The Use of Supernatural Elements in Shakespeares Hamlet...

Discuss the usage and effects that the supernatural elements have in both Kyds `The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeares Hamlet. Ghosts or supernatural beings feature both in The Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd, in 1587, and in Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare, in 1601. Ghosts and the supernatural `remind the characters and the audience of the constraints the past places on the present, and also the obligations the living bear to the departed . There were many superstitions surrounding these entities during Elizabethan times. A ghost defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is `the soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living. The supernatural†¦show more content†¦All we know of the ghost in the Ur Hamlet, as the original text has not survived, is that it was a `ghost who cries like an oyster wife in the cellarage, which is extremely unlike the ghost we see in Hamlet, but that could hav e been an initial starting point for Shakespeare to work from. In the play Hamlet, the ghost initially appears to a group of sentries stationed outside the palace on a cold and eerie night. Ghosts and the supernatural were extremely popular in the drama of the period, and symbolised many things. In other texts of the time the usage of ghosts became extreme, as they started to talk to the characters and quickly lost their potency as a dramatic device. To an Elizabethan audience the appearance of the ghost at this particular time could have any of four meanings. It could be the actual ghost of a person returning to perform a task, an evil omen of a forthcoming event, an incarnation of the devil, or finally a symbol of the craziness and madness about at the time. Which refers specifically to the quote `all is rotten in the state of Denmark. Shakespeare knew these four interpretations and played on them with the inclusion of the ghost, as it created confusion and mayhem. The ghost would not and could not speak, unless, he was spoken to by an educated person. Marcellus judges Horatio to be thisShow MoreRelatedWilliam Shakespeares Hamlet Essay3604 Words   |  15 PagesWilliam Shakespeares Hamlet Hamlet was written around the year 1600 in the final years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who had been the monarch of England for more than forty years and was then in her late sixties. The prospect of Elizabeth’s death and the question of who would succeed