Folk-lore of Shakespeare Part 57

_Laf._ He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.

_Ber._ What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?

_Laf._ A fistula, my lord."

[604] Dr. Bucknill's "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare," p. 95.

[605] Singer's "Shakespeare," vol. iii. p. 225.

The account given of Helena's secret remedy and the king's reason for rejecting it give, says Dr. Bucknill, an excellent idea of the state of opinion with regard to the practice of physic in Shakespeare's time.

_Fit._ Formerly the term "rapture" was synonymous with a fit or trance.

The word is used by Brutus in "Coriola.n.u.s" (ii. 1):

"your prattling nurse Into a rapture lets her baby cry While she chats him."

Steevens quotes from the "Hospital for London's Follies" (1602), where Gossip Luce says: "Your darling will weep itself into a rapture, if you take not good heed."[606]

[606] See Singer's "Shakespeare," vol. vii. p. 347.

_Gold._ It was a long-prevailing opinion that a solution of gold had great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility of the metal might be communicated to a body impregnated with it. Thus, in "2 Henry IV." (iv. 4), Prince Henry, in the course of his address to his father, says:

"Coming to look on you, thinking you dead, And dead almost, my liege, to think you were, I spake unto this crown, as having sense, And thus upbraided it: 'The care on thee depending Hath fed upon the body of my father; Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold; Other, less fine in carat, is more precious, Preserving life in medicine potable.'"

Potable gold was one of the panaceas of ancient quacks. In John Wight's translation of the "Secretes of Alexis" is a receipt "to dissolve and reducte golde into a potable licour, which conserveth the youth and healthe of a man, and will heale every disease that is thought incurable, in the s.p.a.ce of seven daies at the furthest." The receipt, however, is a highly complicated one, the gold being acted upon by juice of lemons, honey, common salt, and _aqua vitae_, and distillation frequently repeated from a "urinall of gla.s.s"-as the oftener it is distilled the better it is. "Thus doyng," it is said, "ye shall have a right naturall, and perfecte potable golde, whereof somewhat taken alone every monthe once or twice, or at least with the said licour, whereof we have spoken in the second chapter of this boke, is very excellent to preserve a man's youthe and healthe, and to heale in a fewe daies any disease rooted in a man, and thought incurable. The said golde will also be good and profitable for diverse other operations and effectes: as good wittes and diligent searchers of the secretes of nature may easily judge." A further allusion to gold as a medicine is probably made in "All's Well that Ends Well" (v. 3), where the King says to Bertram:

"Plutus himself, That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine, Hath not in nature's mystery more science, Than I have in this ring."

Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor's avarice, refers to this old belief:

"And yet he was but esy of despence: He kept that he wan in the pestilence.

For gold in physic is a cordial; Therefore he loved it in special."

Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby's "Receipts" (1674), we are told that the gold is to be calcined with three salts, ground with sulphur, burned in a reverberatory furnace with sulphur twelve times, then digested with spirit of wine "which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects."

The term "grand liquor" is also used by Shakespeare for the _aurum potabile_ of the alchemist, as in "Tempest" (v. 1):

"Where should they Find this grand liquor that hath gilded them?"

_Good Year._ This is evidently a corruption of _goujere_, a disease derived from the French _gouge_, a common camp-follower, and probably alludes to the _Morbus Gallicus_. Thus, in "King Lear" (v. 3), we read:

"The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell, Ere they shall make us weep."

With the corruption, however, of the spelling, the word lost in time its real meaning, and it is, consequently, found in pa.s.sages where a sense opposite to the true one is intended.[607] It was often used in exclamations, as in "Merry Wives of Windsor" (i. 4): "We must give folks leave to prate: what, the good-jear!" In "Troilus and Cressida" (v. 1), Thersites, by the "rotten diseases of the south," probably meant the _Morbus Gallicus_.

[607] Wright's "Notes to King Lear" (1877), p. 196.

_Handkerchief._ It was formerly a common practice in England for those who were sick to wear a kerchief on their heads, and still continues at the present day among the common people in many places. Thus, in "Julius Caesar" (ii. 1), we find the following allusion:

"O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius, To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!"

"If," says Fuller, "this county [Cheshire] hath bred no writers in that faculty [physic], the wonder is the less, if it be true what I read, that if any here be sick, they make him a posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not mend him, then G.o.d be merciful to him."[608]

[608] "Worthies of England" (1662), p. 180.

_Hysteria._ This disorder, which, in Shakespeare's day, we are told, was known as "the mother," or _Hysterica pa.s.sio_, was not considered peculiar to women only. It is probable that, when the poet wrote the following lines in "King Lear" (ii. 4), where he makes the king say,

"O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!

_Hysterica pa.s.sio!_ down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element's below!-Where is this daughter?"

he had in view the subjoined pa.s.sages from Harsnet's "Declaration of Popish Impostures" (1603), a work which, it has been suggested,[609] "he may have consulted in order to furnish out his character of Tom of Bedlam with demoniacal gibberish." The first occurs at p. 25: "Ma.

Maynie had a spice of the _hysterica pa.s.sio_, as it seems, from his youth; hee himselfe termes it the moother (as you may see in his confessione)." Master Richard Mainy, who was persuaded by the priests that he was possessed of the devil, deposes as follows (p. 263): "The disease I speake of was a spice of the mother, wherewith I had been troubled (as is before mentioned) before my going into Fraunce. Whether I doe rightly terme it the _mother_ or no I know not." Dr. Jordan, in 1603, published "A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother."

[609] Singer's "Shakespeare," pp. 384, 385; Wright's "Notes to King Lear," pp. 154, 155.

_Infection._ According to an old but erroneous belief, infection communicated to another left the infector free; in allusion to which Timon ("Timon of Athens," iv. 3) says:

"I will not kiss thee; then the rot returns To thine own lips again."

Among other notions prevalent in days gone by was the general contagiousness of disease, to which an allusion seems to be made in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream" (i. 1), where Helena says:

"Sickness is catching: O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go."

Malone considers that Shakespeare, in the following pa.s.sage in "Venus and Adonis," alludes to a practice of his day, when it was customary, in time of the plague, to strew the rooms of every house with rue and other strong-smelling herbs, to prevent infection:

"Long may they kiss each other, for this cure!

O, never let their crimson liveries wear!

And as they last, their verdure still endure, To drive infection from the dangerous year!"

Again, the contagiousness of pestilence is thus alluded to by Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing" (i. 1): "O Lord, he will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad." The belief, too, that the poison of pestilence dwells in the air, is spoken of in "Timon of Athens" (iv. 3):

"When Jove Will o'er some high-viced city hang his poison In the sick air."

And, again, in "Richard II." (i. 3):

"Devouring pestilence hangs in our air."

It is alluded to, also, in "Twelfth Night" (i. 1), where the Duke says:

"O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence."

While on this subject, we may quote the following dialogue from the same play (ii. 3), which, as Dr. Bucknill[610] remarks, "involves the idea that contagion is bound up with something appealing to the sense of smell, a mellifluous voice being miscalled contagious; unless one could apply one organ to the functions of another, and thus admit contagion, not through its usual portal, the nose:"

"_Sir Andrew._ A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.

_Sir Toby._ A contagious breath.

_Sir Andrew._ Very sweet and contagious, i' faith.