Folk-lore of Shakespeare. Dyer Thomas Firminger Thiselton

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her lips I bob,

      And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.

      The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

      Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;

      Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,

      And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough.”

      A fairy, in another passage, asks Robin:

      “Are you not he

      That frights the maidens of the villagery,

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      Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?”

      We have already mentioned how Queen Mab had the same mischievous humor in her composition, which is described by Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4):

      “This is that very Mab

      That plats the manes of horses in the night,

      And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,

      Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”

      Another reprehensible practice attributed to the fairies was that of carrying off and exchanging children, such being designated changelings.45 The special agent in transactions of the sort was also Queen Mab, and hence Mercutio says:

      “She is the fairies’ midwife.”

      And “she is so called,” says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, “because it was her supposed custom to steal new-born babes in the night and leave others in their place.” Mr. Steevens gives a different interpretation to this line, and says, “It does not mean that she was the midwife to the fairies, but that she was the person among the fairies whose department it was to deliver the fancies of sleeping men in their dreams, those children of an idle brain.”

      CHAPTER II

      WITCHES

      In years gone by witchcraft was one of the grossest forms of superstition, and it would be difficult to estimate the extent of its influence in this and other countries. It is not surprising that Shakespeare should have made frequent allusions to this popular belief, considering how extensively it prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the religious and dramatic literature of the period being full of it. Indeed, as Mr. Williams46 points out, “what the vulgar superstition must have been may be easily conceived, when men of the greatest genius or learning credited the possibility, and not only a theoretical but possible occurrence, of these infernal phenomena.” Thus, Francis Bacon was “not able to get rid of the principles upon which the creed was based. Sir Edward Coke, his contemporary, the most acute lawyer of the age, ventured even to define the devil’s agents in witchcraft. Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Matthew Hale, in 1664, proved their faith – the one by his solemn testimony in open court, the other by his still more solemn sentence.” Hence, it was only to be expected that Shakespeare should introduce into his writings descriptions of a creed which held such a prominent place in the history of his day, and which has made itself famous for all time by the thousands of victims it caused to be sent to the torture-chamber, to the stake, and to the scaffold. Thus he has given a graphic account of the celebrated Jeanne D’Arc, the Maid of Orleans, in “1 Henry VI.,” although Mr. Dowden47 is of opinion that this play was written by one or more authors, Greene having had, perhaps, a chief hand in it, assisted by Peele and Marlowe. He says, “It is a happiness not to have to ascribe to our greatest poet the crude and hateful handling of the character of Joan of Arc, excused though to some extent it may be by the occurrence of view in our old English chronicles.”

      Mr. Lecky,48 too, regards the conception of Joan of Arc given in “1 Henry VI.” as “the darkest blot upon the poet’s genius,” but it must be remembered that we have only expressed the current belief of his day – the English vulgar having regarded her as a sorceress, the French as an inspired heroine. Talbot is represented as accusing her of being a witch, serving the Evil One, and entering Rouen by means of her sorceries (iii. 2):

      “France, thou shalt rue this treason with thy tears,

      If Talbot but survive thy treachery.

      Pucelle, that witch, that damned sorceress,

      Hath wrought this hellish mischief unawares,

      That hardly we escaped the pride of France.”

      Further on (v. 3) she is made to summon fiends before her, but she wishes them in vain, for they speak not, hanging their heads in sign of approaching disaster.

      “Now help, ye charming spells and periapts;

      And ye choice spirits that admonish me

      And give me signs of future accidents.

      You speedy helpers, that are substitutes

      Under the lordly monarch of the north,

      Appear and aid me in this enterprise.”

      But she adds:

      “See, they forsake me! Now the time is come

      That France must vail her lofty-plumed crest,

      And let her head fall into England’s lap.

      My ancient incantations are too weak,

      And hell too strong for me to buckle with:

      Now, France, thy glory droopeth to the dust.”

      Finally, convicted of practising sorcery, and filling “the world with vicious qualities,” she was condemned to be burned. Her death, however, Sir Walter Scott49 says, “was not, we are sorry to say, a sacrifice to superstitious fear of witchcraft, but a cruel instance of wicked policy, mingled with national jealousy and hatred. The Duke of Bedford, when the ill-starred Jeanne fell into his hands, took away her life in order to stigmatize her memory with sorcery, and to destroy the reputation she had acquired among the French.”

      The cases of the Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore, also immortalized by Shakespeare, are both referred to in the succeeding pages.

      The Witch of Brentford, mentioned by Mrs. Page in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 2), was an actual personage, the fame, says Staunton,50 of whose vaticinations must have been traditionally well known to an audience of the time, although the records we possess of her are scant enough. The chief of them is a black-letter tract, printed by William Copland in the middle of the sixteenth century, entitled “Jyl of Braintford’s Testament,” from which it appears she was hostess of a tavern at Brentford.51 One of the characters in Dekker and Webster’s “Westward Ho”52 says, “I doubt that old hag, Gillian of Brainford, has bewitched me.”

      The witches in “Macbeth” are probably Scottish hags. As Mr. Gunnyon remarks,53 “They are hellish monsters, brewing hell-broth, having cats and toads for familiars, loving midnight, riding on the passing storm, and devising evil against such as offend them. They crouch beneath the gibbet of the murderer, meet in gloomy caverns, amid earthquake convulsions, or in thunder, lightning, and rain.” Coleridge, speaking of them, observes that “the weird sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare’s as his Ariel and Caliban – fates, fairies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good, they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, elemental avengers without sex or kin.”

      It has been urged, however, by certain

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