The fantastic in Shakespeare: Hamlet and Macbeth

This thesis aims to present a close reading of two plays by William Shakespeare from the perspective of Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, reconceptualised for the purpose of this paper as a literary mode. The plays selected for analysis in this context, Hamlet and Macbeth, are analyzed for the occurrences of supernatural, and these instances are tested for how they comply with Todorov’s categories of the fantastic, uncanny and marvelous. Each supernatural feature found in the plays is considered in terms of the characters’, readers’ (both early modern and contemporary), and scholars’ responses to it, which are then classified according to Todorov’s theory as a common analytical framework. This classification is then in turn employed to further illuminate how and why the supernatural is used in the two plays; in other words, what consequences the uncanny, fantastic or marvelous quality of the supernatural occurrence bears for the interpretation of the plays as a whole