Summary:
Compares the William Shakespeare play, Hamlet and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Examines supernatural elements contained in both texts. Describes how the characters in both texts react to supernatural elements.
Discuss the usage and effects that the supernatural elements have in both Kyd's 'The Spanish Tragedy' and Shakespeare's 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 can be defined as 'that which is above nature; belonging to a higher realm or system than that.....
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