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- Author: Victoria Bladen x
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The forest in the medieval and early modern imaginary comprised a rich palimpsest of various layers, intersecting and often contradictory. Forests were threatening spaces yet also offered rich resources for use and exploitation. Forested space was linked to royal bodies and subject to the King’s control, yet it was also the sphere of the outlaw and exile. In the forest, nature could be readable as divine text or present an indecipherable labyrinth, a zone of disguise and invisibility, of inversion and confusion. As Robert Pogue Harrison has demonstrated, civilization defined itself against the forest, carving out its identity by ‘opening’ up the forest, yet wild nature haunted civilized humanity, holding up a mirror to human nature. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1603), the forest is a silent yet resonant character that facilitates exile, disguise, gender role reversal, pastoral impulses, meditative contemplation, eco-empathy, and an alternative centre of political power. All of these factors, this chapter argues, are indebted to a complex medieval inheritance that encompassed constructions of the forest in diverse literary genres, performance, art, and folklore, one that included the figures of Robin Hood, the Green Man, and the iconography of the Tree of Life. Our reading of Shakespeare’s forest is rendered more nuanced and less opaque when placed in dialogue with the medieval arboreal imaginary.
In Shakespeare’s England, ghosts were problematic, associated with Catholic ideas about Purgatory. However, ghosts proved popular on the early modern stage, and in Shakespeare’s plays the throne is a particularly haunted space. In Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Richard III and Macbeth, political leaders encounter ghosts who had held power themselves or who were murdered as part of the brutal process of obtaining political power. Ghosts not only unsettle the boundary between life and death in these plays but also question monarchs’ positions, undermining assumptions of legitimacy. Pursuant to the theory of the king’s two bodies, the spirit of divine kingship passed seamlessly to the next legitimate ruler, but in cases of rupture, where power did not legitimately pass, the spirit of ‘authentic’ monarchy could be left disembodied, thus constituting a spectral presence displaced from the political body. Shakespeare was intensely interested in cases of rupture. This chapter explores the ghosts in these four plays, examining how they haunt political spaces, and resonate with the additional spectre, the second ghost, of the disembodied, legitimate ruler.
Shakespeare and the supernatural explores the supernatural in Shakespearean drama, taking account of historical contexts and meanings together with contemporary approaches to these aspects in performance on stage, screen and in popular culture. Supernatural elements constitute a significant dimension of Shakespeare’s plays, contributing to their dramatic power and intrigue: ghosts haunt political spaces and psyches; witches foresee the future; fairies meddle with love; natural portents foreshadow events; and a magus conjures a tempest. Although written and performed for early modern audiences, for whom the supernatural was still part of the fabric of everyday life, the plays’ supernatural elements continue to enthral us and maintain their ability to raise questions in contemporary contexts. The collection considers a range of issues through the lens of five key themes: the supernatural and embodiment; haunted spaces; supernatural utterance and haunted texts; magic, music and gender; and present-day transformations. The volume presents an introduction to the field, covering terminology and the porous boundaries between ideas of nature, the preternatural and the supernatural, followed by twelve chapters from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars whose work interrogates the five themes. They provide new insights into the central issues of how Shakespeare constructs the supernatural through language and how supernatural dimensions raise challenges of representation and meaning for critics and creators. Shakespeare and the supernatural will appeal to scholars, dramatists, teachers and students, providing valuable resources for readers interested in Shakespeare or the supernatural in drama, whether from literary, historical, film or performing arts perspectives.
The introduction constitutes a comprehensive overview of the field of Shakespeare and the supernatural, covering terminology, historical ideas surrounding magic, witchcraft, ghosts and demonology, responses to the supernatural in the space of the theatre, and the ways in which Shakespeare’s work is located between discourses of enchantment and emerging scepticism. It also highlights the porous boundaries between ideas of nature, the preternatural and the supernatural. Providing relevant contexts for the issues explored in the book, it outlines the volume’s five key themes: the supernatural and embodiment; haunted spaces; supernatural utterance and haunted texts; magic, music and gender; and present-day transformations. The introduction also presents a summary of the contributions by each of the authors and explores the dialogues that open up between the various chapters.