Folk-lore of Shakespeare, Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer [e reader comics TXT] 📗
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According to an old proverb, to quit a better for a worse situation was spoken of as to go “out of God’s blessing into the warm sun,” a reference to which we find in “King Lear” (ii. 2), where Kent says:
Thou out of heaven’s benediction com’st
To the warm sun.”
Dr. Johnson thinks that Hamlet alludes to this saying (i. 2), for when the king says to him,
he replies,
i. e., out of God’s blessing.
This expression, says Mr. Dyce,[100] is found in various authors from Heywood down to Swift. The former has:
Out of God’s blessing into the warme sunne;”
and the latter:
“Lord Sparkish. They say, marriages are made in heaven; but I doubt, when she was married, she had no friend there.
Neverout. Well, she’s got out of God’s blessing into the warm sun.”[101]
There seems to have been a prejudice from time immemorial against sunshine in March; and, according to a German saying, it were “better to be bitten by a snake than to feel the sun in March.” Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1), Hotspur says:
This praise doth nourish agues.”
Shakespeare employs the word “sunburned” in the sense of uncomely, ill-favored. In “Much Ado” (ii. 1), Beatrice says, “I am sunburnt;” and in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 3), Æneas remarks:
The splinter of a lance.”
Moon. Apart from his sundry allusions to the “pale-faced,” “silver moon,” Shakespeare has referred to many of the superstitions associated with it, several of which still linger on in country nooks. A widespread legend of great antiquity informs us that the moon is inhabited by a man,[102] with a bundle of sticks on his back, who has been exiled thither for many centuries, and who is so far off that he is beyond the reach of death. This tradition, which has given rise to many superstitions, is still preserved under various forms in most countries; but it has not been decided who the culprit originally was, and how he came to be imprisoned in his lonely abode. Dante calls him Cain; Chaucer assigns his exile as a punishment for theft, and gives him a thorn-bush to carry, while Shakespeare also loads him with the thorns, but by way of compensation gives him a dog for a companion. In “The Tempest” (ii. 2), Caliban asks Stephano whether he has “not dropped from heaven?” to which he answers, “Out o’ the moon, I do assure thee: I was the man i’ the moon when time was.” Whereupon Caliban says: “I have seen thee in her and I do adore thee: my mistress show’d me thee, and thy dog and thy bush.” We may also compare the expression in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), where, in the directions for the performance of the play of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” Moonshine is represented “with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn.” And further on, in the same scene, describing himself, Moonshine says: “All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon;[103] this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.”
Ordinarily,[104] however, his offence is stated to have been Sabbath-breaking—an idea derived from the Old Testament. Like the man mentioned in the Book of Numbers (xv. 32), he is caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath; and, as an example to mankind, he is condemned to stand forever in the moon, with his bundle on his back. Instead of a dog, one German version places him with a woman, whose crime was churning butter on Sunday. The Jews have a legend that Jacob is the moon, and they believe that his face is visible. Mr. Baring-Gould[105] says that the “idea of locating animals in the two great luminaries of heaven is very ancient, and is a relic of a primeval superstition of the Aryan race.” The natives of Ceylon, instead of a man, have placed a hare in the moon; and the Chinese represent the moon by “a rabbit pounding rice in a mortar.”[106]
From the very earliest times the moon has not only been an object of popular superstition, but been honored by various acts of adoration. In Europe,[107] in the fifteenth century, “it was a matter of complaint that some still worshipped the new moon with bended knee, or hood or hat removed. And to this day we may still see a hat raised to her, half in conservatism and half in jest. It is with deference to silver as the lunar metal that money is turned when the act of adoration is performed, while practical peasant wit dwells on the ill-luck of having no piece of silver when the new moon is first seen.” Shakespeare often incidentally alludes to this form of superstition. To quote one or two out of many instances, Enobarbus, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 9), says:
In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2) the king says:
Those clouds, removed, upon our watery eyne.”
Indeed, it was formerly a common practice for people to address invocations to the moon,[108] and even at the present day we find remnants of this practice both in this country and abroad. Thus, in many places it is customary for young women to appeal to the moon to tell them of their future prospects in matrimony,[109] the following or similar lines being repeated on the occasion:
New moon, new moon, be kind to me;
If I marry man or man marry me,
Show me how many moons it will be.”
It was also the practice to swear by the moon, to which we find an allusion in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 2), where Juliet reproves her lover for testifying his affections by this means:
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
And again, in “The Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), where Gratiano exclaims:
We may note here that the inconstancy[110] of the moon is the subject of various myths, of which Mr. Tylor has given the following examples: Thus, an Australian legend says that Mityan, the moon, was a native cat, who fell in love with some one else’s wife, and was driven away to wander ever since. A Slavonic legend tells us that the moon, king of night, and husband of the sun, faithlessly loved the morning star, wherefore he was cloven through in punishment, as we see him in the sky. The Khasias of the Himalaya say that the moon falls monthly in love with his mother-in-law, who throws ashes in his face, whence his spots.[111]
As in the case of the sun, an eclipse of the moon was formerly considered ominous. The Romans[112] supposed it was owing to the influence of magical charms, to counteract which they had recourse to the sound of brazen instruments of all kinds. Juvenal alludes to this practice in his sixth Satire (441), when he describes his talkative woman:
Una laboranti poterit succurrere lunæ.”
Indeed, eclipses, which to us are well-known phenomena witnessing to the exactness of natural laws, were, in the earlier stages of civilization, regarded as “the very embodiment of miraculous disaster.” Thus, the Chinese believed that during eclipses of the sun and moon these celestial bodies were attacked by a great serpent, to drive away which they struck their gongs or brazen drums. The Peruvians, entertaining a similar notion, raised a frightful din when the moon was eclipsed,[113] while some savages would shoot up arrows to defend their luminaries against the enemies they fancied were attacking them. It was also a popular belief that the moon was affected by the influence of witchcraft, a notion referred to by Prospero in “The Tempest” (v. 1), who says:
That could control the moon.”
In a former scene (ii. 1) Gonzalo remarks: “You are gentlemen of brave mettle; you would lift the moon out of her sphere.” Douce[114] quotes a marginal reference from Adlington’s translation of “Apuleius” (1596), a book well known to Shakespeare: “Witches in old time were supposed to be of such power that they could put downe the moone by their inchantment.”[115] One of the earliest references to this superstition among classical authorities is that in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, where Strepsiades proposes the hiring of a Thessalian witch, to bring down the moon and shut her up in a box, that he might thus evade paying his debts by a month. Ovid, in his “Metamorphoses” (bk. xii. 263), says:
Sæpe reluctanti constabat cornua lunæ.”
Horace, in his fifth Epode (45), tells us:
Lunamque cælo deripit.”[116]
Reverting again to the moon’s eclipse, such a season, being considered most unlucky for lawful enterprises, was held suitable for evil designs. Thus, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), one of the witches, speaking of the ingredients of the caldron, says:
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse.”
As a harbinger of misfortune it is referred to in “Antony and Cleopatra,” where (iii. 13), Antony says:
Is now eclipsed; and it portends alone
The fall of Antony!”
Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” (bk. i. 597), speaks much in the same strain:
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations.”
And in “Lycidas,” he says of the unlucky ship that was wrecked:
Built in the eclipse.”
Its sanguine color is also mentioned as an indication of coming disasters in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), where the Welsh captain remarks how:
And its paleness, too, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 2), is spoken of as an unpropitious sign.
According to a long-accepted theory, insane persons are said to be influenced by the moon: and many old writers have supported this notion. Indeed, Shakespeare himself, in “Othello” (v. 2), tells how the moon when
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