ABSTRACT
A very curious indication as to the way in which the producer should treat the Shakespearean tragedies on the stage lies in the appearance in those tragedies of the ghosts or spirits. The fact of their presence precludes a realistic treatment of the tragedies
in which they appear. Shakespeare has made them the centre of his vast dreams, and the central point of a dream, as of a circular geometrical figure, controls and conditions every hair’s breadth of the circumference. These spirits set the key to which, as in music, every note of the com-
position must be harmonized; they are integral, not extraneous parts of the drama; they are the visualized symbols of the supernatural world which enfolds the natural, exerting in the action something of that influence which in “the science of sound” is exerted by those “partial tones, which are unheard, but which blend with the tones which are heard and make all the difference between the poorest instrument and the supreme note of a violin”;1 for, as with these, “so in the science of life, in the crowded street or market place or theatre, or wherever life is, there are partial tones, there are unseen presences. Side by side with the human crowd is a crowd of unseen forms. Principalities and Powers and Possibilities. … These are unseen but not unfelt. They enter into the houses of the human beings that are seen, and for their coming some of them are swept and garnished, and they abide there, and the last state of these human beings is radiant with a divine light and resonant with an added love; or, on the contrary, it may be that, haunted by spirits more wicked than themselves, the last state of such beings is worse than before: subject to a violence and tyranny abhorrent even to themselves; impalpable and inevitable as it would seem, even to the confines of despair.”2
