Victoria Bladen & Yan Brailowsky (dir.), Shakespeare and the supernatural, Manchester University Press, 2020

Supernatural elements are of central significance in many of Shakespeare’s plays, contributing to their dramatic power and intrigue. Ghosts haunt political spaces and internal psyches, witches foresee the future and disturb the present, fairies meddle with love and a magus conjures a tempest from the elements. Although written and performed for early modern audiences, for whom the supernatural, whether sacred, demonic or folkloric, was part of the fabric of everyday life, the supernatural in Shakespeare continues to enthrall audiences and readers, and maintains its power to raise a range of questions in contemporary contexts.
This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches, generating new knowledge and presenting hitherto unexplored avenues of enquiry across the Shakespearean canon.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Shakespeare and the supernatural
Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky

Part I: Embodying the supernatural

• Chapter 1: Shakespeare’s political spectres
  Victoria Bladen
• Chapter 2: ‘Rudely stamped’: Supernatural generation and the limits of power in Shakespeare’s Richard III
  Chelsea Phillips
• Chapter 3: Digital puppetry and the supernatural: Double Ariel in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest (2017)
  Anchuli Felicia King

Part II: Haunted spaces

• Chapter 4: Demons and puns : Revisiting the ‘cellarage scene’ in Hamlet
  Pierre Kapitaniak
• Chapter 5: Performing the Shakespearean supernatural in Avignon: A challenge to the Festival
  Florence March

Part III: Supernatural utterance and haunted texts

• Chapter 6: Prophecy and the supernatural: Shakespeare’s challenges to performativity
  Yan Brailowsky
• Chapter 7: Puck, Philostrate and the locus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s topical allegory
  Laurie Johnson
• Chapter 8: ‘Strange intelligence’: Transformations of witchcraft in Macbeth discourse
  William C. Carroll

Part IV: Magic, music and gender

• Chapter 9: Music and magic in The Tempest: Ariel’s alchemical songs
  Natalie Roulon
• Chapter 10: From Prospero to Prospera: Transforming gender and magic on stage and screen
  Katharine Goodland

Part V: Contemporary transformations

• Chapter 11: ‘I’ll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes’: Representing the supernatural in film adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  Gayle Allan
• Chapter 12: Ophelia and her magical daughters: The afterlives of Ophelia in Japanese pop culture
  Yukari Yoshihara