SOURCE : "Supernatural Intervention: Two Dramatic Traditions," in The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage, The Christopher Publishing House, 1965, pp. 15-53.

In the following essay, Reed demonstrates that the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama of supernaturalism evolved from the fusion of classical sources, and especially the plays of Seneca, with the medieval Christian theater.

The English playwrights of the Renaissance, including Shakespeare, have appropriately been described as "mundane"; this evaluation, probably more than any other factor, has tended to make obscure the unparalleled extent to which they were preoccupied with the occult world. To them, of course, the occult had a reality and a substance that are difficult for modern minds to comprehend. Their interest in supernatural phenomena—an interest that far surpasses that of the secular playwrights of any other period in England—was not, as a matter of fact, inconsistent with their mundane impulse, and does not stamp them...