Shakespeare’s plays are full of the influences of the supernatural—spirits, magic, temptation—haunting the lives of characters and shaping their actions. In this conversation, literary scholar Mary Floyd-Wilson discusses how these demonic representations reflect questions that were very much on the minds of Elizabethan-era theater-goers and offer a valuable perspective on contemporary debates of the period and shifts in thinking about questions of religion, of autonomy, personality, and the mind.

Mary Floyd-Wilson is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where her research focuses on English literature of the early modern period. She was previously a Fellow at the Center in 2008-09 and returns this year to work on a new project, The Tempter or the Tempted: Demonic Causality on the Shakespearean Stage