Arts and Humanities Commons^™

William Shakespeare And Chinua Achebe: A Study Of Character And The Supernatural, Kenneth N. Usongo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines how Shakespeare and Achebe use supernatural devices such as prophecies, dreams, beliefs, divinations and others to create complex characters. Even though these features are indicative of the preponderance of the belief in the supernatural by some people of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and traditional Igbo societies, Shakespeare and Achebe primarily use the supernatural to represent the states of mind of their protagonists.

Through an essentially New Historicist approach to the study of character and the supernatural in the tragedies and novels of Shakespeare and Achebe respectively, I argue that both writers, besides using supernatural features to explore the …