supernatural elements are of central significance in many of Shakespeare’s plays, contributing to their dramatic power and intrigue. Ghosts haunt political spaces and internal psyches, witches foresee the future and disturb the present, fairies meddle with love and a magus conjures a tempest from the elements. Although written and performed for early modern audiences, for whom the supernatural, whether sacred, demonic or folkloric, was part of the fabric of everyday life, the supernatural in Shakespeare continues to enthrall audiences and readers, and maintains its power to raise a range of questions in contemporary contexts.
This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches, generating new knowledge and presenting hitherto unexplored avenues of enquiry across the Shakespearean canon.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Shakespeare and the supernatural
Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky
Part I: Embodying the supernatural
- Chapter 1: Shakespeare’s political spectres
Victoria Bladen - Chapter 2: ‘Rudely stamped’: Supernatural generation and the limits of power in Shakespeare’s Richard III
Chelsea Phillips - Chapter 3: Digital puppetry and the supernatural: Double Ariel in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest (2017)
Anchuli Felicia King
Part II: Haunted spaces
- Chapter 4: Demons and puns : Revisiting the ‘cellarage scene’ in Hamlet
Pierre Kapitaniak - Chapter 5: Performing the Shakespearean supernatural in Avignon: A challenge to the Festival
Florence March
Part III: Supernatural utterance and haunted texts
- Chapter 6: Prophecy and the supernatural: Shakespeare’s challenges to performativity
Yan Brailowsky - Chapter 7: Puck, Philostrate and the locus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s topical allegory
Laurie Johnson - Chapter 8: ‘Strange intelligence’: Transformations of witchcraft in Macbeth discourse
William C. Carroll
Part IV: Magic, music and gender
- Chapter 9: Music and magic in The Tempest: Ariel’s alchemical songs
Natalie Roulon - Chapter 10: From Prospero to Prospera: Transforming gender and magic on stage and screen
Katharine Goodland
Part V: Contemporary transformations