Chapter Eight - Shakespeare and the Supernatural

CHAPTER EIGHT

Shakespeare and the Supernatural

IF YOU WANT to know what someone really believes, don’t listen to their answers — look at their ghosts.

Shakespeare didn’t write theology. He wrote theater. But in his world, the supernatural wasn’t just a special effect or a spooky flourish. It was something deeper — something watching. Something that could alter the plot, enter the room, rewrite your fate, or leave you talking to yourself in the dark.

Ghosts. Witches. Storms. Omens. Prophecies. Curses.

They’re everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays — and they always mean more than they seem to.

Not because he was superstitious.
Because he understood psychology before there was a word for it.

Start with Hamlet’s ghost. The dead king doesn’t just kick off the plot — he hijacks it. He shows up in armor, burning with death and unfinished business, demanding revenge. But he’s not clear. He’s not comforting. He doesn’t guide Hamlet. He breaks him. He says what needs to be done… and leaves.

The rest of the play? Hamlet trying to verify a ghost.

Is he real? A demon? A figment of trauma? A lie Hamlet tells himself to justify violence?

That’s the brilliance of Shakespeare’s ghosts — they never stand still. They’re always flickering between external entity and internal mirror. You can’t separate the haunting from the haunted.

Then there’s Macbeth.

You meet the witches, and it’s already wrong. The scene doesn’t feel staged. It feels summoned.

They give Macbeth the prophecy: he will be king.

They don’t tell him how. They don’t tell him when. They just plant the idea and disappear into the fog.

And that idea? It doesn’t predict the future. It creates it. Macbeth becomes a killer not because fate demands it — but because he thinks it does. He chases the crown the way someone might chase a vision they can’t unsee.

That’s the curse.

Shakespeare’s witches don’t throw fireballs. They drop suggestions — and let the human mind do the rest.

In The Tempest, the supernatural is everywhere — but now it’s controlled by a man. Prospero, a magician, stages the entire play from an island he rules like a god. He conjures spirits, controls weather, and manipulates people like chess pieces.

It’s the closest Shakespeare ever comes to writing himself into a play.

Prospero is the playwright. The wizard. The weaver of illusion who, by the end, gives it all up. He breaks his staff. He drowns his book. He lets the magic die.

“Our revels now are ended…”

It’s not just the end of the play.
It’s the end of Shakespeare.

The Tempest was his final solo work. And in it, he seems to be saying: I’ve seen behind the curtain. I’ve pulled every string. And now, I’m letting go.

The supernatural wasn’t fantasy for Shakespeare. It wasn’t mythology. It was a language — a way of writing what couldn’t yet be named.

There was no Freud. No Jung. No DSM.

So he used ghosts to speak grief.
He used witches to speak ambition.
He used storms to speak wrath.
He used magic to speak authorship.

He gave his audience exactly what they feared and craved: a world that might be watching them back.

And centuries later, the fog hasn’t lifted.