Folk-lore of Shakespeare. Dyer Thomas Firminger Thiselton
S. Master, is this mistress Satan?
Ant. S. It is the devil.
Dro. S. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the wenches say, ‘God damn me;’ that’s as much as to say, ‘God make me a light wench.’ It is written, they appear to men like angels of light.”
(Cf. also “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iv. 3.) In “King John” (iii. 1) even the fair Blanch seemed to Constance none other than the devil tempting Lewis “in likeness of a new untrimmed bride.”
Not only, too, were devils thought to assume any human shape they fancied, but, as Mr. Spalding remarks,81 “the forms of the whole of the animal kingdom appear to have been at their disposal; and, not content with these, they seem to have sought for unlikely shapes to appear in” – the same characteristic belonging also to the fairy tribe.
Thus, when Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester that he has in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes the being from whom he is supposed to have just departed:
“As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend.”
Again, Edgar says (“King Lear,” iii. 6): “The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale” – the allusion probably being to the following incident related by Friswood Williams: “There was also another strange thing happened at Denham about a bird. Mistris Peckham had a nightingale which she kept in a cage, wherein Maister Dibdale took great delight, and would often be playing with it. The nightingale was one night conveyed out of the cage, and being next morning diligently sought for, could not be heard of, till Maister Mainie’s devil, in one of his fits (as it was pretended), said that the wicked spirit which was in this examinate’s sister had taken the bird out of the cage and killed it in despite of Maister Dibdale.”82
Even the shape of a fly was a favorite one with evil spirits, so much so, that the term “fly” was a popular synonym for a familiar. In “Titus Andronicus” (iii. 2) there is an allusion to this belief, where Marcus, being rebuked by Titus for having killed a fly, gives as his reason:
“It was a black ill-favour’d fly,
Like to the empress’ Moor: therefore I kill’d him.”
Mr. Spalding gives the following illustrations of the superstition: “At the execution of Urban Grandier, the famous magician of Loudun, in 1634, a large fly was seen buzzing about the stake; and a priest promptly seizing the opportunity of improving the occasion for the benefit of the onlookers, declared that Beelzebub had come in his own proper person to carry off Grandier’s soul to hell. In 1664 occurred the celebrated witch trials which took place before Sir Matthew Hale. The accused were charged with bewitching two children, and part of the evidence against them was that flies and bees were seen to carry into their victims’ mouths the nails and pins which they afterwards vomited.”
Once more, another form devils assumed was that of a dead friend. Thus “Hamlet” (i. 4), when he confronts the apparition, exclaims:
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked, or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee” —
for, as Mr. Spalding remarks, “it cannot be imagined that Hamlet imagined that a ‘goblin damned’ could actually be the spirit of his dead father; and, therefore, the alternative in his mind must be that he saw a devil assuming his father’s likeness – a form which the Evil One knew would most incite Hamlet to intercourse.”
The same idea seems present in Horatio’s mind:
“What, if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff,
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,
And draw you into madness?”
Once more, in the next act (ii. 2), Hamlet again expresses his doubts:
“The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.”
In the Elizabethan times, too, no superstitious belief exerted a more pernicious and baneful influence on the credulous and ignorant than the notion that evil spirits from time to time entered into human beings, and so completely gained a despotic control over them as to render them perfectly helpless. Harsnet, in his “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures” (1603), has exposed this gross superstition; and a comparison of the passages in “King Lear,” spoken by Edgar when feigning madness, with those given by Harsnet, will show that Shakespeare has accurately given the contemporary belief on the subject. Mr. Spalding also considers that nearly all the allusions in “King Lear” refer to a youth known as Richard Mainey, a minute account of whose supposed possession has been given by Harsnet.
Persons so possessed were often bound and shut up in a dark room, occasionally being forced to submit to flagellation – a treatment not unlike that described in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2):
“Not mad, but bound more than a madman is;
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whipp’d and tormented.”
In the “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 4) we have an amusing scene, further illustrative, probably, of the kind of treatment adopted in Shakespeare’s day:
“Courtesan. How say you now? is not your husband mad?
Adriana. His incivility confirms no less —
Good doctor Pinch, you are a conjurer;
Establish him in his true sense again,
And I will please you what you will demand.
Luciana. Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!
Courtesan. Mark how he trembles in his ecstasy!
Pinch. Give me your hand, and let me feel your pulse.
Ant. E. There is my hand, and let it feel your ear.
Pinch. I charge thee, Satan, hous’d within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers,
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight:
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven.”
Pinch further says:
“They must be bound, and laid in some dark room.”
As Brand remarks,83 there is no vulgar story of the devil’s having appeared anywhere without a cloven foot. In graphic representations he is seldom or never pictured without one. In the following passage, where Othello is questioning whether Iago is a devil or not, he says (v. 2):
“I look down towards his feet; – but that’s a fable. —
If
“Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 49.
Harsnet’s “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures,” p. 225.
“Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 517-519.