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THE OCCULT AS A DRAMATIC DEVICE IN
SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
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epartment of English
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THE OCCULT AS A DRAMATIC DEVICE IN
SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
THESIS
Presented, to the Graduate Council of the
North Texas State University in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
By
Myrtle Seldon Gray, B. A.
Denton, Texas
August, 1967
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Page
INTRODUCTION AND CLASSICAL BACKGROUND
. .
1
THE OCCULT TRADITION IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
16
GHOSTLY VISITATIONS
3^
THE WEIRD SISTERS
60
CONCLUSION
83
BIBLIOGRAPHY
92
iii
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION AND CLASSICAL BACKGROUND
Supernatural manifestations commonly occur in literary
history; moreover, they are a commonplace of tragedy.
Such
manifestations have since ancient times had a strange and
alluring appeal to human curiosity.
Occult phenomena hold a
fascination for mankind too widespread and too far-reaching
to need documentation here.
It is not surprising in a
literary genre as ancient and elemental as drama that occult
phenomena should have had a prominent place.
In almost
every age when drama flourishes, supernatural manifestations
are present on the stage.
The original motivation for the
use of occult phenomena on the stage is lost in the development of mankind's cultural history.
What is important to
note at this point is that as far back as Greek drama, playwrights made considerable use of occult phenomena, not only
for special effects somewhat external to the drama, but in
many cases as an integral part of the structure and thematic
fabric of the play.
It is one of the commonplaces of scholarship ttigt
things occult were prominent on the Elizabethan stage, aiil,
that of all the Elizabethan playwrights Shakespeare was
most adept at employing various kinds of occult devices.
Shakespeare's use of such phenomena has been widely documented, and it is not the purpose of this thesis to tread
old ground or to belabor the obvious.
What this study will
demonstrate is that Shakespeare's use of occult manifestations is not as superficial as it is sometimes said to be.
On the contrary, it is the contention of this study that,
especially in certain of the major tragedies, occult phenomena are integral to the main action, provide the play with
essential motivation, and, in fact, are indispensable to a
proper resolution.
At their best, these occult manifesta-
tions in Shakespeare's tragedies become devices that give
form to the play and become part of established stage techniques and patterns.
A study of this kind must, of necessity, take into account manifestations of the occult in tragic drama that are
antecedent to Shakespeare.
It will, however, in no way be
an attempt to trace the historical use of the occult since
Greek times, nor will it document specific influences from
the classical past.
in a vacuum.
Nonetheless, Shakespeare did not work
Stage techniques and dramaturgical influences
were well established by the time he appeared on the historical scene, and it is inevitable that he would work within
the framework of a continuing tradition, even though in the
end he might modify or depart from the tradition.
Chapter I
of this thesis examines classical drama in order to gain an
insight into the early uses of occult manifestations and to
learn what implications they had for later dramatists.
Chapter II explores several Renaissance plays that were directly or indirectly influenced by the classical tragedies
and which set certain precedents.
Chapter III deals with
the ghosts in Shakespeare's major tragedies and shows that
although the ghosts were not an innovation of Shakespeare,
it was Shakespeare who developed the ghost as a genuine dramatic device.
Chapter IV gives a brief history of witch-
craft as a setting and then discusses in detail Shakespeare's
use of the Weird Sisters as a dramatic device.
In order to discuss the use of the occult phenomena as
a dramatic device, it is necessary to include concrete definitions of the terms used throughout the paper.
The term
occult phenomena is used synonymously with supernaturalism,
preternaturalism, and occultism.
The term dramatic device
is used to mean an indispensable element and an integral
part of the drama that motivates the plot and makes the
drama coherent.
The dramatic device can be more clearly
distinguished when it is compared with the mechanical and
decorative devices used in classical and early Renaissance
tragedies that deal with supernaturalism.
The mechanical
device in its most effective use may motivate the plot, but
it is not indispensable to the plot.
An example of a super-
natural character used as a mechanical device is Seneca's
Juno in Hercules Furens.
At the beginning of the drama Juno,
the wife and sister of Jupiter, is angry because Jupiter
favors his mortal loves.
She calls upon the furies and
other spirits to make Hercules, Jupiter's favorite son, go
1
insane and slay his family.
Juno's appearance in the pro-
logue motivates the plot in Act IV:
Hercules goes mad,
slays his family, but in Act V, returns to his senses.
Juno
has served only as a mechanical device to set the play in
motion.
Her part in the play could easily be dispensed with
without weakening the fabric of the drama.
In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the Delphic oracle is an occult phenomenon.
The oracle warns Laius and Jocasta, the
King and Queen of Thebes, that a son would be born to them
who would kill his father and marry his mother.
A son was
born, and in order to avert the tragedy the child is given
to a shepherd to be killed.
The shepherd first pierced the
child's feet, but being unable to carry through the murder,
he gave it to another shepherd.
The child was subsequently
adopted by Polybus and Merope, King and Queen of Corinth,
who named him Oedipus, which meant swollen-foot.
When
Oedipus reached manhood, he learned from the oracle that he
was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.
Oedipus
was never told of his adoption, and, as a consequence, believing Polybus and Merope to be his real parents, he left
Corinth determined to avoid his horrible fate.
On his way
to Thebes he meets a stranger with whom he quarrels and
Thomas Newton, Seneca and His Tenne Tragedies
(Bloomington, i960), pp. 9-12.
afterwards slays.
Continuing to Thebes, Oedipus meets the
Sphinx and answers her riddle, whereupon she kills herself,
and Oedipus becomes the savior of Thebes.
Shortly after the
news of Laius' death, Oedipus marries Jocasta, Laius' wife,
and is proclaimed King of Thebes.
After many years and the
births of four children Oedipus learns that the man he slew
at the place.where three roads meet was Laius.
Realizing
now that the Delphic oracle concerning his fate had been
fulfilled, Oedipus rushes to Jocasta for the purpose of
killing her.
Finding her already dead by suicide, he takes
2
the brooches from her robe and blinds himself.
The oracle
provides the antecedent action to the play, provides the
initial motivation for the play and is brought in during the
development of the play.
The oracle is indispensable to the
play and serves as a genuine dramatic device.
The decorative device does not motivate the plot, as
the mechanical device might do, nor is it an integral part
of the structure of the drama.
An example of the decorative
device is found in Euripides1 The Troades.
The play opens
with Neptune and Minerva serving as prologue gods.
They
discuss the fall of Troy, a favorite city of Neptune, and
the fact that Minerva's altar has been insulted.-^ Because of
2
Meyer Reinhold, editor, Classical Drama (New York,
1959), PP. 51-55.
3
^Theodore A. Buckley, translator, The Tragedies of
Euripides (New York, 1877), pp. ^3-^5.
these things they wish to make the Greeks' journey homeward
as difficult as possible.
After the prologue, the business
of the play is concerned with the sufferings of the women of
Troy.
The wrath of the gods toward the Greeks is not in-
corporated into the dramatic action of the play.
The role
of the gods in this play is not structurally necessary; they
have no intrinsic value; they simply decorate the drama.
Comparing the mechanical device with the decorative device,
it is apparent that the former is more important to the
drama.
The mechanical device, even when it is represented
by sliding walls, trap doors, and sudden appearances of gods
or devils, is more functional than the decorative device.
C. E. Whitmore says that the influence on the characters is
k
the sole criterion of the intrinsic supernatural.
A ghost
for example may have many appearances in the drama and still
not affect the progress of the action.
On the other hand it
may have a few appearances and yet dominate the action from
beginning to end.
When this is the case, the author has
created a dramatic device.
The large body of occultism to be found in tragic drama
from Greco-Roman times until the present day is sufficient
to attest to the fact that mankind has been preoccupied with
an acute interest in the supernatural.
The appearance of
supernaturalism in Greek drama was an outgrowth of religion.
JLL
C. E. Whitmore, Supernatural in Tragedy (London, 1915)t
p. 11.
In fact, Greek drama had its origins in Greek religion, and
certain supernatural elements of Greek drama were probably
inevitable from the beginning.
The Greeks believed that
their gods made their wills known through soothsayers,
dreams, and oracles.
Their great tragedians made frequent
use of these elements in their dramas.
When one thinks of
Greek drama the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides
immediately come to mind.
These writers, then, will repre-
sent, in this part of the study, the Greek contribution to
the use of the occult as a dramatic device.
The purpose of
this investigation will be to determine in brief how the
classical dramatists employed the occult as a dramatic device .
Aeschylus is from the very beginning, by dint of being
Greek, concerned with the supernatural world.
The earliest
of his extant plays, The Suppliants, deals with Zeus, the
chief of the Olympian gods.
The play concerns the right and
obligation of sanctuary even at the risk of war.-' Danaus
and his fifty daughters flee from Egypt to Argos to avoid
marriage to the fifty sons of Danaus' brother.
Pleasgus,
the King of Argos, knowing the wrath of Zeus if he refused
sanctuary to the suppliants, finally agrees to let them
stay.
The fifty sons and their father, Aegyptus, follow the
suppliants to Argos, or Argolis as it is also called, and
^Buckner B. Trawick, editor, World Literature (New
York, 1955), I, 63.
8
insist upon the marriages.
Each daughter was instructed by
her father to carry a dagger and murder her husband on their
wedding night.
Forty-nine obey the order, the other spares
her husband's life.
There are several myths about the fate
of the daughters who murdered their husbands.
Some say that
Danaus found suitors so scarce after this that he was compelled to give them to the contestants in a race.
Others
say that Lynceus, the brother who was spared, killed them
all to avenge his brothers.
Zeus, the only supernatural
element in the play, is used superficially as an avenging
spirit; thus in Aeschylus' first attempt in using the supernatural he achieves only a decorative device.
In__the next
play, however, he creates the idea for two dramatic devices-- the prophetic_dream and the ghost.
In The Persians,
whose theme is the humiliation of the Persians after their
defeat at Salamis, Atossa has an ominous dream and seeks the
Chorus for advice.
The Chorus sings an incantation to call
up the shade of Darius.
its tomb.
The ghost hears and rises out of
Darius, who, according to the general rule for
ghosts, knows nothing of contemporary happenings in the
world of the living, thinks of the situation in terms of his
own day, when no risky expeditions were undertaken.
His
first idea, therefore, is that some internal disaster has
taken place.
When he hears of the expedition led by his son
Jessie M. Tatlock, Greek and Roman Mythology (New York,
1917). PP. 199-200.
7
Xerxes against Greece he at once condemns it as folly.
He
confirms the fulfillment of the prophecy that the anger of
Zeus will strike his son.
The ghost in The Persians proved
so successful that it was used in other of Aeschylus' plays.
Whitmore believes that the chief interest of The Persians
lies in the fact that it is the first known play in European
literature to "bring the supernatural into even external con-
8
nection with the action.
The plays of Aeschylus do not
contain occult devices that fit the definitions set forth in
this thesis.
But Aeschylus must be given credit for being
the innovator of the idea of the prophetic dream, the ghost,
and the gift of prophecy.
Proof of the value of the use of
prophecy when it is developed into a dramatic device lies in
Sophocles' masterful use of this device in his Oedipus Rex,
as indicated earlier in this chapter.
The second epoch for consideration of occult phenomena
in tragedy is the Roman period, and Roman tragedy is synonymous, in the modern mind at least, with Senecan tragedy.
Seneca's tragedies are adaptations from Greek tragedies, yet
his handling of the material is different enough in many
respects to be accurately titled "Senecan tragedy."
A com-
parison of Greek tragedies with Senecan adaptations will
show the use of occult phenomena that Seneca accepted,
7
'H. J. Rose, A Commentary on the Surviving Plays of
Aeschylus (New York, 1957)» pT 1^1.
®Whitmore, p. 25.
10
rejected, or modified.
It will also show what additions, if
any, Seneca made to the occult phenomena as dramatic devices.
In Medea by Euripides, Medea is a sorceress who has
helped her lover Jason complete a dangerous mission.
She
slays her brother in order that she and Jason might escape
to Corinth for sanctuary.
Jason's uncle.
Later she causes the death of
Medea and Jason live in Corinth for ten
years and have two sons.
When the King of Corinth promises
to further Jason's ambition by offering his daughter in
marriage to Jason, Jason consents to the marriage.
When
Medea learns of the marriage she is furious and threatens
vengeance or suicide.
Her ultimate plan is to use her
powers as a sorceress and kill Jason's wife and. all who
touch her.
In addition she will kill her own sons, whom
Jason loves so well, in an attempt to make him regret his
leaving her.
After the murder of the king and his daughter
is accomplished and the children return to Medea, she learns
that the people of Corinth and Jason are now ready to take
vengeance upon her.
her sons.
She rushes inside the house and slays
Just as Jason enters she appears above the house
in a kind of deus ex machina, a chariot drawn by dragons,
with the bodies of her slain children and flies off to
Athens for sanctuary.
In Seneca's adaptation of this play the powers of Medea
as a sorceress are made more prominent.
The idea of witch-
craft is developed to the point of describing the ingredients
11
of her magic potion that will kill Creusa and Creon.
murder of her sons is vicious.
full view of the audience.
The
She slays the children in
One son is slain before Jason
arrives and the other after Jason has had a chance to plead
for his life.
Medea and the bodies of her children are
carried off to Athens in a chariot drawn by dragons.
Euripides' version of the play makes Medea a pathetic character showing her to be the wronged wife and a mother who is
torn between love for her children and hate for her husband
who has deserted her.
Seneca's version shows Jason to be
the pathetic character and Medea to be a cold-blooded criminal.
The deus ex machina in Euripides' Medea remains un-
changed in Seneca's adaptation of the play.
Although the
powers of witchcraft are elaborated in Seneca's version the
elaboration is not sufficient enough to create a dramatic
device.
Medea's supernatural powers are used to cause the
tragic act of murder and to provide an escape for her at the
end of the play.
As such, her supernatural powers can only
be called mechanical.
Ghosts appear on stage in three of Seneca's dramas, and
they are described in three others.
and Thyestes are prologue ghosts.
pears in the middle of the play.
The ghosts in Agamemnon
In Octavia the ghost ap-
The ghost of Laius in
Oedipus and the ghosts of Achilles and Hector in The Troades
are described by other characters but do not appear on stage.
The ghost of Hector appears to his wife, Andromache, in
12
a dream.
In Agamemnon "by Aeschylus, the prologue is de-
livered by a watchman.
In Seneca's version of this same play
the prologue is delivered by the ghost of Thyestes.
Seneca's
handling of the prologue is more effective, for Thyestes has
more of an interest in the action.
He is the father of
Aegisthus by an incestuous relationship with his daughter.
The ghost of Tantalus in Thyestes is accompanied by a Furie.
The Fury
begins to enumerate the crimes that will be com-
mitted by Tantalus' descendants and urges Tantalus to put a
curse on the house of Pelops.
The ghost of Agrippina in
Octavia seeks revenge for her own death.
The ghost of Laius
in Oedipus seems to be a throw-back to the incantation to the
ghost of Darius in The Persians by Aeschylus.
But Seneca's
description of the incantation and the appearance of the ghost
is more elaborate than that of Aeschylus.
The ghost of Darius
rises without ceremony and simply foretells the anger of Zeus.
The ghost of Laius names Oedipus as his murderer and the defiler of Jocasta's bed.
In the original play of The Troades
by Euripides as in Seneca's version of this same play, the
ghost of Achilles does not appear on stage, but the Senecan
description of the ghost as reported by Talthybius is far
more melodramatic than Euripides' description.
According to
Clarence W. Mendell, the key to understanding Seneca's
use of the supernatural is understanding Seneca's flair for
13
9
the melodramatic.
Seneca's ghosts are used to warn loved-
ones of impending danger.
They demand recognition.
may be the personification of wickedness.
tragedy, they may demand revenge.
They
As in Greek
None of Seneca's plays is
without supernatural elements, but none has the religious
overtones that were present in Greek tragedy.
Seneca's use
of the supernatural is always melodramatic, theatrical,
showy, a rather extraneous adornment except when it is used
10
to manage the plot quickly and easily.
His dreams,
oracles, curses, and magic are usually legitimate dramatic
devices when they help to motivate the plot and give coherence to the drama.
religious purposes.
The Greeks used the occult for
Seneca rejects any religious connection
with the gods and uses them to decorate the drama or for
sensationalism.
stage.
Greek murders were always committed off-
Seneca has his murders committed in full view of the
audience in order to show that his characters want not only
revenge, but bloody revenge.
The Greeks used supernatural
forces to guide human experiences.
Seneca uses them to
produce horror, violence, and gruesome scenes.
By the time of the demise of the Roman theater, occult
phenomena of many types had become traditional in tragedy.
In their earliest manifestation the occult phenomena were
^Clarence W. Mendell, Our Seneca (New Haven, 19^1)»
p. 14-2.
1Q
Ibid.. p. 1^7.
14
religiously oriented.
In The Suppliants the fifty maidens
pray to Zeus, the only supernatural element in the play, for
divine intervention to keep them from having to marry their
fifty cousins.
The Persians contains the first supernatural
interference in Greek tragedy.
Attosa by a simple prayer
succeeds in calling forth the shade of her husband, Darius,
who makes a prediction that Zeus will punish his son Xerxes
for his excessive pride.
In Agamemnon Cassandra the proph-
etess foretells the murder of Agamemnon, but she does not
instigate it nor can she prevent it.
Sophocles underplays
the use of prayer for divine intervention and emphasizes the
use of the oracles.
In Oedipus Rex he succeeds in creating
a dramatic device of the Delphic oracle wherein the entire
play is contingent upon the prophecy of the oracle.
Euripides was unorthodox from the dramatic as well as the
religious standpoints.
His plays reflect his increasing
rejection of the gods as motivators of human affairs.
The
gods in his plays are regularly placed in the prologue and
have no direct connection with the action of the play.
For
example, Neptune and Minerva, two prologue gods, have no real
effect upon the action of The Troades.
Seneca's primary
model for his adaptations of the Greek plays was Euripides.
In Seneca's handling of the supernatural he rejects all
religious motive of the gods.
The one divinity used in
Senecan dramas, Juno in Hercules Furens based on Euripides'
play by the same title, serves as a mechanical device to
15
cause Hercules to go insane and. slay his family.
In addi-
tion she sets the atmosphere of gloom that Seneca thought
was indispensable to tragedy.
Seneca adds ghosts to plays
that did not have them; he gives more forceful roles to
specters he accepts; he increases the importance of the
sorcerers and the soothsayers; he emphasizes the powers of
witchcraft, and. he is overly concerned with violence and
blood-revenge.
Seneca is best remembered, and imitated for
his revenge ghost.
When classical drama was re-discovered
in the Renaissance, for better or for worse, it was the
Roman models that were most influential.
It is only to be
expected that occult and supernatural phenomena, which had
loomed so large in the Greek and Roman tragedies, should
make their way into classically oriented Renaissance tragedy.
CHAPTER II
THE OCCULT TRADITION IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
About fourteen centuries elapsed between the classical
use of the occult phenomena to its revival in Renaissance
England.
Before the revival of tragedy, however, England
had other kinds of dramas.
Early English drama, like Greek
and Roman, began in the Church.
Just as with its Greek
counterparts there began an increasing secularization of
English drama, especially as it was taken over by secular
1
organizations.
The very terms attached to these plays-
miracle, mystery—indicate their concern with the supernatural.
Although many of the later miracle plays and the
morality plays virtually became comedies, the deeply
religious Englishmen were still moved by the pictorial and
musical presentation of the scenes which illustrated beliefs
fundamental to their lives—the reality of hell, the punishment of sin, and the need for repentence.
¥. T. H. Jackson
says the justification for dramatic presentation, so far as
the Church was concerned, lay in the fact that it intensified
2
such beliefs in a way that a mere sermon could not.
1
Phillip Marsh, English Literature, A Concise History
(Austin, 1951)» P« 17.
2
W. T. H. Jackson, The Literature of the Middle Ages
(New York, 1962), p. 320.
16
17
The decline of the religious drama was simultaneous with the
revival of classical drama in Renaissance England.
The dramatists of the Renaissance have sometimes been
called mundane, but the term is misused if it is taken to
mean that the playwrights were concerned only with worldly
things.
It is true that the Renaissance dramatists preferred
classical models to the native religious drama.
They also
contributed to the increasing secularization of the drama.
Nonetheless, there was an evident preoccupation with the
supernatural both in life and on the Elizabethan stage.
The
English playwrights capitalized on the native superstitions
and beliefs in the occult by weaving these ideas into their
plays; moreover, they emphasized these elements with the
blood-thirsty elements of Senecan tragedy, which had become
readily available in translation around the middle of the
sixteenth century.
As Italy was the center of the Renaissance
movement, scholars from all countries flocked there.
H. C.
Schweikert says that the eager study of the old things so
stimulated mental activity that new ideas or broadened
3
literary ideals were bound to result.
He notes that the
scholars returned to their homes not only with the direct
results of their studies but also as missionaries eager to
impart the new learning.
The colleges and universities of
-^H. C. Schweikert, editor, Early English Plays (New
York, 1877), PP. 38-39.
Ibid., p. 39.
18
the various countries not only accepted, the learning of the
scholars, they also went back to the original classics.
The so-called "University Wits" of England accepted Seneca
as their model for classical drama.
At the beginning of the
Senecan revival his plays were still being produced in Latin
at the universities.
Around 1559« when the plays were
translated into English, they readily found many imitators.
The earliest English tragedy in the Senecan style is
Gorboduc. by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville.
In fact,
Gorboduc is identical in plot to Seneca's Thebalis.
Although
Gorboduc has no overt supernatural element, the dumb show—a
pantomime which showed the audience what action would follow—
has at the beginning of Act IV a suggestion of the occult:
There came forth from under the stage, as though
out of hell three Furies, Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone,
clad in black garments sprinkled with blood and flames,
their bodies girt with snakes, their heads spread with
serpents instead of hair, the one bearing in her hand a
snake, the other a whip, and the third a burning firebrand, each driving before them a king and a queen;
which, moved by Furies unnaturally had slain their own
children. The names of the kings and queens were these,
Tantalus, Medea, Athamas, Ino, Cambyses, Althea. After
that the Furies and these had passed about the stage
thrice, they departed, and then the music ceased. Hereby was signified the unnatural murders to follow; that
is to say, Porrex slain by his own mother, and of king
Gorboduc and queen Videna, killed by their own subjects.^
It is a logical assumption that Tantalus, Medea, and the
others were ghosts.
The authors of Gorboduc followed the
Senecan pattern of revenge tragedies by having the ghost
^Schweikert, p. 275-
19
appear with garments "sprinkled with blood."
or
bloody is a stock word in Senecan tragedy.
frequently in Gorboduc.
The word blood
It is used
In Act IV immediately after the
dumb show which lets the audience know that children in this
family will be slain by their own parents, Videna laments
the murder of her favorite son Ferrex by his brother Porrex;
now she plots to kill Porrex:
Thou, Porrex, thou this damned deed hast wroght!
Thou, Porrex, thou shalt dearly bye the same.
• • * • • • • • • « # • • * • • • • • • • • • • #
And here in earth this hand shall take revenge
On thee, Porrex, thou false and caitiff wight.
If after blood so eager were thy thirst,
And murderous mind had so possessed thee,
If such hard heart of rock and stony flint
Lived in thy breast, that nothing else could like 1
Thy cruel tyrant's thought but death and blood,
Wild savage beasts, might not their slaughter serve
To feed thy greedy will, and in the midst
Of their entrails to stain thy deadly hands
g
With blood deserved, and drink thereof thy fill?
As the ghost in the dumb show predicts, Videna slays Porrex.
The authors of Gorboduc unlike Seneca have the murders take
place off-stage.
Another departure from the Senecan style
is having the dumb show precede the acts to explain their
significance.
Seneca, on the other hand, used the chorus to
7
review events and to anticipate the catastrophe.
A third
departure from Seneca is that in Gorboduc the Furies take
revenge upon the ghost of parents who murder their children.
6
Ibid., pp. 276-277.
7
'J. W. Cunliffe, "Italian Prototypes of the Masque and
Dumb Show," PMLA. XXII (March-December, 1907), 155.
20
The use of the occult in Gorboduc is minor, but crudely
effective.
It signals the advent of a more mature handling
of the occult in English Renaissance tragedy.
A later play with Senecan earmarks is Kyd's The Spanish
Tragedy.
This play is a real drama of revenge.
The play
opens with the ghost-of Andrea and Revenge-.serving, as the
Chorus.
Andrea reveals that he was slain and thereby
separated from his love Bel-imperia.
Balthasar, slayer of
Andrea and a captive at the Spanish court, falls in love
with Bel-imperia.
who
She spurns his love in favor of Horatio,
she believes will help her revenge Andrea's death.
Lorenzo, Bel-imperia's brother, is in favor of Balthasar's
suit and is willing, at all costs, to help him win his
sister's love.
In order to get rid of Horatio as a rival,
Lorenzo and Balthasar hang him to a tree and murder him.
Bel-imperia rushes to Hieronimo, Horatio's father, to tell
him of the dreadful deed.
revenge.
Hieronimo dedicates his life to
The action of the play is conceived by Revenge who
predicts to Andrea the deaths of his enemies, and they both
sit back to watch the action.
At the end of the play the
ghost of Andrea summarizes all that has happened:
Horatio murdered in his Fathers bower;
Wilde Serberine by Pedringano slaine;
False Pedringano hangd by quaint deuice;
Faire Isabella by her selfe misdone;
Prince Balthasar by Bel-imperia stabd;
The Duke of Castile and his wicked Sonne
Both done to death by olde Hieronimo;
21
My Bel-imperia falne as Dido fell,
g
And good Hieronimo slaine by himselfe.
All of the major characters are dead at the end of the play.
All of them met a violent death.
The ghost of Andrea is
pleased at the turn of events and tells Revenge that he
would like to be the judge and doom his enemies to unrest
in Hades; the worst punishment of course will be given to
Balthasar
and Pedringano.
The Senecan technique of handlings the revenge ghost has
changed considerably in the hands of Kyd.
TJie actions of
the ghost are less restricted, and it ffl.QXe. appearances
than do Seneca's ghosts.
Unlike_
£he
ghost of Andrea has many human qualities.
the awesome grandeur of the Senecan ghost.
It is lacking in
For example,
when Hieronimo learns that Lorenzo and Balthasar are the
murderers of his son and pretends friendship with them, the
ghost mistakenly thinks that Hieronimo has formed an alliance
with his enemies and tries to wake Revenge so that Revenge
might set things straight again.
In spite of its human
qualities, the ghost of Andrea is clearly a revenge ghost.
He is satisfied with the mass murders that occur and his last
speech shows that he wants to continue his revenge in Hades.
The ghost is combined with the personification of Revenge to
cast a loose framework about the play and to provide some of
O
Frederick S. Boas, editor, The Works of Thomas Kyd
(Oxford, 1962), p. 98.
22
the motivation.
Bel-imperia cannot live or love unless
Andrea's death is revenged.
After the death of Horatio,
Hieronimo lives only for revenge.
Kyd's use of the ghost
is a dramatic device that approaches the skill of Shakespeare's use.
In the end, however, the supernatural
scaffolding of The Spanish Tragedy may "be omitted without
seriously altering the play.
Kyd's play is both an example and a harbinger.
By the
middle of the last decade of the sixteenth century English
Renaissance plays contain abundant examples of the occult
and supernatural.
Some of these examples occur in comedy
and fall outside the province of this thesis.
Among the
writers of tragedy those who belong to or are on the periphery of the University Wits are of major importance.
has already been cited.
Kyd
Marlowe, who set the tone for so
much of Elizabethan tragedy, deserves more extended comment.
Doctor Faustus, considered one of the world's most
exotic dramas, was largely an invention of the Renaissance.
To the boastful charlatan, once he had died, his younger
g
colleagues attributed almost every known act of necromancy.
The people of the Renaissance were eager to believe the occult phenomena presented in the mysterious, magical acts of
Faustus.
Marlowe rejected much of what was considered
extravagant in the original legend of the Faustbuch, but
^Robert R. Reed, The Occult on the Tudor Stage (Boston,
1965), P. 89.
23
knowing the temperament of his times, he kept what he knew
would be plausible to his audience.
Although thj.^afeeX.ial-
ization of demons is a notion completely alien to twentiethcentury audiences, it was a part of the everyday belief of
Elizabethans.. In fact it would have been a. contradiction
of religious doctrine in the sixteenth century not to believe in demonic possession.
Robert R. Reed believes that the most remarkable aspect
of Marlowe's tragedy is the masterful blend of the two opposed supernatural doctrines that center upon Faustus—
namely the Good Angel and the Evil Angel who contend for
10
Faustus' soul.
To the Elizabethans the two angels probably
represented man's divine and diabolic impulses respectively,
and they have close parallels in the old morality plays.
Ac-
cording to Reed, "Mephistophilis" is a secular and not a
religious product.
He is summoned to earth by a sixteenth-
century conjuror in the worldly fashion, that is, in response
11
to the making of both a circle and a formal invocation.
Making a compact with the Devil was the deadliest of sins to
the Elizabethans.
Still, because of his practical jokes,_ it
is difficult to think of Faustus as an evil man.
In some respects a critical study of Faustus can be a
fruitless job because of the general agreement of scholars
10
Ibid.. p. 92.
11
Ibid.
2^
that no satisfactory text of the play has come down to us.
But it is relatively easy to illustrate Marlowe's use of the
occult as a dramatic device.
At the beginning of the play
Faust decides that necromancy is the only study that will
give full scope to his ambition.
He has been reading the
Bible, which he throws aside and picks up a book on necromancy,
Faust:
These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus .most
desires.^
Faustus immediately calls for two of his friends, Valdes and
Cornelius, and soon learns that they are also dabblers in
witchcraft.
Cornelius confesses that he has conjured the
spirits and that they have obeyed and have come:
Corn:
The spirits tell me they can dry the sea,
And fetch the treasure of all foreign wracks,
Yea, all the wealth that our forefathers hid
Within the massy entrails of the earth . . . . 3
But it is clear that Cornelius and. Valdes have not made use
of this newly found, power.
Obviously they are fearful of
running the risk of everlasting damnation for meddling in
the affairs of the occult, but they are more than eager to
help Faustus learn the art.
Valdes:
And Faustus is eager to learn.
Then haste thee to some solitary grove,
And bear wise Bacon's and Albanus' works,
The Hebrew Psalter, and New Testament;
12
E. H. C. Oliphant, editor, Shakespeare and His Fellow
Dramatists (New York, 1929). p. 158.
13
Ibid., p. 160.
25
And whatsoever else is requisite
We will inform thee ere our conference
cease . . , . ^
After assuring Faustus that he will be greater than they are,
his two friends, having served their dramatic purpose—that
of luring Faustus into the hands of Mephistophilis—disappear
from the play.
Faustus is alone when he conjures the spirits.
Faust:
Faustus, begin thine incantations,
And try if devils will obey thy hest
Seeing thou hast prayed and sacrificed to
them.
Within this circle is Jehovah's name,
Forward and backward anagrammatized,
The breviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the Heavens,
And characters of signs and erring stars,
By which the spirits are enforced to rise:
Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute,
And try the uttermost magic can perform.^5
Mephistophilis appears before him, but Faustus sends him
•away because "Thou art too ugly to attend on me."
Mephis-
tophilis appears the second time dressed as a Franciscan
Friar.
Faustus first had the noble thought of using his powers
in the service of his country.
But once he had made a pact
with the Devil, his lofty ideas about humanity disappear
and he does the Devil's work.
Faustus seems to realize his
own weaknesses for he declares, "The god thou serv'st is
thine own appetite . . . ."
1
f.
1 i
Ibid.
15
Ibid.', p. 161.
The question of whether Faustus'
26
soul can be .saved by repentance is never given a definite
answer.
At the closing of the twenty-four-year term Paustus
declares:
Faust:
But Faustus' offences can ne'er be pardoned:
the serpent that tempted Eve may be saved,
but not Faustus.
Marlowe's use of magic and the evil spirit, Mephistophilis,
represent the supernatural and the occult phenomena in
Doctor Faustus.
It_ is principally the supernatural character
Mephistophilis who represents a genuine dramatic device.
Faustus becomes the animated puppet of Mephistophilis without
whom there would be no supernaturalism, and indeed, no play.
The tricksy feats of magic in the play that have rightly
offended so many readers and playgoers not only mar the
dramaturgical aspects of the play, but they are decorative
and mechanical aspects of the supernatural.
Most of these
episodes are not integral to the main action and could be
omitted without loss.
In other words, Mephistophilis is a
vital and indispensable dramatic device.
The tricks are not.
In The Jew of Malta Marlowe uses neither witchcraft,
nor sorcerer, nor ghost, but with masterful handling of
theatrical effects he creates an eerie atmosphere of bloodrevenge.
The action of the play, the characters, and the
stage techniques are so intertwined that it is an impossible
job to try to separate one from the others.
l6
Ibid.. p. 179.
The time of the
27
action is immediately after the war between the men of Malta
and the Turks in which the Turks are victorious, and they
demand of the Govenor of Malta the ten years' tribute that
was due them.
Ferneze, the govenor of Malta, answers that
he needs time to collect the money, whereupon he sends for
Barabas and other Jews.
Barabas is a very wealthy man and a
very miserly and cunning man; but even though he feigns
stupidity and poverty, his property is confiscated by the
Govenor of Malta.
Although Barabas has hidden sacks of gold
and jewels in his house in the event that something like
this should happen, he swears to take revenge on all Christians for the loss of part of his fortune.
The plot then
takes a direction that is both intricate and melodramatic
and it does not need to be recounted here.
this study primarily in a negative way.
It is useful to
It is evident in
all of Marlowe's plays that he rejects the Senecan revengeghost.
In fact, he does not use a ghost at all.
In The Jew
of Malta, however, he creates one scene that gives a ghostly
feeling.
There is an eerie atmosphere in the scene where
Barabas is an intruder in his former home--now a nunnery—
where he awaits his daughter's arrival with his bags of
jewels and gold.
Now I remember those old women's words,
Who in my wealth would tell me winter's tales,
And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night
About the place where treasure hath been hid:
And now methinks that I am one of those:
28
For whilst I live, here lives my soul's sole hope,
And when I die, here shall my spirit walk.1?
J. B. Steane in his critical study of Christopher Marlowe
says one has to search hard to find any comparable virtues
in the world dramatized in The Jew of Malta.
"The little,
congested room of Malta is in fact presided over by Riches,
the dumb god who creates men after his own image, hard,
sparkling and fiery like the jewels they possess or are
1R
possessed by.11
Barabas, to be sure, has a lust for gold.
After Abigail has secured his money from the convent he
exclaims:
My gold, my fortune, my felicity!
Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy!
Welcome the first beginner of my bliss 1^-9
It is somewhat paradoxical that there is no trace of Senecan
dramatic devices in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and that
what remains is largely Senecan stylistic techniques, such
as the use of hyperbole, as when Barabas gloats over the safe
arrival of his ships and his riches of Persian silks, gold,
and orient pearls:
These are the blessings promis'd to the Jews,
And herein was old Abram's happiness!
What more may Heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,
17
'Leo Kirschbaum, editor, The Plays of Christopher
Marlowe (New York, 1962), p. 412.
1R
J. B. Steane, Marlowe, A Critical Study (Cambridge,
1964), p. 167.
^Kirschbaum, p. 413.
29
Making the seas their servants, and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?
And as it has already been noted, Kydian tragedy is
similar to Senecan revenge tragedy.
When murder is committed
in the Kydian tragedy the revenger is dubbed "murderer" by a
medium which he distrusts; delay results until additional
facts corroborate the ascription, but then the revenger is
hampered by the counterdesigns of his enemy and all perish in
21
the catastrophe.
different basis.
Marlowe conceives his play on an entirely
The main concern of the characters in the
play is the siege of Malta.
Barabas1 crimes are committed
in the first part of the play and the principal characters
are unaware of a revenge scheme.
The catastrophe in this
22
play is an unmotivated revenge.
What comes to light when
the total body of Marlowe's plays is taken into account is
that there are remarkably few occult and supernatural elements
for a playwright who has the reputation of being about the
most "Senecan" of all Elizabethan playwrights.
His Doctor
Faustus is the only one of his plays where such elements are
important.
Another play that uses the occult as a diamatic device
is Dekker's The Witch of Edmonton.
In collaboration with
William Rawley and John Ford, Dekker gives us a comprehensive
20
Ibid., p. 400.
2
^Steane, p. 104.
22
Ibid., p. 105.
30
study of the Elizabethan idea of witchcraft.
Typical
Elizabethan ideas of witchcraft brought out are the witches'
familiars in the forms of mice, rats, dogs, and weasels; the
compact with the devil; and the imps.
The main character in Dekker's play is said to have
been a real person.
She was "poor, deform1d, and ignorant/
And like a Bow buckl'd and bent t o g e t h e r . E l i z a b e t h
Sawyer was accused of being a witch, tried, and executed in
London in 1621.
Her testimony was recorded by Henry Goodcole,
and it was from this record that Dekker and his fellow dramatists draw their witch of Edmonton.
In the play Mother
Sawyer complains that
Some call me Witch;
And being ignorant of my self, they go
About to teach me how to be one: urging,
That my bad tongue (by their bad usage made so)
Porespeaks their Cattle, doth bewitch their Corn,
pij.
Themselves, their Servants, and their Babes at nurse.
She concludes that she may as well be a witch as to be called
one.
She curses Old Bank and immediately a demon in the
guise of a dog comes to make a compact with her.
Mother
Sawyer will be served by the demon, but in return she must
"make a deed of gift—her body and her soul" to the Devil.
Dekker's portrayal of the witch is probably the most sympathetic in literary history.
His witch, like the real
^Fredson Bowers, editor, The Dramatic Works of Thomas
Dekker (Cambridge, 1958). Ill, 5052
^Ibid.. p. 506.
31
Elizabeth Sawyer, was reluctant to commit herself to the
Devil.
Sympathetic she may "be, but by comparison with
Shakespeare's witches and the uses to which they are put she
is a crude device.
By 1622, when this play was written,
Shakespeare was dead, of course, and his art had long since
gone much beyond the skill of Dekker and his collaborators.
Shakespeare's earliest use of the occult in tragedy is
in Titus Andronicus.
It has been called both Senecan and
Marlovian, and one taight expect it to show heavy traces of
the influence of the two earlier writers.
ancient Rome.
The setting is
At the beginning of the play Titus is re-
turning home from the Gothic wars.
He brings, as captives,
Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and the three sons.
The
Andronici sacrifice one of the sons in order to appease the
souls of their dead countrymen.
Titus is offered, as a
reward for his victories, the imperial crown.
He refuses it
and supports the claim of Saturninus, the elder son of the
former Emperor.
Saturninus accepts Titus' support and pro-
poses to make Titus' daughter Lavinia the Empress.
Bassianus,
the younger brother of Saturninus, is in love with Lavinia and
abducts her to prevent the marriage.
Titus is so outraged
by this act that he kills one of his own sons who blocks the
pursuit of Lavinia.
Tamora finds favor in the eyes of the
Emperor, and although she does not love him, she marries him
to promote her revenge for the death of her son.
32
Tamora's real love is Aaron, the villainous Moor who
incites Tamora's sons, Demetrius and Chiron, to ravish
Lavinia and to insure her silence by tearing out her tongue
and cutting off her hands.
Demetrius and Chiron slay
Bassianus, satisfy their lust for Lavinia, and pervert the
evidence so that Titus' sons, Martius and Quintus, are accused of the murder'. Aaron deceitfully brings Titus word
that his sons will be freed if he will chop off one of his
hands and send it as evidence of his good faith.
Titus with
Aaron's aid cuts off his hand and sends it to the Emperor;
the hand is scornfully returned with the heads of Titus' two
sons.
In spite of her mutilation, Lavinia manages to con-
vey to her father and her uncle the full story of her wrongs.
She uses the tragic story of Philomena to show what happened,
and she holds a stick in her mouth and writes the names of
her offenders in the sand.
Meanwhile, Tamora gives birth to
Aaron's child, and a white baby is substituted so that
Saturninus will not know of her infidelity.
Titus arranges
a banquet, before which he slays Tamora's sons, carves the
bodies, and serves them to Tamora.
Then Titus slays Lavinia,
to end her shame, and slays Tamora.
Saturninus kills Titus,
and Titus' son, Lucius, kills Saturninus. Lucius then tells
the people the true story of his father's tragedy and is
proclaimed Emperor.
Aaron, the breeder of the crimes, is
condemned to death by torture.
33
The recounting of the plot materials of Titus Andronicus
can only remind the reader of the wild improbability and the
blatant melodrama of the play.
In view of the multitude of
melodramatic stage devices that are obviously influenced by
the Senecan tradition,' it is surprising that the play does
not contain much in the way of occult phenomena.
Of course,
underlying the whole plot is the tradition of blood revenge
and retribution of the gods which have elements of the supernatural.
This tradition allows, in turn, for .foreshadowing,
portents, and prophetic utterances.
But the fact remains
that the only scene in the play that has elements of the occult is the scene late in the play when Tamora, Chiron, and
Demetrius disguise themselves as apparitions representing
Revenge, Rape, and Murder.
The scene is effective stage
business and good melodrama, but it also is integral in that
it motivates Titus and points toward the denouement.
It was
not until some years after Titus Andronicus that Shakespeare
was to employ the occult and supernatural with sophistication
and in ways that are not only dramatically effective but
integral to the structural plan of the play.
CHAPTER III
GHOSTLY VISITATIONS
In the early years of Shakespeare's career as a writer
the spectral visitor had become a well-established stage
character.
From the earliest surviving appearance of the
ghost in classical tragedy—the ghost of Darius in The
Persians by Aeschylus—to the early Renaissance drama it is
obvious that the ghost has an important function in tragedy,
and especially in revenge tragedy.
When the Renaissance
writers turned to the classical models of tragedy, they
turned primarily to Seneca.
It is a modification of the
Senecan ghost that thrived on the Elizabethan stage.
Seneca
had used his ghosts primarily in the prologue, giving them
tremendously long speeches that were to create an atmosphere
of gloom and foreboding.
Their motive was clearly revenge.
The early Renaissance tragedians did little more than imitate
Seneca, with minor modifications.
Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy,
as has been noted, is typical of the Elizabethan adaptation.
Kyd makes a few departures, however, in his handling of the
ghost of Andrea.
The only innovation that can be ascribed to.
Kyd is the use of the ghost as a chorus.
The chorus itself,
of course, was a long-established tradition in classical
drama, but Kyd's adaptation of the ghost to the uses of the
3^
35
chorus is a departure from classical practice.
By not con-
fining the ghost of Andrea to the prologue but having it
appear elsewhere in the drama, Kyd made another departure
from the Senecan ghost that was to be followed by later playwrights.
In most of the later tragedies that employ the
ghost, it appears several times during the play and appears
to and speaks with whomever it pleased.
The primary reason for giving the ghost more freedom,
that is, not restricting it to a soliloquy in the prologue,
was, no doubt, to bring the ghost into closer harmony with
the contemporary religious and folk beliefs of the time.
Senecan ghosts were pagan ghosts, who, when they appeared on
stage, showed the physical marks of having come from an underworld where they were doomed to torture, and they did not
hesitate to give the full, gory details of the kind of torture
they suffered.
The contemporary ghosts of the Renaissance
are Christian.
Instead of being shades of a hell of torture,
they are shades of purgatory, who must walk the earth until
the crimes against them have been revenged.
Early Christian
doctrine considers the ghost to be one who comes from a
mysterious underworld and one who is forbidden to reveal the
nature of its torments.
The Elizabethan audience had pre-
conceived ideas concerning ghosts, and the plays that dealt
with ghosts, in order to be successful on the Elizabethan
stage, had to conform to those ideas.
It can be expected that
36
Shakespeare and. his fellow playwrights would modify the ghost
to conform to prevailing beliefs and attitudes.
In Richard III and Julius Caesar Shakespeare is young
in manipulating the supernatural character of the ghosts, and
they are hidden, in a manner of speaking, in the dreams of
the characters who encounter them.
But even these first at-
tempts are more effective and more sophisticated than the use
of the ghost in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy or the plays of
other early Elizabethan writers.
The use of the ghosts in
Richard III is consistent with the idea that dreams have an
intimate relationship with reality.
In spite of the fact
that Richard III is often thought of as a conscienceless
villain in the Machiavellian tradition, it is his conscience
that troubles Richard in his sleep and causes him to see the
ghosts of the eleven people that he has murdered.
Each ghost
in its turn tells Richard "Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow!" or gives him the advice "despair and die!"
The
first to appear is the ghost of Prince Edward:
Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow!
Think how thou stab'dst me in my prime of youth
At Tewksbury: despair, therefore, and die!
Next the ghost of Henry the Sixth enters:
When I was mortal, my anointed body
By thee was punched full of deadly holes:
Think on the Tower and me: despair, and die!
Harry the Sixth bids thee despair and die!
Enter the ghost of Clarence:
Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow!
I, that was wash'd to death with fulsome wine,
37
Poor Clarence, by thy guile betrated to death!
To-morrow in the battle think on me,
And fall thy edgeless sword:
.
despair, and die!--
The ghost of Clarence is followed in turn by the ghosts of
Rivers, Grey, Vaughn, Hastings, the two young Princes, Lady
Anne, and Buckingham, each condemning him for his evil deeds
and prophesying disaster and death.
In contrast, each ghost
in turn gives the Earl of Richmond hope and a prophfecy that
he shall be king and that he shall be the father of a long
line of kings.
In the best Christian tradition they tell
Richmond that God and good angels fight on his side.
When Richard is suddenly awakened from his dream, it
takes some time before he is certain whether he has actually
seen the ghosts or whether he has been dreaming.
with the words, "Give me another horse:
He awakes
bind up my wounds."
At first he is living the continuation of the dream, and the
words are, in reality, a prophecy.
that "the light burns blue.
Richard notes upon waking
It is now dead midnight,/ Cold
fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh."
All of these
details were signs to the Elizabethans that there had been a
ghostly visitation.
Ghosts were thought to appear in the
dead of night, when the weather is cold, and to avoid bright
light at all costs.
i
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare,
edited by Hardin Craig (New York] 1951)» Richard III. V, iii,
118-120; 12^-127; 131-135* All subsequent references from
Shakespeare will come from this edition.
38
On the other hand., when Richmond is awakened and asked
how he slept the night, he replies:
The sweetest sleep, and fairest-boding dreams
That ever enter'd in a drowsy head,
Have I since your departure had, my lords.
Methought their souls, whose bodies Richard murder'd
Came to my tent, and cried on victory:
I promise you, my soul is very jocund ~
In the remembrance of so fair a dream.
The ghosts that appear to Richard and Richmond are as real
in their dreams as if they had appeared in human form.
It is one of the paradoxes of the play Richard III that
a play which in some ways is so crudely melodramatic is at
the same time so dramatically effective.
The dream-ghost'
scenes are part of the crude machinery of the play.
The
scenes are dramatically effective, but they are not genuine
dramatic devices.
The scenes are external to the action and
could be omitted without marring the play.
It may be argued
that the ghosts motivate the main characters in the final act
of Richard III, but the motivation comes too late for the
ghosts to be considered dramatic devices.
The dramatic de-
vices must be an integral part of the play from beginning to
end.
The appearance of the ghosts is, nonetheless, a natural
consequence of the actions that precede it.
The parade of
the ghosts is good melodrama, but in the last analysis, the
ghosts are mechanical devices that are not absolutely necessary to the structure of the drama.
2
Ibid.. V, iii, 227-233.
39
The mature tragedy Julius Caesar is the earliest play
that shows Shakespeare employing occult phenomena with the
skill and sophistication that approaches that of the late
great tragedies.
The play is remarkable also for the variety
of occult devices employed.
To begin with, Caesar's spirit
(as distinct from his ghost) broods over the whole play.
In the first part of the play, it is Caesar himself that
dominates the play.
In the second half the ghost of Caesar
is the motivator of the action.
C. E. Whitmore indicates
that Caesar's spirit finds expression in the first part of
the play even before Caesar's physical death.
On the night
when the conspirators meet in Brutus' orchard, Brutus persuades the conspirators against Cassius' idea of killing
Antony along with Caesar.
He feels that having to kill
Caesar is bloody enough and he wishes himself and the others
to be known as sacrificers and not butchers.
Instead of
cold-blooded murder he prefers to think
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar:
And in the spirit of men there is no blood;
0 that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,
And not dismember Caesar!. But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it.^"
This reference to Caesar's spirit would not seem to be
significant if it stood alone, but many such references appear throughout the play.
Another example of Caesar's
•^Whitmore, pp. 2^6-2^7.
h
Julius Caesar, II, i, 167-170.
bo
spirit making itself felt before Caesar's death is the unnatural happenings on the eve of Caesar's death.
Casca
reports:
. . . never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
A common slave—you know him well "by sight—
Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn
Like twenty torches join'd, and yet his hand,
Not sensible of fire, remain'd unscortch'd.
Besides--I ha' not since put up my sword—
Against the Capitol! I met a lion,
Who glared upon me, and went surly by,
Without annoying me: and there were drawn
Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women,
Transformed with their fear; who swore they saw
Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.
And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noon-day upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
'These are theirs; they are natural;
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.5
Casca regards these signs as omens foretelling disaster for
the Romans.
Shakespeare's audience was familiar with the
technique of foreshadowing, and in Julius Caesar it is
especially effective.
Moreover, disturbances of the weather
such as thunder, lightning, rain storms, and unruly winds, to
Elizabethans, were signs of wickedness in the earth.
To be-
gin with, such signs and portents reflect the theme that the
evil in man is reflected in the earth and in the elements.
In addition, even when they appear only in the dialogue
5
Ibid.. I, iii, 5-13; 15-33-
such passages provide atmosphere and increase the dramatic
effectiveness of the play.
Calpurnia's dream is still another instance of foreshadowing.
Calpurnia, too, has heard of weird happenings
during the night, perhaps from one of the servants.
She
tells her husband of these portents and of her dream.
Caesar, speaking to Decius, uses the dream as his reason for
not going to the Capitol:
Calpurnia here, my wife, stays me at home:
She dreamt to-night she saw my statua,
Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans
Came smiling, and bathe their hands in it:
And these does she apply for warnings, and. portents,
And evils imminent . . . .°
The cumulative effect of the signs and portents is enhanced
finally by the prognostication of the soothsayer.
By this
time in the play it can be seen that the various kinds of
occult phenomena have begun to affect the action of the play
and to affect the behavior of the characters.
When Caesar
brushes aside the soothsayer, the Elizabethan audience with
its beliefs in metaphysics must have thought Caesar foolhardy
for ignoring a prophetic warning.
Prom this point
the play becomes a fascinating contest between man in his
attempt to control the forces of destiny and the external
and supernatural forces that the gods of retribution have
pitted against him.
6
Antony's attitude at the death of Caesar
Ibld.. II, ii, 75-82.
4-2
signals a turning point.
Antony stands over the dead body
of Caesar and makes the prophecy that
Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
7
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war . . . .
Antony here is using the term spirit figuratively; he certainly does not expect to see Caesar's ghost ranging for
revenge.
But he is sure that he can incite the citizens to
avenge Caesar's death by a plan which even now he has in
mind.
With the appearance of Caesar's ghost in Brutus' tent
at a camp near Sardis, Shakespeare employs a genuine dramatic
device.
Brutus is reading and he notices that the light of
the candle begins to fade.
Suddenly he is aware of the ghost:
Ha! who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.8
Brutus' reaction is strangely calm by comparison with other
ghost scenes.
In answer to the question of "what are thou?"
the ghost answers:
"Thy evil spirit, Brutus."
Brutus then
asks why it came and the answer is that the ghost will meet
Brutus at Philippi.
Brutus' calm reply, "Why, I will see
thee at Philippi then," shows that once he realizes that it
7
Ibid.. Ill, i, 270-273.
8
Ibid,. IV, iii, 275-281.
^3
is Caesar's ghost he accepts it as a matter of fact.
Per-
haps Shakespeare's purpose here was to show the stolidity and
courage of the Roman soldier.
It may have been only that he
chose to show Brutus as weary and phlegmatic.
Brutus seems to
"be resigned to his own death; not only does he take the appearance of Caesar's ghost calmly, he waits some time before
telling anyone about the apparition.
When he learns that
Cassius is dead and how he died, he says:
0 Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.9
Later in another part of the field he confides to Volumnis:
The ghost of Caesar hath appear'd to me
Two several times by night; at Sardis once,
And, this last night, here in Philippi fields:
1 know my hour is come.^O
Then Brutus, unlike Macbeth who also knew when his hour had
come, has Strato to hold his sword so that he can commit
suicide.
His final words are addressed to Caesar's ghost:
"Caesar, now be still:/ I kill'd not thee with half so good
a will."
The play Julius Caesar signals the advent of the great
tragedies.
Shakespeare's writing skills and his drama-
turgical techniques had continued to improve at a remarkable
pace.
Among these techniques his increased adeptness with
occult phenomena of all types is apparent.
9
Ibid., V, iii, 9^-96.
10
Ibid., V, v, 18-21.
The pattern of
it4
development shows that in his use of supernatural manifestations, just as with other traditional stage devices, Shakespeare comes very early to show a range and a flexibility that
go beyond any of his contemporaries.
Almost from the be-
ginning, and especially in Richard III and Julius Caesar.
Shakespeare's techniques with occult phenomena show deviations from the established patterns.
All of the ghosts are
somewhat different in type from the pagan Senecan ghosts.
They make no reference to Hades, nor does their appearance
show signs that they have come from a place of torment.
Un-
like the Senecan ghosts and the early Renaissance adaptations
of the Senecan ghosts, they do not appear as prologue ghosts
whose purpose it is to set an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding.
However, in keeping with the ghost of pre-Shake-
spearean types, they are definitely revenge ghosts.
The
ghosts in Richard III and the ghost of Caesar appear in the
dreams of the victims of the revenge.
They appear in the
dead of night; and in both instances the lights are mysteriously dimmed.
What some of these changes amount to is
that Shakespeare adapted the ghost to conform to prevailing
religious beliefs and superstitions.
consistent in his practice.
is a case in point.
is spoken to.
But he was not always
The matter of ghosts speaking
Caesar's ghost does not speak until it
On the other hand, the long line of ghosts
chard. Ill need no prompting for their melodramatic
speeches.
The spontaneous speech of the ghosts in Richard III
^5
seems to "be more in keeping with the idea of the Senecan
revenge ghost; otherwise it is highly probable that the
ghost may never have a chance to reveal its purpose.
Every-
thing considered, the ghost in Julius Caesar is infinitely
superior to the ghosts in Richard III.
Not only does Caesar's
spirit make itself felt throughout the play, thereby motivating the action from beginning to end, it also accomplishes
its revenge by making its victims commit suicide.
This kind
of revenge is much more subtle than the revenge of Andrea in
The Spanish Tragedy, where the stage is piled with dead
bodies because of the initial desire for revenge on one person.
The occult phenomena are more pronounced and more
numerous in Julius Caesar, as witness the use of the soothsayer and the prophetic dream.
They are, however, more
skillfully used and more integral in the total fabric of the
play than had been apparent in Elizabethan drama up to the
time of Julius Caesar.
From Julius Caesar Shakespeare was
ready to go on to Hamlet, in which appears what surely must
be the most controversial ghost in all literature and certainly the ghost that has become the touchstone for judging
all other dramatic specters.
Nineteenth-century criticism concerning the ghosts in
Elizabethan drama started a trend of philosophical criticism
that is still actively being pursued.
Apparently the only
result of almost a hundred years of critical evaluation of
the subject is the fact that the problem has become
k6
more narrow.
Scholars have now boiled the problem down to
the question of whether or not the ghosts are objective or
subjective.
Robert Hunter West said in 1939.
Pointing the answers to these questions within the play
world are three classes of indices of varying authority:
(1) the opinions of the persons of the play world as
displayed in speech and action; (2) the unquestioned
facts of the play world as revealed in its events; and
(3) the general philosophical and theological cast of
the play world as revealed in its historical and religious setting, lowest believed the second method to be the best because it is
the most authoritative. Robert R. Reed, a later critic,
12
considers some of West's theories abstruse and controversial.
In 1950> West wrote an article for PMLA entitled "King Hamlet's
Ambiguous Ghost," which shows that he, too, is now convinced
that it is useless to do anything except "simply receive the
dramatic force as it reaches us and be content.""^
A study of
the subjectivity or objectivity of the ghost is important to
an understanding of the plays that deal with this supernatural
element, but this paper will concern itself with this matter
only incidentally.
Although the tragedies may contain ghosts that are
spectacular or sensational, such as the Senecan ghosts, or
the ghosts may become humanized, such as the ghost of Andrea
11
Robert Hunter West, The Invisible World (Athens,
Georgia, 1939). PP. 63-6^.
12
Reed, p. 11.
13
-'Robert Hunter West, "King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost,"
PMLA. LXX (December, 1950), 1117.
^7
in The Spanish Tragedy, they are not necessarily to be considered dramatic devices in the sense that this paper employs
that term.
In order to toe considered dramatic devices, the
supernatural elements must serve as an integral part of the
plot; they must motivate the plot and make it coherent.
The
ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth do just that.
The most notable aspect of the ghost in Hamlet to the
superficial reader is that in every respect it conforms to
the prevailing Elizabethan beliefs.
Much research has been
done to document the "conformity" of the Hamlet ghost to the
lore and superstition of the time, and, indeed, the ghost in
Hamlet meets all the requirements for the ghosts of popular
superstition:
it walks at night; it cannot speak unless it
is spoken to; it appears in winter, and so on.
tells the educated Horatio:
it, Horatio."
Marcellus
"Thou art a scholar; speak to
According to the popular superstitions the
exorcists were supposed to speak in Latin.
Horatio does not
use the Latin language in addressing the apparition, but
being learned, it can be assumed that he knows Latin.
From the very first sighting of the specter it is clear
to the officers that the ghost is in the guise of the dead
king.
The officers report to Hamlet:
Two nights together had these gentlemen,
Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch,
In the dead vast and middle of the night,
Been thus encounter'd. A figure like your father,
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie. . . . ^
^Hamlet, I, ii, 197-201.
It was believed that ghosts walked not only when it was dark,
but also when the weather was cold, thus the statements:
"The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold." and "It is a nipping and an eager air."
enters.
Within this setting the ghost
The striking resemblance to Hamlet's father and the
knowledge that ghosts appear before some great crisis in human affairs make Hamlet involuntarily and spontaneously plead:
"Angels and ministers of grace defend us."
The Elizabethans
believed that ghosts left their graves for the purpose of
giving a warning of impending danger to a loved one or to
their country, or that they left their graves to seek revenge
or to give someone information concerning a hidden treasure.
It is apparent that the ghost of Hamlet wished to speak to
Hamlet alone.
Against the wishes and the strength of his
friends Hamlet follows the ghost.
During the interview the
ghost reveals that his motive is revenge:
List, list, 0, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love— .^
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
The ghost also tells Hamlet that his soul has been in purgatory:
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
^Ibid.. I, v, 22-2*1-.
if-9
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.-*-°
The ghost of Hamlet departs with the words:
Hamlet, remember me."
"Adieu, adieu!
When the ghost vanishes Hamlet re-
flects :
0 all you host of heaven! 0 earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? 0, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou, poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain . . . . '
The repetition of the words, "Remember thee!" shows Hamlet's
thoughtfulness about his father's ghost.
He vows that his
only thoughts will be those that the shade has given him.
There is a touch of irony in the statement that his father's
commandment will live within his brain, for that is exactly
where it lives—and dies.
The ghost could barely get back
to its sulphurous region before Hamlet begins to regret his
task, and he says:
"The time is out of joint:
spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!"
0 cursed
In Act II,
Hamlet begins to doubt that he has really seen his father's
ghost and he expresses his doubt by saying:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil; and the devil hath power
l6
Ibid., I, v, ^-6; 9-13.
17
Ibid., I, v, 91-102.
50
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. 1 "
It is not until after Hamlet has had the play-within-theplay staged that he believes that he had truly seen and heard
his father's shade.
These details just recounted are interesting in that
they allow a reconstruction of Elizabethan beliefs and
practices in regard to ghostly visitations.
They are im-
portant also in that they allow Hamlet to be placed in the
context of the popular Elizabethan Revenge play.
For the
purposes of this paper these details and the acts and scenes
from which they are drawn are more important for the light
they throw on Shakespeare's developing dramatic techniques
and most especially on his mature handling of occult phenomena.
It can be seen from Hamlet that Shakespeare was no
longer content to follow the melodramatic and somewhat crude
Senecan models.
It can be seen also that in the handling of
the ghost he is much more sophisticated in Hamlet than he
was in Richard III or even in Julius Caesar.
He was not
content, as were many of his Senecan models, to have the
ghost announce itself in advance of the action.
Nor did he
feel it adequate, as he had in his own earlier plays, to
rely merely on a dramatically effective but mechanical parade
of spirits at or near the end of the play.
l8
Ibld.. II, ii, 627-732.
His skill is
51
shown in Hamlet in that he prepares the audience well in
advance for the appearance of the ghost before it ever appears on stage near the end of Act I.
In addition he subtly
misleads the audience as to the real reason for the appearance
of the ghost.
impact.
When the ghost does appear it has a tremendous
That the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet is a
genuine dramatic device, as opposed to a mere mechanical or
decorative device, is indicated best by the fact that onc'e
the ghost appears and lays the obligation of vengeance on
Hamlet, most of the main action of the play hinges on this"'
admonition, and Hamlet, himself, acts, reacts, or fails to
act, almost solely in response to it.
'
"
"
v
- ':
The final appearance of the ghost is in Gertrude's
closet.
The ghost appears to remind Hamlet that he has yet
to avenge his father's murder and also to show Hamlet that
no harm is to come to Gertrude.
Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But, look, amazement on thy mother sits:
0, step between her and her fighting soul:
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works:
Speak to her, Hamlet.^9
Shakespeare chose this instant—the only time in the play
when Hamlet is truly angry—to heighten the dramatic effect
of the ghost.
It was apparent by this time that Hamlet
needed to be motivated.
The ghost furthers the plot by
indicating to the audience that Hamlet now must win his mother
19
Ibid.. Ill, iv, 110-115.
52
to repentance for her sins, and he furnishes, as he had not
in his first appearance, a clue as to how Hamlet's task may
20
be accomplished.
In seeking to save his mother's soul,
Hamlet must destroy the evil Claudius.
The anticipation of
the ghost, the first appearance of the ghost, and the appearance of the ghost in Gertrude's closet represent the
progressive effectiveness of the ghost as a dramatic device.
The ghost in Macbeth is an effective dramatic device,
although it is thought by Allardyce Nicoll and other critics
to be an hallucination.
"The ghost of Banquo is a material
vision in the sense that it rises upon the stage; and yet it
21
is but an hallucination of Macbeth's own mind."
The ghost
of Banquo has the dramatic function of motivating the plot
from the time of its appearance until the end of the drama.
It is the sight of the ghost that makes Macbeth realize that
he is "in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should /he? wade
no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
It is the
sight of the ghost that makes Macbeth "bent to know,/ By the
worst means, the worst."
The worst means is, of course, by
the conjuration of the Weird Sisters.
The significant thing
here is that for the first time Macbeth is now seeking the
Weird Sisters, and that he was motivated by the sight of the
ghost of Banquo to seek them.
When Macbeth sees the ghost,
20
Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy
(London, 1962), p. ?8.
21
Allardyce Nicoll, Studies in Shakespeare (New York,
1927), p. 123.
53
he is completely unnerved and not responsible for his speech:
"Thou canst not say I did it; never shake/ Thy gory locks at
me."
The fact that the ghost appears only to Macbeth has
been explained by some as an hallucination, and has been
compared with the air-drawn dagger that Macbeth sees just
prior to the murder of Duncan.
Macbeth says of the dagger,
"There is no such thing;/ It is the bloody business which
informs/ Thus to mine eyes."
In other words, he admits that
the dagger is an hallucination, but he does not dismiss the
ghost of Banquo as easily; instead he says:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble. ^
Macbeth believes that he is really seeing the ghost of
Banquo; moreover, he sees the ghost just as the First Murderer describes Banquo as he lay in the ditch.
Whitmore
says, "That the ghost should appear to him /Macbeth/ alone
is perfectly explicable; he is merely using the power of
'selective apparition' to present himself to the person with
whom he is most concerned."2-^
After the guests have departed
Macbeth tries to convince himself that his unusual behavior
is that which is to be expected of one inexperienced in
crime, but he does not convince the audience of this because
he has not really convinced himself.
22
2
Macbeth. Ill, iv, 100-103.
^Whitmore, p. 257.
5^
The ghost of Banquo drives him to the Weird Sisters,
and in their cavern apparitions appear to him again.
The
First Apparition is an armed head—indicative of a soldier,
perhaps Macbeth or Macduff.
Macduff.
It tells him to beware of
The Second Apparition is a bloody child; this
might be Macduff as an infant.
woman born shall harm Macbeth."
It tells him that "none of
Macbeth is excited and
pleased over this prediction and shouts, "Then live Macduff."
The implication of that statement was that Macbeth had
already made a decision to kill Macduff as soon as he had
heard the words of the First Apparition.
The Third Appari-
tion is a child with a crown on its head and a tree in its
hand.
This apparition may be Malcolm.
The crown rightfully
belongs to Malcolm, and it was he who devised that his
soldiers should carry boughs of the trees up Dunsinane hill
to conceal the numbers of the soldiers.
Upon Macbeth's in-
sistence the witches show him a fourth apparition—a show of
eight kings.
This sight once again puts Macbeth into a
state of frenzy:
Horrible sight! Now, I see, 'tis true;
For the blood-bolter'd Banquo smiles upon me,
And points at them for his.
Banquo's ghost smiling at him torments Macbeth so that he
decides, "the very firstlings of my heart shall be/ the
firstlings of my hand."
It is obvious that the apparitions
Macbeth, IV, i, 121-123-
55
are mechanical devices similar to the parade of ghosts in
Richard III.
But it is also equally obvious that the parade
of apparitions here is subtler and much more complex than in
Richard III.
It is noteworthy, also, that even though these
apparitions in Macbeth come late in the play, they do more
than pronounce anathema on Macbeth.
In fact, they provide
the motivation for Macbeth's last bloody deeds.
In this,
they act upon him much as the Weird Sisters had near the beginning of the play.
When Macbeth learns that Macduff has
fled to England the "firstling" of his heart is to
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line.^5
Macbeth's erratic behavior in the banquet scene and his
bloodthirsty action since caused many of his noblemen to
desert him.
When the avenging armies attack at Dunsinane,
he is protected by only a few men who have remained faithful
to him.
What that number is, we do not know, but once again
the ghost of Banquo has had its dramatic effect upon the
plot.
The ghost of Banquo led him to the witches who in turn
showed him the apparitions which told him to be bloody, bold,
and resolute and never fear harm from any human being.
Mac-
beth's first act after his visit to the witches is bloody;
he remains bold to the very end, and would "Hang those who
would talk of fear."
2
Yet he is a pathetic character in the
% b l d . . IV, i, 151-153.
56
soliloquy
I have lived long enough; my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,
.
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.^"
In Act V Macbeth's mind is occupied with thoughts of his
wife's suicide, the desertion of his soldiers, and the "fiend
that lies like truth."
In one breath he seems ready to give
up; in the next, to fight until the very end. • He says in
the same speech, "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun," and "Blow
wind!
come, wrack!/ At least we'll die with harness on our
back."
Macduff is determined to be the one to kill Macbeth in
order that the ghosts of his wife and children might not
haunt him:
"If thou be'st slain and with no stroke of mine,/
My wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still."
Even
when Macbeth realizes that the witches have "lied like truth"
and that he is vulnerable to mortals he remains resolute.
His
last words are those of a brave soldier:
Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!" '
With Macbeth's death Banquo's ghost is avenged along with the
ghosts of Macduff's wife and children.
26
Ibid.. V, iii, 22-28.
27
Ibid.. V, viii, 32-3^.
57
The paramount motive of the ghosts in Richard III.
Julius Caesar, Hamlet. and Macbeth is revenge.
Yet each
ghost has a dramatic effect that is different from its
Senecan ancestor and different from one another.
Richard III
is more nearly Senecan than the other tragedies discussed.
The ghosts in Richard III are seeking Richard's blood and, as
if that were not enough, they are waiting to see his soul in
torment.
Ribner says of Richard III:
"Richard is more than
the stock villain-hero of Senecan revenge drama.
We see this
in the remorse of conscience which he suffers on the evening
before Bosworth Field and in the valor with which he goes
pO
forth to meet his death."
It is through Richard's conscience
that the ghosts have a dramatic effect upon the play.
Had
Richard been as insensitive as Barabas in The Jew of Malta,
the ghosts would have been entirely ineffectual.
As has been
noted, Shakespeare's handling of occult materials in Julius
Caesar was more mature, less derivative, and more complex than
in Richard III.
One of his tasks in Julius Caesar was to
maintain at least a modicum of historical accuracy, while at
the same time making the play plausible and the motivation of
his characters acceptable to his Elizabethan audience.
He
skillfully adapted the occult devices he found in Plutarch to
conform to his own time.
He makes effective use of the signs
and portents for the purpose of foreshadowing.
2
®Ribner, pp. 23-24.
According to
58
Virgil K. Whitaker, the unnatural and supernatural events of
Julius Caesar belong in the same category as the cannibal
29
horses and other portents in Macbeth.
x
Most important he
casts the brooding spirit of Caesar about the whole play and
thereby gives it a dimension it would not have had otherwise.
When the ghost of Caesar does appear to Brutus in a dream,
it is almost an anti-climax, but an intentional one.
Having served his apprenticeship in the occult in
Richard III and Julius Caesar, Shakespeare was well prepared
to mold supernatural phenomena to his own devices in his
great tragedies.
In Hamlet Shakespeare takes the cumbersome
old Senecan Revenge ghost and in the guise of Hamlet's father
turns it into the most important single dramatic device of
the play.
The ghost of Hamlet dominates the plot from be-
ginning to end.
It motivates the plot; it is an integral
part of the structure; and it gives the play coherence.
It
is not much of an exaggeration to say that without the ghost
of King Hamlet the play would have no form, the characters
no motivation.
The ghost in Hamlet becomes the model for all traditional stage ghosts.
It might reasonably have been expected
to be the best that Shakespeare could offer in his use of
occult phenomena as dramatic devices.
If value judgments
must be made, that distinction would probably have to go
^Virgil K. Whitaker, The Mirror up to Nature (California, 1965)»
125.
59
to
Macbeth.
In that play Shakespeare adds a dimension in
the Weird Sisters that puts it almost in a class "by itself.
They are sufficiently striking and sufficiently original in
concept to deserve a separate emphasis.
CHAPTER IV
THE WEIRD SISTERS
There are scholars who claim along with Simon A. Blackmore that Shakespeare's belief in witches was common to his
1
times.
C. E. Whitmore believes that Shakespeare avails him-
self of the "universally" held belief in witchcraft, or was
2
otherwise pandering to a superstitious audience.
Harold C.
Goddard firmly believes that only one convinced of the
reality of supernatural forces could conceivably have im3
parted such overwhelming sense of their presence.
This
study of Shakespeare's use of the occult phenomena as a
dramatic device cannot concern itself except incidentally
with the numerous arguments about the author's belief in the
occult.
Shakespeare may have used the witches in Macbeth
because he believed in witches, or because he was catering
to the tastes his audience and to King James I, who was a
sincere believer in witches and witchcraft, or he may have
used them simply because they appeared in his source material,
This point is not important. The important fact is that the
Simon A. Blackmore, A Great Soul in Conflict (New York,
1910), pp. 218-219.
^Whitmore, pp. 255-257«
-^Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago,
1963), II, 118-119.
60
61
Weird Sisters do serve as an effective dramatic device and
that no discussion of the play is complete without them.
Macbeth is the shortest but also the darkest tragedywritten by Shakespeare.
The tragedy gets its blackness and
gloom from the most effective dramatics Shakespeare ever
used—the Weird Sisters.
The appearances of the witches in
the play are few, but their evil presence is felt throughout.
They seem to be lurking in the crevices of every scene and
^n. ,^h^,h;e^rts:;-of;;those.^whp... h©ve , spoken wit|i;t.,1j)iem.' >-Their ,
words cannot be forgotten by Macbeth nor Banquo.
purpose cannot be forgotten by the .audie&c&i
Their evil
The entire play
is acted in a half-light atmosphere where gloom and darkness
give way to the evil forces in man and nature.
Macbeth's
world is a world of metaphysical evil propelled by strange
and unnatural creatures.
Shakespeare took full advantage of
the temperament of the times when he wrote Macbeth.
Not only
does he give his audience the Weird Sisters and the ghost of
Banquo, he fills the play from beginning to end with metaphysical evil.
Believing :.th'^,t Macbeth is fantastical and
imaginative beyond other tragedies, G. Wilson Knight says
"the play leaves one with an overpowering knowledge of
suffocating, conquering evil, and fixed by the basilisk eye
L
of nameless terror.
Knight agrees with A. C. Bradley that
ultimate ...in ,his genius. In, making
^G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930),
p. 155.
62
Macbeth $ d^grk and desolate drama.
The audience is led to
feel from the very beginning that something evil is about
when the play opens with the witches.
The question, "When
shall we three meet again . . .?" indicates that the witches
have just had a meeting to see what mischief they could conceive , and it clearly implies that the audience, as well as
Macbeth, will meet them again.
The next few lines make clear
the fact that something wicked will happen to Macbeth as the
witches plan their next meeting.with Macbeth.
To Elizabethan
play-goers the very setting indicates that the drama will be
controlled by preternatural as well as by physical blackness.
If Shakespeare were a product of his times and, therefore,
aware of popular belief in witchcraft as Blackmore believes
he was, his belief in the powers of evil and their threat to
the soul was more acute than that of his fellow countrymen.
The poet seems almost depressed by the idea that evil powers
do exist and that they have a physical and moral influence
on the lives of men.
The Elizabethans had heard many tales of witchcraft and
from all indications they believed them all.
George Lyman
Kittredge tells of an actual case history that occurred in
1601 which parallels an episode in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
The story, which Kittredge'calls a typical case of witchcraft, is about the examination of William Tompson of Dartmouth.
William was a sailor.
Late one night he and a
comrade chanced to meet Alice Trevisard who was dressed in
6
the manner of a priest.
3
The two sailors asked, her what she
was doing in the street at that time of night and an altercation followed.
handled.
Alice—thought to be a priest—was roughly
No sooner had the sailors attempted to leave than
William fell and almost broke his neck.
After other insults
and beatings, Alice placed a curse on William, which caused
his ship to be wrecked at sea.
She also made predictions to
Tompson's wife'that other misfortunes would happen to William,
Her predictions came true.-' Tompson's case against Alice
Trevisard could not have been far removed from Shakespeare's
mind when he wrote Macbeth around 1606.
Giving his witches
the actions and speech similar to a real case history of a
witch-trial, Shakespeare has one of his Weird Sisters meet a
sailor's wife, become involved in an argument over some
trivial conversation, and prophesy the sailor's misfortune.
This artifice lends conviction to the reality of Shakespeare ' s witches.^
The Weird Sisters in Macbeth have familiars that put
them in an established tradition.
According to Margaret
Murray there are four ways of obtaining familiars:
(1) by
gift from the devil; (2) by gift from a fellow witch; (3) by
inheritance; and (4) by magical ceremonies.
The gift of a
familiar from the devil was sometimes a divining familiar
and sometimes a domestic familiar.
z
As a divining familiar
^George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New
England (New York, 1956), PP* 12-1^.
64
it represented the devil himself, and the devil dictated
what species of animal the familiar should be.
The domestic
familiar was usually small. ^ t ^ h a S ^ ' ' . b u t ..,npt-:mll, of
the "powers of the divining familiar.
The domestic familiar
was the only kind that could be given by a fellow witch, for
the devil had the sole authority over the divining familiar.
Witchcraft was thought to run in families; it was not uncommon for a mother to give her daughter a familiar or to
leave the familiar to her as a legacy.
When a familiar is
obtained by magical ritual, it is assumed, to be the divining
familiar, for the witch must, upon its appearance, renounce
her faith in Christianity and swear fealty
to the familiar.^
It is not clear whether Greymalkin, a cat, and Paddock, a
toad, are divinijag^or.^domes.tic familiars. .¥evdo-Kknow;v;.''however, that'the witches are quick to answer their calls.
Pe0or4s of witchcraft almost always associate the witch
with a cat as her familiar.
Christina Hole tells of a cat-
familiar that belonged to one Dorothy Ellis, a Cambridgeshire
witch who in 3.6^7 confessed to Thomas Castell that
. . .
••si,n'c''e, shee-"being much
troubled in hir minde, there appeared unto hir the
Devell in the liknes of a great datt and speak to this
examinant and demanded of hir hir blodde, which she
gave him©^. after which the spirit in the liknes of a
'ca%t~"''suok----up,C)n':the• body •''o'f-"ithi's'••examinant'."'
^Margaret Alice Murray, The Witchcult in Western Europe
(Oxford, 1921), pp. 222-223.
^Christina Hole, Witchcraft in England (New York, 19^7)»
P. 51.
65
After that event the cat became her familiar and helped her
to commit many malefic acts. ;She supposedly aWnge^'herself
upon the family of'
Slater
girl to have violent fits and by causing the mother to. become lame.
The familiars of Shakespeai^i^r-¥eIr<i-..SiB:t!-gr,s -were
just what the audience expected.
In fact it. is doubtful that
his audience would have put any credulity in the witches had
the familiars been omitted.
There were certain things the
'Elizabethans and "Jacobeans believed'about the""wl1?6Ke")Sr<
they expected an accurate representation of their beliefs in
contemporary literature.,/ Shakespeare's treatment of the
' '
/
Weird Sisters is so masterful that the audience could immediately upon seeing them and hearing the first ten lines of
the play fill in certain unspecified background details.
The
audience assumes that the witch must renounce the Catholic
faith and take a vow to serve the devil; she must destroy her
rosary and trample on the Holy Cross; she must drop her name
and take a grotesque nickname; she must request that the
devil cross out her name from Christ's book and write it in
his own book; she must pay homage to the devil periodically,
never less than once a month; she must receive from the devil
some mark of identification, and try hard to win other souls
over to the devil.
Just the sight of Shakespeare's Weird
Sisters summoned these and many more superstitions about
witches to the minds of his audience.
66
In>Sha,ke spear e ' s day in-England, every Village .had its
w-tfco&.f>,;ior jcpYen,,_of,-;w,itches. The Elizabethan witches were
considered ignorant and coarse in their practice of magic;
their malevolence was feared to a degree that is incomprehensible to the modern mind.
The entire English people-king
and subjects1, believed that witches were old women who were
poor and ragged, skinny and hideous, and full of vulgar
gpite.
These women had sold their souls to the devil for the
purpose of fulfilling some personal desire.
After having
made a pact with Satan, the witches were able to perform or
to have their familiars perform whatever malefic act they
might command.
Witches were thought to be able to control
the wind, raise tempests, fly through the air, concoct magic
potions, and call forth evil spirits from the underworld.
According to Kittredge, the Elizabethans did not import their
ideas or practices of witchcraft from the Continent.
They
inherited these ideas from their forefathers in an unbroken
O
line of tradition.
He says that although witches may be
either whjte or black—beneficent or malefic—there is
usually a tendency among theologians to:condemn both as those
Q
who deal with evil spirits.
Beatrice White says, in the
introduction to George Gifford's A Dialogue..Concerning. Witches
and Witchcraft, "It is obvious that the witches of Macbeth
O
Kittredge, p. 23.
9
Ibid.
67
a
r
e
t
h
e
common or garden ./sic/ witch
wi.th- her>,jLiap3: in pots ...of wool . under -her bed.."
-are.
And indeed
Shakespeare's Weird Sisters are similar to the
common witches of the day whose main purpose it was to concoct charms and potions, to foretell the future, and, at
worst, to injure with the "evil-eye."
These similarities
made them recognizable to his audience.
But they are dif-
ferent enough from the English witches and the Scandinavian
Norms of Scottish witch-lore to be considered the creation
of the poet.
If the Weird Sisters had been nothing more than
the vulgar old women common to the popular idea of witches,
Banquo's words upon seeing them would have been superfluous.
What are these
So wither'd, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't. Live you? or are you aught
Than man may question?H
It is only after the witches have vanished and the two messengers have brought Macbeth the news that he is indeed the
Thane of Cawdor in addition to the Thane of Glamis that the
full impact of the powers of the weird creatures really hits
him, and he cries:
"What, can the devil speak true?"
It is well to note here just how little material Shakespeare used from the Holinshed Chronicle to create his Weird
Sisters, and how much he used from records of Scottish
10
George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and
Witchcraft, edited by G. B. Harrison (Oxford, 1931)V p. vii.
1
Macbeth, I, iii, 39-^3.
68
witch-trials.
Holinshed says that the two generals were
passing through "woods and. fields," when three women met
them.
The women were dressed in strange and wild apparel,
"resembling creatures of an elder world."
They gave their
prophecies to Macbeth and Banquo and then disappeared.
12
Further mention was made that the prophecies all came true.
Holinshed gives no more information or elaboration than this.
All of the details, actions, and words of Shakespeare's
witches are the poet's own imaginative creation from actual
case histories of witches.
And he intends that the audience
accept his creation as real and not figments of Macbeth's
and Banquo's minds.
In order to give his Weird Sisters the
reality he seeks, Shakespeare draws further details from the
Scottish witch-trials connected with Francis, Earl Bothwell.
Bothwell's witches had familiar spirits not unlike those of
Shakespeare's witches.1-^
Graymalkin calls to one of the
Weird Sisters; Paddock to another.
In the cavern scene
Harpier, another familiar not identified, cries, "'Tis time,
'tis time."
The witches of the Scottish witch-trials were
accused of having the gift of prophecy.
Agnes or Anny
Sampsoun (tried January 27th, 1590) was supposed to have
"foreknown by the spirit that the Queen's Majesty would never
1?
Allardyce and Josephine Nicoll, editors, Holinshed
Chronicle {New York, 1927), pp. 207-210.
^Lilian Winstanley, Macbeth, King Lear & Contemporary
History (Cambridge, 1922), p. 205.
69
come in this country unless the king fetched her."
Agnes
was also accused of delaying the coming of Anne of Denmark
by raising storms at sea.
§h&-kesp^ar.e,rs.'!wi.tcKW'"will'•jcausfc
a ship to "be "tempest-tosse'tK"
The Scottish witches were
known to each other by the term sister.
Nowhere in the play
Macbeth is the word witch used; rather they are called the
weird sisters, the weird women, or sister.
When the witches
meet for the second time in Act I, Scene iii, the first
witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?"
asks, "Sister, where thou?"
The third witch
When Macbeth is bent on learning
the worst news that can come to him in Act III, Scene iv, he
says, "Betimes I will to the weird sisters."
The Scottish
witches could travel over the land and through the air. fchey-s
could transform themselves into animal's, but usually the tail
of the animal would be missing.
Singing and dancing were
important parts of Scottish witch ceremonies.
Shakespeare's
Weird Sisters sing and dance when they know that Macbeth is
coming:
A drum, a drum!
Macbeth doth come.
The weird sisters, hand in hand
Posters of the sea and land . . . .
^
^
And when the sailor's wife will not give chestnuts to the
witch, the witch will have revenge by punishing the sailor:
iZj,
•Ibid.
1
^Macbeth. I, iii, 30-33.
70
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger,
But in a sieve 1 1 11 thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, I'll do.
The ingredients in the cauldron seem to have been suggested by certain details from the Scottish witch-trials.
At
the trial of Patrick Loucy we find him accused of
. . . consorting with one Janet Hunter, a notorious
witch, and who was executed to the death for sorcery
and witchcraft . . . . Janet and the said Patrick . . .
convened themselves upon the common waste sandhills in
Kyle . . . where the Devil appeared to them and conferred with them . . . . There appeared to them a
devilish spirit in the likeness to a woman and calling
herself Helen M'bune . . . . At diverse times thereafter
they assembled themselves in diverse kirks and kirkyards; where the said Patrick and his associates aforesaid, raised and took up sundry dead persons out of
their graves, and dismembered the said dead corpses for
the practising of their witchcraft and sorcery.17
The main interest in this trial is that it occurred just a
short time before the date of Macbeth.
Just as in the witch-
trial of Patrick Loucy, Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches
upon a blasted heath.
Later in the play the witches use dis-
membered corpses for their cauldron:
Liver of blaspheming Jew; . . .
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips;
.o
Finger of birth-strangled babe . . . .
Another important element in the Bothwell witch-trial is
dancing.
The witch scenes in Macbeth give full play to
singing and dancing.
l6
At the beginning of Act IV the witches
Ibid., I, iii, 7-10.
"^Winstanley, p. 108.
1
^Macbeth, IV, i, 25, 27, 30.
71
can be certain that Macbeth will visit them:
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.19
The witches sing and dance as they brew their hideous hellbroth, and when they have finished Hecate enters:
0, well done! I commend your pains;
And every one shall share i1 the gains:
And now about the cauldron sing,
Like elves and fairies in a ring.
Enchanting all that you put in.^0
The stage directions at this point call for music and song.
When the witches wish to make their charms more potent, they
sing or chant as they dance in a circle.
..Blackmore believes that the witches in Act IV are baser
witches than those found at the beginning of the play.
It seems highly improbable that so excellent an
artist would without reason,.debase, those preternatural
beings,, the "Fates," or Weird Sisters, to the low level
'common type. 21
He sees such action as the dancing and incantation as a
degradation and uncalled for.
^awesomeness of the witches.
At the beginning of the play the Weird Sisters were mysterious
beings whose place of abode was unknown, and whose powers were
mysterious.
In the latter part of the play their action seems
demeaning to some critics and Hecate an awkward interpolation.
19
20
Ibid., IV, i, 4-5.
Ibid. . IV, i, 39-^:
^Blackmore, p. 206.
72
Cumberland Clark believes that the Hecate scene is "meaningless and superfluous" and that, it serves no dramatic purpose.
He finds her inconsistent with the other supernatural beings.
Clark says scholars are now nearly all agreed that some other
22
hand than Shakespeare's meddled with the tragedy.
Perhaps
this is true, but the passages that Clark believes to be
interpolations (Act I, Scenes i and iii; Act III, Scene v,
and the appearance of Hecate in Act IV, Scene i) all have an
intrinsic value to the play.
For example Act I, Scene i,
sets the mood of gloom and foreboding; it gives the audience
to know that this is going to be a play replete with evil,
full of natural and supernatural phenomena.
shows the evil nature of the witches.
Act I, Scene iii,
Hecate's appearance
in Act III, Scene v, supports the next appearance of the
witches and explains why the witches are now making a cauldron
to drive Macbeth to his own destruction.
It is Hecate's com-
mand because of her jealousy in not being consulted about
"traffic" with Macbeth in the beginning.
The witches ac-
knowledge" "that they have superiors, superiors in the forms
of their familiars known to be demons, but also Hecate is
recognized as their superior.
3^t wourd"not be germane for this study to become in.-...
v6W^a'"TfT^lie^a3gumerits about possible interpolations.
A.
point "tci"T5^c"n6ted, however, is that Macbeth, .as late as
22
Cumberland Clark, Shakespeare and the Supernatural
(London, 1931). P. 8?»
73
Act IV, never doubts the powers of the witches.
Determined.
to know','¥^1r'iM^'>&h,ead for him, Macbeth conjures them byall the powers they are known to possess.
I conjure, you, by that which you profess,
Kowe'er you come to know it, answer me:
Though^©u-iuhtie -the winds and" let them fight
Against the .churches; though the yesty waves
Confpufi(i;'arid swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn toe lodged and trees blown down;
Though , ca'stles. topple oh their warders' heads;
Though palaces and•pyramids .do slope
Thair^iieStds to their' foundations; though the treasure
Of nature's 'germens tumble all together,
Ev.e.^::,^rlJi:--d'estruction - sicken; answer me
Td'-vWimt I ask you.23
This passage, and. others, reveal that the witch scenes are
still a powerful force even late in the play, and they still
provide'' motivation that is indispensable to the final resolution of the play.
It has been of value in this study to recount in some
detail the specific attributes of witches and witchcraft.
This review has helped establish the authenticity of the
witches in Macbeth and has demonstrated that they were, in
effect, lifted out of the witch-trials of the time.
There
are embodied in them practically all of the beliefs and
practices of demonology contemporary with Shakespeare.
The
witch scenes have the added, if rather obvious, value of
providing an atmosphere for the evil machinations in the play.
In addition, the theatrical effectiveness of the witch scenes
would seem to be beyond question.
23
Macbeth, IV, i, 50-61.
No one of these things
7^
cited here would be sufficient, however, in itself, to account for the general excellence of the play.
And unless
there were an added dimension in Shakespeare's use of the
occult in Macbeth, it would be redundant, to say the least,
to merely rehearse what has been stated many times before.
This added dimension is in the area of structure.
Like the
ghost scenes in Hamlet, the witch scenes in Macbeth provide
the play with a genuine dramatic device that is integral to
the action of the play and provides the initial and continuing
motivation.
The first set of prophecies stimulates the already ambitious Macbeth to seize the throne "by the nearest means."
Soon after the third witch prophesies that Macbeth "shalt be
king hereafter" the audience realizes that Macbeth's ambition
exists before the play begins.
Banquo notes that Macbeth
gives a start or an uncontrolled gesture of surprise when the
prophecy of kingship is made.
Good sir, why do you start and
seem to fear
gij.
Things that do sound so fair?
A guilty start is a natural reaction in such a circumstance,
especially when innermost longings have been voiced.
The
subsequent murder of Banquo was brought about by his inquisitiveness and as an indirect result of his question to
the Weird Sisters:
Ibid.. I, iii, 51.
75
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.25
When the prophecy that Banquo's descendants will be kings is
added to the prophecy that Macbeth is to receive a "fruitless crown," Banquo's death warrant was sealed.
The predictions of the Weird Sisters are fulfilled to
the smallest particular.
There is, however, nothing sur-
prising •iH:^M'SlCC?OTr:transcendingi,mortals.. in -perfection of
.natl3re and of 'irit'eTrect, the ;witches. can,;perceiv.e-many-,,..tilings-,
that are obscure .or unknown to us.
Their greater intelli-
gence is owed to the greater excellence of their spiritual
nature, and its excellence is proportioned to their nearer
approach to the Deity.
Supernatural beings are purported
to be clairvoyant in the sense that whatever happens outwardly among men is immediately known to them.
Act I,
Scene i, reveals that the battle will be lost and won before
the set of sun.
The witches know that Macbeth and his
forces will be the victors, and they make plans to meet with
Macbeth.
There is no passage in the text to indicate that
the witches were present or even near the camp at Forres when
Duncan tells his soldiers Ross and Angus to find Macbeth and
greet him by. the title "Thane of Cawdor," yet the witches
know that this has happened, and they greet Macbeth by
25
Ibid., I, iii, 58-61.
26
Blackmore, p. *1-3•
76
that title.
The- witches hear, a drum and know that Macbeth
is apprpaeatei^ng.
These and other passages indicate that
Shakespeare employs the witches in a manner approaching the
use of the oracles and other devices for prognostication in
Greek drama.
In this context the term "weird" sometimes
applied to them becomes more significant.
Henry N. Paul
explains that Theobald changed the word we.yward in the First
Folio to weird and justified his change by the reference in
Holinshed that says that some people thought the women on
the heath to be "the weird sisters, that is, as ye would say,
27
the Goddesses of Destiny."
The term weird suggests the
supernatural or evil spirits, ghosts or any of the Fates.
The Fates of Greek and Roman mythology were believed to be
able to control human destiny.
As a dramatic device, the'
Weird Sisters in Macbeth are an approximation to the Greek
concept of Fate or destiny,
©AUQfeerpart^to the-classical chorus.
The chorus was employed
to"• give" tft'fe background of the drama,> to interpret the actions
of the characters, and to anticipate coming -events.
Shake-,
speare's Weird Sisters in Act I represent what- is comparable
to ttoe-Greek prologue.
In Act III, Scene v, the Hecate
"scene; they anticipate the action that,.is to-..follow-. As ,
aias^ady^'fid't'ed the prophecy of ^he Weird Sisters i-s comparable
^Henry Neill Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York.
1950), p. 159.
77
to the prophecies of the oracles in Greek tragedy,, and Macbeth is no more bound by the prophecy than is Oedipus.
It
is not surprising to find such strong classical overtones in
a play which has been called Shakespeare's most classical.
The architectonic and structural aspects of the witch
scenes continue to be apparent in the body of the play.
The
ideas set in motion in Act I continue to germinate, of course,
but beyond that Shakespeare returns to the witches for motivation of even the final catastrophic ending.
In Act IV,
Scene i, Macbeth has demanded that the witches let him know
what lies ahead for him.
They acknowledge their "masters" in
this scene, .asking Macbeth if he would rather know the future
from their masters.
From this point the witches set into mo-
tion the second set of prophecies and pronouncements.
beth should beware of Macduff.
harm Macbeth.
Mac-
No one of woman.born shall
Macbeth need not fear danger until Birnam Wood
march up the hill to Dunsinane.
It is notable that in the
first set of prophecies the witches do not prescribe a line
of action for Macbeth to follow.
But in Act IV when they wish
to make him destroy himself, they tell him to "Be bloody, bold,
and resolute; laugh to scorn/ The power of man . . . ."
The
witches know that "security is mortals' chieftest enemy."
Macbeth believes the words of the apparitions because he wants
to believe them.
beth.
In reality the witches do not lie to Mac-
Macbeth was slain by Macduff; Macduff was "from his
mother's womb untimely ripped."
The Eiigl'l'lK-
78
forces cut limbs from the trees of Birnam Wood to camouflage
their numbers thus making Birnam Wood march up the hill to ......
Dunsina»e.
When Macbeth finally realizes that the witches
have deceived him, that most of his men have deserted him, and
that his wife has committed suicide, he is at the nadir of his
despair.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more . . . .2°
These lines just quoted may be said to sum up the main thematic threads of the play.
They state succinctly what the
scenes with the weird sisters are all about.
But this speech
of Macbeth's is just an epilogue to Banquo's when he advised
Macbeth that
. . . oftentimes, to win us to our harm
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.^9
The basilisk eye bf nameless terror thatKnightspeaks
of is manifested in mood, tone, and atmospher e-of . the <irama.
The mood is one o f f ear .• The tone is one of continual uncertainty as the characters incessantly question one another
and themselves.
The atmosphere is dark and evil.
2
^Macbeth. V, v, 19-26.
29 Ibid.. I, iii, 123-126.
The witches
79
act upon Macbeth who, in turn, sets the mood, of the play.
In Act I, Macbeth shows fear, or at least apprehension, after
the Weird Sisters hail him King of Scotland.
The fear of
this prophecy stems in part from the fact that Banquo has
heard it.
Macbeth's fear is in part also that his inner
thoughts have been exposed.
He fears his own ambition and
his leaning toward the supernatural in order to achieve his
ambition:
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot-.<be',ill-cannot• be^.good; if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor;
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose- horrid image doth unfix my hair"
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the, use-of nature?,.. Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings;' '
My thought, .whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.30
Macbeth fears his evil thoughts can be read when he hears
Duncan proclaim his eldest son Malcolm Prince of Cumberland:
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Lady Macbeth knows her husband's fears and her own fears become intertwined with his:
Yet do I fear thy nature;
What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
Ibid.. I, iii, 130-142.
30
31
Ibid., I, iv, 50-53.
80
And yet wouldst wrongly win. Thou 'ldst have,
great Glamis,
That which cries, "Thus thou must do, if thou
have it";
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be u n d o n e . 3 2
It is fear that at first makes Macbeth decide against the
murder of Duncan.
He fears the very stones will prate his
"whereabout" as he steals toward Duncan's chamber to murder
him.
He is afraid to go back to Duncan's chambers to return
the daggers and smear the grooms with blood.
follow through in the murder plot he says:
Refusing to
"I am afraid to
think what I have done; look on't again I dare not."
After
Duncan's body has been discovered, it is fear that causes
Macbeth's speech to become verbose and unnatural.
Macbeth's
fear turns to terror when he sees the ghost of Banquo. - He;c,;.
•i'^'-'iMable.'.to ^nd^x^tantl^vhy^.^tiy^Macbe-th'^oS
ruby of her cheeks when his are blanched with fear. . These
/fears are cumulative, and it is appalling to see the Mandisintegrate before us.
Macbeth's fears are dissipated after
he has seen the apparitions in the witches' cavern and has
heard their prophecy that he should be bloody, bold, and
resolute.
From this point in the play until the end, the
audience no longer shares the fears with Macbeth; they are
fearful of him and what crimes he may commit.
The scene in
the witches' cavern sets Macbeth off on the last grotesque
course of action.
32Ibid.. I, v, 17, 21-26.
81
Shakespeare makes his audience feel the presence of
evil when Lady Macbeth so earnestly invokes the evil spirits;
--. . ,
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe-" top full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the .access-and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell4purpose, nor keep peace.-between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk forvK^J^-,; you murdering' ministers,
Wherever in your'";sIg#t$es^ substances
You wait on nature's mischief'.33
Evil is felt hovering about the dagger scene and again when
Macbeth hears voices that tell him to "sleep no more."
Demonic spirits trouble Banquo's sleep; Duncan laughs in his
sleep; and Lady Macbeth is unable to sleep without a candle.
Even nature is disturbed by the presence of demons.
Macbeth
fears that the stones under his feet will prate his whereabout
as he steals to Duncan's chamber.
An owl, an ill omen in it-
self, shrieks just before Duncan's murder.
The Old Man
reports
'Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that's done. On Tuesday last
A falcon, towering in her pride of place, ,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.^
Ross adds his information concerning unnatural happenings to
that of the Old Man.
He had witnessed Duncan's horses,
"minions of their race," turn wild and eat each other. .Evil.
spi?r4*fe«r^
of evil spirits are omnipresent in
33Ibid.. I, v, M - 5 1 .
3
^Ibid.. II, iv, 10-13.
82
Some of the spirits are consciously invoked, as
with Lady Macbeth; others appear involuntarily.
The
presences of the Weird Sisters permeate the whole play to an
extent that the play cannot be comprehended, without them.
Through them and the scenes in which they appear Shakespeare
creates a dramatic device using occult phenomena that is the
most effective he ever employed.
Through this dramatic
device Shakespeare adds another dimension to the play that at
times transcends the worldly altogether.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
In almost every age where drama has flourished, supernaturalism has had a prominent place on the stage.
In Greek
drama the playwrights made considerable use of occult phenomena, not only for special effects, but also as an integral
part of the structure of the play.
Supernaturalism in Greek
drama, at its best, was a natural extension of occult beliefs
and practices in Greek life and religion.
In almost every
instance when it appears in the drama it is integral to the
plot; it motivates character; and it is an extension of the
theme.
It must be pointed out and stressed that supernatu-
ralism itself is not automatically a dramatic device, nor
can it become one until the author deliberately uses the
phenomena to motivate the plot and to make it coherent.
The
Greek playwrights did not come automatically and intuitively
to an effective use of the occult.
The Suppliants of
Aeschylus is an example of the supernatural being used merely
as a decorative detail.
Although Pleasgus aids the Sup-
pliants because he fears the wrath of Zeus, Zeus has no influence on the structure of the play.
This play, the earliest
extant by Aeschylus, shows the rudiment of occultism in
tragedy.
Prom this small beginning evolves a more elaborate
83
84
and a more mature handling of occultism in tragedy.
The
Persians, another play by Aeschylus, is important in the
history of occultism in tragedy because it was the first to
make use of the prophetic dream and the ghost.
This play
made innovations which broadened the scope of the use of occultism, and according to C. E. Whitmore, it was the first
known play in the literature of Western culture to bring the
supernatural even into external connection with the action.
Although the handling of the occult in The Persians is more
meaningful than it is in The Suppliants, Aeschylus does not
make the prophetic dream and the ghost an integral part in
the drama.
By the time Sophocles appears on the scene Greek
playwrights had begun to use the occult in tragedy with great
sophistication.
In Oedipus Rex the oracle at Delphi is a
dramatic device which dominates and motivates the entire
action and theme of the play.
The subtlety with which the
occult is developed in Oedipus Rex is not to be matched again
until Shakespeare reaches the height of his powers in Hamlet
and Macbeth.
Because of the obvious influence of Seneca upon Elizabethan tragedy, it is natural to assume that much of the
occultism on the Elizabethan stage derives from Seneca alone.
Seneca was undoubtedly important but the influences are more
varied than at first supposed.
Seneca's contribution to the
occult in tragedy is primarily in the form of revenge
ghosts, divination, and mechanical devices.
Seneca departed
85
from Greek decorum by having his murders committed on stage.
The Grecian specters were used primarily to prophesy and to
motivate and were rarely vindictive.
On the other hand,
revenge is the main purpose of the Senecan ghosts.
not untypical of Seneca's plays.
Medea is
In it appears a chariot
drawn by dragons that aids Medea in her escape from Corinth.
This kind of use of supernaturalism is mechanical, superficial, and melodramatic.
Although many critics believe that
Seneca's dramatic technique is poor, that his characters are
unreal, and that he relies upon horror for dramatic effect,
it cannot be denied that Seneca's adaptations of the Greek
tragedies had a great influence upon the Renaissance playwrights.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries reflect the
Senecan influence in the division of the play into five acts,
the use of the prologue, chorus, ghosts, long soliloquies,
and the use of magic, horror, and revenge.
The playwrights of the early Elizabethan period ignored
the supernaturalism found in English medieval drama and
focused their attention on Senecan tragedy.
Although they
found their English audience ready to accept the occultism
found in Senecan tragedy, the early Elizabethan playwrights
were not prepared to improve upon the use of supernatural
elements and convert them into genuine dramatic devices that
were indispensable to the action and structurally integrated
into the play as a whole.
For example Sackville and Norton
make superficial use of the occult in Gorboduc by having
86
Magaera arid, her sister furies appear in a dumb show to
prophesy the downfall of the royal family.
Choosing this
kind of setting, the authors imply the external nature of
the occult phenomena.
The ghost of Andrea in Thomas Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy is different in some respects from the
Senecan ghost, "but it is not an improvement upon the ghost
as a dramatic device.
The ghost of Andrea makes three ap-
pearances in the play; it is made to appear more human than
the Grecian or Senecan ghost; it does not set an atmosphere
of terror.
At times it comes dangerously close to being a
comic figure.
Andrea is accompanied by Revenge who is the
real motivator of the plot.
But the lack of seriousness on
the part of both supernatural beings makes it difficult to
believe that the tragic deaths are caused by their influence.
Even Shakespeare's early attempts at using the supernatural
fall short of being authentic dramatic devices.
In Richard
III the parade of the ghosts of Richard's victims prophesying
his defeat comes too late in the play to be considered a
dramatic device.
The dramatic device must motivate at least
the major portion of the drama and be an integral part of
the structure.
This study has made no special attempt to
establish priorities, but Christopher Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus was among the first plays to use the occult as an
authentic dramatic device.
The play employs a number of oc-
cult elements that are only decorative and mechanical, such
as the magic tricks and even the Good Angel and the Bad Angel.
8?
In the character of Mephistophilis, however, Marlowe has
developed a supernatural character that has affinities to
the Greek oracle and one which is an integral, vital dramatic device.
Although supernatural!sm and the occult are present in
many of Shakespeare's tragedies, they can be judged as
genuine dramatic devices in only three--Julius Caesar, Hamlet,
and Macbeth.
In these plays Shakespeare uses the ghosts and
the witches with all the superstitions they imply and weaves
them into the structure of the dramas so well that they become indispensable to the plot.
By the time of these plays
the spectral visitor is of ancient lineage.
That Shakespeare
was able to inject new life into the ghostly visitor is as
remarkable as it is obvious.
He is able to breathe new life
into the ghost in part because of his close reliance on details drawn from life.
Shakespeare's use of the ghost is in
keeping with the expectations of his audience.
The pre-
vailing view of the time was that ghosts were spirits, sometimes good, more often evil, that had returned from hell or
purgatory.
The spirit was believed to have had some mission
on earth that could only be carried out by some supernatural
force.
The uneducated believed that the ghost was actually
the spirit of some deceased person who left his grave in
order to appear on earth to impart a message of impending
danger, civil strife, or personal harm to someone.
They also
believed that the ghost of one who had been murdered was
88
doomed to walk the earth until the murder was avenged.
If
this air of contemporaneity were all that Shakespeare accomplished with his ghosts, he would be little better in this
device than a number of his contemporaries.
The main contention of this thesis is that at the height
of his dramatic maturity Shakespeare was able to transform
what had become rather crude and hackneyed treatment of the
occult into an employment of occult phenomena that transcends
anything that was being written in his time.
In his plays
where the occult is used most extensively and most skillfully
the various supernatural manifestations have, in most instances, ceased to be merely superficial and melodramatic
decorative and mechanical devices.
In Julius Caesar, Hamlet,
and Macbeth the occult phenomena have been transformed, in
terms of the terminology adopted by this study, into authentic
dramatic devices.
On the most obvious and superficial level
this means that the occult manifestations are so carefully
interwoven into the fabric of the play that to alter or omit
them would be to materially alter the play.
A key distinc-
tion, then, is that when the supernatural element is integral
and indispensable it becomes a genuine dramatic device incorporated into the structure of the play and having a direct
bearing on the motivation of the play.
The distinctions which this thesis makes are perhaps
best indicated through comparison and contrast.
The central
chapters of the thesis have examined in detail Shakespeare's
89
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth in order to demonstrate
that in the employment of the occult they are a distinct
advancement in technique over what was being written in Shakespeare's time and over Shakespeare's earlier plays such as
Titus Andronicus and Richard III.
This study has concen-
trated on two main supernatural manifestations:
the ghostly
visitation, which culminated and reached its zenith in
Hamlet; and the Weird Sisters of Macbeth.
With the ghostly visitor Shakespeare was working in an
already well-established
tradition.
He was not content in
Hamlet, however, to accept the somewhat crude Senecan ghost
without modification.
The ghost of Hamlet's father is more
than just another revenge ghost.
The influence of the ghost
permeates the play, much as Caesar's spirit had dominated the
earlier play.
The Hamlet ghost acts as chorus and commentator
in a manner reminiscent of the classical chorus, yet it remains at all times integral to the main action.
The Hamlet
ghost, finally, is the primary motivator of the forward movement of the plot and of the character of the hero.
The evil presence of the Weird Sisters is felt throughout the entire play.
They, like the ghosts, are limited in
their appearances on stage in the drama, but the audience is
ever mindful that they control the plot.
The Weird Sisters
fulfilled the expectations of an audience that believed in
witchcraft as much as it believed in life and death.
Shake-
speare must have been thoroughly acquainted with the current
90
beliefs and superstitions about witchcraft or he could not
have created a dramatic device such as his Weird Sisters who,
in three appearances and somewhat less than one hundred and
fifty lines, could give the play an atmosphere of dreadful
foreboding.
The overwhelming influence of the witches on the
play is a work of genius.
Everything considered, Macbeth
shows better than any other of Shakespeare's plays his consummate skill with the occult and supernatural.
The play is
almost inconceivable except as worked out within the framework of the prophecies of the witches.
An investigation of the uses of the occult in tragedies
from classical to modern times shows that the two periods in
which this device was used most effectively are the Attic
Greek and the Elizabethan.
Comparing Oedipus and Macbeth,
and considering that each was developed in the context of its
own time, one finds that they have remarkable similarities.
The underlying ideas of both plays include the belief that
life is basically tragic, that every man has a personal responsibility for his sins, that man has limitations and must
subordinate himself to those limitations, and that excessive
pride will be punished.
Oracular forces are important in
both plays, but the final destinies are in the hands of the
hero.
Shakespeare seems intuitively to have reverted to a
dramatic technique with occult phenomena that is more nearly
Sophoclean than Senecan.
That he was right is indicated by
the fact that in plays like Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and
91
Macbeth the modern audience is able to transcend its tendency
to disbelieve and accepts the supernatural mechinery almost
without question, whereas in Seneca, Kyd, and even Marlowe the
occult devices remain at best quaint anachronisms.
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