Folk-lore of Shakespeare, Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer [e reader comics TXT] 📗
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The names of the several fiends in “King Lear,” Shakespeare is supposed to have derived from Harsnet’s “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures” (1603).
Flibbertigibbet, one of the fiends that possessed poor Tom, is, we are told (iv. 1), the fiend “of mopping and mowing, who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women.” And again (iii. 4), “he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin.”
Frateretto is referred to by Edgar (iii. 6): “Frateretto calls me; and tells me, Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend.”
Hobbididance is noticed as “prince of dumbness” (iv. 1), and perhaps is the same as Hopdance (iii. 6), “who cries,” says Edgar, “in Tom’s belly for two white herring.”
Mahu, like Modo, would seem to be another name for “the prince of darkness” (iii. 4), and further on (iv. 1) he is spoken of as the fiend “of stealing;” whereas the latter is described as the fiend “of murder.” Harsnet thus speaks of them: “Maho was general dictator of hell; and yet, for good manners’ sake, he was contented of his good nature to make show, that himself was under the check of Modu, the graund devil in Ma(ister) Maynie.”
Obidicut, another name of the fiend known as Haberdicut (iv. 1).
Smulkin (iii. 4). This is spelled Smolkin by Harsnet.
Thus, in a masterly manner, Shakespeare has illustrated and embellished his plays with references to the demonology of the period; having been careful in every case—while enlivening his audience—to convince them of the utter absurdity of this degraded form of superstition.
[82] “Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 49.
[83] Harsnet’s “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures,” p. 225.
[84] “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 517-519.
[85] Ibid. vol. i. pp. 365-367.
[86] See Jones’s “Credulities, Past and Present,” 1880, p. 133.
[87] See Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, p. 393; Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 264.
[88] Ibid. p. 378.
CHAPTER V. NATURAL PHENOMENA.Many of the most beautiful and graphic passages in Shakespeare’s writings have pictured the sun in highly glowing language, and often invested it with that sweet pathos for which the poet was so signally famous. Expressions, for instance, such as the following, are ever frequent: “the glorious sun” (“Twelfth Night,” iv. 3); “heaven’s glorious sun” (“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” i. 1); “gorgeous as the sun at midsummer” (“1 Henry IV.,” iv. 1); “all the world is cheered by the sun” (“Richard III.,” i. 2); “the sacred radiance of the sun” (“King Lear,” i. 1); “sweet tidings of the sun’s uprise” (“Titus Andronicus,” iii. 1), etc. Then, again, how often we come across passages replete with pathos, such as “thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west” (“Richard II.,” ii. 4); “ere the weary sun set in the west” (“Comedy of Errors,” i. 2); “the weary sun hath made a golden set” (“Richard III.,” v. 3); “The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head” (“Romeo and Juliet,” v. 3), etc. Although, however, Shakespeare has made such constant mention of the sun, yet his allusions to the folk-lore connected with it are somewhat scanty.
According to the old philosophy the sun was accounted a planet,[89] and thought to be whirled round the earth by the motion of a solid sphere, in which it was fixed. In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 13), Cleopatra exclaims:
Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in! darkling stand
The varying shore o’ the world.”
Supposing this sphere consumed, the sun must wander in endless space, and, as a natural consequence, the earth be involved in endless night.
In “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff, according to vulgar astronomy, calls the sun a “wandering knight,” and by this expression evidently alludes to some knight of romance. Mr. Douce[90] considered the allusion was to “The Voyage of the Wandering Knight,” by Jean de Cathenay, of which the translation, by W. Goodyeare, appeared about the year 1600. The words may be a portion of some forgotten ballad.
A pretty fancy is referred to in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Capulet says:
But for the sunset of my brother’s son
It rains downright.”
And so, too, in the “Rape of Lucrece:”
“That Shakespeare thought it was the air,” says Singer,[91] “and not the earth, that drizzled dew, is evident from many passages in his works. Thus, in ‘King John’ (ii. 1) he says: ‘Before the dew of evening fall.’” Steevens, alluding to the following passage in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1), “and when she [i. e., the moon] weeps, weeps every little flower,” says that Shakespeare “means that every little flower is moistened with dew, as if with tears; and not that the flower itself drizzles dew.”
By a popular fancy, the sun was formerly said to dance at its rising on Easter morning—to which there may be an allusion in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Romeo, addressing Juliet, says:
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
We may also compare the expression in “Coriolanus” (v. 4):
Tabors, and cymbals, and the shouting Romans,
Make the sun dance.”
Mr. Knight remarks, there was “something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter Day, to see him mounting over the hills with tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing, bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind.”[92]
A cloudy rising of the sun has generally been regarded as ominous—a superstition equally prevalent on the Continent as in this country. In “Richard III.” (v. 3), King Richard asks:
He should have braved the east an hour ago:
A black day will it be to somebody.”
“The learned Moresin, in his ‘Papatus,’” says Brand,[93] “reckons among omens the cloudy rising of the sun.” Vergil, too, in his first Georgic (441-449), considers it a sign of stormy weather:[94]
Conditus in nubem, medioque refugerit orbe,
Suspecti tibi sint imbres; namque urget ab alto
Arboribusque satisque Notus pecorique sinister,
Aut ubi sub lucem densa inter nubila sese
Diversi rumpent radii, aut ubi pallida surget,
Tithoni croceum linquens Aurora cubile,
Heu, male tum mitis defendet pampinus uvas:
Tam multa in tectis crepitans salit horrida grando.”
A red sunrise is also unpropitious, and, according to a well-known rhyme:
Be sure the rain will fall apace.”
This old piece of weather-wisdom is mentioned by our Lord in St. Matthew, xvi. 2, 3: “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day, for the sky is red and lowring.” Shakespeare, in his “Venus and Adonis,” thus describes it:
Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field,
Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds,
Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.”
Mr. Swainson[95] shows that this notion is common on the Continent. Thus, at Milan the proverb runs, “If the morn be red, rain is at hand.”
Shakespeare, in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), alludes to another indication of rain:
Witnessing storms to come, woe and unrest.”
A “watery sunset” is still considered by many a forerunner of wet. A red sunset, on the other hand, beautifully described in “Richard III.” (v. 3)—
is universally regarded as a prognostication of fine weather, and we find countless proverbs illustrative of this notion, one of the most popular being, “Sky red at night, is the sailor’s delight.”
From the earliest times an eclipse of the sun was looked upon as an omen of coming calamity; and was oftentimes the source of extraordinary alarm as well as the occasion of various superstitious ceremonies. In 1597, during an eclipse of the sun, it is stated that, at Edinburgh, men and women thought the day of judgment was come.[96] Many women swooned, much crying was heard in the streets, and in fear some ran to the kirk to pray. Mr. Napier says he remembers “an eclipse about 1818, when about three parts of the sun was covered. The alarm in the village was very great, indoor work was suspended for the time, and in several families prayers were offered for protection, believing that it portended some awful calamity; but when it passed off there was a general feeling of relief.” In “King Lear” (i. 2), Gloucester remarks: “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects; love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father.” Othello, too (v. 2), in his agony and despair, exclaims:
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.”
Francis Bernier[97] says that, in France, in 1654, at an eclipse of the sun, “some bought drugs against the eclipse, others kept themselves close in the dark in their caves and their well-closed chambers, others cast themselves in great multitudes into the churches; those apprehending some malign and dangerous influence, and these believing that they were come to the last day, and that the eclipse would shake the foundations of nature.”[98]
In “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 1), Shakespeare refers to a curious circumstance in which, on a certain occasion, the sun is reported to have appeared like three suns. Edward says, “do I see three suns?” to which Richard replies:
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow’d some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun,
In this the heaven figures some event.”[99]
This fact is mentioned both by Hall and Holinshed; the latter says: “At which tyme the sun (as some write) appeared to the Earl of March like three sunnes, and sodainely joyned altogether in one, upon whiche sight hee tooke
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