It is no objection to this to say that there are ghosts, witches, and apparitions on his stage, and that therefore he was a believer in the supernatural. We must not confound the machinery of the stage with the stage-master. Even Hamlet, when he exclaims that he sees his dead father and Horatio asks him "Where?" answers: "In my mind's eye;" which shows how little the appurtenances of the theatre of those times affected the atmosphere of the author's mind. This same Hamlet who in popular _parlance_ has beheld his dead father revisit the glimpses of the moon, declares in the language of his own sober thought, that the beyond is an "undiscovered country from whose bourne _no traveler returns._" And if Macbeth, unlike Hamlet, puts faith in the supernatural, he does so to his own hurt. But even Macbeth recovers his senses sufficiently to exclaim: And be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with lies in a double sense; and again: Infected be the air whereon they ride; And damned all those that trust them! If it be objected that Shakespeare's hostility to the supernatural is confined to what might be called the _bogus_ variety, and not to the kind that is true, we reply that there is no evidence in the plays that Shakespeare ever made such a distinction. Without anywhere intimating that he believed in one kind of the supernatural and not in another (the kind people believe in is generally their own, and the kind they deny, that of somebody else), Shakespeare expresses his opinion of those who accept the supernatural in no uncertain way:-- Look how the world's poor people are amazed At apparitions, signs, and prodigies, Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gaz'd Infusing them with dreadful prophecies. * Having just told us that "It is difficult to say whether Shakespeare had any religious faith or no," Green intimates that Shakespeare was an agnostic, and probably a disciple of Montaigne. If he was an agnostic, it is not true that we do not know "whether he had any religious faith or no." We can be sure that he was without religious faith of any kind, using the word "religious" in the sense of the supernatural--if he preferred agnosticism to the creeds. He was an agnostic, it is to be supposed, because he could not conscientiously profess any of the "religious faiths" of his day. But to be an agnostic does not mean to be without a religion; it only means to be without a revealed religion. This very agnosticism, as the expression of a courageous, honest and rational protest against revealed religions, is a religion--more manly, certainly, than the popular religions, because while the latter are imitative to a large extent, the former is unconstrained and personal.