Introduction: Shakespeare and the supernatural – Victoria Bladen and Yan BrailowskyPart I: Embodying the supernatural1 Shakespeare’s political spectres – Victoria Bladen 2 ‘Rudely stamped’: supernatural generation and the limits of power in Shakespeare’s Richard III – Chelsea Phillips 3 Digital puppetry and the supernatural: double Ariel in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest (2017) – Anchuli Felicia KingPart II: Haunted spaces4 Demons and puns: Revisiting the ‘cellarage scene’ in Hamlet – Pierre Kapitaniak5 Performing the Shakespearean supernatural in Avignon: a challenge to the Festival – Florence MarchPart III: Supernatural utterance and haunted texts6 Prophecy and the supernatural: Shakespeare’s challenges to performativity – Yan Brailowsky7 Puck, Philostrate and the locus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s topical allegory – Laurie Johnson 8 ‘Strange intelligence’: Transformations of witchcraft in Macbeth discourse – William C. CarrollPart IV: Magic, music and gender9 Music and magic in The Tempest: Ariel’s alchemical songs – Natalie Roulon10 From Prospero to Prospera: transforming gender and magic on stage and screen – Katharine Goodland Part V: Contemporary transformations11 ‘I’ll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes’: representing the supernatural in film adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Gayle Allan12 Ophelia and her magical daughters: the afterlives of Ophelia in Japanese pop culture – Yukari YoshiharaIndex

Supernatural elements constitute a significant dimension 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; and a magus conjures a tempest from the elements. This volume combines the historical contexts of the supernatural in Shakespearean drama with contemporary approaches to performance on stage, screen and in popular culture. Although written and performed for early modern audiences, for whom the supernatural was still part of the fabric of everyday life, the plays’ supernatural elements continue to enthral us and maintain their ability to raise questions of control, agency, and power in contemporary contexts. Through an analysis of five key themes: the supernatural and embodiment; haunted spaces; supernatural utterance and haunted texts; magic, music and gender; and contemporary transformations, this volume provides new insights on the construction of the supernatural through language and how mystical dimensions create challenges of representation and meaning for critics and creators.