Shakespeare's World | Science, Magic, and Folklore
Cast ashore on Prospero's island, the enchanted noblemen and mariners wonder at the noises and illusions they experience. "These are not natural events," Alonso exclaims at last, "they strengthen from strange to stranger" (The Tempest, V. i. 227-228). Modern scholars of Elizabethan England, poring over masses of published and manuscript sources, have echoed Alonso's amazement, for it has become clear that Shakespeare and his contemporaries inhabited a realm that was almost as wonderful as Prospero's. Supernatural beings and preternatural events were commonly encountered by people of...
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