Classic Audiobook Collection - Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding ~ Full Audiobook [history]

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding audiobook. Genre: history Written as a scholarly essay, Elizabethan Demonology investigates what educated and ordinary people in England believed about devils, witches, possession, and unseen spiritual forces during the Reformation and the decades that followed. Thomas Alfred Spalding argues that to read Elizabethan drama clearly, especially the plays of William Shakespeare, modern readers must recover the religious assumptions and folk ideas that shaped daily life and public imagination. Moving between theology, popular superstition, and literary evidence, Spalding traces how older pagan or foreign gods were reinterpreted as lesser spirits, how fear of diabolic agency found support in sermons and pamphlets, and how these convictions surfaced on the stage in vivid scenes of temptation, prophecy, and haunting. Along the way he pays particular attention to Shakespeare's handling of the supernatural, using close readings to show how an audience that took demons seriously would have heard certain words, symbols, and moral stakes differently than we do today. Expanded from papers first delivered to the New Shakespeare Society, this compact work is both a window into early modern belief and a guide for readers who want to understand why the devil felt so real in Elizabethan literature. citeturn0search1turn0search7turn0search0 For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:19:09) Chapter 02 (00:42:53) Chapter 03 (01:01:28) Chapter 04 (01:26:45) Chapter 05 (01:53:36) Chapter 06 (02:18:31) Chapter 07 (02:44:28) Chapter 08 (02:59:38) Chapter 09 (03:25:28) Chapter 10 (03:48:14) Chapter 11 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

elizabethan demonology by thomas alfred spalding section one it is impossible to understand and appreciate thoroughly the production of any great literary genius who lived and wrote in times far removed from our own without a certain amount of familiarity not only with the precise shades of meaning possessed by the vocabulary he made use of as distinguished from the sense conveyed by the same words in the present day but also with the customs and ideas, political, religious, and moral, that predominated during the period in which his works were produced. Without such information, it will be found impossible, in many matters of the first importance, to grasp the writer's true intent, and much will appear vague and lifeless that was full of point and vigor when it was first conceived. Or, worse still, modern opinion upon the subject will be set up as the standard of interpretation. Ideas will be full, forced into the writer's sentences that could not by any manner of possibility have had place in his mind,

and utterly false conclusions as to his meaning will be the result. Even the man who has had some experience in the study of an early literature, occasionally finds some difficulty in preventing the current opinions of his day from obtruding themselves upon his work and warping his judgment. To the general reader, this must indeed be a frequent and serious stumbling. block. This is a special source of danger in the study of the works of dramatic poets, whose very art lies in the representation of the current opinions, habits, and foibles of their times, in holding up the mirror to their age. It is true that, if their works are to live,

they must deal with subjects of more than mere passing interest. But it is also true that many, and the greatest of them, speak upon questions of eternal interest in the particular light cast upon them in their times. And it is quite possible that the truth may be entirely lost from want of power to recognize it under the disguise in which it comes. A certain motive, for instance, that is an overpowering one in a given period, subsequently appears grotesque, weak, or even powerless. The consequent action becomes incomprehensible, and the actor is contemned, and a simile that appeared most appropriate in the ears of the author's contemporaries seems meaningless or ridiculous to later generations. An example or two of this possibility of error, derived from works produced during the period, with which it is the object of these pages to deal, will not be out of place here.

A very striking illustration of the manner in which a word may mislead is afforded by the oft-quoted line, Assume a virtue if you have it not. By most readers, the secondary and in the present day, almost universal meaning of the word assume, pretend that to be which in reality has no existence, that is, in the particular case, ape the chastity you do not in reality possess, is understood in this sentence. And consequently, Hamlet, and through him, Shakespeare, stand committed to the appalling doctrine that hypocrisy and morals is to be commended and cultivated. Now, such a proposition never for an instant entered Shakespeare's head. He used the word assume in this case in its primary and justice sense, ad sumo, take to, acquire.

And the context plainly shows that Hamlet meant that his mother, by self-denial, would gradually acquire that virtue in which she was so conspicuously wanting. Yet, for lack of a little knowledge of the history of the word employed, the other monstrous glass has received almost universal and applauding acceptance. This is a fair example of the style of error, which a reader unacquainted with the history of the changes our language has undergone, may fall into. Ignorance of changes in customs and morals may cause equal or greater error. The difference between the older and more modern law and popular opinion, relating

to promises of marriage and their fulfillment, affords a striking illustration of the absurdities that attend upon the interpretation of the ideas of one generation by the practice of another. Perhaps no greater nonsense has been talked upon any subject than this one, especially in relation to Shakespeare's own marriage by critics who seem to have thought that a fervent expression of acute moral feeling

would replace and render unnecessary, patient investigative. In illustration of this difference, a play of messengers, the maid of honor, may be advantageously cited, as the catastrophe turns upon this question of marriage contracts. Camiola, the heroine, having been pre-contracted by oath to Bertoldo, the king's natural brother, and hearing of his subsequent engagement to the Duchess of Siena, determines to quit the world and take the veil. But before doing so, and without informing anyone, except her confessor, of her intention, she contrives a somewhat dramatic scene for the purpose of exposing her false lover. She comes into the presence of the king and all the court, produces her contract,

claims Bertoldo as her husband, and demands justice of the king, adjuring him that he shall not, swayed or by favor or affection, by a false glass or rested comment, alter the true intent and letter of the law. Now the only remedy that would occur to the mind of the reader of the present day, under such circumstances, would be an action for breach of promise of marriage, and he would probably be aware of the very recent origin of that method of procedure. The only reply, therefore, that he would expect from Roberto would be a mild and simple, sympathetic assurance of inability to interfere, and he must be somewhat taken aback to find this

claim of cameola admitted as indisputable. The riddle becomes somewhat further involved when, having established her contract, she immediately intimates that she has not the slightest intention of observing it herself by declaring her desire to take the veil. This can only be explained by the rules current at the time regarding spousals. The betrothal, or hand-fasting, was in messenger's time, a ceremony that entailed very serious obligations upon the parties to it. There were two classes of spouses, Sponsalio de Futuro and Sponsalia de presenti, a promise of marriage in the future, and an actual declaration of present marriage. This last form of betrothal was, in fact, marriage, as far as the contracting parties were concerned. It could not, even though not consummated,

be dissolved by mutual consent, and a subsequent marriage, even though celebrated with religious rights, was utterly invalid, and could be set aside at the suit of the injured person. The results entailed by Sponsalia de Futuro were less serious, although no spousalsals of the same nature could be entered into with a third person during the existence of the contract, yet it could be dissolved by mutual consent, and was dissolved by subsequent sponsalia in presenti, or matrimony. But such spousals could be converted into valid matrimony by the cohabitation of the parties, and this, instead of being looked upon as reprehensible, seems to have been treated as all action, and to be by all means encouraged. In addition to this, completion of a contract for

marriage de Futuro, confirmed by oath, if such a contract were not indeed indissoluble, as was thought by some, could at any rate be enforced against an unwilling party. But there were some reasons that justified the dissolution of Sponsalia of either description. Affinity was one of these, and what is to the purpose here, in England before the Reformation, and in those parts of the continent unaffected by it, the entrance into a religious order was another. Here, then, we have a full explanation of Camiola's conduct. She is in possession of evidence of a contract of marriage between herself and Bertoldo, which, whether in presenti or in futuro, being confirmed by oath, she can force upon him, and which will invalidate his proposed marriage with the

the Duchess. Having established her right, she takes the only step that can with certainty free both herself and Bertoldo from the bond they had created by retiring into a nunnery. This explanation renders the action of the play clear, and at the same time shows that Shakespeare in his conduct, with regard to his marriage, may have been behaving in the most honorable and praiseworthy manner, as the bond, with the date of which the date of the birth of his first child is compared, is for the purpose of exonerating the ecclesiastics from any liability for performing the ecclesiastical ceremony, which was not at all a necessary preliminary to a valid marriage, so far as the husband and wife were concerned, although it was essential

to render issue of the marriage legitimate. These are instances of the deceptions that are likely to arise from the two fertile sources that have been specified. There can be no doubt that the existence of errors arising from the former source, misapprehension in the meaning of words, is very generally admitted, and effectual remedies have been supplied by modern scholars for those who will make use of them. Errors arising from the latter source are not so entirely recognized or so securely guarded against. But what has just been said, should be surely shows that it is of no use reading a writer of a past age with merely modern conceptions, and therefore that if such a man's works are worth study at all, they must be read with the help

of the light thrown upon them by contemporary history, literature, laws, and morals. The student must endeavor to divest himself, as far as possible, of all ideas that are the result of a development subsequent to the time in which his author lived, and to place himself in harmony with the life and the thoughts of the people of that age, sit down with them in their homes, and learn the sources of their loves, their hates, their fears, and see wherein domestic happiness, or lack of it, made them strong or weak. Follow them to the marketplace, and witness their dealings with their fellows, the honesty or baseness of them, and trace the cause, look into their very hearts, if it may be, as they kneel, at the devotion they feel

or simulate, and become acquainted with the springs of their dearest aspirations and most secret prayers. A hard discipline, no doubt, but not more hard than salutary. Salutary in two ways, first, as a test of the student's own earnestness of purpose. For in these days of revival of interest in our elder literature, it has become much the custom for flippant persons who are covetous of being thought well read by their less enterprising companions, to skim over the surface of the pages of the wisest and noblest of our great teachers, either not understanding or misunderstanding them. I have read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, is the sublimely satirical expression, constantly heard from the mouths of those who, having read words set down by the men

they name, have no more capacity for reading the hearts of the men themselves, through these words, than a blind man has for discerning the color of flowers. As a consequence of this flippancy of reading, numberless writers, whose works have long been consigned to a well-merited oblivion, have, of late years been disinterred and held up for public admiration, chiefly upon the ground that they are ancient and unknown. The man who reads for the sake of having done so, not for the sake of the knowledge gained by doing so, finds as much charm in these petty writers as in the greater, and hence their transient and undeserved popularity. It would be well, then, for every earnest student, before beginning the study of anyone

having pretensions to the position of a master, and who is not of our own generation, to ask himself, am I prepared thoroughly to sift out and ascertain the true import of every illusion contained in this volume? And if he cannot honestly answer yes, let him shut the book, assured that he is not impelled to the study of it by a sincere thirst for knowledge, but by impertinent curiosity, or a shallow desire to obtain undeserved credit for learning. The second way in which such a discipline will prove salutary is this. it will prevent the student from straying too far afield in his reading. The number of classical authors whose works will repay such severe study is extremely limited. However much enthusiasm he may throw into his studies,

he will find that nine-tenths of our older literature yields too small a harvest of instruction to attract any but the pedant to expend so much labor upon them. The two great vices of modern reading will be avoided. flippancy on the one hand, and pedantry on the other. The object, therefore, which I have had in view of the compilation of the following pages, is to attempt to throw some additional light upon a condition of thought, utterly different from any belief that has firm hold in the present generation, that was current and peculiarly prominent during the lifetime of the man who bears overwhelmingly the greatest name, either in our own or any kind of. Either in our own or any,

other literature. It may be said, and perhaps with much force, that enough and more than enough, has been written in the way of Shakespeare criticism. But is it not better that somewhat too much should be written upon a subject than too little? We cannot expect that everyone shall see all the greatness of Shakespeare's vast and complex mind. By one, a truth will be grasped that has saluted the vigilance of others. And it is better that those who can by no possibility grasp anything at all should have patient hearing, rather than that any additional light should be lost. The useless, lifeless criticism vanishes quietly away into chaos. The good remains quietly to be useful. And it is in reliance upon the justice and certainty of this law that I aim in

bringing before the mind, as clearly as may be, a phase of belief that was continually and powerfully influencing Shakespeare during the whole of his life, but is now well-nigh-forgotten, or entirely misunderstood. If the endeavor is a useless and unprofitable one, let it be forgotten. I am content, but I hope to be able to show that an investigation of the subject does furnish us with a key, which, in a manner, unlocks the secret. of Shakespeare's heart, and brings us closer to the real living man, to the very soul of him, who, with hardly any history in the accepted sense of the word, has left us in his works a biography of far deeper and more precious meaning, if we will but understand it. But it may be said that

Shakespeare, of all men, is able to speak for himself, without aid or comment. His works appeal to all, young and old, in every time, every nation. It is true, he can be understood. He is, to use again Ben Johnson's oft-quoted words, not of an age, but for all time. Yet he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit and opinions of his era, that without a certain comprehension of the men of the Elizabethan period, he cannot be understood fully. Indeed, his greatness is to a large extent due to his sympathy with the men around him, his power of clearly thinking out the answers to the all-time questions, and giving a voice to them that his contemporaries could understand, answers that others could not for themselves formulate, could perhaps only vaguely and dimly

feel after. To understand these answers fully, the language in which they were delivered must be first thoroughly mastered. I intend, therefore, to attempt to sketch out the leading features of a phase of religious belief that acquired peculiar distinctness and prominence during Shakespeare's lifetime, more perhaps than it ever did before or has done since, the belief in the existence of evil spirits and their influence upon and dealings with mankind. The subject will be treated in three sections. The first will contain a short statement of the laws that seem to be of universal operation in the creation and the creation and maintenance of the belief in a multitudinous band of spirits, good and evil, and of a few of the

conditions upon the Elizabethan epic that may have had a formative and modifying influence upon that belief. The second will be devoted to an outline of the chief features of that belief, as it existed at the time in question, the organization, appearance, and various functions and powers of the evil spirits, with special reference to Shakespeare's plays. The third and concluding section will embody an attempt to trace the growth of Shakespeare's thought upon religious matters through the medium of his allusions to this subject. End of Section 1. Section 2 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libre Vox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eva Davis. Section 2

The Empire of the Supernatural must obviously be most extended where civilization is the least advanced. An educated man has to make a conscious and sometimes severe effort to refrain from pronouncing a dogmatic opinion as to the cause of a given result when sufficient evidence to warrant a definite conclusion is wanting. To the savage, the notion of any necessity for or advantage to be derived from, such self-restraint never once occurs neither the lightning that strikes his hut the blight that withers his crops the disease that destroys the life of those he loves nor on the other hand the beneficent sunshine or life-giving rain is by him traceable to any known physical cause they are the results of influences utterly beyond his understanding supernatural matters upon which imagination is allowed free scope to run riot, and from which spring up a legion of myths, or attempts to represent in some manner these incomprehensible processes, grotesque or poetic, according to the character

of the people with which they originate, which, if their growth be not disturbed by extraneous influences, eventually develop into the national creed. The most ordinary events of the savages everyday life do not admit of a natural solution. His whole existence is bound in, from birth to death, by a network of miracles, and regulated in its smallest details by unseen powers of whom he knows little or nothing. Hence it is that in primitive societies, the functions of legislator, judge, priest, and medicine man, are all combined in one individual that great means of communication between man and the unknown, whose person is pre-eminently sacred. The laws that are to guide the community come in some mysterious manner through him from the higher

powers. If two members of the clan are involved in a quarrel, he is appealed to to apply some test in order to ascertain which of the two is in the wrong, an ordeal that can have no judicial operation, except on the assumption of the existence of omnipotent beings, interested in the discovery of evil-doers who will prevent the test from operating unjustly melodies and famines are unmistakable signs of the displeasure of the good or spite of the bad spirits and are to be averted by some propitiatory act on the part of the sufferers or the mediation of the priest's doctor the remedy that would put an end to a long-continued drought will be equally effective in arresting an epidemic but who and of what nature are these supernatural powers whose influences are thus brought to bear upon every day life and who appear to take such an interest in the affairs of mankind it seems that there are three great principles at work in the evolution and modification of the ideas upon this subject which must now be shortly stated the first of these is the apparent incapacity of the majority of mankind to accept a purely monotheistic creed it is a demonstrable fact that the primitive religions now open to observation attribute specific events and results to distinct supernatural beings

and there can be little doubt that this is the initial step in every creed it is a bold and somewhat perilous revolution to attempt to overturn this doctrine and to set up monotheism in its place and when successfully accomplished is rarely permanent the more educated portions of the community maintain allegiance to the new teaching perhaps but among the lower classes it soon becomes degraded to or amalgamated with some form form of polytheism more or less pronounced, and either secret or declared. Even the Jews, the nation the most conspicuous for its supposed uncompromising adherence to a monotheistic creed, cannot claim absolute freedom from taint in this respect, for in the country places, far from the center of worship, the people were constantly following after strange gods, and even some of their most notable worthies, were liable. to the same accusation.

It is not necessary, however, that the individuality and specialization of function of the supreme beings recognized by any religious system should be so conspicuous as they are in this case, or in the Greek or Roman Pamphion, to mark it as in its essence polytheistic, or of polytheistic tendency. It is quite enough that the immortals are deemed to be capable of hearing and answering the prayers of their adorers, and of interfering actively in passing events either for good or for evil. This, at the root of it, constitutes the crucial difference between polytheism and monotheism, and in this sense the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, representing the oldest undisturbed evolution of a strictly monotheistic doctrine, is undeniably polytheistic.

Apart from the Virgin Mary, there is a whole hierarchy of inferior deities, saints, and angels, subordinate to the one supreme being. This may possibly be denied by the authorized expounders of the doctrine of the Church of Rome, but it is nevertheless certain that it is the view taken by the uneducated classes, with whom the saints are must. more present and definite deities than even the Almighty himself. It is worth noting that during the dancing mania of 1418, not God or Christ or the Virgin Mary, but St. Vitis was prayed to by the populace to stop the epidemic that was afterwards known by his name. There was a temple to St. Michael on Mount St. Angelo, and Augustine thought it necessary to declare that angel worship

were heretics. Even Protestantism, though a much younger growth than Catholicism, shows a slight tendency toward polytheism. The saints are, of course, quite out of the question, and angels are as far as possible relegated from the citadel of asserted belief into the vaguer regions of poetical sentimentality. But, although, again unadmitted by the orthodox of the sect, the popular conception of Christ is, and until the masses are more educated in theological niceties than they are at present, necessarily must be, as of a supreme being totally distinct from God the Father. This applies in a less degree to the third person in the Trinity, less because his individuality is less clear. George Eliot has, with her usual penetration, noted this fact in Silas Marner, where, in Mrs. Winthrop's

simple theological system, the Trinity is always referred to as them. The posthumous history of Francis of Assisi affords a striking illustration of this strange tendency towards polytheism. This extraordinary man received no little reverence and adulation during his lifetime, but it was not until after his death, that the process of deification commenced. It was then discovered that the stigmata were not the only points of resemblance between the departed saint and the divine master he professed to follow, that his birth had been foretold by the prophets, that, like Christ, he underwent transfiguration, and that he had worked miracles during his life. The climax of the apotheosis was reached in 1486, when a monk preaching at Paris seriously maintained that St. Francis

was in very truth a second Christ, the second son of God, and that after his death he descended into purgatory and liberated all the spirits confined there, who had the good fortune to be arrayed in the Franciscan garb. The second principle is that of the Manichaeists, the division of spirits into hostile camps, good and evil. This is a much more common belief than the orthodox are willing to allow. There is hardly any religious system that does not recognize a first source of evil, as well as a first source of good. But the spirit of evil occupies a position of varying importance. In some systems, he maintains himself as a co-equal of the spirit of good. In others, he sinks to a lower stage, remaining very powerful to do harm, but nevertheless

under the control in matters of the highest importance, of the more beneficent being. In each of these cases, the first principle is found operating, ever augmenting the ranks, monodialism being as impossible as monotheism, and hence the importance of fully establishing that proposition. The last and most important of these principles is the tendency of all theological systems to absorb into themselves the deities extraneous to themselves, not as gods, but as inferior or even evil spirits. The actual existence of the foreign deity is not for a moment disputed, the presumption in favor of innumerable spiritual agencies being far too strong to allow the possibility of such a doubt. but just as the alien is looked upon as an inferior being created chiefly for the use and benefit of the chosen people and what nation is not if its opinion of itself may be relied upon a chosen people so the god the alien worships is a spirit of inferior power and capacity and can be recognized solely as occupying a position subordinate to that of the gods of the land

this principle has such an important influence in the elaboration of the belief in demons that it is worth while to illustrate the generality of its application in the greek system of theology we find in the first place a number of deities of varying importance and power whose special functions are defined with some distinctness and then below these an innumerable band of spirits the souls of the departed probably the relics of an earlier pure ancestor worship, who still interest themselves in the inhabitants of this world. These Greek Dimonies were certainly accredited with supernatural power, and were not of necessity either good or evil in their influence or action. It was to this second class that foreign deities were assimilated. They found it impossible, however, to retain even this humble position,

the ceremonies of their worship, and the language in which those ceremonies were performed were strange to the inhabitants of the land in which the acclimatization was attempted and the incomprehensible is first suspected then loathed it is not surprising then that the newcomers soon fell into the ranks of purely evil spirits and that those who persisted in exercising their rights were stigmatized as devil worshippers or magicians but in process of time this polytheistic system became pre-eminently unsatisfactory to the thoughtful men whom greece produced in such numbers the tendency towards monotheism which is usually associated with the name of plato is hinted at in the writings of other philosophers who were his predecessors the effect of this revolution was to recognize one supreme being the first cause and to subordinate to him all the other deities of the ancient and popular theology, to coordinate them, in fact, with the older class of demons, the first step in the descent to the lowest category of all. The history of the Neoplatonic belief is one of elaboration upon these ideas.

The conception of the supreme being was complicated in a manner closely resembling the idea of the Christian Trinity, and all the subordinate demons were classified into good and evil geniuses. Thus, a theoretically monotheistic system was established with a tremendous hierarchy of inferior spirits, who frequently bore the names of the ancient gods and goddesses of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, strikingly resembling that of Roman Catholicism. The subordinate demons were not at first recognized as entitled, to any religious rights, but in the course of time, by the inevitable operation of the first principle just enunciated, a form of the eurgy sprang up with the object of attracting the kindly

help and patronage of the good spirits, and was tolerated, and attempts were made to hold intercourse with the evil spirits, which were, as far as possible, suppressed and discountenanced. The history of the operation of this principle upon the Jewish religion is very similar and extremely interesting, although they do not seem to have ever had any system of ancestor worship, as the Greeks had, yet the Jews appear originally to have recognized the deities of their neighbors as existing spirits, but inferior in power to the God of Israel. All the gods of the nations are idols, are words that entirely fail to convey the idea of the Psalm. For the word translated idols is Elohim, the very term usually employed to designate Jehovah. And the true sense of the passage, therefore, is, all the gods of the nations are gods, but Jehovah made the heavens. In another place we read that, the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.

As, however, the Jews gradually became acquainted with the barbarous rights with which their neighbors did honor to their gods, the foreigners seemed to have fallen more and more in estimation until they came to be classed as evil spirits. To this process, such names as Beelzebub, Moloch, Ashtharoth, and Belial bear witness. Beelzebub, the prince of the devils of later time, being one of the gods of the hostile Philistines. The introduction of Christianity made no difference in this respect. Paul says to the believers at Corinth, that the things which the gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to devils greek dimonia and not to god and i would not that ye should have fellowship with devils and the septuagint renders the word elohim in the ninety-fifth psalm by this greek dimonia which as the christians had already a distinct term for good spirits came to be applied to evil ones only

under the influence therefore of the new religion the gods of greece and rome who in the days of their supremacy had degraded so many foreign deities to the position of demons were in their turn deposed from their high estate and became the nucleus around which the christian belief in demonology formed itself the gods who under the old theologies reigned paramount in the lower regions became pre-eminently diabolic in character in the new system and it was hecatee who to the last retained her position of active patroness and encourager of witchcraft a practice which became almost indissolubly connected with her name numerous instances of the completeness with which this process of diabolization was affected and the firmness with which it retained its hold upon the popular belief even to late times might be given but the following must suffice in one of the miracle plays the conversion of saul a countess of devils is held, at which Mercury appears as the messenger of Belial. But this absolute rejection of every pagan belief and ceremony was characteristic of the Christian Church in its infancy only. So long as the band of believers was a small and persecuted one, no temptation to violate the rule could exist. But as the church grew and acquired influence and position, it discovered that

good policy demanded that the sternness and inflexibility of its youthful theories should undergo some modification. It found that it was not the most successful method of enticing stragglers into its fold to stigmatize the gods they ignorantly worshipped as devils, and to persecute them as magicians. The more impetuous and enthusiastic supporters did persecute, and persecute most relentlessly the adherence of the dying faith. But persecution, whether of good or evil, always fails as a means of suppressing a hated doctrine, unless it can be carried to the extent of extermination of its supporters. And the more far-seeing leaders of the Catholic Church soon recognized that a slight surrender of principle was a far surer road to success than stubborn uncompromising opposition. It was in this spirit that the Catholics dealt with the oracles of heathendom. Mr. Lecky is hardly correct when he says that nothing analogous to the ancient oracles

was incorporated with Christianity. There is the notable case of the God Scythian, whom Constantine identified with the Archangel Michael, and whose oracular functions were continued in a precisely similar manner by the latter. Oracles that were not thus absorbed and supported were recognized as existed. but under diabolic control, and to be tolerated, if not patronized, by the representatives of the dominant religion. The oracle at Delphi gave forth prophetic utterances for centuries after the commencement of the Christian era, and was the less dangerous, as its operations could be stopped at any moment,

by holding a saintly relic to the god or devil Apollo's nose. There is a fable that St. Gregory, in the course of his travels, passed near the oracle, and his extraordinary sanctity was such as to prevent all subsequent utterances. This so disturbed the presiding genius of the place that he appealed to the saint to undo the baneful effects his presence had produced, and Gregory benevolently wrote a letter to the devil, which was in fact a license to continue the business of prophesying unmolested. This nonsensical fiction shows clearly enough that the oracles were not. generally looked upon as extinguished by christianity as the result of a similar policy we find the names and functions of the pagan gods and the earlier christian saints confused in the most extraordinary manner

the saints assuming the duties of the moribundiities where those duties were of a harmless or necessary character the church carried out exactly the same principles in her missionary efforts among the heathen hordes of northern europe do you renounce the devils and all their words and works thoner wadon and saxonaut was part of the form of recantation and minister to the scandinavian converts and at the present day odin take you is the norse equivalent of the devil take you on the other hand an attempt was made to identify balter the beautiful with christ a confusion of character that may go far towards accounting for a custom joyously observed by our forefell the beautiful with christ a confusion of character that may go far towards accounting for a custom joyously observed by our four fathers at christmas tide but which the false modesty of modern society has nearly succeeded in banishing from amongst us for balter was slain by loki with a branch of mistletoe and christ was betrayed by judas with a kiss upon the conversion of the inhabitants of great britain to christianity the native deities underwent the same inevitable fate and sank into the rank of evil spirits perhaps the just your opinion is that they became the progenitor of our fairy mythology, rather than the subsequent devil lore, although the similarity between these two classes of spirits is sufficient to warrant us in classing them as species of the same genus, their characters and functions being perfectly interchangeable, and even at times merging

and becoming indistinguishable. A certain lurking affection in the new converts for the religion they had deserted, perhaps under compulsion, may have led them to look upon their ancient objects of veneration as less detestable in nature and dangerous in act than the devils imported as an integral portion of their adopted faith, and so originated this class of spirits less evil than the other. Sir Walter Scott may be correct in his assertion that many of these fairy myths owe their origin to the existence of a demer. miniative, autokhtonic race that was conquered by the invading Celts, and the remnants of which lurked about the mountains and forests, and excited in their victors a superstitious reverence

on account of their great skill in metallurgy. But this will not explain the retention of many of the old god names, that of the Deuzi, the Celtic nocturnal spirits, in our word deuce, and that of the neck, or water spirits, in Nixie and Old Nick. These words undoubtedly indicate the accomplishment of the faxeless Descances Severno by the native deities. Elves, brownies, gnomes, and trolls were all at one-time Scotch or Irish gods. The trolls obtained a character similar to that of the more modern succubus, and have left their impression upon Elizabethan in the word trule. End of Section 2.

Section 3 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eva Davis The preceding very superficial outline of the growth of the belief in evil spirits is enough for the purpose of this essay as it shows that the basis of English devil lore

was the annihilated mythologies of the ancient heathen religions, italic and Teutonic, as well as those brought into direct conflict with the Jewish system, and also that the more important of the Teutonic deities are not to be traced in the subsequent hierarchy of fiends, on account probably of their temporary or permanent absorption into the proselytizing system, or the refusal of the new converts to believe them to be so blessed, as their teachers painted them. The gradual growth of the superstructure, it would be well-nigh impossible and quite unprofitable to trace. It is due, chiefly, to the credulous ignorance and distorted imagination, monkish and otherwise, of several centuries. Carlisle's graphic

picture of Abbott Samson's vision of the devil in past and present will perhaps do more to explain how the belief grew and flourished than pages of explanatory. statements. It is worthy of remark, however, that to the last, communications with evil spirits was kept up by means of formulae and rights that are undeniably the remnants of a form of religious worship. Incomprehensible in their jargon, as these formulae mostly are, and strongly tinctured as they have become, with burlesked Christian symbolism and expression, for those who used them could only supply the fast-dying memory of the elder forms from the existing system. They still, in all their grotesqueness, remain the battered relics of a dead faith.

Such being the natural history of the conflict of religions, it will not be a matter of surprise that the leaders of our English Reformation should, in their turn, have attributed the miracles of the Roman Catholic saints to the same infernal source as the early Christians supposed, to have been the origin of the prodigies and oracles of paganism. The impulse given by the secession from the Church of Rome to the study of the Bible by all classes added impetus to this tendency. In Holy Rit, the reformers found full authority for believing in the existence of evil spirits, possession by devils, witchcraft, and divine and diabolic interference by way of miracle generally. And they consequently acknowledge,

the possibility of the repetition of such phenomena in the times in which they lived. A position more untenable, perhaps, than that of modern orthodoxy, that accepts without murmur all the supernatural events recorded in the Bible, and utterly rejects all subsequent relations of a similar nature, however well authenticated. The reformers believed unswervingly in the truth of the biblical accounts of miracles, and that what God had once permitted to take place, might, and would be repeated in case of serious necessity. But they found it utterly impossible to accept the puerile and meaningless miracles perpetrated under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church as evidence of divine interference, and they had not travelled far enough upon the road

towards rationalism to be able to reject them one and all, as in their very nature impossible. The consequence of this was one of those compromises which we so often. often meet with in the history of the changes of opinion affected by the reformation. Only those particular miracles that were indisputably demonstrated to be impostors, and there were plenty of them, such as the rude of Boxley, were treated as such by them. The unexposed remainder were treated as genuine supernatural phenomena, but caused by diabolical, not divine, agency. The reforming divine Calphill, supporting this view of the Catholic miracles in his answer to Marshall's treatise of the cross, points out that the majority of supernatural events that have taken place in this world have been, most undoubtedly, the work of the devil,

and puts his opponents into a rather embarrassing dilemma by citing the miracles of paganism, which both Catholic and Protestant concurred in attributing to the evil one. He then clenches his argument by asserting that it is the devil's cunning that persuades those that will walk in a popish blindness, that they are worshipping God when they are in reality serving him. Therefore, he continues, consciously following an argument of St. Cyprianus against the pagan miracles, these wicked spirits do lurk in shrines, in rudes, in crosses, in images, and first of all, pervert the priests, which are easiest to.

to be caught with bait of a little gain. Then work they miracles. They appear to men in diverse shapes, disquiet them when they are awake, trouble them in their sleeps, distort their members, take away their health, afflict them with diseases, only to bring them to some idolatry. Thus, when they have obtained their purpose that elude affiances reposed where it should not, they enter, as it were, into a new league, and trouble them no more. what do the simple people then verily suppose that the image the cross the thing that they have kneeled and offered unto the very devil indeed hath restored them to health whereas he did nothing but leave off to molest them this is the help and cure that the devils give when they leave off their wrong and injury here we have a distinct charge of devil worship the old doctrine cropping up again after centuries of rose-worship the old doctrine cropping up again after centuries of oppose. All the gods of our opponents are devils. Nor were Catholics a wit behind the Protestants in

this matter. The priests zealously taught that the Protestants were devil-worshippers and magicians, and the common people so implicitly believed in the truth of the statement that we find one poor prisoner taken by the Dutch at the siege of Alcimar in 1578, making a desperate attempt to save his life by promising to worship his captor's devil precisely as they did a suggestion that failed to pacify those to whom it was addressed having thus stated so far as necessary the chief laws that are constantly working the extension of the domain of the supernatural as far as demonology is concerned without a remembrance of which the subject itself would remain somewhat difficult to comprehend fully i shall now attempt to in indicate one or two conditions of thought and circumstance that may have tended to increase and vivify the belief during the period in which the Elizabethan literature flourished. It was an era of change. The nation was emerging from the dim twilight of medievalism

into the full day of political and religious freedom. But the morning mists, which the rising sun had not yet dispelled, rendered the more distant and complex objects distilled, and pretentious. The very fact that doubt, or rather, perhaps, independence of thought, was at last, within certain limits, treated as non-criminal in theology, gave an impetus to investigation and speculation in all branches of politics and science. And with this change came, in the main, improvement. But the great defect of the time was that this newly liberated spirit of free inquiry was not kept in check by any sufficient previous discipline in logical methods of reasoning. Hence the possibility of the wild theories that then existed, followed out

into action or not, according as circumstances favored or discouraged. Arthur Hackett, with casting out of devils and other madnesses, vehemently declaring himself the Messiah and King of Europe in the Year of Grace, 1591, and getting himself believed by some, so long as he remained unhanged. Or, more pathetic still, many weary lives wasted day by day in fruitless, silent search after the impossible philosopher's stone, or elixir of life. As in law, so in science, there were no sufficient rules of evidence clearly and unmistakably laid down for the guidance of the investigator, and consequently it was only necessary to broach a novel theory in order to have it accepted without any previous serious testing.

Men do not seem to have been able to distinguish between a hypothesis and approved conclusion, or rather the rule of presumptions was reversed, and men accepted the hypothesis as conclusive until it was disproved. It was a perfectly rational and sufficient, explanation in those days to refer some extraordinary event to some given supernatural cause, even though there might be no ostensible link between the two. Now such a suggestion would be treated by the vast majority with derision or contempt. On the other hand, the most trivial occurrences, such as sneezing, the appearance of birds of ill omen, the crowing of a cock, and events of like unimportance happening at a particular moment, might, by some unseen concatenation of causes and

effects, exercise an incomprehensible influence upon men, and consequently had important bearings upon their conduct. It is solemnly recorded in the Commons journals that during the discussion of the statute against witchcraft passed in the reign of James I, a young Jack Dahl flew into the house, which accident was generally regarded as a malum omen to the bill. Extraordinary bravery on the part of an adversary was sometimes accounted for by asserting that he was the devil in the form of a man, as the Volshin soldier does with regard to Coriolanus. This is no mere dramatist's fancy, but a fixed belief of the times. Sir William Russell fought so desperately at Sudfa that he could,

got mistaken for the evil one, and Drake also gave the Spaniards good reason for believing that he was a devil and no man. This intense credulousness, childish almost in itself, but yet, at the same time combined with the strong man's intellect, permeated all classes of society. Perhaps a couple of instances, drawn from strangely diverse sources, will bring this more vividly before the mind than any amount of attempted theorizing. The first is one of the tricks of the jugglers of the period. To make one dance naked, make a poor boy confederate with you, so as after charms, etc. spoken by you, he uncloth himself and stand naked, seeming, whilst he undresseth himself, to shake, stamp, and cry, still hastening to be unclothed till he be stark

naked. Or, if you can procure none to go so far, let him only begin to stamp and shake, etc., and unclothe him, and then you may, for the reverence of the company, seem to release him. The second illustration must have demanded, if possible, more credulity on the part of the audience than this harmless entertainment. Cranmer tells us that in the time of Queen Mary, a monk preached a sermon at St. Paul's, the object of which was to prove the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and, after the manner of his kind, told the following little anecdote in support of it. A maid of Northgate Parish and Canterbury, in pretense to wipe her mouth, kept the host in her handkerchief, and when she came home, she put the same into a pot, clothes covered,

and she spitted into another pot, and after a few days, she, looking in the one pot, found a little young pretty babe, about a shaftman long, and the other pot was full of gore blood. That the audiences before which these absurdities were seriously brought, for amusement or instruction, could be excited in either case to any other feeling than good-natured contempt for a would-be imposter, seems to us nowadays to be impossible. It was not so in the times when these things transpired, the actors of them were not knaves, nor were their audiences fools, to any unusual extent. If anyone is inclined to form a low opinion of the Elizabethans intellectually,

on account of the divergence of their capacities of belief in this respect from his own, he does them a great injustice. Let him take at once Charles Lamb's warning, and try to understand rather than to judge them. We, who have had the benefit of 300 more years of experience and liberty of thought than they, should have to hide our faces, for very shame had we not arrived at juster and truer conclusions upon these difficult topics that so bewildered our ancestors. But can we, with all our boasted advantages of wealth, power, and knowledge, truly say that all our aims are as high, all our desires as pure, our words as true, and our deeds as noble, as those whose opinions we feel this tendency to contem? If not, or if indeed they have anything

whatsoever to teach us in these respects, let us remember that we shall never learn the lesson wholly, perhaps not learn it at all, unless, casting aside this first impulse to despise, we try to enter fully into and understand these strange dead beliefs of the past. It is in this spirit that I now enter upon the second division of the subject in hand, in which I shall try to indicate the chief features of the belief in demonology as it existed during the Elizabethan period. These will be taken up in three main heads, the classification, physical appearance, and powers of the evil spirits.

it is difficult to discover any classification of devils as well authenticated and as universally received as that of the angels introduced by dionysius the areopagite which was subsequently imported into the creed of the western church and popularized in elizabethan times by decker's hierarchy the subject was one which from its nature could not be settled ex cathedra and consequently the subject had to grow up as best it might, each writer adopting the arrangement that appeared to him most suitable. There was one rough but popular classification into greater and lesser devils. The former branch was subdivided into classes of various grades of power, the members of which passed under the titles of kings, dukes, marquises, lords, captains, and other dignitaries. Each of these was supposed to have a certain number of legions of the latter class under his command. These were the evil spirits who appeared most frequently on the earth as the emissaries of the greater fiends to carry out their evil

designs. The more important class kept for the most part in a mystical seclusion and only appeared upon earth in cases of the greatest emergency, or when compelled to do so by conjuration. to the class of lesser devils belonged to the bad angel, which, together with a good one, was supposed to be assigned to every person at birth, to follow him through life, the one to tempt, the other to guard from temptation, so that a struggle similar to that recorded between Michael and Satan for the body of Moses was raging for the soul of every existing human being. This was not a mere theory but a vital active belief,

as the beautiful, well-known lines at the commencement of the eighth canto of the second book of the fairy queen, and the use made of these opposing spirits in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and in the Virgin Martyr, by Messenger and Decker, conclusively show. Another classification, which seems to retain a reminiscence of the origin of devils from pagan deities, is affected by reference to the localities supposed to be inhabited by the different classes of evil spirits. According to this arrangement, we get six classes. 1. Devils of the fire who wander in the region near the moon. Two, devils of the air who hover around the earth. Three, Devils of the Earth, to whom the fairies are allied.

Four, Devils of the Water. Five, sub-mundane devils. Six. Lucifuge. These devil's power and desire to injure mankind appear to have increased with the proximity of their location to the Earth's center, but this classification had nothing like the hold upon the popular mind that the former grouping had, and may consequently be dismissed with this mention. End of Section 3 Section 4 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eva Davis.

Section 4 The Greater Devils, or the most important of them, had distinguishing names, strange, uncouth names, some of them telling of a heathenish origin, others inexplicable and almost unpronounceable, such as Astoroth, Bale, Belial, Zephyr, Cerberus, Phoenix, Bealum, why he, and Hagentai, Leray, Marcosius, Gzoin, Glaziolabulus. Scott enumerates 79, the above amongst them, and he does not by any means exhaust the number. As each archdevil had 20, 30, or 40 legions of inferior spirits under his command, and a legion

was composed of six hundred and sixty-six devils. It is not surprising that the latter did not obtain distinguishing names until they made their appearance upon earth, when they frequently obtained one from the form they loved to assume. For example, the familiars of the witches in Macbeth, paddock, toad, Grimalkin, cat, and Harper, harpy, possibly. Is it surprising that, with resources of this nature at his command, such an adept in the art of necromancy as Owen Glendower should hold Harry Percy, much to his disgust, at the least nine hours, in reckoning up the several devil's names that were his lackeys. Of the twenty devils mentioned by Shakespeare, four only belong to the class of greater devils. Hecett, the principal patroness of witchcraft,

is referred to frequently and appears once upon the scene. The two others are Ammiman and Barbison, both of whom are mentioned twice. Ammiman was a very important personage being no other than one of the four kings. Zimoner was King of the North, and is referred to in Henry VI, Part 1, Gorson of the South, Gop of the West, and Ammeman of the East. He is mentioned in Henry the fourth part one, and Mary Wives. Barbison also occurs in the same passage in the latter play, and again in Henry the fifth, a fact that does, to a slight extent, help to bear out the otherwise ascertained chronological sequence of these plays.

The remainder of the devils belong to the second class. Nine of these occur in King Lear, and will be referred to again when the subject of possession is touched upon. It would appear that each of the greater devils, on the rare occasion upon which he made his appearance upon earth, assumed a form peculiar to himself. The lesser devils, on the other hand, had an ordinary type common to the whole species, with a capacity for almost infinite variation and transmutation, which they used, as will be seen, to the extreme perplexity and annoyance of mortals. As an illustration in the form of which a greater

devil might appear, this is what Scott says of the questionable Balam above mentioned. Balam cometh with three heads, the first of a bull, the second of a man, and the third of a ram. He hath a serpent's tail and flaming eyes, riding upon a furious bear, and carrying a hawk on his fist. But it was the lesser devils, not the greater, that came into close contact with humanity, who therefore demand careful consideration. All the lesser devils seem to have possessed a normal form, which was as hideous and distorted as fancy could render it. To the conception of an angel,

imagination has given the only beautiful appendage the human body does not possess, wings. To that of a devil, it has added all those organs of the brute creation that are most hideous or most harmful. Advancing civilization has almost exterminated the belief in a being with horns, cloven hooves, goggle eyes, and scaly tail that was held up to many yet living as the avenger of childish disobedience in their earlier days, together perhaps, with some strength of conviction of the moral hideousness of the evil he was intended in a rough way to typify. But this hazily retained impression of the author of evil, was the universal and entirely credited conception of the ordinary appearance of

those bad spirits who were so real to our ancestors of Elizabethan days. Some are so carnally minded, says Scott, that a spirit is no sooner spoken of, but they think of a black man with cloven feet, a pair of horns, a tail, and eyes as big as a basin. Scott, however, was one of a very small minority in his opinion as to the carnal-mindedness of such a belief. He, in his day, like those in every age and country, who dare to hold convictions opposed to the creed of the majority, was a dangerous skeptic. His book was publicly burnt by the common hangman, and not long afterwards a royal author wrote a treatise, against the damnable doctrines of two principally in our age,

whereof the one, called Scott, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so maintains the old air of the Sadducees in denying of spirits, the abandoned impudence of the man, and the logic of his royal opponent. Spencer has clothed with horror this conception of the appearance, of a fiend, just as he is enshrined in beauty, the belief in the guardian angel. It is worthy of remark that he describes the devil as dwelling beneath the altar of an idol in a heathen temple. Prince Arthur strikes the image thrice with his sword.

And the third time, out of a hidden shade, thereforth issued from under the altar's smoke, a dreadful fiend with foul, deformed look that stretched itself as it had longed, long line still, and her long tail and feathers strongly shook, that all of the temple did with terror fill, yet him not terrified that feared nothing ill. An huge great beast it was, when it in length was stretched forth, that nigh filled all the place, and seemed to be of infinite great strength, horrible, hideous, and of hellish race, born of the brooding of a kidnap base, or other like infernal furies kind, for of a maid she had the outward face to hide the whore which did lurk behind, the better to beguile whom she's so fond did find. There too, the body of a dog she had,

full of fell raven in fierce greediness, a lion's claws with power and rigor clad to rend and tear what so she can oppress, a dragon's tale who sting without redress, full deadly wounds where so it is impight, and eagle's wings, for scope and speediness, that nothing may escape her reaching might, whereto she ever list to make her hearty flight.

The dramatists of the period make frequent references to this belief, but nearly always by way of ridicule. It is hardly to be expected that they would share in the grosser opinions held by the common people in those times, common, whether king or clown. In the Virgin martyr, Harpox is made to say, I'll tell you what now of the devil, he's no such horrid creature, cloven-footed, black saucer eyes, his nostrils breathing fire, as these lying Christians make him. But his opinion was, perhaps, a prejudiced one. In Ben Johnson's, the devil is an ass. When Fitz de Trell, doubting Pug's statement as to his infernal character, says, I looked on your feet afore, you cannot cousin me, your shoes are not cloven, sir,

you are whole-hoofed. Pug, with great presence of mind, replies, sir, that's a popular error deceives many. So too, Othello, when he is questioning whether Iago is a devil or not, says, I look down to his feet, but that's a fable. And when Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester that he has in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes that being from whom he is supposed to have just parted. thus. As I stood here below, me thought his eyes were two full moons. He had a thousand noses. Horns whelked and waved like the enridged sea. It was some fiend. It can hardly be,

but that the thousand noses are intended as a satirical hit at the enormity of the popular belief. In addition to this normal type, common to all these devils, each one seems to have had, like the greater devils, a favorite form in which he made his appearance when conjured, generally that of some animal real or imagined. It was telling of, the moldwarp and the aunt, of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, and of a dragon and a finless fish,

a clip-winged griffin and a molten raven, a couching lion, and a ramping cat, that annoyed Harry Hotspur so terribly, and neither in this illusion, which was suggested by a passage in Holland's Head, nor in Macbeth, where he makes the three witches conjure up their familiars in the shapes of an armed head, a bloody child, and a child crowned, has Shakespeare gone beyond the fantastic conceptions of the time? But the third proposed section, which deals with the powers and functions exercised by the evil spirits, is by far the most

interesting and important. And the first branch of the series is one that suggests itself, as a natural sequence upon what has just been said as to the ordinary shapes in which devils appeared, namely the capacity to assume at will any form they chose. In the early and middle ages, it was universally believed that a devil could, of his own inherent power, call into existence any manner of body that it pleased his fancy to inhabit, or that would most conduce to the success of any contemplated evil. In consequence of this belief, the devils became the rivals, indeed the successful rivals, of Jupiter himself in the art of physical tergiversation. There was, indeed, a tradition that a devil could not create any animal

form of less size than a barley corn, and that it was in consequence of this incapacity that the Magicians of Egypt, those indubitable devil worshippers, failed to produce lice as Moses did. Although they had been so successful in the matter of the serpents and the frogs, a very gross absurdity as Scott judiciously remarks. This, however, would not be a serious limitation upon the practical usefulness of the power. The Great Reformation Movement wrought a change in this respect. man began to accept argument and reason, though savoring of special pleading of the schools, in preference to tradition, though never so venerable and well authenticated.

And the leaders of the revolution could not but recognize the absurdity of laying down as infallible dogma that God was the creator of all things, and then insisting with equal vehemence, by way of postulate, that the devil was the originator of some. The thing was gross and palpable in its absurdity, and had to be done away with as quickly as might be. But how? On the other hand, it was clear as daylight that the devil did appear in various forms to tempt and annoy the people of God, was at that very time doing so in the most open and unabashed manner. How were reasonable men to account for this manifest conflict between rigorous logic and more rigorous fact?

There was a prolonged and violent controversy upon the point, the reformers not seeing their way to agree amongst themselves, and tedious as violent. Cermons were preached, books were written, and, when argument was exhausted, unpleasant epithets were bandied about, much as in the present day, in similar cases. The result was that two theories were evolved, both extremely interesting as illustrations of the hair-splitting chop-logic tendency, which, amidst all their straightforwardness, was so strongly characteristic of the Elizabethans. The first suggestion was that, although the devil could not, of his own inherent power, create a body, he might get hold of a dead carcass, and temporarily restore animation, and so serve his turn. This belief was held, amongst others,

by the erudite King James, and is pleasantly satirized by sturdy old Ben Johnson in the devil is an ass. Where Satan, the greater devil, who only appears in the first scene, just to set the storm a-brewing, says to Pug, Puck, the lesser devil who does all the mischief, or would have done it had not man in those latter times, got to be rather beyond the devil's in evil than otherwise. Not without a touch of regret at the waning of his power. You must get a body ready-made, Pug, I can create you none. And consequently, Pug is advised to assume the body of a handsome cut-purse that morning hung at Tyburn. But the theory, though ingenious, was insufficient. The devil would occasionally appear in the likeness of a living person, and how could that be accounted for? Again, an evil spirit with all his

ingenuity, would find it hard to discover the dead body of a griffin, or a harpy, or of such eccentricity as was affected by the before-mentioned Balaam, and these and other similar forms were commonly favored by the inhabitants of the netherworld. The second theory, therefore, became the more popular amongst the learned, because it left no one point unexplained. The divines held that, although the power of the Creator had, in no wise, been delegated to the devil, yet he was, in the course of Providence, permitted to exercise a certain supernatural influence over the minds of men, whereby he could persuade them that they really saw a form that had no material objective existence. Here was a position incontrovertible, not on account of the arguments by which it

could be supported, but because it was impossible to reason against it, and it slowly but surely took hold upon the popular mind. Indeed, the elimination of the diabolic factor leaves the modern skeptical belief that such apparitions are nothing more than the result of disease, physical or mental. But the semi-sceptical state of thought was in Shakespeare's time, making its way only amongst the more educated portion of the nation. The masses still clung to the old and venerated, if not venerable, belief that devils could at any moment assume what form soever they might please, not troubling themselves further to inquire into the method of the operation. They could appear in the likeness of an ordinary human being, as Harpix and Mephistopheles do,

creating thereby the most embarrassing complications in questions of identity. And if this belief is born in mind, the charge of being a devil so free, made in the times of which we write, and before alluded to, against persons who performed extraordinary feats of valor, or behaved in a manner discreditable and deserving of general reprobation, loses much of its barbarous grotesqueness. There was no doubt as to Coriolanus, as has been said, nor Shylock. Even the outward sainted Angelo is yet a devil. And Prince Hal confesses that, there's a devil haunts him in the likeness of an old

fat man, an old white-bearded Satan. The devils had an inconvenient habit of appearing in the guise of an ecclesiastic. At least, so the churchmen were careful to insist, especially when busying themselves about acts of temptation that would least become the holy robe they had assumed. This was the ecclesiastical method of accounting for certain stories, not very creditable to the priesthood, that had too inconvenient a basis of evidence to be dismissed as fabricacious. But the honest lay public seems to have thought, with downright old Chaucer, that there was more in the matter than the priests chose to admit. This feeling we, as usual, find reflected in the dramatic literature of our period.

In the troublesome reign of King John, an old play upon the basis of which Shakespeare constructed his own King John, we find this question dealt with in some detail. In the elder play, the bastard does the shaking of bags of hoarding abbots, Coram Populo, and thereby discloses a phase of monastic life judiciously suppressed by Shakespeare. Philip sets at liberty much more than imprisoned angels, according to one account, and that a monks, imprisoned beings of quite another sort. There, Alice the Nun, having been discovered in the chest, where the abbot's wealth was supposed to be concealed, proposes to purchase pardon for the offense

by disclosing the secret horde of a sister nun. Her offer being accepted, a friar is ordered to force the box in which the treasure is supposed to be secreted. On being questioned as to its contents, he answers, Friar Lawrence, my lord, now holy water help us. Some witch or some devil assented delude us. held credo Laurentius that thou should be penned thus. In the press of a nun, we are all undone, and brought to discredence, if thou be friar Lawrence. Unfortunately, it proves indubitably to be that good man, and he is ordered to execution,

not, however, without some hope of redemption by money payment, for times are hard, and cash in hand not to be despised. It is amusing to notice, too, that when assuming the clerical garb, the devil carefully considered the religious creed of the person to whom he intended to make himself known. The Catholic accounts of him show him generally assuming the form of a Protestant parson, whilst to those of the Reformed creed he invariably appeared in the habit of a Catholic priest. In the semblance of a friar, the devil is reported, by a Protestant, to have preached, upon a time, a very Catholic sermon, so good indeed that a priest who was a listener could find no fault with the doctrine,

a stronger basis of fact than one would have imagined for Shakespeare saying, The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. It is not surprising that of human forms, that of a negro or a more, should be considered a favorite one with evil spirits. Iago makes allusion to this when inciting Brabancho to search for his daughter. The power of coming in the likeness of human beings, generally, is referred to somewhat cynically in time of Athens, thus. Varro's servant. What is a whoremaster, fool? Fool. A fool in good clothes, and something like thee,

tis a spirit, sometime tepiers like a lord, some time like a lawyer, sometime like a philosopher, with two stone more 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. All shapes that man goes up and down in seem indeed to have been at the devil's control. So entirely was this the case, that to Constance, even the fair blanche, was none other than the devil, tempting Louis and likeness of a new uptrimmed bride. And perhaps not without a certain prophetic feeling of the fitness of things, as it may possibly seem to some of our more warlike politicians,

evil spirits have been known to appear as Russians. But all the shapes that man goes up and down in did not suffice. The forms of the whole of the animal kingdom seem to have been at the devil's disposal, and not content with these, they seem to have sought further for unlikely shapes to assume. Poor Caliban complains that Prospero's spirits, lead me like a firebrand in the dark. Just as Ariel and Puck, Willow the Whist, mislead their victims,

and that, For every trifle are they set upon me, Sometimes like apes that maw and chatter at me, And after bite me, Then like hedgehogs, which lie tumbling in my barefoot way, And mount their pricks at my footfall, Sometime am I all wound with adders, Who, with cloven tongues, do his,

hiss me into madness. And doubtless, the scene which follows the soliloquy, in which Caliban, Trinculo and Stefano, mistake one another in turn for evil spirits, fully flavored with fun as it still remains, had far more point for the audiences at the globe, to whom a stray devil or two was quite in the natural order of things under such circumstances than it can possibly possess for us. In this play, Ariel, Prospero's familiar, besides appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving in such a manner as to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea, crying, hell is empty and all the devils are here, assumes the forms of a water nymph, a harpy,

and also the goddess series, while the strange shapes, maskers, and even the hounds that hunt and worry the would-be king and vice-royce of the island, are Ariel's meaner fellows. Puck's favorite forms seem to have been more outlandish than Ariel's, as might have been expected of that malicious little spirit. He beguiles the fat and bean-fed horse by, Naying in likeness of a filly foal, and sometimes lurk eye in a gossip's bowl, in very likeness of a roasted crab. And when she drinks, against her lips, I bob, and on her withered du lap pour the ale. The wisest aunt telling the saddest tale, sometime for three-foot stool, mistaken me, then slip eye from her, and down topples she. And again,

sometime a horse-all-be, some time a hound, a hog, a headless bear, some time a fire, and nay and bark and grunt and roar and burn, like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire at every turn. With regard to this last passage, it is worthy of note that in the year 1584, strange news came out of Somersetshire, entitled A dreadful discourse of the dispossessing of one Margaret Cooper at Ditchit from a devil in the likeness of a headless bear.

End of Section 4 Section 5 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libravox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. In Haywood-Mbrom's Witch of Edmonton, the devil appears in the likeness of a black dog and takes his part in the dialogue, as if his presence were a matter of quite ordinary occurrence, not in any way calling for special remark. However gross and absurd this may appear, it must be remembered that this play is,

in its minutest details, merely a dramatization of the events duly proved in a court of law, to the satisfaction of 12 Englishmen in the year 1612. The shape of a fly, too, was a favorite one with the evil spirits, so much so that the term fly became a common synonym for a familiar the word Beelzebub was supposed to mean the king of the flies. At the execution of Urban Grandier, the famous magician of London 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 the victim's mouths the nails and pins, which they afterward vomited.

There is an allusion to this belief in the fly-killing scene in Titus Andronicus, but it was not invariably a repulsive or ridiculous form that was assumed by these enemies of mankind. Their ingenuity would have been but little worthy of commendation had they been content to appear as ordinary human beings, or animals, or even in fancy costume. The Swiss divine Bollinger, after a lengthy and elaborately learned argument as to the particular day in the week of creation, upon which it was most probable, that God called the angels into being, says, by way of peroration, Let us lead a holy and angel like life in the sight of God's holy angels. Let us watch, lest he that transfigureth and turneth himself into an angel of light under a good show and likeness deceive us.

They even went so far, according to Kranmer, as to appear in the likeness of Christ, in their desire to mislead mankind, for, when devils will the blackest sins put on, they do suggest at first with heavenly shows. But one of the most ordinary forms supposed at this period to be assumed by devils was that of a dead friend of the object of the visitation. Before the Reformation, the belief that the spirits of the departed had power at will to revisit the scenes and companions of their earthly life, was almost universal.

The reforming divines distinctly denied the possibility of such a revisitation, and accounted for the undoubted phenomena, as usual, by attributing them to the devil. James I first says that the devil, when appearing to men, frequently assumed the form of a person newly dead, to make them believe that it was some good spirit that appeared to them, either to forewarn them of the death of their friend, or else to discover unto them the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slocter. For he dare not so elude any that knoweth that neither can the spirit of the defunct return to his friend,

nor yet an angel use such forms. He further explains that such devils follow mortals to obtain two ends, the one is the tinsel, loss, of their life, by inducing them to such perilous places at such times as he either follows or possesses them. The other thing that he preises to obtain is the tinsel of their soul. But the belief in the appearance of ghosts was too deeply rooted in the popular mind to be extirpated, or even greatly affected by a dogmatic declaration. The masses went on believing as they always had believed,

and as their fathers had believed before them, in spite of the reformers, and to their no little discontent. Pilkington, Bishop of Durham, in a letter to Archbishop Parker, dated 1564, complains that, among other things that be amiss here in your great cares, you shall understand that in Blackburn, there is a fantastical, and as some say, lunatic young man, which says that he has spoken with one of his neighbors that, died four years since or more. Diverse times he says he has seen him and talked with him,

and took with him the curate, the schoolmaster, and other neighbors who all affirm that they see him. These things be so common here that none in authority will gainsay it, but rather believe and confirm it that everybody believes it. If I had known how to examine with authority, I would have done it. Here is a little glimpse at the practical troubles of a a well-intentioned bishop of the 16th century that is surely worth preserving. There were thus two opposite schools of belief in this matter of the supposed spirits of the departed, the conservative, which held to the old doctrine of ghosts, and the reforming which denied the possibility of ghosts, and held to the theory of devils. In the midst of this disagreement of doctors,

it was difficult for a plain man to come to a definite conclusion upon the question. And, in consequence, all who were not content with quiet dogmatism were in a state of utter uncertainty, upon a point not entirely without importance in practical life, as well as in theory. This was probably the position in which the majority of thoughtful men found themselves, and it is accurately reflected in three of Shakespeare's plays. which, for other and weightier reasons, are grouped together in the same chronological division, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet.

In the first-mentioned play, Brutus, who afterwards confesses his belief that the apparition he saw at Sardis was the ghost of Caesar, when in the actual presence of the spirit, says, art thou some God, some angel, or some devil? The same doubt flashes across the month. of Macbeth on the second entrance of Banquo's ghost, which is probably intended to be a devil appearing at the instigation of the witches, when he says, with evident allusion to a diabolic power before referred to, What man dare I dare? Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros, or the herkin tiger. Take any shape but that. But it is in Hamlet that the

undecided state of opinion upon this subject is most clearly reflected, and hardly enough influence has been allowed to the doubts arising from this conflict of belief, as urgent or deterrent motives in the play, because this temporary condition of thought has been lost sight of. It is exceedingly interesting to note how frequently the characters who have to do with the apparition of the late King Hamlet alternate between the theories that, it is a ghost, and that it is a devil which they have seen. The whole subject has such an important bearing upon any attempt to estimate the character of Hamlet, that no excuse need be offered for once again traversing such well-trodden ground. Horatio, it is true, is introduced

to us in a state of determined skepticism. But this lasts for a few seconds only, vanishing upon the first entrance of the spectre, and and never again appearing. His first inclination seems to be to the belief that he is a victim of a diabolical illusion, for he says, What art thou that usurposed this time of night, together with that fair and warlike form, in which the majesty of Barry Denmark did sometimes march?

And Marcellus seems to be of the same opinion, for immediately before, he exclaims, Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio. Having apparently the same idea as had coachman Toby in the Nightwaker when he exclaims, Let's call the butler up, for he speaks Latin, and that will daunt the devil. On the second appearance of the illusion, however, Horatio leans to the opinion that it is really the ghost of the late king that he sees, probably in consequence of the conversation that has taken place since the former visitation, and he now appeals to the ghost for information that may enable

him to procure rest for his wandering soul. Again, during his interview with Hamlet, when he discloses the secret of the specter's appearance, though very guarded in his language, Horatio clearly intimates his conviction that he has seen the spirit of the late king. The same variation of opinion is visible in Hamlet himself, but, as might be expected, with much more frequent alternations. When first he hears Horatio's story, he seems to incline to the belief that it must be the work of some diabolic agency. If it assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape and bid me hold my peace. Although, characteristically, in almost the next line, he exclaims,

My father's spirit in arms, all is not well, etc. This too seems to be the dominant idea in his mind when he is first brought face to face with the apparition and exclaims, angels and ministers of grace defend us, be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, bring with the airs from heaven or blasts from hell,

be thine intense wicked or cherubes, Thou comst in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee. For it cannot be supposed that Hamlet imagined that a goblin damned could actually be the spirit of his dead father. And therefore the alternative in his mind must have been that he saw a devil assuming his father's likeness, a form which the evil one knew would most incite Hamlet to intercourse. But even as he speaks, the other things. gradually obtains ascendancy in his mind, until it becomes strong enough to induce him to follow the spirit. But whilst the devil theory is gradually relaxing its hold upon Hamlet's mind,

it is fastening itself with ever-increasing force upon the minds of his companions, and Horatio expresses their fears in words that are worth comparing with those just quoted from James' demonology. Hamlet responds to their entreaties not to follow this specter thus. Why? What should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pins fee, and, for my soul, what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? And Horatio answers, What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff, that beetles oar his base into the sea, and there assume some of the, horrible form, which might deprive your sovereignty of reason, and draw you into madness.

The idea that the devil assumed the form of a dead friend in order to procure the tinsel of both body and soul of his victim is here vividly before the minds of the speakers of these passages. The subsequent scene with the ghost convinces Hamlet that he is not the victim of malign influences, as far as he is capable of conviction, for his very first words when alone restate the doubt, Oh, all you host of heaven, O earth, what else, and shall I couple hell?

And the enthusiasm with which he is inspired and consequence of this interview is sufficient to support his certainty of conviction until the time for decisive action again arrives. It is not until the idea of the play test occurs to him that his doubts are once more aroused, and then they return with redoubled force. The spirit that I have seen may be the devil, and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape,

yea, and perhaps, out of my weakness and my melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me. And he again alludes to this in his speech to Horatio, just before the entry of the king and his train to witness the performance of the players. This question was, in Shakespeare's time, quite a legitimate element of uncertainty in the complicated problem that presented itself for solution to Hamlet's ever-analyzing mind. And this being so, an apparent inconsistency in detail, which has usually been charged upon Shakespeare with regard to this play, can be satisfactorily explained.

Some critics are never weary of exclaiming that Shakespeare's genius was so vast and uncontrollable that it must not be tested, or expected to be found conformable to the rules of art that limit ordinary mortals, that there are many discrepancies and errors in his plays that are to be condoned upon that account. In fact, that he was a very careless and slovenly workman. A favorite instance of this is taken from Hamlet, where Shakespeare actually makes the chief character of the play talk of death as, the born from whence no traveler returns, not long after he has been engaged in a prolonged conversation with such a returned traveler. Now, no artist, however distinguished or however transcendent his genius, is to be pardoned

for insincere workmanship, and the greater the man, the less his excuse. Errors arising from want of information, and Shakespeare commits these often, may be pardoned if the means for correcting them be unattainable, but errors arising. arising from mere carelessness are not to be pardoned. Further, in many of these cases of supposed contradiction, there is an element of carelessness indeed, but it lies at the door of the critic, not of the author, and this appears to be true in the present instance.

The dilemma, as it presented itself to the contemporary mind, must be carefully kept in view. Either the spirits of the departed could revisit this world, or they could not, if they could not, then the apparitions mistaken for them must be devils assuming their forms. Now the tendency of Hamlet's mind, immediately before the great soliloquy on suicide, is decidedly in favor of the latter alternative. The last words that he has uttered, which are also the last quoted here,

are those in which he declares most forcibly that he believes the devil theory possible, and consequently that the dead do not return to this world, And his utterances in his soliloquy are only an accentuate and outcome of this feeling of uncertainty. The very root of his desire for death is that he cannot discard with any feeling of certitude, the Protestant doctrine that no traveler does after death return from the invisible world, and that the so-called ghosts are a diabolic deception. Another power possessed by the evil spirits, and one that excited much attention and created an immense amount of strife during Elizabethan times, was that of entering into the bodies of human beings, or otherwise influencing them so as utterly to deprive them of all self-control,

and render them mere automata under the command of the fiends. This was known as possession or obsession. It was another of the medieval beliefs, against which the reformers steadily set their faces, and all the resources of their causistry were exhausted to expose its absurdity. But their position in this respect was an extremely delicate one. On one side of them, zealous Catholics were exercising devils, who shrieked out their testimony to the eternal truth of the Holy Catholic Church. Whilst at the same time on the other side,

the zealous Puritans of the extremer sort were casting out fiends, who bore equally fervent testimony to the superior efficacy and purity of the Protestant faith. The tendency of the more moderate members of the party, therefore, was towards a compromise similar to that arrived at upon the question how the devils came by the forms in which they appeared upon the earth. They could not admit that devils could actually enter into and possess the body of a man in these latter days. Although during the earlier history of the church, such things had been permitted by divine providence, for some inscrutable but doubtless satisfactory reason, that was Catholicism. On the other hand, they could not for an instant, tolerate, or even sanction the doctrine

that devils had no power whatever over humanity. That was atheism. But it was quite possible that evil spirits, without actually entering into the body of a man, might so infest, worry, and torment him as to produce all the symptoms indicative of possession. The doctrine of obsession replaced that of possession, and, once adopted, was supported by a string of those quaint, conceded arguments so peculiar to the time. But as in all other cases, the refinements, of the theologians had little or no effect upon the world outside their controversies. To the ordinary mind, if a man's eyes goggled, body swelled, and mouth foamed, and it was admitted

that these were the work of a devil, the question whether the evildoer were actually housed within the sufferer, or only hovered in his immediate neighborhood, seemed a question of such minor importance as to be hardly worth discussing. A conclusion that the lay mind is apt to come to upon other questions that appear portentous to the divines. And the theory of possession, having the advantage in time over that of obsession, was hard to dislodge. One of the chief causes of the persistency with which the old belief was maintained was the utter ignorance of the medical men of the period on the subject of mental disease.

The doctors of the time were mere children in knowledge of the science they professed, and to attribute a disease, the symptoms of which they could not comprehend, to a power outside their control by ordinary methods, was a safe method of screening a reputation, which might otherwise have suffered. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? cries Macbeth to the doctor, in one of those moments of yearning after the better life he regrets, but cannot return to, which come over him now and again. No, the disease is beyond his practice.

And although this passage has in it a deeper meaning than the one attributed to it here, it well illustrates the position of the medical man in such cases. Most doctors of the time were mere empirics, dabbled more or less in alchemy, and in the treatment of mental disease were little better than children. They had four co-practitioners, all who, by their credit, with a populace for superior wisdom, found themselves in a position to engage in a profitable employment. Priests, preacher, schoolmasters, Dr. Pinches, and Sir Topazes, became so commonly exorcists that the church found it necessary to forbid the casting out of spirits without a

special license for that purpose. But as the reformers only combated the doctrine of possession, upon strictly theological grounds, and did not go on to suggest any substitute for the time-honored practice of exorcism as a means for getting rid of the admittedly obnoxious result of diabolic interference. It is not altogether surprising that the method of treatment did not immediately change. Upon this subject, a book called Trial of Witchcraft by John Kada, Dr. In Physics, published in 1616, is extremely instructive. The writer is evidently in advance of his time and his opinions upon the principal subject with which he professes to deal, and weighs the evidence for and against the reality of witchcraft

with extreme precision and fairness. In the course of his argument, he has to distinguish the symptoms that show a person to have been bewitched, from those that point to a demoniacal possession. Reason doth detect, says he, the sick to be afflicted by the immediate supernatural power of the devil two ways. The first way is by such things as are subject and manifest to the learned physician only. The second is by such things as are subject and manifest to the vulgar view. The two signs by which the learned physician recognized diabolic intervention were, first, the preternatural appearance of the disease from which the patient was suffering, and secondly, the inefficacy of the remedies applied.

In other words, if the leech encountered any disease, the symptoms of which were unknown to him, or if, through some unforeseen circumstances, the drug he prescribed failed to operate in its accustomed manner, a case of demoniacal possession was considered to be conclusively proved, and the medical man was merged in the magician. The second class of cases in which the diabolic agency is palpable to the layman as well as the doctor, Cata illustrates thus. In the time of their paroxysms or fits, some diseased persons have been seen to vomit crooked iron, coals, brimstone, nails, needles, pins, lumps of lead, wax, hair, straw, and the like.

In such quantities, figure, fashion, and proportion, as could never possibly pass down, or arise up through the natural narrowness of the throat, or be contained in the unproportionable small capacity, natural susceptibility and position of the stomach. Possessed persons, he says, were also clairvoyant, telling what was being said and done at a far distance, and also spoke languages which at ordinary times they did not understand, as their successors, the modern spirit mediums do. This gift of tongues was one of the prominent features of the possession of Will Summers and the other persons exercised by the Protestant preacher John Darrell,

whose performances as an exorcist created quite a domestic, sensation in England at the close of the 16th century. The whole affair was investigated by Dr. Harsnett, who had already acquired fame as an iconoclast in these matters, as will presently be seen, but it would have little more than an antiquarian interest now, were it not for the fact that Ben Johnson made it the subject of his satire in one of his most humorous plays, The Devil is an Ass. In it he turns the last-mentioned peculiarity to good account. For when Fitzatrel in the Fifth Act feigns madness, and quotes Aristophanes, and speaks in Spanish and French, the judicious Sir Paul either-sides comes to the conclusion that it is the devil by his several languages.

But more interesting and more important for the present purpose are the cases of possession that were dealt with by Father Parson, and his colleagues in 1585 to 86, and of which Dr. Harsnick gave such a highly spiced and entertaining account in his declaration of egregious popish impostures, first published in the year 1603. It is from this work that Shakespeare took the names of the devils mentioned by Edgar,

and other references made by him in King Lear, and an outline of the relation of the play to the book will furnish incidentally much matter illustrative of the subject of possession. But before entering upon this outline, a brief glance at the condition of affairs, political and domestic, which partially caused and nourished these extraordinary eccentricities, is almost essential to a proper understanding of them. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding.

This Libravox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. Section 6 The year 1586 was probably one of the most critical years that England has passed through since she was first a nation, standing alone amongst the European states, with even the Netherlandsers growing cold towards her, on account of her ambiguous treatment of them, she had to fight out the battle of her independence against odds to all appearances irresistible.

With Sixtus plotting her overthrow at Rome, Philip at Madrid, Mendoza and the English traders at Paris, and Mary of Scotland at Chartley, while a third of her people were malcontent, and James VI was friend or enemy as it best suited his convenience. The outlook was anything but reassuring

for the brave men who held the helm in those stormy times. But although England owed her deliverance, chiefly to the forethought and hardihood of her sons, it cannot be doubted that the sheer imbecility of her foes contributed not a little to that result. To both these conditions, she owed the fact that the great armada, the embodiment of the foreign hatred and hostility, threatening to break upon her shores like a huge wave, vanished like its spray. Medina Sedonia, with his querulous complaints and general ineffectuality, was hardly a match for Drake and his sturdy companions, nor were the leaders of the Babington conspiracy, the representatives and would-be leaders of the

corresponding internal convulsion, the infatuated worshippers of the Fair Devil of Scotland, the men to cope for a moment with the intellects of Walsingham and Burley. The events which Harsnet investigated and wrote upon with politico-theological animus formed an eddy in the main current of the Babbington conspiracy. For some years before, that plot had taken definite shape, seminary priests had been swarming into England from the continent, and were sedulously engaged in preaching rebellion in the rural districts, sheltered and protected by the more powerful of the disaffected noble

and gentry. Modern apostles, preparing the way before the future regenerator of England, Cardinal Allen, the would-be Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. Among these was one Weston, who, in his enthusiastic admiration

for the martyr traitor, Edmund Campion, had adopted the alias of Edmonds. This Jesuit was gifted with the power of casting out devils, and he exercised it in order to prove the divine origin of the Holy Catholic faith, and, by implication, the duty of all persons religiously inclined to rebel against a sovereign who was ruthlessly treading it into the dust. The performances which Harsnett examined into took place chiefly in the House of Lord Vaux at Hackney,

and of one Peckham at Denham, in the end of the year 1585 and the beginning of 1586. The possessed persons were Anthony Tyrell, another Jesuit who rounded upon his friends in the time of their tribulation, Marwood, Antony Babington's private servant, who subsequently found it convenient to leave the country, and was never examined upon the subject, Trafford and Maney, two young gentlemen, and Sarah and Friswood Williams and Anne Smith made servants. Richard Maney, the most edifying subject of them all, was something. 17 only when the possession seized him. He had only just returned England from Reims, and when passing through Paris, had come under the influence of Charles Padgett and Morgan,

so his antecedents appeared somewhat open to suspicion. With the truth or falsehood of the statements and deductions made by Harsnet, we have little or no concern. Western did not pretend to deny that he had the power of exorcism, or that he exercised it upon the persons, question, but he did not admit the truth of any of the more ridiculous stories, which Harsnett so triumphantly brings forward, to convict him of intentional deceit. And his features, if the portrait in Father Morris's book is an accurate representation of him, convey an impression of feeble, unpractical piety that one is loath to associate with a malicious impostor. In addition to this, one of the witnesses against him, Tyrell, when he was a little bit of

was a manifest knave and coward. Another, mani, as conspicuous a fool. While the rest were servant maids, all of them interested in exonerating themselves from the stigma of having been adherents of a lost cause, at the expense of a ringleader who seemed to have made himself too conspicuous to escape punishment. Furthermore, the evidence of these witnesses was not taken until 1598 and 1602, 12 and 16 years after the events to which it related took place. And when taken, was taken by Harsnet, a violent Protestant and almost maniacal exorcist hunter, as the miscellaneous collection of literature evoked by his exposure of Parson Daryl's dealings with Will Summers and others will show.

Among the many devil's names mentioned by Harsnet in his declaration, and in the examinations of witnesses annexed to it, the following have undoubtedly been repeated in King Lear. Fliberti gibbet, spelt in the play Fliberda gibbet, Hobber de dance, called hop dance and hobbitid dance, and Frateretto, who are called Morris Dancers, Haberdicut, who appears in Lear as Abeducut, Smolkin, one of Trafford's devils,

Modu, who possessed Manny, and Mahou, who possessed Sarah Williams. These two latter devils have in the play, managed to exchange the final vowels of their names, and appear as Modo and Mahou. A comparison of the passages in King Lear, spoken by Edgar when feigning madness, with those in Harsnett's book, which seem to have suggested them, will furnish as vivid a picture as it is possible to give of the state. state of contemporary belief upon the subject of possession. It is impossible not to notice that nearly all the illusions in the play refer to the performance of the youth Richard Mani. Even Edgar's

hypothetical account of his moral failings in the past seems to have been an accurate reproduction of Mani's conduct in some particulars, as the quotation below will prove. And there appears to be so little necessity for these remarks of Edgars that it seems almost possible that there may have been some point in these passages that has since been lost. A careful search, however, has failed to disclose any reason why Manny should be held up to obloquy, and the passages in question were evidently not the result of a direct reference to the declaration. After his examination by Harsnett in 1602, Manny seems to have sunk into the insignificant position. which he was so calculated to adorn, and nothing more is heard of him,

so the references to him must be accidental merely. One curious little repetition in the play of a somewhat unimportant incident recorded by Harsnett is to be found in the fourth scene of the third act, where Edgar says, Who gives anything to poor Tom, whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through Ford and Whirlpool, Orbog and Quagmire, that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge, etc.

The events referred to took place at Denham. A halter and some knife-blades were found in a corridor of the house. A great search was made in the house to know how the said halter and knife-blades came thither, but it could not in any wise be found out, as it was. was pretended, till Master Maney and his next fit said, as it was reported, that the devil laid them in the gallery, that some of those that were possessed might either hang themselves with the halter or kill themselves with the blades. But the bulk of the references relating to the possession of Manny occur further on in the same scene. Fool, this cold night

will turn us all to fools and madmen. Edgar, take heed. of the foul fiend, obey thy parents, keep thy word justly, swear not, commit not with man's sworn spouse, set not thy sweetheart on proud array, Tom's a cold. Lear, what hast thou been? Edgar, A serving man, proud in heart and mind that curled my hair, wore my gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress's heart, and did the act of darkness with her. swore as many oaths as i spake words and broke them in the sweet face of heaven one that slept in the contriving of lust and waked to do it wine loved i deeply dice dearly and in women out paramour'd the turk False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand, hog and sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog and madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks, betray thy poor heart to woman, keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of placates, thy pen from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend.

This must be read in conjunction with what Edgar says of himself subsequently. five fiends have been in poor tom at once of lust as obdicate hobedadadance prince of dumbness mahu of stealing modo of murder flibbertigibet of mopping and mowing whose sense possesses chambermaids and waiting women the following are the chief parts of the account given by harsnet of the exorcism of mani by weston a most extraordinary transaction said to be taken from weston's own own account of the matter. He was supposed to be possessed by the devils who represented the seven deadly sins, and, by instigation of the first of the seven, began to set his hands into his side, curled his hair, and used such gestures as Master Edmund's present affirmed that the spirit was pride. Herewith he began to curse and to ban, saying, What a pox do I hear? I will stay no longer among a company of rascal priests,

but go to the court, and brave it among my fellows, the nobleman there assembled. Then Master Edmonds did proceed again with his exorcisms, and suddenly the senses of Mani were taken from him. His belly began to swell, and his eyes to stare, and suddenly he cried out, "'Ten pounds in the hundred. He called for a scrivener to make a bond, swearing that he would not lend his money without a pawn.

There could be no other talk had with the spirit, but money and usury, so as all the company deemed this devil to be the author of covetousness. Ear long, Master Edmunds beginneth again his exorcisms, wherein he had not proceeded far, but up cometh another spirit, singing most filthy and bawdy songs. Every word almost that he spake was nothing but ribaldry. They that were present with one voice affirmed this. that devil to be the author of luxury. Envy was described by disdainful looks and contemptuous speeches, wrath, by furious gestures, and talk as though he would have fought, gluttony by vomiting,

and sloth by gasping and snorting as though he had been asleep. A sort of prayer meeting was then held for the relief of the distressed youth, whereupon the spirit of pride departed in the form of a peacock, the spirit of sloth in the likeness of an ass, the spirit of envy in the similitude of a dog, the spirit of gluttony and the form of a wolf. There is in another part of King Lear a further reference to the incidents attendant upon these exorcisms. Edgar says, The foul fiend haunts, poor Tom, in the voice of a nightingale. This seems to refer to the following incident related by Friswood Williams. There was also another strange thing happened to Denham about a bird.

Mistress Peckham had a nightingale, which she kept in a cage, wherein Master Dibdale took great delight, and would often be playing with it. This nightingale was one night conveyed out of the cage, and being next morning diligently sought for could not be heard of, till Master Mani's devil, in one of his fits, as it was pretended, said that the wicked spirit which was in this examined its sister had taken the bird out of the cage and killed it in despite of Master Dividale. The treatment to which, in consequence of his belief in possession, unfortunate persons like Mani and Summers,

who were probably only suffering from some harmless form of mental disease, were subjected, was hardly calculated to affect a cure. The most ignorant quack was considered, perfectly competent to deal with cases which, in reality, require the most delicate and judicious management combined with the profoundest physiological as well as psychological knowledge. The ordinary method of dealing with these lunatics was as simple as it was irritating. Bonds and confinement in a darkened room were the specifics, and the monotony of this treatment was relieved by occasional visits from the sage who had charge of the case, to mumble a prayer

or a mutter in exorcism. Another popular but unpleasant cure was by flagellation, so that Romeo's, not mad but bound more than a madman is, shut up in prison kept without my food, whipped, and tormented. If an exaggerated description of his own mental condition is in itself no inflated metaphor, Shakespeare, in the comedy of errors, and indirectly also in 12th night,

has given us intentionally ridiculous illustrations of scenes which he had not improbably witnessed, in the country at any rate, and which bring vividly before us the absurdity of the methods of diagnosis and treatment usually adopted. Cordeson, how say you now? Is not your husband mad? Adriana, his insolity confirms no less. Good Dr. Pinch, you are a conjurer, establish him in his true sense again, and I will please you what you will demand. Luciana. Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks.

Quartisan, mark how he trembles in his ecstasy. Pinch, give me your hand and let me feel your pulse. Antiphilus of Ephesus. There is my hand, and let it feel your ear. Pinch, I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man, to yield possession to my holy prayers, And to thy state of darkness, high thee straight, I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven. Antiphilus of Ephesus. Peace, doting wizard, peace, I am not mad. Pinch, oh, that thou wert not,

poor, distressed soul. After some further business, pinch pronounces his opinion. Mistress, both man and master are possessed. I know it by their pale and deadly look. they must be bound and laid in some dark room. But good Dr. Pinch seems to have been mild even to feebleness in his conjuration. Many of his brethren in art had much more effective formulae. It seems that devils were peculiarly sensitive to any opprobrious epithets that chance to be bestowed upon them. The skillful exorcist took advantage of this weakness, and if he could only managed to keep up a flow of uncomplimentary remarks sufficiently long and offensive, the unfortunate spirit became embarrassed, restless, agitated, and finally took to flight.

Here is a specimen of the nicknames, which had so potent in effect if Harsna is to be credited. Here, therefore, thou senseless false lewd spirit, master of devils, miserable creature, tempter of men, deceiver of bad angels, captain of heretics, father of lives, fatuous, beastial niny, drunkard, infernal thief, wicked serpent, ravening wolf, lean, hunger-bitten, impure sow, silly beast, truculent beast, cruel beast, bloody beast, beast of all blasts, the most beastial acerontal spirit, smoky spirit, tartarius spirit. Whether this objurgation terminates from loss of breath on the part of the conjurer, or the precipitate departure of the spirit addressed, it is impossible to say.

It is difficult to imagine any logical reason for its conclusion. Occasionally other and sometimes more elaborate methods of exorcism than those mentioned by Romeo were adopted, especially when the operation was conducted for the purpose of bringing into prominence some great religious truth. The more evangelical of the operators adopted the plan of lying on the top of their patients, after the manner of Eliasim Paul. But the Catholic exorcists invented and carried to perfection, the greatest refinement in the art.

The patient, seated in a holy chair, specially sanctified for the occasion, was compelled to drink about a pint of a compound of sack and salad oil, after which refreshment, a pan of burning brimstone was held under his nose, until his face was blackened by the smoke. All this, while the officiating priest kept up his invocation of the fiends in the manner illustrated above, and, under such circumstances, it is extremely doubtful whether the most determined character would not be prepared to see somewhat unusual phenomena for the sake of a short respite. Another remarkable method of exorcism was a process termed firing out the fiend. The holy flame of piety resident in the priest was so terrible to the evil spirit

that the mere contact of the holy hand with that part of the body of the afflicted person in which he was resident was enough to make him shrink away into some more distant portion. So, by a judicious application of the hand, the exorcist could drive. the devil into some limb, from which escape into the body was impossible, and the evil spirit, driven to the extremity, was obliged to depart, defeated, and disgraced. This influence could be exerted, however, without actual corporal contact, as the following quaint extract from Harsnett's book will show. Some puny rash devil doth stay till the holy priest become somewhat near, as into the chamber, the demoniac doth abide, purposing, as it seems, to try a pluck with the priest,

and then his heart suddenly failing him, as Demus, when he saw his friend Genius approach, cries out that he is tormented with the presence of the priest, and so is fired out of his hold. The more violent or uncommon of the bodily diseases were, as the quotation from Cotta's book shows, attributed to the same diabolic source, in an era when the most profound ignorance prevailed with regard to the simplest laws of health, when the commoner diseases were considered as God's punishment for sin, and not attributable to natural causes, when so eminent a divine as Bishop Hooper could declare that, the air, the water, and the earth, have no poison in themselves to hurt their Lord and Master man, unless man first point.

poisoned himself, with sin. And when, in consequence of this ignorance and this false philosophy, and the inevitable neglect attendant upon them, those fearful plagues, known as the black death, could, almost without notice, sweep down upon a country and decimate its inhabitants, it is not wonderful that these terrible scourges were attributed to the malevolence of the evil one. But it is curious to notice that, Although possessing such terrible powers over the bodies and minds of mortals, devils were not believed to be potent enough to destroy the lives of persons they persecuted, unless they could persuade their victims to renounce God.

This theory probably sprang out of the limitation imposed by the Almighty upon the power of Satan during his temptation of Job, and the advice given to the sufferer by his wife, curse God and die. Hence, when evil spirits began their assaults upon a man, one of their first endeavors was to induce him to do some act that would be equivalent to such a renunciation. Sometimes this was a bond assigning the victim's soul to the evil one, in consideration of certain worldly advantages. Sometimes, a formal denial of his baptism. sometimes a deed that drives away the guardian angel from his side and leaves the devil's influence uncontracted. In the Witch of Edmonton, the first act that Mother Sawyer demands her familiar

to perform after she has struck her bargain is to kill her enemy banks, and the fiend has reluctantly to declare that he cannot do so unless by good fortune he could happen to catch him cursing. Both Harpachs and Mephistopheles suggest to their victims that they have the power to destroy their enemies, but neither of them is able to exercise it. Faust can torment but not kill his would-be murderers, and Springes and Hershey's are powerless to take Dorothea's life. In the latter case, it is distinctly the protection of the guardian angel that limits the diabolic power, so it is not unnatural that Grishano should think the cursing of his better angel from his side,

the most desperate turn, that poor old Brabancho could have done himself had he been living to hear of his daughter's cruel death. It is next to impossible for people in the present day to have any idea what a consolation this belief in a good attendant spirit, specially appointed to guard weak mortals through life, to ward off evils and guide to eternal safety, must have been in a time when, according to the current belief, any person, however blameless, however holy, was liable at any moment to be possessed by a devil,

or harried and tortured by a witch. End of Section 6. Section 7 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This recording is in the last month. public domain, recording by Eva Davis. This leads by a natural sequence to the consideration of another and more insidious form of attack upon mankind, adopted by the evil spirits. Possession and obsession were methods of assault adopted against the will of the afflicted person, and hardly to be avoided by him without the

supernatural intervention of the church. The practice of witchcraft and magic involved the absolute involuntary barter of body and soul to the evil one, for the purpose of obtaining a few short years of superhuman power to be employed for the gratification of the culprit's avarice ambition or desire for revenge. In the strange history of that most inexplicable mental disease, the witchcraft epidemic, as it has been justly called by a high authority on such matters, We moderns are, by the nature of our education and prejudices, completely incapacitated for sympathizing with either the persecutors or their victims. We are at a loss to understand how clear-sided and upright men, like Sir Matthew Hale,

could consent to become parties to a relentless persecution to the death of poor helpless beings whose chief crime in most cases was that they had suffered starvation both in body and in mind. We cannot understand it, because none of us believe in the existence of evil spirits. None, for although there are still a few persons who nominally hold to the ancient faith, as they do to many other respectable but effete traditions, yet they would be at a loss for a reason for the faith that is in them, should they chance to be asked for one, and not one of them would be prepared to make the smallest material sacrifice for the sake of it.

It is true that the existence of evil spirits recently received a tardy and somewhat hesitating recognition in our ecclesiastical courts, which at first authoritatively declared that a denial of the existence of the personality of the devil constituted a man a notorious evil liver and depraver of the Book of Common Prayer. But this was promptly reversed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, under the auspices of two low-church law lords and two archbishops with the very vague proviso that they do not mean to decide that these doctrines are otherwise than inconsistent with the formularities of the Church of England. Yet, the very contempt with which these portentous

declarations of church law have been received shows how great has been the fall of the once almost omnipotent minister of evil. The ancient Satan does indeed exist in some few formularies, but in such a washed-out and flimsy condition as to be the reverse of conspicuous. All that remains of him and of his subordinate legions is the ineffectual ghost of a departed creed, for the resuscitation of which no man will move a finger. It is perfectly impossible for us, therefore, to comprehend, although by an effort, we may perhaps bring ourselves to imagine, the horror and loathing with which good men, entirely believing in the existence and omnipresence of countless legions of evil spirits,

able and anxious to perpetrate the mischiefs that it has been the object of these pages in some part to describe, would regard those who, for their own selfish gratification, deliberately surrendered their hopes of eternal happiness in exchange for an alliance with the devils, which would render these ten times more capable than before of working their wicked wills. To men believing this, no punishment could seem too sudden or too terrible for such offenders against religion and society, and no means of possible detection too slight or far-fetched to be neglected. Indeed, it might reasonably appear to them better that many innocent persons should perish, with the assurance of future reward for their undeserved sufferings,

than that a single guilty one should escape undetected, and become the medium by which the devil might destroy more souls. But the persecuted, far more than the persecutors, deserve our sympathy, although they rarely obtain it. It is frequently asserted that the absolute truth of a doctrine is the only support that will enable its adherence successfully, to weather the storms of persecution. Those who assent to this proposition

must be prepared to find a large amount of truth in the beliefs known to us under the name of witchcraft if the position is to be successfully maintained. For never was any sect persecuted more systematically or with more relentlessness than these little offending heretics. Protestants and Catholics, Anglicans and Calvinists,

so ready at all times to commit one another to the flames and to the headsmen found in this matter common ground upon which all could heartily unite for the grand purpose of extirpating error when out of the quiet of our own times we look back upon the terrors of the tower and the smoke and glare of smithfield we think with mingled pity and admiration of those brave men and women who in the sixteenth century enriched with their blood and ashes, the soil from whence was to spring our political and religious freedom. But no wit of admiration, hardly a glimmer of pity, is even casually evinced for those poor creatures who, neglected, despised, and abhorred were at the same time dying the same agonizing death, and passing through the torment of the flames to that something after death, the undiscovered country, without the sweet assurance which sustained their better-remembered fellow-sufferers, that beyond the martyr's cross was wading the martyr's crown. No such hope supported those

who were condemned to die for the crime of witchcraft. Their anticipations of the future were as dreary as their memories of the past, and no friendly voice was raised or hands stretched out, to encourage or console them during that last sad journey. Their hope of mercy from man was small, strangulation before the application of the fire, instead of the more lingering and painful death, at most. Their hope of mercy from heaven, nothing. Yet, under these circumstances, the most auspicious, perhaps, that could be imagined for the extirpation of a heretical belief, persecution failed to a its object. The more the government burnt the witches, the more the crime of witchcraft spread, and it was not until an attitude of contemptuous toleration was adopted towards the culprits

that the belief died down, gradually but surely, not on account of the conclusiveness of the arguments directed against it, but from its own inherent lack of vitality. The history and phenomena of witchcraft have been so admirable. treated by more than one modern investigator as to render it unnecessary to deal exhaustively with a subject which presents such a vast amount of material for arrangement and comment. The scope of the following remarks will therefore be limited to a consideration of such features of the subject as appear to throw light upon the supernaturalism in Macbeth. This consideration will be carried out with some minuteness as certain modern critics, importing

mythological learning that is the outcome of comparatively recent investigation into the interpretation of the text, have declared that the three sisters, who play such an important part in that drama, are not witches at all, but are, or are intimately allied to the norns or fates of Scandinavian paganism. It will be the object of the following pages to illustrate the contemporary belief concerning witches and their powers, by showing that nearly every characteristic point attributed to the sisters has its counterpart in contemporary witch lore, that some of the illusions, indeed, bear so strong a resemblance to certain events that had transpired not many years before Macbeth was written, that it is not improbable that Shakespeare was alluding to them

in much the same offhand cursory manner as he did to the mani incident when writing King's Lear. The first critic whose comments upon this subject call for notice is the eminent gervinus. In evident ignorance of the history of witchcraft, he says, in the witches, Shakespeare has made use of the popular belief in evil geniuses and in adverse persecutors of mankind, and has produced a similar but darker race of beings, just as he made use of the belief in fairies in the midsummer night's dream. This creation is less attractive and complete, but not less masterly. The poet in the text of the play itself calls these beings witches only derogatorily. They call themselves weird sisters. The fates bore this denomination, and the sisters remind us indeed

of the northern fates, or valkyries. They appear wild and weather-beaten in exterior and attire, common in speech, in noble, half-human creatures, ugly as the evil one, and in like manner old, and of neither sex. They are guided by more powerful masters. Their work entirely springs from delight in evil, and they are wholly devoid of human sympathies. They are simply the embodiment of inward temptation. They come in storm and vanish in air like corporeal impulses, which, originating in the blood, cast up bubbles of sin and ambition in the soul. They are weird sisters only in the sense in which men carry their own fates within their bosoms. This criticism is so entirely subjective and unsupported by evidence that it is difficult to deal satisfactorily

with it. It will be shown hereafter that this description does not apply in the least to the Scandinavian norns, while so far as it is true to Shakespeare's text, it does not clash with contemporary records of the appearance and actions of witches. The next writer to bring forward a view of this character was the Reverend F. G. F. G. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F.kear critic, whose ingenious efforts in iconoclasm cause a curious alternation of feeling between admiration and amazement. His argument is unfortunately mixed up with a question of textual criticism, for he rejects certain scenes in the play as the work of the inferior dramatist Middleton. The question relating to the text will only be noticed,

so far as it is inextricably involved with the argument respecting the nature of the weird sisters. Mr. Flay's position is, shortly, this. He thinks that Shakespeare's play commenced with the entrance of Macbeth and Banquo in the third scene of the first act, and that the weird sisters, who subsequently take part in that scene, are norns, not witches, and that in the first scene of the fourth act,

Shakespeare discarded the norns, and introduced three entirely new characters who were intended to be genuine witches. The evidence which can be produced in support of this theory, apart from question of style and probability, is threefold. The first proof is derived,

from a manuscript entitled The Book of Plays and Notes Thereof for Common Policy, written by a somewhat famous magician doctor, Simon Foreman, who was implicated in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. He says,

In Macbeth, at the Globe, 1610, the 20th April, Saturday, there was to be observed, first, how Macbeth and Bangu, two noblemen of Scotland, riding through a wood, there stood before them three women fairies, or nymphs,

and saluted Macbeth, saying three times unto him, hail Macbeth, king of Cador, for thou shalt be a king, but thou shalt beget no kings, etc. This, if foreman's account held together decently in other respects, would be strong, although not conclusive evidence in favor of the theory. But the whole note is so full of inconsistencies and misstatements, that it is not unfair to conclude, either that the writer was not paying marvelous attention to the entertainment he professed to describe, or that the player's copy differed in many essential points from the present text. Not the least conspicuous of these inconsistencies

is the account of the sister's greeting of Macbeth, just quoted. Subsequently, Foreman narrates that Duncan created Macbeth, Prince of Cumberland, and that, when Macbeth had murdered the king, the blood on his hands could not be washed off by any means, nor from his wife's hands, which handled the bloody daggers in hiding them, by which means they became both much amazed and affronted. Such a loose narration cannot be relied upon if the text in question contains any evidence at all rebutting the conclusion that the sisters are intended to be women fairies or nymphs. The second piece of evidence, is the story of Macbeth, as it is narrated by Holland's head, from which Shakespeare derived

his material. In that account, we read that, it fortunate, as Macbeth and Banquo journeyed toward Feres, where the king then lay, they went sporting by the way together without other company, save only themselves, passing through the woods and fields. When suddenly, in the midst of a land, there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world, whom when they attentively beheld, wondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said, All hail Macbeth, Thane of Galams! For he had lately entered into that dignity in office by the death of his father, Sunil. The second of them said, Hail Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor. But the third said,

All hail Macbeth, the hereafter shall be King of Scotland. Afterwards, the common opinion was that these women were either the weird sisters, that is, as ye would say, the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies, endowed with knowledge of prophecy by their necromanical science, because everything came to pass as they had spoken. This is all that is heard of these goddesses of destiny in Holland's head's narrative. Macbeth is warned to beware Macduff by certain wizards in whose words he put great confidence,

and the false promises were made to him by a certain witch, whom he had in great trust, who had told him that he should never be slain with man born of any woman, nor vanquished till the wood of Bernain came to the castle of Dunsinane. In this account, we find that the supernatural communications, adopted by Shakespeare, were derived from three sources, and the contention is that he has retained two of them, the goddesses of destiny and the witches, and the evidence of this retention is the third proof relied on, namely that the stage direction in the first folio, Act 4, Scene 1, is, Enter Hecett and the other three witches. when three characters, supposed to be witches, are already upon the scene.

Hollinshead's narrative makes it clear that the idea of the goddesses of destiny was distinctly suggested to Shakespeare's mind, as well as that of the witches, as the means of supernatural influence. The question is, did he retain both, or did he reject one and retain the other? It can scarcely be doubted that one such influence running through the play would conduce to harmony and unity of idea, and as Shakespeare, not a servile follower of his source, in any case, has interwoven in Macbeth the totally distinct narrative of the murder of King Death. It is hardly to be supposed that he would scruple to blend these two different sets of characters,

if any advantage were to be gained by so doing. As to the stage direction in the first folio, it is difficult to see what it would prove, even supposing that the folio were the most scrupulous piece of editorial work that had ever been affected. It presupposes that the weird sisters are on the stage as well as the witches, but it is perfectly clear that the witches continue the dialogue. So the other more powerful beings must be supposed to be standing silent in the background. A suggestion so monstrous that it is hardly necessary to refer to the slovenliness of the folio stage directions. to show how unsatisfactory an argument based upon one of them must be.

The evidence of Foreman in Holland's Head has been stated fully in order that the reader may be in possession of all the materials that may be necessary for forming an accurate judgment upon the point in question. But it seems to be less relied upon than the supposition that the appearance and powers of the beings in the admittedly genuine part of the third scene of the first act are not those formally attributed to witches, and that Shakespeare, having once decided to represent Norns, would never have degraded them to three old women who were called by Paddock and Grimalkin,

sail in sieves, kill swine, serve heckett, and deal in all the common charms, illusions, and incantations of vulgar witches. The three who look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet are aunt. They who can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow, they who seem corporal but melt into the air like bubbles of the earth, the wayward sisters who make themselves air and having them more than mortal knowledge are not beings of this stamp. Now there is a great mass of contemporary evidence to show that these supposed characteristics of the Norns are, in fact, some of the chief attributes of the witches of the 16th and 17th centuries. If this be so, if it can be proved that the

supposed goddesses of destiny of the play, in reality, possess no higher powers than could be acquired by ordinary communication with evil spirits, then no weight must be attached to the vague stage direction in the folio, occurring as it does in a volume notorious for the extreme carelessness with which it was produced, and it must be admitted that the goddesses of destiny of Holland's head were sacrificed for the sake of the witches. If, in addition to this, it can be shown that there was a very satisfactory reason why the witches should have been chosen as the representatives of the evil influence instead of the Norns, the argument will be as complete as it is possible to make it. But before proceeding to examine the contemporary evidence,

it is necessary in order to obtain a complete conception of the mythological view of the weird sisters. To notice a piece of criticism that is at once an expansion of and a variation upon, the theory just stated. It is suggested that the Sisters of Macbeth are but three in number, but 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 is the special prophetess, whilst the first takes cognizance of the past,

and the second of the present in affairs connected with humanity. These are the tasks of Erder, Verdandi, and Skulth. The first begins by asking, when shall we three meet again? The second decides the time, when the battle's lost or won. The third, the future prophecies, that will be ere set of sun. The first again asks, where? The second decides, upon the heath. The third, the future prophecies, there to meet.

meet with Macbeth, but their role is most clearly brought out in the famous hails. First, Erder, past. All hail, Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of Glamps. Second, Verdandy, present. All hail, Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of Cador. Third, Sculta. All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter. This sequence is supposed to be retained

in other of the sister's speeches. But a perusal of these will soon show that it is only in the second of the above quotations that it is recognizable with any definiteness. And this, it must be remembered, is an almost verbal transcript from Hollen's head, and not an original conception of Shakespeare's, who might feel himself quite justified in changing the characters of the speakers, while retaining their utterances. In addition to this, the natural sequence is in many cases utterly and unnecessarily violated. As, for instance, in Act 1, Scene 3, where Erder, who should be solely occupied with past matters,

predicts, with extreme minuteness, the results that are to follow from her projected voyage to Aleppo, and that without any expression of resentment, but rather with promise of assistance from Sculpta, whose province she is thus invading. But this latter piece of criticism seems open to one grave objection to which the former is not liable. Mr. Flay separates the portions of the play, which are undoubtedly to be assigned to witches, from the parts he gives to his norns,

and attributes them to different characters. The other mixes up the witch and norn elements in one confused mass. The earlier critic saw the absurdity of such a supposition when he wrote. Shakespeare may have raised the wizard and witches of the latter parts of Holland's head to the weird sisters of the former parts. But the converse process is impossible. Is it conceivable that Shakespeare, who, as most people admit, was a man of some poetic feeling, being in possession of the beautiful Norn legend, the silent fake goddesses sitting at the foot of Igdrasil,

the mysterious tree of human existence, and watering its roots with water from the sacred spring, could, ruthlessly, and without cause mar the charm of the legend by the gratuitous introduction of the gross and primarily unpoetical details incident to the practice of witchcraft. No man with a glimmer of poetry in his soul will imagine it for a moment. The separation of characters is more credible than this, but if that theory can be shown to be unfounded, there is no improbability in supposing that Shakespeare, finding that the question of witchcraft was, in consequence of events that had taken place not long

before the time of the production of Macbeth, absorbing the attention of all men, from king to peasant, should set himself to deal with such a popular subject. And by the magic of his art, so raise it out of its degradation into the region of poetry, that men should wonder and say, can this be witchcraft indeed? End of Section 7. Section 8 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libravox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. In comparing the evidence to be deduced from the contemporary records of witchcraft

with the sayings and doings of the sisters in Macbeth, these parts of the play will first be dealt with, upon which no doubt as to their genuineness has ever been cast, and which are asserted to be solely applicable to Norns. If it can be shown that these describe witches rather than Norns, the position that Shakespeare intentionally substituted witches, for the goddesses of destiny, mentioned in his authority, is practically unassailable. First, then, it is asserted that the description of the appearance of the sisters given by

Banquo applies to Norns rather than witches. They look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet our aunt. This question of applicability, however, must not be decided by the consideration of a single sentence, but of the whole passage from which it is extracted, and whilst considering it, it should be carefully borne in mind that it occurs immediately before those lines which are chiefly relied upon as proving the identity of the sisters with Erda, Verdandhi, and Sculta. Banquo, on seeing the sisters, says,

What are these so withered and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet her aunt, live you or are you aught that man may question? You seem to understand me, by each one 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. It is in the first moment of surprise that the sisters, appearing so suddenly, seem to banquo unlike the inhabitants of this earth. When he recovers from the shock and is capable of deliberate, criticism. He sees chappy fingers, skinny lips, in fact, nothing to distinguish them from poverty-stricken, ugly old women, but their beards. 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. Scott, for instance, says, They are women which commonly be old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles. They are lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces. And Harsnett describes 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, untoothed, furrowed, having her lips 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.

It must be remembered that these accounts are by two skeptics, who saw nothing in the witches but poor, degraded old women. In a description which assumes their supernatural power, such minute details would not be possible, yet there is quite enough in Benko's description to suggest neglect, squalor, and misery. But if this were not, so, there is one feature in the description of the sisters that would settle the question once and forever. The beard was in Elizabethan times the recognized characteristic of the witch. In one old play, it is said, the women that come to us for disguises must wear beards, and that's to say a token of a witch. And in another, some women have beards, marry, they are half witches. And Sir Hugh Evans

gives decisive testimony to the fact when he says of the disguised false staff. By yea and no, I think the omen is a witch indeed. I like not when an omen has a great peered. I spy a great peered under her muffler. Every item of Banquo's description indicates that he is speaking of witches. Nothing in it is incompatible with that supposition. Will it apply with equal force to norms? It can hardly be that these mysterious mythical beings, who exercise an incomprehensible yet powerful influence over human destiny, could be described with any propriety, in terms so revolting. A veil of wild, weird grandeur might be thrown around them, but can it be supposed that Shakespeare would degrade them by representing them with chappy fingers,

skinny lips and beards? It is particularly to be noticed, too, that although in this passage he is making an almost verbal transcript from Holland's head, these details are interpolated without the authority of the chronicle. Let it be supposed for an instant that the text ran thus. Banquo, what are these so withered and so wild in their attire that look not like the inhabitants of the earth and yet our aunt? Live you or are you aught that man may question. Macbeth. Speak if you can. What are you? First which. All hail Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of glumse. Second witch. All hail Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of Codour. Third witch. All hail Macbeth. Thou shall be king hereafter. This is so accurate a dramatization of the parallel passage in Holland's head, and so entire in itself, that there is some temptation to ask whether it was not so written at first, and the interpolated lines subsequently inserted by the author. Whether this be so or not, the question must be put. Why, in such a passage, did Shakespeare insert three lines of most

striking description of the appearance of witches? Can any other reason be suggested than that he made up his mind to replace the goddesses of destiny by the witches, and had determined that there should be no possibility of any doubt arising about it. The next objection is that the sisters exercised powers that witches did not possess. They can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not. In other words, they foretell future events, which witches could not do. But this is not the fact. the recorded witch trials team with charges of having prophesied what things were about to happen.

No charge is more common. The following, quoted by Charles Knight, in his biography of Shakespeare, might almost have suggested the simile in the last-mentioned lines. Jeanette Wischart is indicted for passing to the green growing corn in May, 22 years since, or thereby, sitting thereupon Timus in the morning before the sun rising, and being there found and demanded what she was doing, thou answered, I shall tell thee, I have been peeling the blades of the corn. I find it will be a dear year.

The blade of the corn grows withersons, and when it grows sangatus about, it will be a good cheap year. The following is another apt illustration of the power, which has been translated from the unwieldy Lowland Scotch account of the trial of Bessie Roy in 1590. The ditté charged her thus, you are indicted and accused that whereas when you were dwelling with William King and Barre about twelve years ago or thereabouts, and having gone into the field to pluck lint with other women,

in their presence made a compass in the earth, and a hole in the midst thereof. And afterwards, by their conjurations, thou caused a great worm to come up first out of the said hole, and creep over the compass, and next a little worm came forth, which crept over, also, and last thou caused a great worm to come forth, which could not pass over the compass, but fell down and died. Which enchantment and which craft thou interpreteth in this form, that the first great worm that crept over the compass was the Goodman William King, who should live, and the little worm was a child in the good wife's womb, who was unknown to anyone to be with child, and that the child should live. And, thirdly, the last grower,

great worm thou interpreteth to be the good wife who should die, which came to pass after thy speaking. Surely there could hardly be plainer instances of looking into the seeds of time and saying which grain will grow and which will not, than these. Perhaps this is the most convenient place for pointing out the full meaning of the first scene of Macbeth, and its necessary connection with the rest of the play. It is, in fact, the fag 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 unmeaning at the commencement of the play. The audience is therefore left to assume that the witches have met, performed at 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, all that is needed for the dramatic effect is a slight hint of probable diabolical interference, and that Macbeth is to be the special object of it, and this is done in as artistic a manner as is perhaps imaginable. In the first scene they obtain their information, in the second they utter their prediction. Every minute detail of these scenes is based upon the broad, recognized facts of witchcraft. It is also suggested that the power of vanishing from the sight, possessed by the sisters, the power to make themselves

air was not characteristic of witches. But this is another assertion that would not have been made had the authorities upon the subject been investigated with only slight attention. No feature of the crime of witchcraft is better attested than this, and the modern witch of storybooks is still represented as writing on a broomstick, a relic of the enchanted rod with which the devil used to provide his worshippers, upon which to come to his sabbaths. One of the charges in the indictment against the notorious Dr. Fiann ran thus, Fillet for suffering himself to be carrot to North Burak Kirk, as if he had been souchined athorat the eard. Most effectual ointments were prepared for affecting this method of locomotion,

which have been recorded, and are given below as an illustration of the wild kind of recipes, which Shakespeare rendered more grim in his caldron scene. The efficacy of these ointments is well illustrated by a story narrated by Reginald Scott, which, unfortunately, on account of certain incidents, cannot be given in his own terse words. The hero of it happened to be staying temporarily with a friend, and on one occasion found her rubbing her limbs with a certain preparation, and mumbling the while. After a time she vanished out of his sight, and he, being curious, to investigate the affair, rubbed himself with the remaining ointment, and almost immediately

he found himself transported a long distance through the air, and deposited right in the very midst of a witch's Sabbath. Naturally alarmed, he cried out, In the name of God what make I hear? And upon these words, the whole assembly vanished away. The only vestige of a difficulty, therefore, that remains, is the use of the term weird sisters in describing the witches. It is perfectly clear that Hollinshead used these words as a sort of synonym for the goddesses of destiny, but with such a mass of evidence has been produced to show that Shakespeare elected to introduce witches in the place of the Norns, it surely would not be unwarrantable to suppose that he might retain this term as a poetical and not unsuitable description of the characters

to whom it was applied. And this is the less improbable as it can be shown that both words were at times applied to witches. As the quotation given subsequently proves, the Scotch witches were in the habit of speaking of the frequenters of a particular Sabbath as the sisters. And in Haywood's Witches of Lancashire, one of the characters says about a certain act of supposed witchcraft, I remember that some three months since I crossed a wayward woman, one that I now suspect. Here, then, in the very stronghold of the supposed proof of the Norn theory, it is possible to extract convincing evidence that the sisters are intended to be merely witches. It is not surprising that other portions of the play, in which the sisters are mentioned,

should confirm this view. Banquo, upon hearing the fulfillment of the prophecy of, of the second witch, clearly expresses his opinion of the origin of the foreknowledge he has received in the exclamation, what, can the devil speak true? For the devil most emphatically spoke through the witches, but how could he, in any sense, be said to speak through norns? Again, Macbeth informs his wife that on his arrival at Fueres, he made inquiry into the amount of reliance that could be placed in the utterances of the witches, and learned by the perfectest report

that they had more in them than mortal knowledge. This would be possible enough if witches were the subjects of the investigation, for their chief title to authority would rest upon the general opinion current in the neighborhood in which they dwelt. But how could such an inquiry be carried out successfully in the case of Norns?

It is noticeable, too, that Macbeth knows exactly where to find this sister, when he wants them. And when he says, More shall they speak, for now I am bent to know, by the worst means the worst. He makes another clear allusion to the traffic of the witches with the devil. After the events recorded in Act 4, Scene 1, Macbeth speaks of the prophecies upon which he relies as the equivocation of the fiend, and the prophets as, those juggling fiends, and with reason.

For he has seen and heard the very devils themselves. the masters of the witches and sources of all their evil power. Every point in the play that bears upon the subject at all tends to show that Shakespeare intentionally replaced the goddesses of destiny by witches, and that the supposed norn origin of these characters is a result of a somewhat too great eagerness to unfold a novel and startling theory. End of Section 8. Section 9 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding.

This Libravox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. Assuming, therefore, that the witch nature of the sisters is conclusively proved, it now becomes necessary to support the assertion previously made, that good reason can be shown why Shakespeare should have elected to represent witches rather than norns. It is impossible to read Macbeth without noticing the prominence given to the belief that witches had the power of creating storms and other atmospheric disturbances, and that they delighted in so doing. The sisters elect to meet in thunder, lightning, or rain. To them fair is foul, and foul is fair, as they hover through the fog and filthy air. The whole of the earlier part of the third scene of the first act is one blast of tempest with its attendant devastation.

They can loose and bind the winds, cause vessels to be tempest-tossed at sea, and mutilate wrecked bodies. They describe themselves as posters of the sea and land. The heath they meet upon is blasted, and they vanish as breath into the wind. Macbeth conjures them to answer, his questions thus. Though you untie the winds and let them fight against the churches,

though the yest-y waves confound and swallow navigation up, though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down, though castles topple on their water's heads, though palaces and pyramids do slope their heads to their foundations, though the treasure of nature's germans tumble altogether, even till destruction sicken. Now, this command over the elements does not form at all a prominent feature in the English records of witchcraft. A few isolated charges of the kind may be found. In 1565, for instance, a witch was burnt, who confessed that she had caused all the tempests that had taken place in that year. Scott, too, has a few short sentences upon this subject, but does not give it the slightest prominence. Nor in the earlier Scotch trials, recorded by Pitcairn, does this charge appear amongst

the accusations against the witches. It is exceedingly curious to notice the utter harmless nature of the charges brought against the earlier culprits, and how, as time went on and the panic increased, they gradually deepened in color, until no act was too gross, too repulsive, or too ridiculously impossible to be excluded from the indictment. The following quotations. The following quotations, from one of the earliest reported trials are given because they illustrate most forcibly the condition of the poor women who were supposed to be witches, and the real basis of fact upon which the belief in the crime subsequently built itself. Bessie Dunlop was tried for witchcraft in 1576. One of the principal accusations against her was that she held intercourse with the

devil who appeared to her in the shape of a neighbor of hers, one Tom Reed, who had recently died. Being asked how and where she met Tom Reed, she said, as she was gangen betwixt her own house in the yard of Montcassel, driving her kai to the pasture, and make an heavy sail with herself, great and very fast for her cow that was dead, her husband and child that were lying sick in the land deal, and she knew risen out of Gisain. The aforesaid Tom met her by the way, he'll sit her, and said, good day, Bessie, and she said, Godspeed you, goodman. santa marie said he bessie why makes thou so great dole and ser greeting for any wardly thing she answered alas have i not great cause to make great dole for aguirreus track it and my husband is on the point of dead and one baby of my own will not live, and myself at any weak point,

have I not good cause then to have an sair heart? But Tom said, Bessie, thou ascribe it God, and ask it something you should not have done, and therefore I counsel thee to mend to him, for I tell thee thy barn shall die, and the sake of, or ye come home, and thy twelf sheep shall die too,

but thy husband shall mend, and shall be as hell and fair as ever he was, And then I was something blithe, for it told me that my goodman would mend. Then Tom Reed went away from me in through the yard of Monk Castle, and I thought that he gait in at a narrow hall of the dyke, nor any early man could have gone through, and swore was something flight. This was the first time that Tom appeared to her. On the third occasion he asked her if she would not throw in him.

She said, she would throw in only body did a good. Then Tom promised her much well if she would deny her Christendom. She answered that, if she should be riven at horse, his tireless, she shall never do that, but promised to be lia and true to him in only thing she could do. Whereat he was angry. On the fourth occasion, the poor woman fell further into sin, and accompanied Tom to a fairy meeting. Tom asked her to join the party, but she said, she saw no profit to gain that kind of goddess unless she can't wherefore.

Tom offered the old inducement, wealth. But she replied that, she dwelt with her owen husband and bairness, and could not leave them. And so Tom began to be very crabbit with her, and said, If so, she thought she would get little good of him. She was then demanded if she had ever asked any favour of Tom for herself or any other person. She answered that When sondry persons came to her To seek help for their beast

The cow or you Or for any barn that was tained away With an evil blast of wind Or elf gripp it She gait and spirited Tom What might help them And Tom would pull an herb And give her out of his own hand

And better shear the same with any other kinds of herbs Then open the beast's mouth And put them in And the beast wouldn't mend It seems hardly possible To believe that a story like this which is half marred by the attempt to partially modernize its simple pathetic language, and which would probably bring a tear to the eye, if not a shilling from the pocket,

of the most unsympathetic being of the present day, should be considered sufficient 300 years ago to convict the narrator of a crime worthy of death. Yet so it was. This sad picture of the breakdown of a poor woman's intellect in the unequal struggle against poverty and sickness is only made visible to us by the light of the flames that mercifully, to her perhaps,

took poor Bessie Dunlop away forever from the sick husband and weakly children, and the kai, and the humble hovel where they all dwelt together, and from the daily heart-rending, almost hopeless struggle to obtain enough food to keep life in the bodies of this miserable family. The historian, who makes it his chief anxiety to record, to the minutest and most irrelevant details, the deeds, noble or ignoble, of those who have managed to stamp their names upon the muster roll of fame, turns carelessly or scornfully the page which contains

such insignificant matter as this. But those who believe that not a worm is cloven in vain, that not a moth with vain desire is shriveled in a fruitless fire, or but subserves another's gain, will hardly feel that poor Bessie's life and death were entirely without their meaning. As the trials for witchcraft increase, however, the details grow more and more revolting, and in the year 1590 we find a most extraordinary batch of cases, extraordinary for the monstrosity of the charges contained in them, and also for the fact that this feature, so insisted upon in Macbeth, the raising of winds and storms, stands out in extremely bold relief. The explanation of this is as follows.

In the year 1589, King James VI brought his bride, Anne of Denmark, home to Scotland. During the voyage, an unusually violent storm raged, which scattered the vessels composing the royal escort, and it would appear caused the destruction of one of them. By a marvelous chance, the king's ship was driven by a wind which blew directly contrary to that which filled the sails of the other vessels, and the king and queen were both placed in extreme jeopardy. James, who seems to have been as perfectly convinced of the reality of witchcraft, as he was of his own infallibility, at once came to the conclusion that the storm had been raised by the aid of evil spirits for the express purpose of getting rid of so powerful an enemy of the Prince of

darkness as the righteous king. The result was that a rigorous investigation was made into the whole affair. A great number of persons were tried for attempting the king's life by witchcraft, and that prince, undeterred by the apparent impropriety of being judge in what was, in reality, his own cause, presided at many of the trials, condescended to superintend the tortures applied to the accused in order to extort a confession, and even went so far in one case as to write a letter to the judges commanding a condemnation. Under these circumstances, considering who the prosecutor was, and who the judge, and the effectual methods at the service of the court for extorting confessions, it is not surprising that the king's surmises were fully justified by the statements of the accused.

It is impossible to read these without having parts of the witch scenes and Macbeth ringing in the ears like an echo. John Fien, a young schoolmaster, and leader of the gang or a coven, as it was called, was charged with having caused the leak in the king's ship, and with having raised the wind and created a mist for the purpose of hindering his voyage. On another occasion, he and several other witches entered into a ship and caused it to perish. He was also able, by witchcraft, to open locks.

He visited churchyards at night and dismembered bodies for his charms, the bodies of unbaptized infants being preferred. Agnes Sampherson's, said to the king that to compass his death, she took a black toad and hung it by the hind legs for three days, and collected the venom that fell from it. She said that if she could have obtained a piece of linen that the king had worn, she could have destroyed his life with this venom, causing him such extraordinary pains as if he had been lying upon sharp thorns or endus of needles. She went out to sea to a vessel called the grace of God, and when she came away,

the devil raised a wind, and the vessel was wrecked. She delivered a letter from Fian to another witch, which was to this effect. Yisa warned the rest of the cisteris to raise the wind this day at Elwyn Orris to stay the quinis coming in Scotland. This is her confession as to the methods adopted for raising the storm. At the time when his majesty was in Denmark, she, being accompanied by the parties before, specially named, took a cat and christened it. and afterwards bound to each part of that cat the chiefest parts of a dead man and the several joints of his body, and that in the night following the said cat was conveyed into the midst of the sea by all these witches,

sailing in their riddles or sieves, as is afore said, and so left the said cat right before the town of Leith in Scotland. This stun there did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been seen. which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a vessel coming over from the town of Brunt Island to the town of Leith. Again it is confessed that the said christened cat was the cause that the king's majesty's ship, at his coming forth of Denmark, had a contrary win to the rest of his ships. It is worth a note that this art of going to sea and sieves, which Shakespeare has referred to in his drama, seems to have been peculiar to this set of witches. english witches had the reputation of being able to go upon the water in egg-shells and cockle-shells but seem never to have detected any peculiar advantages in the sieve not so these scotch witches agnes told the king that she with the great many other witches to the number of two hundredth all together went to sea each one in a riddle or sieve and went into the same very substantially with flagons of wine making mary and drinking by the way

in the same riddles or sieves to the Kirk of North Barak in Lothian, and that after they landed they took hands on the land and danced a real or short dance. They then opened to the graves and took the fingers, toes, and knees of the bodies to make charms. It can be easily understood that these trials created an intense excitement in Scotland. The result was that a tract was printed, containing a full account of all the principal incidents,

and the fact that this pamphlet was reprinted once, if not twice, in London, shows that interest in the affair spread south of the border. And this is confirmed by the publisher's prefatorial apology, in which he states that the pamphlet was printed to prevent the public from being imposed upon by unauthorized and extravagant statements of what had taken place. Under ordinary circumstances, events of this nature would form a nine-day's wonder and then die a natural death. But in this particular case, the public interest continued for an abnormal time. For eight years subsequent to the date of the trials, James published his demonology, a work founded to a great extent upon his experiences at the trials of 1590.

This was a sign to both England and Scotland that the subject of which craft was still of engrossing interest to him, and as he was then the fully recognized heir apparent to the English crown, the publication of such a work would not fail to induce a great amount of attention to the subject dealt with. In 1603, he ascended the English throne. His first parliament met on the 19th of March, 1604, and on the 27th of the same month, a bill was brought into the House of Lords, dealing with the question of witchcraft. It was referred to a committee of which 12 bishops were members, and this committee, after much debating, came to the conclusion that the bill was imperfect. In consequence of this, a fresh one was drawn,

and by the 9th of June a statute had passed both houses of Parliament, which enacted, among other things, that, if any person shall practice or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or shall consult with, entertain, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, or take up any dead man, woman, or child, out of his, her, or their grave, or the skin, bone, or any other part of any dead person to be

employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, or shall practice any witchcraft, whereby any person shall be killed, wasted, pined, or lamed in his or her body, or any part thereof, such offenders shall suffer the pains of death as felons, without benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Hutchinson, in his essay on witchcraft, published in 1720, declares that this statute was framed expressly to meet the offenses exposed by the trials of 1590-91. But, although this cannot be conclusively proved, yet it is not at all improbable that the hurry with which the statute was passed into law immediately upon the accession of James would recall to the public mind

the interest he had taken in those trials in particular, and the subject in general. And that Shakespeare, producing, as nearly all the critics agree, his tragedy at about this date, should draw upon his memory for the half-forgotten details of those trials, and thus embody in Macbeth the allusions to them that have been pointed out much less accurately than he did in the case of the Babington affair, because the facts had been far less carefully recorded,

and the time at which his attention had been called to them, far more remote. There is one other mode of temptation, which was adopted by the evil spirits, implicated to a great extent with the traditions of witchcraft, but nevertheless more suitably handled as a separate subject, which is of so gross and revolting a nature, that it should willingly be passed over in silence. Were it not for the fact that the belief in it was, as Scott says, so strongly and universally received in the times of Elizabeth and James. From the very earliest period of the Christian era, the affection of one sex for the other was considered to be under the special control of the devil. Marriage was to be tolerated,

but celibacy was the state most conducive to the near intercourse with heaven that was so dearly sought after. This opinion was doubtless generated by the tendency of the early Christian leaders to hold up the events of the life rather than the teachings of the sacred founder of the sect, as the one rule of conduct to be received by his followers. To have been the recipients of the stigmata was a far greater evidence of holiness and favor with heaven than the quiet and unnoted daily practice of those virtues upon which Christ pronounced his blessing.

And in less improbable matters they did not scruple in their enthusiasm to attempt to establish a rule of life in direct contradiction to the laws of that universe, of which they profess to believe him to be the creator, the futile attempt to imitate his immaculate purity blinded their eyes to the fact that he never taught or encouraged celibacy among his followers and this gradually led them to the strange conclusion that the passion which sublimed and brought under control is the source of man's noblest and holiest feelings, was a prompting proceeding from the author of all evil. Embed with this idea,

religious enthusiasts of both sexes amurred themselves in convents, took oaths of perpetual celibacy, and even in certain isolated cases, sought to compromise with heaven and baffle the tempter by rendering a fall impossible, forgetting that the victory over sin does not consist in immunity from temptation, but being tempted not to fall. But no convent walls are so strong as to shut great nature out. And even within these sacred precincts, the ascetics found that they were not free from

the temptations of their arch-enemy. In consequence of this, a belief sprang up and spread from its original source into the outer world, in a class of devils called Incubi and Secubi, who roamed the earth with no other object than to tempt people to abandon their purity of life. The cases of assault by incubi were much more frequent than those by succubi, just as women were much more affected by the dancing manias in the 15th century than men, the reason perhaps being that they are much less capable of resisting physical privation. But according to the belief of the Middle Ages, there was no generic difference between the incubus and succubus. Here was a belief that, when the witch fury sprang up,

attached itself as a matter of course, as the phase of the crime. And it was an almost universal charge against the accused, that they offended in this manner, with their familiars, and hundreds of poor creatures suffered death upon such an indictment. More details will be found in the authorities upon this unpleasant subject. This intercourse did not, as a rule, result in offspring, but this was not universally the case. All badly deformed or monstrous children were suspected of having had such an undesirable parentage, and there was a great tendency to believe that they ought to be

destroyed. Luther was a decided advocate of this course, deeming the destruction of a life far preferable to the chance of having a devil in the family. In Drayton's poem, the mooncaf, one of the gossips present at the birth of the calf, suggests that it ought to be buried alive as a monster. Caliban is a mooncaf, and his origin is distinctly traced to a source of this description. It is perfectly clear what was the one thing that the foul witch Sycorax did, which prevented her life from being taken, and it would appear from this that the inhabitants of Argyr were far more merciful in this respect

than their European neighbors. Such a charge would have sent any woman to the stake in Scotland, without the slightest hope of mercy, and the usual plea for respite would only have been an additional reason for hastening the execution of the sentence. In the preceding pages, an endeavor has been made to delineate

the most prominent features of a belief which the Great Reformation was destined first to foster into unnatural proportions and vitality, and in the end, to destroy. Up to the period of the Reformation, the creed of the nation had been practically uniform, and one set of dogmas was unhesitatingly accepted by the people as

infallible, and therefore hardly demanding critical consideration. The great upheaval of the 16th century rent this quiescent uniformity into shreds. Doctrons until then considered as indisputable were brought within the pale of discussion, and hence there was a great diversity of opinion, not only between the supporters of the old and of the new faith, but between the reformers themselves. This was conspicuously the case with regard to the belief in the devils and their works.

The more timid of the reformers clung in a great measure to the Catholic opinions. A small band, under the influence possibly of that knight-errant of Freedom of Thought, Gordano Bruno, who exercised some considerable influence during his visit to England

by means of his Oxford lectures and disputations, entirely denied the existence of evil spirits. But the great majority gave in their adherence to a creed that was the mean between the doctrines of the old faith

and the new skepticism. Their strong common sense compelled them to reject the puerilities advanced as serious evidence by the Catholic Church, but they cast aside with equal vehemence

and more horror, the doctrines of the Bruno School. That there are devils, says Bollinger, reduced apparently from argument to invective, The Sadducees in times past denied, and at this day also, some scarce religious, nay, rather epicures, deny the same, who, unless they repent, shall one day feel to their exceeding great

pain and smart, both that there are devils, and that they are the tormentors and executioners of all wicked men and epicures. It must be remembered, too, that the emancipation from medievalism was a very gradual process, not, as we are too prone to think it, a revolution suddenly and completely affected. It was an evolution, not an explosion. There is found, in consequence, a great divergence of opinion, not only between the earliest and the later reformers, but between the statements of the same man at different periods of his career. Tyndall, for instance, seems to have believed in the actual possession of the human body by devils, and this appears to have been the opinion of the majority at the beginning of the Reformation, for the first prayer book of Edward the Sixth contain the Catholic

form of exorcism for driving devils out of children, which was expunged upon revision, the doctrine of obsession having in the meantime triumphed over the older belief. It is necessary to bear these facts in mind, whilst considering any attempt to depict the general bearings of a belief such as that in evil spirits, for many irreconcilable statements are to be found among the authorities, and it is the duty of the writer to sift out and describe those views which predominated, and these must not be supposed to be proved inaccurate, because a chance quotation can be produced in contradiction. End of Section 9.

Section 10 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libravox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. There is great danger in the attempt to bring under analysis any phase of religious belief, that the method of treatment may appear unsympathetic, if not irreverent. The greatest effort has been made in these pages to avoid this fault as far as possible. for, without doubt, any form of religious dogma, however barbarous, however seemingly ridiculous, if it has once been sincerely believed and trusted by any portion of mankind, is entitled to reverent treatment. No body of great and good men can at any time credit and take comfort from a

pure and simple, and if an extinct creed appears to lack that foundation of truth which makes creeds tolerable, it is safer to assume that it had a meaning and a truthfulness to those who held it, that lapse of time has tended to destroy, together with the creed itself, then to condemn men wholesale as knaves and hypocrites. But the particular subject, which has here been dealt with, will surely be considered to be specially entitled to respect, when it is a very important. remembered that it was once an integral portion of the belief of most of our best and bravest ancestors, of men and women who dared to witness to their own sincerity amidst the fires of persecution and in the solitude of exile. It has nearly all disappeared now. The terrific hierarchy of fiends,

which was so real, so full of horror 300 years ago, has gradually vanished away before the advent of fuller knowledge and purer faith, and is now hardly thought of, and less is a dead medieval myth. But let us deal tenderly with it, remembering that the day may come when the beliefs that are nearest to our hearts may be treated as open to contempt or ridicule, and the dogmas to which we most passionately cling will, like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. footnote, perhaps the following prayer, contained in Thomas Beckin's Palmander, shows more clearly than the comments of any critic, the reality of the terror. An infinite number of wicked angels there are, O Lord Christ, which without seizing seek my destruction.

Against this exceeding great multitude of evil spirits, send thou me thy blessed and heavenly angels, which may deliver me from then tyranny. thou, O Lord, hast devoured hell, and overcome the prince of darkness and all his ministers, yea, and that not for thyself, but for those that believe in thee. Suffer me not, therefore, to be overcome of Satan and his servants, but rather let me triumph over them, that I, through strong faith and help of the blessed angels, having the victory of the hellish army, may with a joyful heart say, death, where is thy sting, hell where is thy victory, and so forever and ever magnify thy holy name, Amen. Parker Society, page 84, end of footnote.

Little attempt has hitherto been made in the way of direct proof, to show that fairies are really only a class of devils who exercise their powers, in a manner less terrible and revolting than that depicted by theologians. And for this reason, chiefly, that the proposition is already more than half established, when it has been shown that the attributes and functions, possessed by both fairy and devil, are similar and kind, although differing in degree. This has already been done to a great extent in the preceding pages, where the various actions of Puck and Ariel have been shown to differ in no essential respect from those of the devils of the time. But before commencing to study this phase of supernaturalism in Shakespeare's works

as a whole, and as indicative, to a certain extent, of the development of his thought upon the relation of man to the invisible world about and above him, it is necessary that this identity should be admitted without a shadow of a doubt. It has been shown that fairies were probably the descendants of the lesser local deities, as devils were of the more important of the heathen gods that were overturned by the advancing wave of Christianity, although in the course of time this distinction was entirely obliterated and forgotten. It has also been shown, as before mentioned, that many of the powers exercised by fairies were in their essence similar

to those exercised by devils, especially that of appearing in diverse shapes. These parallels could be carried out to an almost unlimited extent, but a few proofs only need to be cited to show this identity. In the medieval romance of King Orpheo, Fairyland has been substituted for the classical Hades. King James, in his demonology, adopts a fourth. fourfold classification of devils, one of which he names fairy, and coordinates with the incubus. The name of the devil's supposed to preside at the witch's sabbaths is sometimes given as Hecett, Diana, Sibbila, sometimes Queen of Elfheim, or Fairy. Indeed, Shakespeare's line in the comedy of errors had it not been unnecessarily tampered with by the critics, a fiend, a fairy,

pitiless in rough, would have conclusively proved this identity of character. The real distinction between these two classes of spirits depends on the condition of national thought upon the subject of supernaturalism in its largest sense. A belief which has little or no foundation upon indisputable phenomena must be continually passing through varying phases. And these phases will be regulated by the nature of the subjects upon which the attention of the mass of the people is most firmly concentrated. Hence, when a nation has but one religious creed, and one that has for centuries been accepted by them, almost without question or doubt, faith becomes stereotyped,

and the mind assumes an attitude of passive receptivity, undisturbed by doubts or questionings. Under such conditions, a belief in evil spirits ever ready and watching to tempt a man into heresy of belief or sinful act, and thus to destroy both body and soul, although it may exist as a theoretic portion of the accepted creed, cannot possibly become a vital doctrine to be believed by the general public. It may exist as a subject for learned dispute to while away the leisure hours of divines, but cannot by any possibility obtain an influence over the thoughts and lives of their charges. Mental disturbance on questions of doctrinal importance being, for those reasons, out of the question, the attention of the people is almost entirely riveted upon questions of

material ease and advantage. The little letts and hindrances of everyday life and agricultural and domestic matters are the tribulations that appeal most incessantly to the ineradicable sense of an invisible power, adverse to the interests of mankind. And consequently, the class of evil spirits believed in at such a time will be fairies rather than devils. Malicious little spirits, who blight the growing corn, stop the better from forming in the churn, pinched the sluttish housemaid black and blue, and whose worst act is the exchange of the baby from its cot for a fairy changeling. beings of a nature most exasperating to thrifty housewife and hard-handed farmer, but nevertheless not irrevocably prejudiced against humanity,

and easily to be pacified and reduced into a state of fawning friendship by such little attentions as could be rendered without difficulty by the poorest cotter. The whole fairy mythology is perfumed with an honest, healthy, careless joy in life, and a freedom from mental doubt. i love true lovers honest men good fellows good hosewives good meat good drink and all things that good is but nothing that is ill declares robin good fellow and this jovial materialism only reflects the state of mind of the folk who were not unwilling to believe that this lively little spirit might be seen of nights busying himself in their houses by the dying embers of the deserted fire such seems to have been the condition of England immediately before the period of the Great Reformation. But with the progress of that revolution of thought, the condition changes.

The one true and eternal creed, as it had been deemed, is shattered forever. Men who have hitherto accepted their religious convictions, in much the same way as they had succeeded to their patrimonies, are compelled by this tide of opposition to think and study for themselves. Each man finds himself left face to face with the great hereafter and his relation to it. Terrible doctrines are formulated, impress themselves with remorseless vigor upon his understanding. Original sin, justification by faith, eternal damnation for even honest error of belief. Doctrines that throw an atmosphere of solemnity, if not gloom about national thought, in which no fairy mythology can flourish.

It is no longer questions of material ease and gain that are of the chief concern, and consequently the fairies in their doings, from their own triviality, fall far into the background, and their place is occupied by a countless horde of remorseless schemers who are never seizing in their efforts to drag both body and soul to perdition. But it is in the towns,

the centers of interchange of thornishers, thought, of learning, and of controversy, that this revolution first gathers power. The sparsely populated countryside are far more impervious to the new ideas, and the country people cling far longer and more tenaciously to the dying religion and its attendant beliefs. The rural districts were but little affected by the Reformation for years after it had triumphed in the towns, and consequently, the beliefs of the inhabitants were hardly. touched by the struggle that was going on within so short a distance. We find a Reginald Scott, indeed, complaining half in joke, half in sarcasm, that Robin Goodfellow

has long disappeared from the land, but it is only from the towns that he has fled, towns in which the spirit of the Cartwrights and the Latimer's, the Barnum's and the Delibers, is abroad. In the same Cambridge where Scott had been educated, a young student had hanged himself, because the shadow of the doctrine of predestination was too terrible for him to live under. And such a place was surely no home for Puck and his merry band. But in the country places, remote from the growl and trembling of this mental earthquake, he still loved to lurk. And even at the very moment when Scott was penning the denial of his existence,

he was nestling among the woods and flowers of Avonside, and invisible whispering in the ear of a certain fair-haired youth there, thoughts of no inconsiderable moment. And long time after that, after the youth had become a man, and had coined those thoughts into words that glitter still, after his monument had been erected in the quiet Stratford churchyard, puck reveled, harmless and undisturbed, among many a countryside, nay, even to the present day in some old-world nooks, a faint whispering rumor of him may still be heard. Now, perhaps one of the most distinctive marks of literary genius is a certain receptivity of mind,

a capability of receiving impressions from all surrounding circumstance, of extracting from all sources, whether from nature or man, consciously or unconsciously, the material upon which it shall work. For this process to be perfect, accomplished, an entire and enthusiastic sympathy with man and the current ideas of the time is absolutely essential. An in proportion as this sympathy is contracted and partial, so will the work produce be stunted and untrue. And on the other hand, the more universal and entire it is, the more perfect and vital will be the art. Bearing this in mind, and also the facts that Shakespeare's

early training was affected in the little country village, that upon the verge of manhood he came to London, where he spent his prime in contact with the bustle and friction of busy town life, and that the later years of his life were passed in the quiet retirement of the home of his boyhood. There would be good ground for an argument, a priori, even were there none of a more conclusive nature, that his earlier works would be found impregnated with the country fairy myths, with which his youth would come in contact, that the result of the labors of his middle life would show that these earlier reminiscences

had been gradually obliterated by the gloomier influence of ideas that were the result of the struggle of opposed theories that had not then ceased to rage in the towns, and that the diabolic element and the questions relating thereto would predominate, and that, finally,

his later works, written under the calmer influence of Stratford Life, would show a certain return to the fairy lore of his earlier years. But fortunately, we are not left to rely upon any such hypothetical evidence in this matter, however probable it may appear. Although the general reading public cannot be asked to accept as infallible any chronological order of Shakespeare's plays that dogmatically asserts a particular sequence, or to investigate the somewhat dry and specialist arguments upon which the conclusions are founded,

Yet, there are certain groupings into periods which are agreed upon as accurate by nearly all critics, and which, without the slightest danger of error, may be asserted to be correct. For instance, it is indisputable that Love's Labor's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, and a Midsummer Night's dream, are amongst Shakespeare's earliest works, that the tragedies of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear are the productions of his middle life between 1600 and 1606, and that a winter's tale and the tempest are amongst the latest plays which he wrote. Here we have everything that is required to prove the question in hand.

At the commencement and at the end of his writings, when a youth fresh from the influence of his country nurture and education, and when a mature man settling down into the old life again, after a long and victorious struggle with the world, with his accumulated store of experience, we find plays which are perfectly saturated with fairy lore, the dream and the tempest. These are the poles of Shakespeare's thought in this respect.

And in the center, embedded as it were, between two layers of material that do not bear any distinctive stamp of their own, but appear rather as a medium for uniting the diverse strata, lie the great tragedies, produced while he was in the very rush and swirl of town life. And reflecting accurately, as we have seen, many of the doubts and speculations that were agitating in the minds of men who were ardently searching out truth. It is worth noting, too, in passing, that directly Shakespeare's steps out of his beaten path to depict, in the merry wives of Windsor, the happy country life and manners

of his day, he at the same time returns to Fairyland again, and brings out the Windsor children, trooping to pinch and plague, the town-bred tainted Falstaff. But this is not by any means all that this subject reveals to us about Shakespeare. If it were, the less said about it, the better. To look upon the tempest, as in its essence merely a return to the dream, the end is the beginning, to believe that his thoughts worked in a weary, unending circle, that the valley of the shadow of death only leads back to the foot of the hill difficulty, is intolerable, and not more intolerable than false. Although based upon similar material, the ideas and tendencies of the tempest upon supernaturalism, are no more identical with those of a Midsummer Night's dream,

than the thoughts of Baroon upon things in general are those of Hamlet, or Hamlets, those of Prospero. But before it is possible to point out the nature of this difference, and to show that a change is a natural growth of thought, not a mere retrogression, a few explanatory remarks are necessary. There is no more insufficient and misleading view of Shakespeare and his work, than that which until recently obtained almost universal credence, and is even at the present time somewhat loudly asserted in some quarters,

namely that he was a man of considerable genius, who wrote and got acted some thirty plays more or less, simply for commercial purposes and nothing more, made money thereby, and died leaving a will, and that, beyond this, he and his works are, and must remain an inexplicable mystery. The critic who holds this view and finds it equally advantageous to commence the study of Shakespeare's work by taking the tempest, or loves labors lost as his text, is about as judicious as the botanist who would enlarge upon the structure of the seed pod,

without first explaining the preliminary stages of plant growth, or the architect who would dilate upon the most convenient arrangement of chimney-pots, before he had discussed the laws of foundation. The plays may be studied separately, and studied so, are found beautiful. But taken in an approximate chronological order, like a string of brilliant jewels, each one gains lustre from those that proceed and follow it. For no man ever wrote sincerely and earnestly, or indeed ever did any one thing in such a spirit, without leaving some impress upon his work of his mental condition whilst he was doing it. and no such man ever continued his literary labors from the period of youth right through his manhood

without leaving behind him in more or less legible character, a record of the ripening of his thought upon matters of eternal importance, although they may not be of necessity directly connected with the ostensible subject in hand. Insincere men may ape sentiments they do not really believe in, but in the end they will either be exposed and held up to ridicule, or their work will sink into obscurity. Sincerity in the expression of genuine thought and feeling alone can stand the test of time. And this is, in reality, no contradiction to what has just been said, as to the necessity of a receptive condition of mind in the production of works of true genius.

This capacity of receiving the most delicate objective impressions is, indeed, one essential, but without the cognate power to assimilate this food and evolve the result that these influences have produced subjectively, it is worse than useless. The two must coexist and act and react upon one another. Nor must we be induced to surrender these principles in the present particular case, on account of the usual fine but vague talk

about Shakespeare's absolute self-annilation in favor of the characters that he depicts. It is said that Shakespeare so identifies himself with each person in his dramas, that it is impossible to detect the great master and his thoughts behind this cunningly devised screen. If this means that Shakespeare has always a perfect comprehension of his characters, is competent to measure out to each absolute and unerring justice, and is capable of sympathy with even the most repulsive, it will not be disputed for an instant.

It is so true that it is dangerous to take a sentence out of the mouth of any one of his characters and say for certain, this Shakespeare thought, although there are many characters with whom everyone must feel that Shakespeare identified himself for the time being, rather than others. But if it is intended to assert that Shakespeare has so eliminated himself from his writings, as to make it impossible to trace anywhere the tendencies of his own thought at the time when he is, he was writing. It must be most emphatically denied for the reasons just stated. Freedom from prejudice must be carefully dissociated from lack of interest in the motive that underlies the construction of each play. There is a tone or keynote in each drama that

indicates the author's mental condition at the time when it was produced. And if several plays, following each other in brisk succession, all have the same predominant tone, it seems to be past question that Shakespeare is incidentally and indirectly uttering his own personal thought and experience. End of Section 10. Section 11 of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding. This Libravox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. If it be granted then that it is possible to follow thus the growth of Shakespeare's thought through the medium of his successive works, there is only one small point to be glanced at before attempting to trace this growth in the matter of supernaturalism. The natural history of the evolution of opinion upon matters which, for want of a more embracing and satisfactory word,

we must be content to call religious, follows a uniform course in the minds of all men, except those duller than the fat weed that roots itself at ease on Lethe's wharf, who never get beyond the primary stage. This course is separable into three periods. The first is that in which a man accepts unhesitatingly the doctrines which he has received from his spiritual teachers, customary, not intellectual, belief. This sits lightly on him,

entails no troublesome doubts and questionings, possesses or appears to possess, formally to meet all possible emergencies, and consequently brings with it a happiness that is genuine, though superficial. But this customary belief rarely satisfies for long. Contact with the world brings to light other and opposed theories. Introspection and independent investigation of the basis of the hereditary faith are commenced.

Many doctrines that have been hitherto accepted, as eternally and indisputably true, are found to rest upon but slight foundation, apart from their title, who respect on account of age. Doubts follow as to the claim to acceptance of the whole system that has been so easily and unhesitatingly swallowed, and the period of skepticism or no belief, with its attendant misery commences, for although Dagon has been but little honored in the time of his strength, in his downfall he is much regretted. Then comes that long, weary, groping, after some firm, reliable basis of belief. But heaven and earth appear for the time

to conspire against the seeker. An intellectual flood has drowned out the old order of things. Not even a mountain peak appears in the wide waste of desolation as assurance of ultimate rest. And in the dark, overhanging firmament, no arc of promise is to be seen. But this is a state of mind which, from its very nature, cannot continue forever. No man could endure it. While it lasts, the struggle must be continuous,

but somewhere through the cloud lies the sunshine and the land of peace, the final period of intellectual belief. Out of the chaos comes order. Ideas that but recently appeared, confused, incoherent, and meaningless, assume their true perspective. It is found that all the strands of the old conventional faith have not been snapped in the turmoil, and these, re-knit and strengthened with the new and full knowledge of experience and investigation, form the cable that secures that strange, holy confidence of belief

that can only be gained by a preliminary warfare with doubt, a peace that truly passes all understanding to those who have never battled for it. As to its foundation, diverse to a miracle in diverse mind, but still a peace. If this be a true history of the course of development of every mind that is capable, of independent thought upon and investigation of such high matters,

it follows that Shakespeare's soul must have experienced a similar struggle, for he was a man of like passions with ourselves. Indeed, to so acute and sensitive a mind, the struggle would be probably more prolonged and more agonizing than to many. And it is these three mental conditions, first of unthinking acceptance of generally received teaching, second, of profound and agitating skepticism, and thirdly, of belief founded upon reason and experience that may be naturally expected to be found impressed upon his early, middle, and later works. It is impossible here to do more than indicate some of the evidence that

this supposition is correct. For to attend to a ten, to investigate the question exhaustively would involve the minute consideration of a majority of the plays. The period of Shakespeare's customary or conventional belief is illustrated in a midsummer night's dream, and to a certain extent also in the comedy of errors. In the former play, we find him loyally accepting certain phases of the hereditary Stratford belief in supernaturalism, throwing them into poetical form and making them beautiful. It has often before been observed, and is well worthy of observation, that of the three groups of characters in the play, the country folk, a class whose manner and appearance had most vividly reflected themselves upon the camera of Shakespeare's mind, are by far the most lifelike and distinct. The fairies, who had been the companions of his childhood and youth, in countless talks in the ingle and ballads in the lanes, come second in prominent. and finish. Whilst the ostensible heroes and heroines of the piece, the aristocrats of Athens,

are colorless and uninteresting as a dumb show, the real shadows of the play. This is exactly the ratio of impressionability that the three classes would have for the mind of the youthful dramatist. The first is a creation from life, the second from traditionary belief, the third from hearsay. And when it has been said that the fairies are a creation from traditionary belief, a full and accurate description of them has been afforded. They are an embodiment of a popular superstition and nothing more. They do not conceal any thought of the poet who has created them, nor are they used for any deeper purpose with regard to the other persons of the drama than temporary and objectless annoyance.

Throughout the whole play runs a healthy, thoughtless, honest, almost riotous happiness, no note of difficulty, no shadow of coming doubt being perceptible. The pert and nimble spirit of mirth is fully awakened, the worst tricks of the intermeddling spirits are mischievous merely, and of only transitory influence, and the summer still doth tend upon their state, brightening this fairyland with its sunshine and flowers. Man has absolutely no power to govern these supernatural powers,

and they have but unimportant influence over him. They can affect his comfort, but they cannot control his fate. But all this is merely an adapting and elaborating of ideas, which had been handed down from father to son for many generations. Shakespeare's puck is only the puck of a hundred ballads, reproduced by the hand of a true poet, no original thought upon the connection of the visible with the invisible world

is imported into the creation. All these facts tend to show that when Shakespeare wrote a Midsummer Night's dream, that is, at the beginning of his career as a dramatic author, he had not broken away from the trammels of beliefs in which he had been brought up, but accepted them unhesitatingly and joyously.

But there is a gradual toning down of the spirit of unbroken content, as time wears on. Putting aside the historical plays, in which Shakespeare was much more bound down by his subject matter than in any other species of drama, we find the comedies, in which his room for expression of individual feeling was practically unlimited, gradually losing their unalloyed hilarity, and deepening down into a sadness of thought and expression that sometimes leaves a doubt, whether or not a doubt, whether or not a little bit of the the play should be classed as comedies at all. Shakespeare has been more and more in contact with the disputes and doubts of the educated men of his time, and seats have been silently sewing themselves

in his heart, which are soon to bring forth a plenteous harvest in the great tragedies of which these semi-comodies, such as all's well that ends well, and measure for measure, are but the first fruits. Thus, when next we find Shakespeare dealing with questions relating to supernaturalism, the tone is quite different from that taken in his earlier work. He has reached the second period of his thought upon the subject, and this has cast its attendant gloom upon his writings. That he was actually battling with questions current in his time is demonstrated by the way in which, in three consecutive plays, derived from utterly diverse sources, the same question of ghost or devil is agitated, as has before been pointed out.

But it is not merely a point of theological dogma which stamps these plays as a product of Shakespeare's period of skepticism, but a theory of the influence of supernatural beings upon the whole course of human life. Man is still incapable of influencing these unseen forces, or bending them to his will, but they are now no longer harmless or incapable of anything but temporary or trivial evil. Puck might lead night wanderers into mischance and laugh mischievously at the bodily harm that he had caused them. But Puck has now disappeared, and in his stead is found a malignant spirit who seeks to laugh his fiendish laughter over the soul he has deceived into destruction. questions arise thick and fast that are easier put than answered.

Can it be that evil influences have the upper hand in this world? That, be a man never so honest, never so pure, he may nevertheless become the sport of blind chance or ruthless wickedness? May a hamlet, patiently struggling after truth and duty, be put upon and abused by the darker powers? May Macbeth, who would fain do right, were not evil, so ever present with him, be juggled with and led to destruction by fiends? May an undistinguishing fate sweep away at once the good with the evil?

Hamlet with Liartes, Desdemona with Iago, Cordelia with Edmund. And above the turmoil of this reign of terror, is there no word uttered of a supreme good, guiding and controlling the unlucid ill? No word of encouragement? hope? If this be so indeed that man is but the puppet of malignant spirits, away with this life, it is not worth the living, for what power has man against the fiends? But at this point arises a further question to demand solution, what shall be hereafter? If evil is supreme here, shall it not be so in that undiscovered country, that life to come? The dreams that may come give him pause, and he either shuffles on, doubting, hesitating, and incapable of decision,

or he hurls himself wildly against his fate. In either case, his life becomes like to a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is strange to note, too, how the ebb of this wave of skepticism upon questions relating to the immaterial world is only recoil that adds force to a succeeding wave of cynicism with regard to the physical world around. Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello give place to Lear, Troilus and Cresida, Antony and Cleopatra, and Tyman. So true is it that unfaith in aught is want of faith in all, that in these later plays, it would seem that honor, honesty, and justice were virtues not possessed by man or woman, or, if possessed, were only a curse to bring down disgrace and destruction upon the possessor.

Contrast the women of these plays with those of the comedies immediately preceding the Hamlet period. In the latter plays, we find the heroines, by their sweet womanly guidance and gentle but firm control, triumphantly bringing good out of evil in spite of adverse circumstance. Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, and Isabella. are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender, delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which their influence is made to be felt. Events must inevitably have gone tragically, but for their intervention. But with the advent of the second period, all this changes. At first the women, like Brutus's Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona,

however noble or sweet in character and well-meaning and motive, are incapable of grasping the guiding threads of the events around them and controlling them for good. They have to give way to characters of another kind, who bear the form without the nature of women. Commencing with Lady Macbeth, the conception falls lower and lower through Goneril and Regan, Cressida, Cleopatra,

until in the climax of this utter despair, Tyman, there is no character that it would not be a profanity to call by the name of woman. And just as womanly purity and innocence quail before unwomanly self-assertion and voluptuousness, so manly loyalty and unselfishness give way before unmanly treachery and self-seeking. It is true that the bad men do not finally triumph,

but they triumph over the good with whom they happen to come in contact. In King Lear, what man shows any virtue who does not receive punishment for the same? Not Gloucester, whose loyal devotion to his king, obtains for him a punishment that is only merciful in that it prevents him from further suffering the sight of his beloved master's misery. Not Kent, who, faithful in his self-denying service through all manner of obliquy, is left at last asked with a prayer that he may be allowed to follow Lear to the grave. And beyond these two, there is little good to be found. But Lear is not by any means the climax.

The utter despair of good in man or woman rises higher in Troilus and Cresida and reaches its culminating point in Tyman, a fragment only of which is Shakespeare's. The pen fell from the tired hand. The worn and distracted brain refused to fulfill the task of depicting the depth to which the poet's estimate of mankind had fallen. And we hardly know whether to rejoice or regret

that the clumsy hand of an inferior writer has screened from our knowledge, the full disclosure of the utter and contemptuous cynicism and want of faith, with which, for the time being, Shakespeare was infected. Before passing on to consider the plays of the third period, as evidence of Shakespeare's final thought, it will be well to pause and re-read with the ten times, a summing up of Shakespeare's teaching as it has been presented to us by one of the greatest and most earnest teachers of morality of the present day. Every word that Mr. Ruskin writes is so evidently from the depth of his own good heart, and every doctrine that he enunciates, so pure in theory and so true in practice,

that a difference with him upon the final teaching of Shakespeare's work cannot be too cautiously expressed. But the estimate of this which he has given in the third lecture of Sesame and Lily's is so painful, if regarded as Shakespeare's latest and most mature opinion, that everybody, even Mr. Ruskin himself, would be glad to modify its gloom with a few rays of hope, if it were possible to do so. What then, says Mr. Ruskin, is the message to us of our own poet and searcher of hearts. after fifteen hundred years of Christian faith have been numbered over the graves of men. Are his words more cheerful than the heathens, Homer?

Is his hope more near, his trust more sure, his reading of fate more happy? Ah, no, he differs from the heathen poet chiefly in this, that he recognizes for deliverance no gods nigh at hand, and that, by petty chance, by a momentary folly, by broken message, by fool's tyranny or traitor's snare, the strongest and most righteous are brought to their ruin, and perish without word of hope. He, indeed, as part of his rendering of character, ascribes the power and modesty of habitual devotion to the gentle and the just. The deathbed of Catherine is bright with visions of angels, and the great soldier king, standing by his few dead, acknowledges the presence of the hand that can save alike by many or by few.

but observe that from those who with deepest spirit meditate and with deepest passion mourn, there are no such words as these, nor in their hearts are any such consolations. Instead of the perpetual sense of the helpful presence of the deity, which, through all heathen tradition, is the source of heroic strength, in battle and exile, and in the valley of the shadow of death, we find only in the great Christian poet, the consciousness of a moral law through which the gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments discourage us, and of the resolved arbitration of the destinies that conclude into precision of doom what we feebly and blindly began, and force us when our indiscretion serves us, and our deepest plots to Paul, to the confession that,

there's a divinity that shapes our ends, refue them how we will. Now it is perfectly clear that this criticism was written with two or three plays, all belonging to one period, very conspicuously before the mind. Of the illustrative exceptions that are made to the general rule, one is derived from a play which Shakespeare wrote at a very early date, and the other from a scene which he almost certainly never wrote at all. The whole of the rest of the passage quoted is founded upon Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, that is, upon the earlier productions of what we must call Shakespeare's skeptical period.

But these plays represent an essentially transient state of thought. Shakespeare was to learn and to teach that those who most deeply meditate and most passionately mourn are not the men of noblest or most influential character. That such may command our sympathy, but hardly our respect or admiration. Still less did Shakespeare finally assert, although for a time he believed, that a blind destiny concludes into precision

what we feebly and blindly begin. Far otherwise, and nobler was his conception of man and his mission, and the unseen powers and their influences, in the third and final stage of his thought. Had Shakespeare lived longer, he would doubtless have left us a series of plays, filled with the bright and reassuring tenderness and confidence of this third period, as long and as brilliant in execution as those of the second period.

But as it is, we are in possession of quite enough material to enable us to form accurate conclusions upon the state of his final thought. It is upon the tempest that we must in the main rely for an exposition of this, for though the other plays and fragments fully exhibit the restoration of his faith and man and woman, which was a necessary concurrence with his return from skepticism. Yet it is in the tempest that he brings himself as nearly face-to-face as dramatic possibilities would allow him, with circumstances that admit of the indirect expression of such thought. It is fortunate, too, for the purpose of comparing Shakespeare's earliest and latest opinions, that the characters

of the tempest are divisible into the same groups as those of the dream. The gross cana are represented, but now no longer the most accurate in color and the most absorbing and interest of the characters of the play, or unessential to the evolution of the plot. They have a distinct importance in the movement of the piece, and represent the unintelligent, material resistance to the work of regeneration that Prospero seeks to carry out, and which must be controlled by him. just as Sebastian and Antonio form the intelligent, designing resistance. The spirit world is there, too, but they, like the former class, have no independent plot of their own, and no independent operation against mankind. They only represent the invisible forces over which Prospero must assert control, if he would ensure success for his schemes. Ariel is, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary of all Shakespeare's creation.

He is, indeed, formed upon a basis half fairy, half devil, because it was only through the current notions upon demonology that Shakespeare could speak his ideas. But he certainly is not a fairy in the sense that puck is a fairy, and he is very far indeed from bearing even a slight resemblance to the familiars whom the magicians of the time professed a call from the vasty deep. He is, indeed but air, as Prospero says, the embodiment of an idea. The representative of those invisible forces, which operate as factors in the shaping of events which, ignored, may prove resistant or fatal, but properly controlled and guided, work for good. Lastly, there are the heroes and heroine of the play, now no longer shadows, but the centers of interest and admiration, and assuming their

due position and prominence. It is probable, therefore, that it is not merely a student's fancy that in Prospero's Stormgirt, Spirit-Hunted Island, can be seen Shakespeare's final and matured image of the mighty world. If this be so, how far more bright and hopeful it is than the verdict which Mr. Ruskin finds Shakespeare to have returned. Man is no longer a pipe for fortune's fingers to sound what stop she please. The evil elements still exist in the world, and are numerous and formidable, but man, by nobleness of life and word, by patience and self-mastery, can master them, bring them into subjection, and make them tend to eventual good. Caliban, the gross, sensual earthly element, though somewhat raised, would run riot, and is therefore compelled

to menial service. force of Stefano and trinkulo is vanquished by mental superiority. Even the super mundane spirits, now no longer thirsting for the destruction of body and soul, are bound down to the work of carrying out the decrees of truth and justice. Man is no longer the plaything but the master of his fate, and he, seeing now the possible triumph of good over evil, and his duty to do his best in aid of this triumph, has no more fear of the dreams, the something after death. Our little life is still rounded by a sleep, but the thought which terrifies Hamlet has no power to a fright prospero. The hereafter is still a mystery, it is true. He has tried to see into it,

and has found it impenetrable. But revelation has come like an angel with peace upon his wings, in another and an unexpected way. Duty lies here, in and around him, and around him, and in this world. Here he can write wrong, succor the weak, abase the proud, do something to make the world better than he found it. And in the performance of this he finds a holier calm than the veins strivings after the unknowable could ever afford. Let him work while at his day, for the night cometh when no man can work. It is not a piece of pure sentimentality that sees improspero a type of Shakespeare in his final stage of thought. It is the type altogether as it should be, and it is pleasing to think of him, in the full maturity of his manhood, wrapping his seers' cloak

about him, and while waiting calmly the unfolding of the mystery which he has sought in vain to solve, watching with a noble benevolence the gradual working out of truth, order, and justice. It is pleasing to think of him as speaking to the world the great Christian doctrine so universally overlooked by Christians, that the only remedy for sin demanded by eternal justice is nothing but heart's sorrow and a clear life ensuing. A speech which, though uttered by Ariel, is spoken by Prospero, who himself beautifully iterates part of the doctrine when he says, the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance. They, being penitent, the sole drift of my purpose doth extend not a frown further.

It is pleasant to dwell upon his sympathy with Ferdinand and Miranda, for the love of man and woman is pure and holy in this regenerate world, no more of Troilus and Cressida, upon his patient waiting for the evolution of his schemes, upon his faith in their ultimate success, and above all, upon the majestic and unaffected reverence that appears indirectly in every line. reverence, to adapt the words of the great teacher whose opinion about Shakespeare has been perhaps too rashly questioned, for what is pure and bright in youth, for what is true and tried in age, for all that is gracious among the living, great among the dead, and marvelous in the powers that cannot die.

End of Section 11 End of Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding