The supernatural in hamlet and macbeth

Selected critical approaches to the supernatural in Hamlet
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy
A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, a study of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, was first published more than a hundred years ago, in 1904, and its importance can be judged by the fact that in the Cambridge New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, first published in 1971, the two essays on Shakespeare criticism over the centuries are titled “Shakespeare criticism: Dryden to Bradley” and “Shakespeare criticism since Bradley.” M.A. Shaaber, the author of the first of the essays, speaks of Bradley’s influence as “very great” and “deserved” (247). Stanley Wells, the author of the second, calls Shakespearean Tragedy a “great book” and a “landmark” (249)
Shaaber describes Bradley as a critic whose strength was the psychological analysis of Shakespeare’s characters, and who assumed "that everything in a play is explicable, that Shakespeare knew all the answers, and that we can discover them too if we apply our minds with sufficient discernment and sympathy. He assumes that Shakespeare would allow no part to inconsistency or chance or unreason in the scheme of a play and labours to eliminate them wherever he finds them. When Shakespeare offers insufficient explanation Bradley supplies what is wanting" (247). In this respect, Bradley sounds like just the opposite of Robert H. West, who regards “unreason” and the inexplicable as part of the essence of Shakespeare’s tragic effect in both Hamlet and Macbeth.
While Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy has a great deal to say about the Witches in Macbeth, his discussion of King Hamlet’s ghost is short. It is based on his recognition of what he calls “some vaster power” that lies behind “all that happens or is done” in Hamlet (140). “We do not define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it” (140-141).
Bradley suggests that this “feeling of a supreme power or destiny” is religious in some way, and he thinks that it is as much a part of Macbeth as of Hamlet (141). It is another reason why, he ways, the two plays top the list of Shakespeare’s plays “in general esteem” (143). In Hamlet, he thinks that one of the principal ways Shakespeare creates this feeling is by making the Ghost “so majestical a phantom” (142). With its grave, impersonal manner and its “measured and solemn” speech, "the Ghost affects the imagination not simply as the apparition of a dead king who desires the accomplishment of his purposes, but also as the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice . . . a reminder or a symbol of the connection of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster life of which it is but a partial appearance” (141).
Carrying through his idea of Hamlet’s religious character, Bradley sees the action of the play framed in a way that is “an intimation . . . that the apparent failure of Hamlet’s life is not the ultimate truth concerning him”: a soul in torment coming from Purgatory (Bradley seems to accept without question that the Ghost does come from Purgatory) opens the play, and in the play’s last scene a soul at rest is accompanied by angels to heaven (142).