The supernatural in hamlet and macbeth

CONCLUSION
 
Hamlet and Macbeth are two of the most written-about works in all of English literature. They have been written about so much because audiences, scholars, and critics have found them fascinating as theatre, as well as psychology, for what they say about the world of Shakespeare’s England, and for what they seem to say about the mind of Shakespeare himself.
When it comes to the role of supernatural in the two plays, I do not think it makes much difference what Shakespeare himself believed about ghosts and witches, even if we could know for sure what that was (which we cannot). What seems to me to be clear is what he believed about the members of his audience: that they thought of ghosts and witches as part of a supernatural order which was as “real” as anything in the natural order and which on occasion could intrude itself into the natural order and affect people and events there. For Christians who were able to believe in the miracles and mysteries of the Bible with a literalness that is no longer possible for most of us today, belief in the reality of ghosts and witches was totally consistent with their ideas about the world as a whole. An Elizabethan skeptic on the subject would also have to have been a skeptic about some of the central claims of Christianity, and there were not many such skeptics in Shakespeare’s audience. Those “modernist” critics who argue that King Hamlet’s ghost and the Weird Sisters are not real but only “symbols” and “objectifications” of the respective heroes’ troubled minds (Curry, 56) seem to me, therefore, to have no ground to stand on, and would have no ground to stand on even if Horatio and Marcellus and Barnardo and Banquo did not testify with “the sensible and true avouch” of their own eyes (Hamlet, I.1.57) that the supernatural is, literally, there.
Since it is almost impossible to write about Hamlet without writing about the Ghost and almost impossible to write about Macbeth without writing about the Weird Sisters, in collecting opinions about the role of the supernatural in the two plays I have barely scratched the surface of the huge bibliography of criticism for each of them. But though I have read only a very little of what professional scholars and critics have had to say about the supernatural in Hamlet and Macbeth, I have formed an opinion of my own on what is the best way to approach the subject.
.Among the several critics I have sampled, Robert H. West in Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery is the kind of model I would want to follow if I were a professional critic of Shakespeare. West seems to be at the opposite pole from A.C. Bradley, at least if M.A. Shaaber’s characterization of Bradley that I have quoted earlier is true: someone who assumes that everything in the great tragedies can be satisfactorily explained; that there are no inconsistencies; that “Shakespeare knew all the answers” to the psychological and philosophical questions raised by the plays; and that the answers are all there in the plays if only you are clever enough and work hard enough to uncover them.
This sounds very much like the puzzle-solving approach to Shakespeare that West thinks is not only “certain to end with a confusing failure” (57) but, more importantly, that misses exactly the thing which makes the great tragedies great by explaining away the mystery at the heart of the plays. It is like dissecting a body in order to locate the soul. West believes that Shakespeare purposely left the nature of the Ghost and the Witches uncertain and not fully explainable by critical analysis because he knew that uncertainty of this kind creates dramatic “awe and mystery” (79), and because he recognized that the awe and mystery created by tragedy reflect the awe which we feel before the mystery of life itself. And this seems to me a better way to explain why Hamlet and Macbeth appeal so powerfully to our imagination than by trying to dissect out every last muscle and blood vessel
.There is another reason why West’s general approach of leaving room for “inconsistency or chance or unreason” (Shaaber, 247) in the plays may make good sense. Shakespeare was a working man of the theatre, supplying popular entertainment week after week and year after year in his roles as company shareholder, actor, and playwright, and without any idea that his plays would outlive him as they have. It does not seem plausible that he could have had the time or the energy or the foresight necessary to pack into them as many subtle and different meanings as generations of critics writing in the leisure of their studies have been able to extract from them. Similarly, when it comes to the many inconsistencies that critics have discovered in Hamlet and Macbeth, I think that it makes at least as much sense to blame them on hasty composition by a busy and pressured playwright who knew that they would be overlooked by audiences in the theatre, as to try and make sense of them by engaging in elaborate intellectual gymnastics that only other intellectual gymnasts can fully understand or appreciate. Shakespeare is good enough not to have to be perfect.