Malvolio, when confined in a dark room, as a presumed lunatic:
“Mal. I am no more mad than you are: make the trial of it in any constant question.
Clo. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?
Mal. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
Clo. What thinkest thou of his opinion?
Mal. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.
Clo. Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam.”
Although this primitive superstition is almost effete among civilized nations, yet it still retains an important place in the religious beliefs of savage and uncivilized communities.
CHAPTER IV
DEMONOLOGY AND DEVIL-LORE
The state of popular feeling in past centuries with regard to the active agency of devils has been well represented by Reginald Scot, who, in his work on Witchcraft, has shown how the superstitious belief in demonology was part of the great system of witchcraft. Many of the popular delusions of this terrible form of superstition have been in a masterly manner exposed by Shakespeare; and the scattered allusions which he has given, illustrative of it, are indeed sufficient to prove, if it were necessary, what a highly elaborate creed it was. Happily, Shakespeare, like the other dramatists of the period, has generally treated the subject with ridicule, showing that he had no sympathy with the grosser opinions shared by various classes in those times, whether held by king or clown. According to an old belief, still firmly credited in the poet’s day, it was supposed that devils could at any moment assume whatever form they pleased that would most conduce to the success of any contemplated enterprise they might have in hand; and hence the charge of being a devil, so commonly brought against innocent and harmless persons in former years, can easily be understood. Among the incidental allusions to this notion, given by Shakespeare, Prince Hal (“1 Henry IV.,” ii. 4) tells Falstaff “there is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man;” “an old white-bearded Satan.” In the “Merchant of Venice” (iii. 1) Salanio, on the approach of Shylock, says: “Let me say ‘amen’ betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew.”
Indeed, “all shapes that man goes up and down in” seem to have been at the devil’s control, a belief referred to in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 2):
“Var. Serv. What is a whoremaster, fool?
Fool. A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. ’Tis a spirit: sometime ’t appears like a lord; sometime like a lawyer; sometime like a philosopher, with two stones moe than’s artificial one: he is very often like a knight; and, generally, in all shapes that man goes up and down in from fourscore to thirteen, this spirit walks in.”
A popular form assumed by evil spirits was that of a negro or Moor, to which Iago alludes when he incites Brabantio to search for his daughter, in “Othello” (i. 1):
“Zounds, sir, you are robb’d; for shame, put on your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say.”
On the other hand, so diverse were the forms which devils were supposed to assume that they are said occasionally to appear in the fairest form, even in that of a girl (ii. 3):
“When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows.”
So in “The Comedy of Errors” (iv. 3) we have the following dialogue:
“Ant. S. Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!
Dro. S. Master, is this mistress Satan?
Ant. S. It is the devil.
Dro. S. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the wenches say, ‘God damn me;’ that’s as much as to say, ‘God make me a light wench.’ It is written, they appear to men like angels of light.”
(Cf. also “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iv. 3.) In “King John” (iii. 1) even the fair Blanch seemed to Constance none other than the devil tempting Lewis “in likeness of a new untrimmed bride.”
Not only, too, were devils thought to assume any human shape they fancied, but, as Mr. Spalding remarks,81 “the forms of the whole of the animal kingdom appear to have been at their disposal; and, not content with these, they seem to have sought for unlikely shapes to appear in” – the same characteristic belonging also to the fairy tribe.
Thus, when Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester that he has in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes the being from whom he is supposed to have just departed:
“As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend.”
Again, Edgar says (“King Lear,” iii. 6): “The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale” – the allusion probably being to the following incident related by Friswood Williams: “There was also another strange thing happened at Denham about a bird. Mistris Peckham had a nightingale which she kept in a cage, wherein Maister Dibdale took great delight, and would often be playing with it. The nightingale was one night conveyed out of the cage, and being next morning diligently sought for, could not be heard of, till Maister Mainie’s devil, in one of his fits (as it was pretended), said that the wicked spirit which was in this examinate’s sister had taken the bird out of the cage and killed it in despite of Maister Dibdale.”82
Even the shape of a fly was a favorite one with evil spirits, so much so, that the term “fly” was a popular synonym for a familiar. In “Titus Andronicus” (iii. 2) there is an allusion to this belief, where Marcus, being rebuked by Titus for having killed a fly, gives as his reason:
“It was a black ill-favour’d fly,
Like to the empress’ Moor: therefore I kill’d him.”
Mr. Spalding gives the following illustrations of the superstition: “At the execution of Urban Grandier, the famous magician of Loudun, in 1634, a large fly was seen buzzing about the stake; and a priest promptly seizing the opportunity of improving the occasion for the benefit of the onlookers, declared that Beelzebub had come in his own proper person to carry off Grandier’s soul to hell. In 1664 occurred the celebrated witch trials which took place before Sir Matthew Hale. The accused were charged with bewitching two children, and part of the evidence against them was that flies and bees were seen to carry into their victims’ mouths the nails and pins which they afterwards vomited.”
Once more, another form devils assumed was that of a dead friend. Thus “Hamlet” (i.
“Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 49.
Harsnet’s “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures,” p. 225.
