Folk-lore of Shakespeare Part 5

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 s.l.u.ttish 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."

[45] This superst.i.tion is fully described in chapter on _Birth_.

CHAPTER II.

WITCHES.

In years gone by witchcraft was one of the grossest forms of superst.i.tion, 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. Williams[46] points out, "what the vulgar superst.i.tion 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 c.o.ke, 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. Dowden[47] is of opinion that this play was written by one or more authors, Greene having had, perhaps, a chief hand in it, a.s.sisted 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."

[46] "Superst.i.tions of Witchcraft," 1865, p. 220.

[47] "Shakspere Primer," 1877, p. 63.

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 d.a.m.ned sorceress, Hath wrought this h.e.l.lish mischief unawares, That hardly we escaped the pride of France."

[48] "Rationalism in Europe," 1870, vol. i. p. 106.

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 subst.i.tutes 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 h.e.l.l 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 Scott[49] says, "was not, we are sorry to say, a sacrifice to superst.i.tious 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."

[49] "Demonology and Witchcraft," 1881, pp. 192, 193.

The cases of the d.u.c.h.ess of Gloucester and of Jane Sh.o.r.e, 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, ent.i.tled "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."

[50] "Shakespeare," 1864, vol ii. p. 161.

[51] See Dyce's "Glossary," p. 51.

[52] Webster's Works, edited by Dyce, 1857, p. 238.

The witches in "Macbeth" are probably Scottish hags. As Mr. Gunnyon remarks,[53] "They are h.e.l.lish monsters, brewing h.e.l.l-broth, having cats and toads for familiars, loving midnight, riding on the pa.s.sing 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 s.e.x or kin."

[53] "Ill.u.s.trations of Scottish History, Life, and Superst.i.tion," 1879, p. 322.

It has been urged, however, by certain modern critics, that these three sisters, "who play such an important part in 'Macbeth,' are not witches at all, but are, or are intimately allied to, the Norns or Fates of Scandinavian paganism."[54] Thus, a writer in the _Academy_ (Feb. 8, 1879) thinks that Shakespeare drew upon Scandinavian mythology for a portion of the material he used in constructing these characters, and that he derived the rest from the traditions of contemporary witchcraft; in fact, that the "sisters" are hybrids between Norns and witches. The supposed proof of this is that each sister exercises the special function of one of the Norns. "The third," it is said, "is the special prophetess, while the first takes cognizance of the past, and the second of the present, in affairs connected with humanity. These are the tasks of Urda, Verdandi, and Skulda. The first begins by asking, 'When shall we three meet again?' The second decides the time: 'When the battle's lost and won.' The third the future prophesies: 'That will be ere the set of sun.' The first again asks, 'Where?' The second decides: 'Upon the heath.' The third the future prophesies: 'There to meet with Macbeth.'"

[54] Spalding's "Elizabethan Demonology," 1880, p. 86.

It is further added that the description of the sisters given by Banquo (i. 3) applies to Norns rather than witches:

"What are these So wither'd and so wild in their attire, That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, And yet are on't? Live you? or are you aught That man may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her chappy finger laying Upon her skinny lips: you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so."

But, as Mr. Spalding truly adds, "a more accurate poetical counterpart to the prose descriptions given by contemporary writers of the appearance of the poor creatures who were charged with the crime of witchcraft could hardly have been penned." Scot, for instance, in his "Discovery of Witchcraft" (book i. chap. iii. 7), says: "They are women which commonly be old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; they are leane and deformed, showing melancholie in their faces." Harsnet, too, in his "Declaration of Popish Impostures" (1603, p. 136), speaks of a witch as "an old weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, un-toothed, furrowed, having her limbs trembling with palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her paternoster, yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab."

The beard, also, to which Shakespeare refers in the pa.s.sage above, was the recognized characteristic of the witch. Thus, in the "Honest Man's Fortune" (ii. 1), it is said, "The women that come to us for disguises must wear beards, and that's to say a token of a witch." In the "Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv. 2), Sir Hugh Evans says of the disguised Falstaff: "By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a 'oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her m.u.f.fler."

It seems probable, then, that witches are alluded to by Shakespeare in "Macbeth," the contemporary literature on the subject fully supporting this theory. Again, by his introduction of Hecate among the witches in "Macbeth" (iii. 5), Shakespeare has been censured for confounding ancient with modern superst.i.tions. But the incongruity is found in all the poets of the Renaissance. Hecate, of course, is only another name for Diana. "Witchcraft, in truth, is no modern invention. Witches were believed in by the vulgar in the time of Horace as implicitly as in the time of Shakespeare. And the belief that the pagan G.o.ds were really existent as evil demons is one which has come down from the very earliest ages of Christianity."[55] As far back as the fourth century, the Council of Ancyra is said to have condemned the pretensions of witches; that in the night-time they rode abroad or feasted with their mistress, who was one of the pagan G.o.ddesses, Minerva, Sibylla, or Diana, or else Herodias.[56] In Middleton's "Witch," Hecate is the name of one of his witches, and she has a son a low buffoon. In Jonson's "Sad Shepherd" (ii. 1) Maudlin the witch calls Hecate, the mistress of witches, "Our dame Hecate." While speaking of the witches in "Macbeth,"

it may be pointed out that[57] "the full meaning of the first scene is the f.a.g-end of a witch's Sabbath, which, if fully represented, would bear a strong resemblance to the scene at the commencement of the fourth act. But a long scene on such a subject would be tedious and uninteresting at the commencement of the play. The audience is therefore left to a.s.sume that the witches have met, performed their conjurations, obtained from the evil spirits the information concerning Macbeth's career that they desired to obtain, and perhaps have been commanded by the fiends to perform the mission they subsequently carry through."

Brand[58] describes this "Sabbath of the witches as a meeting to which the sisterhood, after having been anointed with certain magical ointments, provided by their infernal leader, are supposed to be carried through the air on brooms," etc. It was supposed to be held on a Sat.u.r.day, and in past centuries this piece of superst.i.tion was most extensively credited, and was one of the leading doctrines a.s.sociated with the system of witchcraft.

[55] "Notes to Macbeth" (Clark and Wright), 1877, p. 137.

[56] Scot's "Discovery of Witchcraft," 1584, book iii. chap.

16. See Douce's "Ill.u.s.trations of Shakespeare," p. 235.

[57] "Elizabethan Demonology," pp. 102, 103. See Conway's "Demonology and Devil-lore," vol. ii. p. 253.

[58] "Pop. Antiq.," 1849, vol. iii. p. 8.

Referring, in the next place, to the numerous scattered notices of witches given by Shakespeare throughout his plays, it is evident that he had made himself thoroughly acquainted with the superst.i.tions connected with the subject, many of which he has described with the most minute accuracy. It appears, then, that although they were supposed to possess extraordinary powers, which they exerted in various ways, yet these were limited, as in the case of Christmas night, when, we are told in "Hamlet" (i. 1), "they have no power to charm." In spite, too, of their being able to a.s.sume the form of any animal at pleasure, the tail was always wanting. In "Macbeth" (i. 3), the first witch says:

"And, like a rat without a tail, I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do."

One distinctive mark, also, of a were-wolf, or human being changed into a wolf, was the absence of a tail. The cat was said to be the form most commonly a.s.sumed by the familiar spirits of witches; as, for instance, where the first witch says, "I come, Graymalkin!"[59] (i. 1), and further on (iv. 1), "Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd." In German legends and traditions we find frequent notice of witches a.s.suming the form of a cat, and displaying their fiendish character in certain diabolical acts. It was, however, the absence of the tail that only too often was the cause of the witch being detected in her disguised form.

There were various other modes of detecting witches: one being "the trial by the stool," to which an allusion is made in "Troilus and Cressida" (ii. 1), where Ajax says to Thersites,

"Thou stool for a witch!"