Abstract

Borrowing the famous Catullian oxymoron, “Odi et amo", this paper explores the contrasting, and occasionally overlapping, attitudes of eighteenth-century society towards the belief in the supernatural. Fascination and contempt, “Love and Hate", are the two main feelings surrounding the Enlightenment’s obsession with unseen and invisible powers. Taking examples from Davenant and Dryden’s The Tempest, Davenant’s Macbeth and Garrick’s Hamlet, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these two attitudes are traceable in the widespread practice of ‘making Shakespeare fit’ and translate themselves into two main strands of thought. On the one hand, the omission and/or replacement of the supernatural, which is a manifestation of contempt coming from exalting the faculty of reason; on the other hand, the aestheticization of the supernatural, which, by reducing and performing it as entertaining fiction, mirrors that kind of undercover fascination.