X. FOLK-MEDICINE
Without discussing the extent of Shakespeare’s technical medical knowledge, the following pages will suffice to show that he was fully acquainted with many of the popular notions prevalent in his day respecting certain diseases and their cures. These, no doubt, he collected partly from the literature of the period, with which he was so fully conversant, besides gathering a good deal of information on the subject from daily observation. Anyhow, he has bequeathed to us some interesting particulars relating to the folk-medicine of bygone times, which is of value, in so far as it helps to illustrate the history of medicine in past years. In Shakespeare’s day the condition of medical science was very unlike that at the present day. As Mr. Goadby, in his “England of Shakespeare” (1881, p. 104), remarks, “the man of science was always more or less of an alchemist, and the students of medicine were usually extensive dealers in charms and philtres.” If a man wanted bleeding he went to a barber-surgeon, and when he required medicine he consulted an apothecary; the shop of the latter being well described by Romeo (v. 1):
“And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, An alligator stuff’d, and other skins Of ill-shap’d fishes; and about his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds, Remnants of pack-thread and old cakes of roses, Were thinly scattered, to make up a show.”
Such a man was as ready “to sell love-philtres to a maiden as narcotics to a friar.”
Bleeding. Various remedies were in use in Shakespeare’s day to stop bleeding. Thus, a key, on account of the coldness of the metal of which it is composed, was often employed; hence the term “key-cold” became proverbial, and is referred to by many old writers. In “Richard III.” (i. 2), Lady Anne, speaking of the corpse of King Henry the Sixth, says
“Poor key-cold figure of a holy king.”
In the “Rape of Lucrece” (l. 1774) the same expression is used:
“And then in key-cold Lucrece’ bleeding stream He falls, and bathes the pale fear in his face.”
In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Wild Goose Chase” (iv. 3) we read: “For till they be key-cold dead, there’s no trusting of ’em.”[589]
[589] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 482; also, Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 311; Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, pp. 168, 169.
Another common remedy was the one alluded to in “King Lear” (iii. 7), where one of the servants says:
“I’ll fetch some flax, and whites of eggs, To apply to his bleeding face.”
This passage has been thought to be parodied in Ben Jonson’s play, “The Case is Altered” (ii. 4): “Go, get a white of an egg and a little flax, and close the breach of the head; it is the most conducible thing that can be.” Mr. Gifford, however, has shown the incorrectness of this assertion, pointing out that Jonson’s play was written in 1599, some years before “King Lear” appeared, while the allusion is “to a method of cure common in Jonson’s time to every barber-surgeon and old woman in the kingdom.”[590]
[590] Aldis Wright’s “Notes to King Lear,” 1877, p. 179.
Cobwebs are still used to stanch the bleeding from small wounds, and Bottom’s words seem to refer to this remedy of domestic surgery: “I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb; if I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you.”
Anciently, says Mr. Singer, “a superstitious belief was annexed to the accident of bleeding at the nose;” hence, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), Launcelot says: “It was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last.” In days gone by, it was customary with our forefathers to be bled periodically, in spring and in autumn, in allusion to which custom King Richard refers (“Richard II.,” i. 1), when he says to his uncle:
“Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.”
Hence the almanacs of the time generally gave particular seasons as the most beneficial for bleeding. The forty-seventh aphorism of Hippocrates (sect. 6) is, that “persons who are benefited by venesection or purging should be bled or purged in the spring.”
Blindness. The exact meaning of the term “sand-blind,” which occurs in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), is somewhat obscure:
“Launcelot. O heavens, this is my true-begotten father! who, being more than sand-blind, high gravel blind, knows me not.
* * * * *
Gobbo. Alack, sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not.”
It probably means very dim-sighted,[591] and in Nares’s “Glossary”[592] it is thus explained: “Having an imperfect sight, as if there was sand in the eye.” The expression is used by Beaumont and Fletcher in “Love’s Cure” (ii. 1): “Why, signors, and my honest neighbours, will you impute that as a neglect of my friends, which is an imperfection in me? I have been sand-blind from my infancy.” The term was probably one in vulgar use.[593]
[591] Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 381; cf. the word “Berlué, pur-blinded, made sand-blind,” Cotgrave’s “Fr. and Eng. Dict.”
[592] Vol. ii. p. 765.
[593] Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 93.
Blister. In the following passage of “Timon of Athens” (v. 1), Timon appears to refer to the old superstition that a lie produces a blister on the tongue, though, in the malice of his rage, he imprecates the minor punishment on truth, and the old surgery of cauterization on falsehood:[594]
“Thou sun, that comfort’st, burn!—Speak, and be hang’d; For each true word, a blister! and each false Be as a caut’rizing to the root o’ the tongue, Consuming it with speaking!”
[594] Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 258.
We may also compare the passage in “Winter’s Tale” (ii. 2), where Paulina declares:
“If I prove honey-mouth’d, let my tongue blister, And never to my red-look’d anger be The trumpet any more.”[595]
[595] Cf., too, “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):
“A blister on his sweet tongue, with my heart, That put Armado’s page out of his part.”
Bone-ache. This was a nickname, in bygone years, for the Lues venerea, an allusion to which we find in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), where Thersites speaks of “the bone-ache” as “the curse dependent on those that war for a placket.” Another name for this disease was the “brenning or burning,” a notice of which we find in “King Lear” (iv. 6).
Bruise. A favorite remedy in days past for bruises was parmaceti, a corruption of spermaceti, in allusion to which Hotspur, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3), speaks of it as “the sovereign’st thing on earth for an inward bruise.” So, too, in Sir T. Overbury’s “Characters,” 1616 [“An Ordinarie Fencer”]: “His wounds are seldom skin-deepe; for an inward bruise, lambstones and sweetbreads are his only spermaceti.” A well-known plant called the “Shepherd’s Purse” has been popularly nicknamed the “Poor Man’s Parmacetti,” being a joke on the Latin word bursa, a purse, which, to a poor man, is always the best remedy for his bruises.[596] In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), a plantain-leaf is pronounced to be an excellent cure “for your broken shin.” Plantain-water was a remedy in common use with the old surgeons.[597]
[596] Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1870, p. 185.
[597] “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” 1860, p. 78.
Bubukle. According to Johnson, this denoted “a red pimple.” Nares says it is “a corrupt word for a carbuncle, or something like;” and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his “Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words,” defines it as a botch or imposthume. It occurs in “Henry V.” (iii. 6), where Fluellen describes Bardolph’s face as “all bubukles.”
Burn. The notion of one heat driving out another gave rise to the old-fashioned custom of placing a burned part near the fire to drive out the fire—a practice, says Dr. Bucknill,[598] certainly not without benefit, acting on the same principle as the application of turpentine and other stimulants to recent burns. This was one of the many instances of the ancient homœopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also cure.[599] Thus, in “King John” (iii. 1), Pandulph speaks of it:
“And falsehood falsehood cures; as fire cools fire Within the scorched veins of one new burn’d.”
[598] “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” 1860, p. 65.
[599] See Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 761.
Again, in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 4), Proteus tells how:
“Even as one heat another heat expels, Or as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite forgotten.”
We may also compare the words of Mowbray in “Richard II.” (i. 1), where a similar idea is contained:
“I am disgrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here; Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear, The which no balm can cure, but his heart-blood Which breath’d this poison.”
Once more, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), Benvolio relates how
“one fire burns out another’s burning, One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish; Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.”
Cataract. One of the popular names for this disease of the eye was the “web and the pin.” Markham, in his “Cheap and Good Husbandry” (bk. i. chap. 37), thus describes it in horses: “But for the wart, pearle, pin, or web, which are evils grown in or upon the eye, to take them off, take the juyce of the herb betin and wash the eye therewith, it will weare the spots away.” Florio (“Ital. Dict.”) gives the following: “Cataratta is a dimnesse of sight occasioned by humores hardened in the eies, called a cataract or a pin and a web.” Shakespeare uses the term in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2), where Leontes speaks of
“all eyes blind With the pin and web, but theirs;”
and in “King Lear” (iii. 4), alluding to “the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet,” says, “he gives the web and the pin.”[600] Acerbi, in his “Travels” (vol. ii. p. 290), has given the Lapland method of cure for this disease. In a fragment of an old medical treatise it is thus described: “Another sykenes ther byth of yezen; on a webbe, a nother a wem, that hydyth the myddel of the yezen; and this hes to maners, other whilys he is white and thynne, and other whilys he is thykke, as whenne the obtalmye ne is noght clene yhelyd up, bote the rote abydyth stylle. Other whilys the webbe is noght white but rede, other blake.”[601] In the Statute of the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII. a pin and web in the eye is recited among the “customable diseases,” which honest persons, not being surgeons, might treat with herbs, roots, and waters, with the knowledge of whose nature God had endowed them.
[600] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. pp. 660, 661; Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 322.
[601] Quoted in Singer’s “Shakespeare.”
Chilblains. These are probably alluded to by the Fool in “King Lear” (i. 5): “If a man’s brains were in’s heels, were’t not in danger of kibes?” Hamlet, too, says (v. 1): “the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.”
Deformity. It was an old prejudice, which is not quite extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are marked by nature as prone to mischief. Thus, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), Margaret says of Richard, Duke of Gloster:
“Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog! Thou that was seal’d in thy nativity The slave of nature, and the son of hell.”
She calls him hog, in allusion to his cognizance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare’s day for a deformed person was a “stigmatic.” It denoted any one who had been stigmatized, or burned with an iron, as an ignominious punishment, and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature has set a mark of deformity. Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), Queen Margaret says:
“But thou art neither like thy sire, nor dam; But like a foul misshapen stigmatic Mark’d by the destinies to be avoided, As venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”
Again, in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1), young Clifford says to Richard:
“Foul stigmatic, that’s more than thou canst tell.”
We may note, too, how, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), mothers’ marks and congenital forms are deprecated by Oberon from the issue of the happy lovers:
“And the blots of Nature’s hand Shall not in their issue stand; Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be.”[602]
[602] Cf. “King John” (iii. 1), where Constance gives a catalogue of congenital defects.
Indeed, constant allusions are to be met with in our old writers relating to this subject, showing how strong were the feelings of our forefathers on the point. But, to give one further instance of this superstition given by Shakespeare, we may quote the words of King John (iv. 2), with reference to Hubert and his supposed murder of Prince Arthur:
“A fellow by the hand of Nature mark’d, Quoted, and sign’d, to do a deed of shame, This murder had not come into my mind.”
This adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body concurs, too, with Bacon’s theory: “Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for, as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on nature.”
Drowning. The old superstition[603] of its being dangerous to save a person from drowning is supposed, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, to be alluded to in “Twelfth Night.” It was owing to the belief that the person saved would, sooner or later, injure the man who saved him. Thus, in Sir Walter Scott’s “Pirate,” Bryce, the pedler, warns the hero not to attempt to resuscitate an inanimate form which the waves had washed ashore on the mainland of Shetland. “‘Are you mad,’ exclaimed the pedler, ‘you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not if ye bring him to life again he will do you some capital injury?’”
[603] “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 150. See “Notes and Queries” for superstitions connected with drowning, 5th series, vol. ix. pp. 111, 218, 478, 516; vol. x. pp. 38, 276; vol. xi. pp. 119, 278.
Epilepsy. A popular name for this terrible malady was the “falling-sickness,” because, when attacked with one of these fits, the patient falls suddenly to the ground. In “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) it is thus mentioned in the following dialogue:
“Cassius. But, soft, I pray you: what, did Cæsar swoon?
Casca. He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless.
Brutus. ’Tis very like; he hath the falling-sickness.
Cassius. No, Cæsar hath it not; but you, and I, And honest Casca, we have the falling-sickness.”
Fistula. At the present day a fistula means an abscess external to the rectum, but in Shakespeare’s day it was used in a more general signification for a burrowing abscess in any situation.[604] The play of “All’s Well that Ends Well” has a special interest, because, as Dr. Bucknill says, its very plot may be said to be medical. “The orphan daughter of a physician cures the king of a fistula by means of a secret remedy left to her as a great treasure by her father. The royal reward is the choice of a husband among the nobles of the court, and ‘thereby hangs the tale.’” The story is taken from the tale of Gilletta of Narbonne, in the “Decameron” of Boccaccio. It came to Shakespeare through the medium of Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” and is to be found in the first volume, which was printed as early as 1566.[605] The story is thus introduced by Shakespeare in the following dialogue (i. 1), where the Countess of Rousillon is represented as inquiring:
“What hope is there of his majesty’s amendment?
Laf. He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.
Count. This young gentlewoman had a father—O, that ‘had!’ how sad a passage ’tis!—whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. Would, for the king’s sake, he were living! I think it would be the death of the king’s disease.
Laf. How called you the man you speak of, madam?
Count. He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his great right to be so; Gerard de Narbon.
Laf. He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.
Ber. What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?
Laf. A fistula, my lord.”
[604] Dr. Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 95.
[605] Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iii. p. 225.
The account given of Helena’s secret remedy and the king’s reason for rejecting it give, says Dr. Bucknill, an excellent idea of the state of opinion with regard to the practice of physic in Shakespeare’s time.
Fit. Formerly the term “rapture” was synonymous with a fit or trance. The word is used by Brutus in “Coriolanus” (ii. 1):
“your prattling nurse Into a rapture lets her baby cry While she chats him.”
Steevens quotes from the “Hospital for London’s Follies” (1602), where Gossip Luce says: “Your darling will weep itself into a rapture, if you take not good heed.”[606]
[606] See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 347.
Gold. It was a long-prevailing opinion that a solution of gold had great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility of the metal might be communicated to a body impregnated with it. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), Prince Henry, in the course of his address to his father, says:
“Coming to look on you, thinking you dead, And dead almost, my liege, to think you were, I spake unto this crown, as having sense, And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending Hath fed upon the body of my father; Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold; Other, less fine in carat, is more precious, Preserving life in medicine potable.’”
Potable gold was one of the panaceas of ancient quacks. In John Wight’s translation of the “Secretes of Alexis” is a receipt “to dissolve and reducte golde into a potable licour, which conserveth the youth and healthe of a man, and will heale every disease that is thought incurable, in the space of seven daies at the furthest.” The receipt, however, is a highly complicated one, the gold being acted upon by juice of lemons, honey, common salt, and aqua vitæ, and distillation frequently repeated from a “urinall of glass”—as the oftener it is distilled the better it is. “Thus doyng,” it is said, “ye shall have a right naturall, and perfecte potable golde, whereof somewhat taken alone every monthe once or twice, or at least with the said licour, whereof we have spoken in the second chapter of this boke, is very excellent to preserve a man’s youthe and healthe, and to heale in a fewe daies any disease rooted in a man, and thought incurable. The said golde will also be good and profitable for diverse other operations and effectes: as good wittes and diligent searchers of the secretes of nature may easily judge.” A further allusion to gold as a medicine is probably made in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3), where the King says to Bertram:
“Plutus himself, That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine, Hath not in nature’s mystery more science, Than I have in this ring.”
Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor’s avarice, refers to this old belief:
“And yet he was but esy of despence: He kept that he wan in the pestilence. For gold in physic is a cordial; Therefore he loved it in special.”
Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby’s “Receipts” (1674), we are told that the gold is to be calcined with three salts, ground with sulphur, burned in a reverberatory furnace with sulphur twelve times, then digested with spirit of wine “which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects.”
The term “grand liquor” is also used by Shakespeare for the aurum potabile of the alchemist, as in “Tempest” (v. 1):
“Where should they Find this grand liquor that hath gilded them?”
Good Year. This is evidently a corruption of goujère, a disease derived from the French gouge, a common camp-follower, and probably alludes to the Morbus Gallicus. Thus, in “King Lear” (v. 3), we read:
“The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell, Ere they shall make us weep.”
With the corruption, however, of the spelling, the word lost in time its real meaning, and it is, consequently, found in passages where a sense opposite to the true one is intended.[607] It was often used in exclamations, as in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4): “We must give folks leave to prate: what, the good-jear!” In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), Thersites, by the “rotten diseases of the south,” probably meant the Morbus Gallicus.
[607] Wright’s “Notes to King Lear” (1877), p. 196.
Handkerchief. It was formerly a common practice in England for those who were sick to wear a kerchief on their heads, and still continues at the present day among the common people in many places. Thus, in “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1), we find the following allusion:
“O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius, To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!”
“If,” says Fuller, “this county [Cheshire] hath bred no writers in that faculty [physic], the wonder is the less, if it be true what I read, that if any here be sick, they make him a posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not mend him, then God be merciful to him.”[608]
[608] “Worthies of England” (1662), p. 180.
Hysteria. This disorder, which, in Shakespeare’s day, we are told, was known as “the mother,” or Hysterica passio, was not considered peculiar to women only. It is probable that, when the poet wrote the following lines in “King Lear” (ii. 4), where he makes the king say,
“O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element’s below!—Where is this daughter?”
he had in view the subjoined passages from Harsnet’s “Declaration of Popish Impostures” (1603), a work which, it has been suggested,[609] “he may have consulted in order to furnish out his character of Tom of Bedlam with demoniacal gibberish.” The first occurs at p. 25: “Ma. Maynie had a spice of the hysterica passio, as it seems, from his youth; hee himselfe termes it the moother (as you may see in his confessione).” Master Richard Mainy, who was persuaded by the priests that he was possessed of the devil, deposes as follows (p. 263): “The disease I speake of was a spice of the mother, wherewith I had been troubled (as is before mentioned) before my going into Fraunce. Whether I doe rightly terme it the mother or no I know not.” Dr. Jordan, in 1603, published “A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother.”
[609] Singer’s “Shakespeare,” pp. 384, 385; Wright’s “Notes to King Lear,” pp. 154, 155.
Infection. According to an old but erroneous belief, infection communicated to another left the infector free; in allusion to which Timon (“Timon of Athens,” iv. 3) says:
“I will not kiss thee; then the rot returns To thine own lips again.”
Among other notions prevalent in days gone by was the general contagiousness of disease, to which an allusion seems to be made in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), where Helena says:
“Sickness is catching: O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go.”
Malone considers that Shakespeare, in the following passage in “Venus and Adonis,” alludes to a practice of his day, when it was customary, in time of the plague, to strew the rooms of every house with rue and other strong-smelling herbs, to prevent infection:
“Long may they kiss each other, for this cure! O, never let their crimson liveries wear! And as they last, their verdure still endure, To drive infection from the dangerous year!”
Again, the contagiousness of pestilence is thus alluded to by Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1): “O Lord, he will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad.” The belief, too, that the poison of pestilence dwells in the air, is spoken of in “Timon of Athens” (iv. 3):
“When Jove Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison In the sick air.”
And, again, in “Richard II.” (i. 3):
“Devouring pestilence hangs in our air.”
It is alluded to, also, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 1), where the Duke says:
“O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence.”
While on this subject, we may quote the following dialogue from the same play (ii. 3), which, as Dr. Bucknill[610] remarks, “involves the idea that contagion is bound up with something appealing to the sense of smell, a mellifluous voice being miscalled contagious; unless one could apply one organ to the functions of another, and thus admit contagion, not through its usual portal, the nose:”
“Sir Andrew. A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.
Sir Toby. A contagious breath.
Sir Andrew. Very sweet and contagious, i’ faith.
Sir Toby. To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion.”
[610] “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 121.
Insanity. That is a common idea that the symptoms of madness are increased by the full moon. Shakespeare mentions this popular fallacy in “Othello” (v. 2), where he tells us that the moon makes men insane when she comes nearer the earth than she was wont.[611]
[611] See p. 73.
Music as a cure for madness is, perhaps, referred to in “King Lear” (iv. 7), where the physician of the king says: “Louder the music there.”[612] Mr. Singer, however, has this note: “Shakespeare considered soft music favorable to sleep. Lear, we may suppose, had been thus composed to rest; and now the physician desires louder music to be played, for the purpose of waking him.”
[612] Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare” (1866), p. 333.
So, in “Richard II.” (v. 5), the king says:
“This music mads me: let it sound no more; For though it have holp madmen to their wits, In me, it seems, it will make wise men mad.”
The power of music as a medical agency has been recognized from the earliest times, and in mental cases has often been highly efficacious.[613] Referring to music as inducing sleep, we may quote the touching passage in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 5), where the king says:
“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends; Unless some dull and favourable hand Will whisper music to my weary spirit.
Warwick. Call for the music in the other room.”
[613] “A Book of Musical Anecdote,” by F. Crowest (1878), vol. ii. pp. 251, 252.
Ariel, in “The Tempest” (ii. 1), enters playing solemn music to produce this effect.
A mad-house seems formerly to have been designated a “dark house.” Hence, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), the reason for putting Malvolio into a dark room was, to make him believe that he was mad. In the following act (iv. 2) he says: “Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad; they have laid me here in hideous darkness;” and further on (v. 1) he asks,
“Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d, Kept in a dark house?”
In “As You Like It” (iii. 2), Rosalind says that “Love is merely a madness, and ... deserves as well a dark-house and a whip as madmen do.”
The expression “horn-mad,” i. e., quite mad, occurs in the “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 1): “Why, mistress, sure my master is horn-mad.” And, again, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), Mistress Quickly says, “If he had found the young man, he would have been horn-mad.”
Madness in cattle was supposed to arise from a distemper in the internal substance of their horns, and furious or mad cattle had their horns bound with straw.
King’s Evil. This was a common name in years gone by for scrofula, because the sovereigns of England were supposed to possess the power of curing it, “without other medicine, save only by handling and prayer.” This custom of “touching for the king’s evil” is alluded to in “Macbeth” (iv. 3), where the following dialogue is introduced:
“Malcolm. Comes the king forth, I pray you?
Doctor. Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched souls That stay his cure; their malady convinces The great assay of art; but, at his touch— Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand—— They presently amend.
Malcolm. I thank you, doctor.
Macduff. What’s the disease he means?
Malcolm. ’Tis call’d the evil: A most miraculous work in this good king; Which often, since my here-remain in England, I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven, Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people, All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures; Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers: and ’tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction. With this strange virtue He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy; And sundry blessings hang about his throne, That speak him full of grace.”
This reference, which has nothing to do with the progress of the drama, is introduced, obviously, in compliment to King James, who fancied himself endowed with the Confessor’s powers.[614] The poet found authority for the passage in Holinshed (vol. i. p. 279): “As hath bin thought, he was enspired with the gift of prophecie, and also to haue hadde the gift of healing infirmities and diseases. Namely, he vsed to help those that were vexed with the disease, commonly called the kyngs euill, and left that vertue as it were a portion of inheritance vnto his successors the kyngs of this realme.” Edward’s miraculous powers were believed in, we are told, by his contemporaries, or at least soon after his death, and were expressly recognized by Pope Alexander III., who canonized him. In Plot’s “Oxfordshire” (chap. x. sec. 125) there is an account, accompanied with a drawing, of the touch-piece supposed to have been given by this monarch. James I.’s practice of touching for the evil is frequently mentioned in Nichols’s “Progresses.” Charles I., when at York, touched seventy persons in one day. Indeed, few are aware to what an extent this superstition once prevailed. In the course of twenty years, between 1660 and 1682, no less than 92,107 persons were touched for this disease. The first English monarch who refused to touch for the king’s evil was William III., but the practice was resumed by Queen Anne, who officially announced, in the London Gazette, March 12, 1712, her royal intention to receive patients afflicted with the malady in question. It was probably about that time that Johnson was touched by her majesty, upon the recommendation of the celebrated physician Sir John Floyer, of Lichfield. King George I. put an end to this practice, which is said to have originated with Edward the Confessor, in 1058.[615] The custom was also observed by French kings; and on Easter Sunday, 1686, Louis XIV. is said to have touched 1600 persons.
[614] See Beckett’s “Free and Impartial Enquiry into the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the King’s Evil,” 1722.
[615] See “Notes and Queries,” 1861, 2d series, vol. xi. p. 71; Burns’s “History of Parish Registers,” 1862, pp. 179, 180; Pettigrew’s “Superstitions Connected with Medicine and Surgery,” 1844, pp. 117-154.
Lethargy. This is frequently confounded by medical men of former times, and by Shakespeare himself, with apoplexy. The term occurs in the list of diseases quoted by Thersites in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1).[616]
[616] Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 235.
Leprosy. This was, in years gone by, used to denote the lues venerea, as in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 8):
“Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,— Whom leprosy o’ertake!
* * * * *
Hoists sails and flies.”
Leech. The old medical term for a leech is a “blood-sucker,” and a knot would be an appropriate term for a number of clustering leeches. So, in “Richard III.” (iii. 3), Grey, being led to the block, says of Richard’s minions:
“A knot you are of damned blood-suckers.”
In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) mention is made by Warwick of the “blood-sucker of sleeping men,” which, says Dr. Bucknill, appears to mean the vampire-bat.
Measles. This word originally signified leprosy, although in modern times used for a very different disorder. Its derivation is the old French word meseau, or mesel, a leper. Thus, Cotgrave has “Meseau, a meselled, scurvy, leaporous, lazarous person.” Distempered or scurvied hogs are still said to be measled. It is in this sense that it is used in “Coriolanus” (iii. 1):
“As for my country I have shed my blood, Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs Coin words till their decay, against those measles, Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought The very way to catch them.”
Pleurisy. This denotes a plethora, or redundancy of blood, and was so used, probably, from an erroneous idea that the word was derived from plus pluris. It is employed by Shakespeare in “Hamlet” (iv. 7):
“For goodness, growing to a plurisy, Dies in his own too-much.”
In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 1) there is a similar phrase:
“that heal’st with blood The earth when it is sick, and cur’st the world O’ the plurisy of people.”
The word is frequently used by writers contemporary with Shakespeare. Thus, for instance, Massinger, in “The Picture” (iv. 2), says:
“A plurisy of ill blood you must let out By labour.”
Mummy. This was a preparation for magical purposes, made from dead bodies, and was used as a medicine both long before and long after Shakespeare’s day. Its virtues seem to have been chiefly imaginary, and even the traffic in it fraudulent.[617] The preparation of mummy is said to have been first brought into use in medicine by a Jewish physician, who wrote that flesh thus embalmed was good for the cure of divers diseases, and particularly bruises, to prevent the blood’s gathering and coagulating. It has, however, long been known that no use whatever can be derived from it in medicine, and “that all which is sold in the shops, whether brought from Venice or Lyons, or even directly from the Levant by Alexandria, is factitious, the work of certain Jews, who counterfeit it by drying carcasses in ovens, after having prepared them with powder of myrrh, caballine aloes, Jewish pitch, and other coarse or unwholesome drugs.”[618] Shakespeare speaks of this preparation. Thus Othello (iii. 4), referring to the handkerchief which he had given to Desdemona, relates how:
“it was dyed in mummy which the skilful Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts.”
[617] See Pettigrew’s “History of Mummies,” 1834; also Gannal, “Traité d’Embaumement,” 1838.
[618] Rees’s “Encyclopædia,” 1829, vol. xxiv.
And, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), the “witches’ mummy” forms one of the ingredients of the boiling caldron. Webster, in “The White Devil” (1857, p. 5), speaks of it:
“Your followers Have swallow’d you like mummia, and, being sick, With such unnatural and horrid physic, Vomit you up i’ the kennel.”
Sir Thomas Browne, in his interesting “Fragment on Mummies,” tells us that Francis I. always carried mummy[619] with him as a panacea against all disorders. Some used it for epilepsy, some for gout, some used it as a styptic. He further adds: “The common opinion of the virtues of mummy bred great consumption thereof, and princes and great men contended for this strange panacea, wherein Jews dealt largely, manufacturing mummies from dead carcasses, and giving them the names of kings, while specifics were compounded from crosses and gibbets leavings.”
[619] Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” 1866, p. 332, calls it a balsamic liquid.
Nightmare. There are various charms practised, in this and other countries, for the prevention of nightmare, many of which are exceedingly quaint. In days gone by it appears that St. Vitalis, whose name has been corrupted into St. Withold, was invoked; and, by way of illustration, Theobald quotes from the old play of “King John”[620] the following:
“Sweet S. Withold, of thy lenitie, defend us from extremitie.”
[620] “Six Old Plays,” ed. Nichols, p. 256, quoted by Mr. Aldis Wright, in his “Notes to King Lear,” 1877, p. 170.
Shakespeare, alluding to the nightmare, in his “King Lear” (iii. 4), refers to the same saint, and gives us a curious old charm:
“Saint Withold footed thrice the old [wold]; He met the night-mare, and her nine-fold; Bid her alight And her troth plight, And, aroint thee, witch, aroint thee!”
For what purpose, as Mr. Singer[621] has pointed out, the incubus is enjoined to “plight her troth,” will appear from a charm against the nightmare, in Reginald Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” which occurs, with slight variation, in Fletcher’s “Monsieur Thomas” (iv. 6):
“St. George, St. George, our lady’s knight, He walks by day, so does he by night, And when he had her found, He her beat and her bound, Until to him her troth she plight, She would not stir from him that night.”
[621] “Shakespeare,” vol. ix. p. 413.
Paralysis. An old term for chronic paralysis was “cold palsies,” which is used by Thersites in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1).[622]
[622] Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 235.
Philosopher’s Stone. This was supposed, by its touch, to convert base metal into gold. It is noticed by Shakespeare in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 5):
“Alexas. Sovereign of Egypt, hail!
Cleopatra. How much unlike art thou Mark Antony! Yet, coming from him, that great medicine hath With his tinct gilded thee.”
The alchemists call the matter, whatever it may be, says Johnson, by which they perform transmutation, a medicine. Thus, Chapman, in his “Shadow of Night” (1594): “O, then, thou great elixir of all treasures;” on which passage he has the following note: “The philosopher’s stone, or philosophica medicina, is called the great elixir.” Another reference occurs in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 2), where the Fool, in reply to the question of Varro’s Servant, “What is a whoremaster, fool?” answers, “A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. ’Tis a spirit: sometime ’t appears like a lord; sometime like a lawyer; sometime like a philosopher, with two stones moe than’s artificial one,” etc.; a passage which Johnson explains as meaning “more than the philosopher’s stone,” or twice the value of a philosopher’s stone; though, as Farmer observes, “Gower has a chapter, in his ‘Confessio Amantis,’ of the three stones that philosophers made.” Singer,[623] in his note on the philosopher’s stone, says that Sir Thomas Smith was one of those who lost considerable sums in seeking of it. Sir Richard Steele was one of the last eminent men who entertained hopes of being successful in this pursuit. His laboratory was at Poplar.[624]
[623] “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. iii. p. 284.
[624] See Pettigrew’s “Medical Superstitions,” pp. 13, 14.
Pimple. In the Midland Counties, a common name for a pimple, which, by rubbing, is made to smart, or rubbed to sense, is “a quat.” The word occurs in “Othello” (v. 1), where Roderigo is so called by Iago:
“I have rubb’d this young quat almost to the sense, And he grows angry.”
—Roderigo being called a quat by the same mode of speech as a low fellow is now called a scab. It occurs in Langham’s “Garden of Health,” p. 153: “The leaves [of coleworts] laid to by themselves, or bruised with barley meale, are good for the inflammations, and soft swellings, burnings, impostumes, and cholerick sores or quats,” etc.
Plague. “Tokens,” or “God’s tokens,” were the terms for those spots on the body which denoted the infection of the plague. In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Biron says:
“For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see;”
and in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 10) there is another allusion:
“Enobarbus. How appears the fight?
Scarus. On our side like the token’d pestilence, Where death is sure.”
In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), Ulysses says of Achilles:
“He is so plaguy proud that the death tokens of it Cry—‘No recovery.’”
King Lear, too, it would seem, compares Goneril (ii. 4) to these fatal signs, when he calls her “a plague sore.” When the tokens had appeared on any of the inhabitants, the house was shut up, and “Lord have mercy upon us” written or printed upon the door. Hence Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), says:
“Write, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ on those three; They are infected, in their hearts it lies; They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.”
The “red pestilence,” referred to by Volumnia in “Coriolanus” (iv. 1), probably alludes to the cutaneous eruptions common in the plague:
“Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, And occupations perish!”
In “The Tempest” (i. 2), Caliban says to Prospero, “The red plague rid you.”
Poison. According to a vulgar error prevalent in days gone by, poison was supposed to swell the body, an allusion to which occurs in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), where, in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, the former declares:
“You shall digest the venom of your spleen, Though it do split you.”
We may also compare the following passage in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), where the king says:
“Learn this, Thomas, And thou shalt prove a shelter to thy friends; A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in, That the united vessel of their blood, Mingled with venom of suggestion— As, force perforce, the age will pour it in— Shall never leak, though it do work as strong As aconitum, or rash gunpowder.”
In “King John,” Hubert, when describing the effect of the poison upon the monk (v. 6), narrates how his “bowels suddenly burst out.” This passage also contains a reference to the popular custom prevalent in the olden days, of great persons having their food tasted by those who were supposed to have made themselves acquainted with its wholesomeness. This practice, however, could not always afford security when the taster was ready to sacrifice his own life, as in the present case:[625]
“Hubert. The king, I fear, is poison’d by a monk: I left him almost speechless....
Bastard. How did he take it? who did taste to him?
Hubert. A monk, I tell you; a resolved villain.”
[625] Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 136.
The natives of Africa have been supposed to be possessed of the secret how to temper poisons with such art as not to operate till several years after they were administered. Their drugs were then as certain in their effect as subtle in their preparation.[626] Thus, in “The Tempest” (iii. 3), Gonzalo says:
“All three of them are desperate: their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, Now ’gins to bite the spirits.”
[626] Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i. p. 65.
The belief in slow poisoning was general in bygone times, although no better founded on fact, remarks Dr. Bucknill,[627] than the notion that persons burst with poison, or that narcotics could, like an alarum clock, be set for a certain number of hours. So, in “Cymbeline” (v. 5), Cornelius relates to the king the queen’s confession:
“She did confess, she had For you a mortal mineral; which, being took, Should by the minute feed on life, and, lingering, By inches waste you.”
[627] “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 226.
Pomander. This was either a composition of various perfumes wrought in the shape of a ball or other form, and worn in the pocket or hung about the neck, and even sometimes suspended to the wrist; or a case for containing such a mixture of perfumes. It was used as an amulet against the plague or other infections, as well as for an article of luxury. There is an allusion to its use in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3), by Autolycus, who enumerates it among all his trumpery that he had sold. The following recipe for making a pomander we find in an old play:[628] “Your only way to make a pomander is this: take an ounce of the purest garden mould, cleans’d and steep’d seven days in change of motherless rose-water. Then take the best labdanum, benjoin, with storaxes, ambergris, civet, and musk. Incorporate them together, and work them into what form you please. This, if your breath be not too valiant, will make you smell as sweet as any lady’s dog.”
[628] Quoted in Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 671.
Rheumatism. In Shakespeare’s day this was used in a far wider sense than nowadays, including, in addition to what is now understood by the term, distillations from the head, catarrhs, etc. Malone quotes from the “Sidney Memorials” (vol. i. p. 94), where the health of Sir Henry Sidney is described: “He hath verie much distempored divers parts of his bodie; as namelie, his heade, his stomack, &c., and thereby is always subject to distillacions, coughes, and other rumatick diseases.” Among the many superstitions relating to the moon,[629] one is mentioned in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), where Titania tells how the moon,
“Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound.”
[629] See p. 74.
The word “rheumatic” was also formerly used in the sense of choleric or peevish, as in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), where the Hostess says: “You two never meet but you fall to some discord: you are both, in good troth, as rheumatic as two dry toasts.” Again, in “Henry V.” (ii. 3), the Hostess says of Falstaff: “A’ did in some sort, indeed, handle women; but then he was rheumatic,[630] and talked of the whore of Babylon.”
[630] Malone suggests that the hostess may mean “then he was lunatic.”
Serpigo. This appears to have been a term extensively used by old medical authors for any creeping skin disease, being especially applied to that known as the herpes circinatus. The expression occurs in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 1), being coupled by the Duke with “the gout” and the “rheum.” In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), Thersites says: “Now, the dry serpigo on the subject.”
Sickness. Sickness of stomach, which the slightest disgust is apt to provoke, is still expressed by the term “queasy;” hence the word denoted delicate, unsettled; as in “King Lear” (ii. 1), where it is used by Edmund:
“I have one thing, of a queasy question, Which I must act.”
So Ben Jonson employs it in “Sejanus” (i. 1):
“These times are rather queasy to be touched.”
Sigh. It was a prevalent notion that sighs impair the strength and wear out the animal powers. Thus, in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), Queen Margaret speaks of “blood-drinking sighs.” We may, too, compare the words of Oberon in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 2), who refers to “sighs of love, that cost the fresh blood dear.” In “3 Henry VI.” (iv. 4), Queen Elizabeth says:
“for this I draw in many a tear, And stop the rising of blood-sucking sighs.”
Once more, in “Hamlet” (iv. 7), the King mentions the “spendthrift sigh, that hurts by easing.” Fenton, in his “Tragical Discourses” (1579), alludes to this notion in the following words: “Your scorching sighes that have already drayned your body of his wholesome humoures.”
It was also an ancient belief that sorrow consumed the blood and shortened life. Hence Romeo tells Juliet (iii. 5):
“And trust me, love, in my eye so do you: Dry sorrow drinks our blood.”
Small-pox. Such a terrible plague was this disease in the days of our ancestors, that its name was used as an imprecation. Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), the Princess says: “A pox of that jest.”
Saliva. The color of the spittle was, with the medical men of olden times, an important point of diagnosis. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff exclaims against fighting on a hot day, and wishes he may “never spit white again,” should it so happen.[631]
[631] Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 150.
Sterility. The charm against sterility referred to by Cæsar in “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) is copied from Plutarch, who, in his description of the festival Lupercalia, tells us how “noble young men run naked through the city, striking in sport whom they meet in the way with leather thongs,” which blows were commonly believed to have the wonderful effect attributed to them by Cæsar:
“The barren, touched in this holy chase, Shake off their sterile curse.”
Suicide. Cominius, in “Coriolanus” (i. 9), arguing against Marcius’s overstrained modesty, refers to the manner in which suicide was thought preventable in olden times:
“If ’gainst yourself you be incens’d, we’ll put you, Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles, Then reason safely with you.”
Toothache. It was formerly a common superstition—and one, too, not confined to our own country—that toothache was caused by a little worm, having the form of an eel, which gradually gnawed a hole in the tooth. In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), Shakespeare speaks of this curious belief:
“Don Pedro. What! sigh for the toothache?
Leonato. Where is but a humour, or a worm.”
This notion was, some years ago, prevalent in Derbyshire,[632] where there was an odd way of extracting, as it was thought, the worm. A small quantity of a mixture, consisting of dry and powdered herbs, was placed in some small vessel, into which a live coal from the fire was dropped. The patient then held his or her open mouth over the vessel, and inhaled the smoke as long as it could be borne. The cup was then taken away, and in its place a glass of water was put before the patient. Into this glass the person breathed hard for a few moments, when it was supposed the grub or worm could be seen in the water. In Orkney, too, toothache goes by the name of “the worm,” and, as a remedy, the following charm, called “wormy lines,” is written on a piece of paper, and worn as an amulet, by the person affected, in some part of his dress:
“Peter sat on a marble stone weeping; Christ came past, and said, ‘What aileth thee, Peter?’ ‘O my Lord, my God, my tooth doth ache.’ ‘Arise, O Peter! go thy way; thy tooth shall ache no more.’”
[632] See “English Folk-Lore,” p. 156.
This notion is still current in Germany, and is mentioned by Thorpe, in his “Northern Mythology” (vol. iii. p. 167), who quotes a North German incantation, beginning,
“Pear tree, I complain to thee; Three worms sting me.”
It is found, too, even in China and New Zealand,[633] the following charm being used in the latter country:
“An eel, a spiny back True indeed, indeed: true in sooth, in sooth. You must eat the head Of said spiny back.”
[633] See Shortland’s “Traditions and Superstitions of the New-Zealanders,” 1856, p. 131.
A writer in the Athenæum (Jan. 28, 1860), speaking of the Rev. R. H. Cobbold’s “Pictures of the Chinese, Drawn by Themselves,” says: “The first portrait is that of a quack doctress, who pretends to cure toothache by extracting a maggot—the cause of the disorder. This is done—or, rather, pretended to be done—by simply placing a bright steel pin on the part affected, and tapping the pin with a piece of wood. Mr. Cobbold compares the operation to procuring worms for fishing by working a spade backwards and forwards in the ground. He and a friend submitted to the process, but in a very short time compelled the doctress to desist, by the excessive precautions they took against imposition.” We may further note that John of Gatisden, one of the oldest medical authors, attributes decay of the teeth to “a humour or a worm.” In his “Rosa Anglica”[634] he says: “Si vermes sint in dentibus, ℞ semen porri, seu lusquiami contere et misce cum cera, pone super carbones, et fumus recipiatur per embotum, quoniam sanat. Solum etiam semen lusquiami valet coctum in aqua calida, supra quam aquam patiens palatum apertum si tenuerit, cadent vermes evidenter vel in illam aquam, vel in aliam quæ ibi fuerit ibi posita. De myrrha et aloe ponantur in dentem, ubi est vermis: semen caulis, et absinthium, per se vermes interficit.”
[634] Liber Secundus—“De Febribus,” p. 923, ed. 1595.
Tub-fast. In years past “the discipline of sweating in a heated tub for a considerable time, accompanied with strict abstinence, was thought necessary for the cure of venereal taint.”[635] Thus, in “Timon of Athens” (iv. 3), Timon says to Timandra:
“Be a whore still! they love thee not that use thee; Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust. Make use of thy salt hours: season the slaves For tubs and baths: bring down rose-cheeked youth To the tub-fast, and the diet.”
[635] Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 906.
As beef, too, was usually salted down in a tub, the one process was jocularly compared to the other. So, in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 2), Pompey, when asked by Lucio about his mistress, replies, “Troth, sir, she hath eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in the tub.” Again, in “Henry V.” (ii. 1), Pistol speaks of “the powdering-tub of infamy.”
Vinegar. In Shakespeare’s day this seems to have been termed “eisel” (from A. S. aisel), being esteemed highly efficacious in preventing the communication of the plague and other contagious diseases. In this sense it has been used by Shakespeare in Sonnet cxi.:
“like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eisel, ’gainst my strong infection.”
In a MS. Herbal in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, occurs “acetorum, ance vynegre or aysel.” The word occurs again in “Hamlet” (v. 1), where Laertes is challenged by Hamlet:
“Woo’t drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?”
The word woo’t, in the northern counties, is the common contraction of wouldst thou, which is the reading of the old copies. In former years it was the fashion with gallants to do some extravagant feat, as a proof of their love, in honor of their mistresses, and, among others, the swallowing of some nauseous potion was one of the most frequent. Hence, in the above passage, some bitter potion is evidently meant, which it was a penance to drink. Some are of opinion that wormwood is alluded to; and Mr. Singer thinks it probable that “the propoma called absinthites, a nauseously bitter medicament then much in use, may have been in the poet’s mind, to drink up a quantity of which would be an extreme pass of amorous demonstration.” It has been suggested by a correspondent of “Notes and Queries,”[636] that the reference in this passage from “Hamlet” is to a Lake Esyl, which figures in Scandinavian legends. Messrs. Wright and Clark, however, in their “Notes to Hamlet” (1876, p. 218), say that they have consulted Mr. Magnusson on this point, and he writes as follows: “No such lake as Esyl is known to Norse mythology and folk-lore.” Steevens supposes it to be the river Yssell.[637]
[636] See 4th series, vol. x. pp. 108, 150, 229, 282, 356.
[637] See Dyce’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 239.
Water-casting. The fanciful notion of recognizing diseases by the mere inspection of the urine was denounced years ago, by an old statute of the College of Physicians, as belonging to tricksters and impostors, and any member of the college was forbidden to give advice by this so-called “water-casting” without he also saw the patient. The statute of the college runs as follows: “Statuimus, et ordinamus, ut nemo, sive socius, sive candidatus, sive permissus consilii quidquam impertiat veteratoriis, et impostoribus, super urinarum nuda inspectione, nisi simul ad ægrum vocetur, ut ibidem, pro re natû, idonea medicamenta ab honesto aliquo pharmacopoea componenda præscribat.” An allusion to this vulgar error occurs in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 1), where, after Speed has given to Valentine his amusing description of a lover, in which, among other signs, are “to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence,” and “to fast, like one that takes diet,” the following quibble takes place upon the within and the without of the symptoms:
“Valentine. Are all these things perceived in me?
Speed. They are all perceived without ye.
Valentine. Without me? they cannot.
Speed. Without you? nay, that’s certain; for, without you were so simple, none else would: but you are so without these follies, that these follies are within you, and shine through you like the water in an urinal, that not an eye that sees you but is a physician to comment on your malady.”
This singular pretence, says Dr. Bucknill,[638] is “alleged to have arisen, like the barber surgery, from the ecclesiastical interdicts upon the medical vocations of the clergy. Priests and monks, being unable to visit their former patients, are said first to have resorted to the expedient of divining the malady, and directing the treatment upon simple inspection of the urine. However this may be, the practice is of very ancient date.” Numerous references to this piece of medical quackery occur in many of our old writers, most of whom condemn it in very strong terms. Thus Forestus, in his “Medical Politics,” speaks of it as being, in his opinion, a practice altogether evil, and expresses an earnest desire that medical men would combine to repress it. Shakespeare gives a further allusion to it in the passage where he makes Macbeth (v. 3) say:
“If thou couldst, doctor, cast The water of my land, find her disease, And purge it to a sound and pristine health, I would applaud thee to the very echo.”
[638] “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” 1860, pp. 1-64.
And in “2 Henry IV” (i. 2) Falstaff asks the page, “What says the doctor to my water?” and, once more, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), Fabian, alluding to Malvolio, says, “Carry his water to the wise woman.”
It seems probable, too, that, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 3), the term “mock-water,” employed by the host to the French Dr. Caius, refers to the mockery of judging of diseases by the water or urine—“mock-water,” in this passage, being equivalent to “you pretending water-doctor!”
XI. CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH THE CALENDAR
In years gone by the anniversaries connected with the calendar were kept up with an amount of enthusiasm and merry-making quite unknown at the present day. Thus, for instance, Shakespeare tells us, with regard to the May-day observance, that it was looked forward to so eagerly as to render it impossible to make the people sleep on this festive occasion. During the present century the popular celebrations of the festivals have been gradually on the decline, and nearly every year marks the disuse of some local custom. Shakespeare has not omitted to give a good many scattered allusions to the old superstitions and popular usages associated with the festivals of the year, some of which still survive in our midst.
Alluding to the revels, there can be no doubt that Shakespeare was indebted to the revel-books for some of his plots. Thus, in “The Tempest” (iv. 1), Prospero remarks to Ferdinand and Miranda, after Iris, Ceres, and Juno have appeared, and the dance of the nymphs is over:
“You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort, As if you were dismay’d; be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.”
It has been inferred that Shakespeare was present at Kenilworth, in 1575, when Elizabeth was so grandly entertained there. Lakes and seas are represented in the masque. Triton, in the likeness of a mermaid, came towards the queen, says George Gascoigne, and “Arion appeared, sitting on a dolphin’s back.” In the dialogue in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” between Oberon and Puck (ii. 1), there seems a direct allusion to this event:
“Oberon. My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou remember’st Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid’s music.
Puck. I remember.”
Then, too, there were the “Children of the Revels,” a company who performed at Blackfriars Theatre. In “Hamlet” (ii. 2), Shakespeare alludes to these “children-players.”[639] Rosencrantz says, in the conversation preceding the entry of the players, in reply to Hamlet’s inquiry whether the actors have suffered through the result of the late inhibition, evidently referring to the plague, “Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace; but there is, sir, an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t; these are now the fashion; and so berattle the common stages—so they call them—that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither.”
[639] “The England of Shakespeare,” E. Goadby, 1881, p. 153.
Twelfth-Day. There can be no doubt that the title of Shakespeare’s play, “Twelfth Night,” took its origin in the festivities associated with this festival. The season has, from time immemorial, been one of merriment, “the more decided from being the proper close of the festivities of Christmas, when games of chance were traditionally rife, and the sport of sudden and casual elevation gave the tone of the time. Of like tone is the play, and to this,”[640] says Mr. Lloyd, “it apparently owes its title.” The play, it appears, was probably originally acted at the barristers’ feast at the Middle Temple, on February 2, 1601-2, as Manningham tells us in his “Diary” (Camden Society, 1868, ed. J. Bruce, p. 18). It is worthy of note that the festive doings of the Inns of Court, in days gone by, at Christmas-tide were conducted on the most extravagant scale.[641] In addition to the merry disports of the Lord of Misrule, there were various revels. The Christmas masque at Gray’s Inn, in 1594, was on a magnificent scale.
[640] “Critical Essays on the Plays of Shakespeare,” 1875, p. 145; see Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iii. pp. 347, 348.
[641] See “British Popular Customs,” p. 473.
St. Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14). Whatever may be the historical origin of this festival, whether heathen or Christian, there can be no doubt of its antiquity. According to an old tradition, to which Chaucer refers, birds choose their mates on this day; and hence, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iv. 1), Theseus asks:
“Good morrow, friends. St. Valentine is past: Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?”
From this notion, it has been suggested, arose the once popular practice of choosing valentines, and also the common belief that the first two single persons who meet in the morning of St. Valentine’s day have a great chance of becoming wed to each other. This superstition is alluded to in Ophelia’s song in “Hamlet” (iv. 5):
“To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your valentine.”
There seems every probability that St. Valentine’s day, with its many customs, has come down to us from the Romans, but was fathered upon St. Valentine in the earlier ages of the Church in order to Christianize it.[642] In France St. Valentine’s was a movable feast, celebrated on the first Sunday in Lent, which was called the jour des brandons, because the boys carried about lighted torches on that day.
[642] “Notes and Queries,” 6th series, vol. i. p. 129.
Shrove-Tuesday. This day was formerly devoted to feasting and merriment of every kind, but whence originated the custom of eating pancakes is still a matter of uncertainty. The practice is alluded to in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 2), where the clown speaks of “a pancake for Shrove-Tuesday.”[643] In “Pericles” (ii. 1) they are termed “flap-jacks,” a term used by Taylor, the Water-Poet, in his “Jack-a-Lent Workes” (1630, vol. i. p. 115): “Until at last by the skill of the cooke it is transformed into the form of a flap-jack, which in our translation is called a pancake.” Shrovetide was, in times gone by, a season of such mirth that shroving, or to shrove, signified to be merry. Hence, in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3), Justice Silence says:
“Be merry, be merry, my wife has all; For women are shrews, both short and tall; ’Tis merry in hall, when beards wag all, And welcome merry shrove-tide. Be merry, be merry.”
[643] Cf. “As You Like It” (i. 2). Touchstone alludes to a “certain knight, that swore by his honour they were good pancakes.”
It was a holiday and a day of license for apprentices, laboring persons, and others.[644]
[644] See Hone’s “Every Day Book,” 1836, vol. i. p. 258; “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 239; see, also, Dekker’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” 1606, p. 35; “British Popular Customs,” pp. 62-91.
Lent. This season was at one time marked by a custom now fallen into disuse. A figure, made up of straw and cast-off clothes, was drawn or carried through the streets amid much noise and merriment; after which it was either burned, shot at, or thrown down a chimney. This image was called a “Jack-a-Lent,” and was, according to some, intended to represent Judas Iscariot. It occurs twice in the “Merry Wives of Windsor;” once merely as a jocular appellation (iii. 3), where Mrs. Page says to Robin, “You little Jack-a-Lent, have you been true to us?” and once (v. 5) as a butt, or object of satire and attack, Falstaff remarking, “How wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when ’tis upon ill employment!” It is alluded to by Ben Jonson in his “Tale of a Tub” (iv. 2):
“Thou cam’st but half a thing into the world, And wast made up of patches, parings, shreds; Thou, that when last thou wert put out of service, Travell’d to Hamstead Heath on an Ash Wednesday, Where thou didst stand six weeks the Jack of Lent, For boys to hurl three throws a penny at thee, To make thee a purse.”
Elderton, in a ballad called “Lenton Stuff,” in a MS. in the Ashmolean Museum, thus concludes his account of Lent:[645]
“When Jakke a’ Lent comes justlynge in, With the hedpeece of a herynge, And saythe, repent yowe of yower syn, For shame, syrs, leve yowre swerynge: And to Palme Sonday doethe he ryde, With sprots and herryngs by his syde, And makes an end of Lenton tyde!”[646]
[645] “Notes and Queries,” 1st series, vol. xii. p. 297.
[646] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 443; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. p. 101. Taylor, the Water-Poet, has a tract entitled “Jack-a-Lent, his Beginning and Entertainment, with the mad Prankes of Gentlemen-Usher, Shrove Tuesday.”
In the reign of Elizabeth butchers were strictly enjoined not to sell fleshmeat in Lent, not with a religious view, but for the double purpose[647] of diminishing the consumption of fleshmeat during that period, and so making it more plentiful during the rest of the year, and of encouraging the fisheries and augmenting the number of seamen. Butchers, however, who had an interest at court frequently obtained a dispensation to kill a certain number of beasts a week during Lent; of which indulgence the wants of invalids, who could not subsist without animal food, was made the pretence. It is to this practice that Cade refers in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 3), where he tells Dick, the butcher of Ashford: “Therefore, thus will I reward thee,—the Lent shall be as long again as it is; and thou shalt have a license to kill for a hundred lacking one.”
[647] Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vi. p. 219.
In “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Falstaff mentions an indictment against Hostess Quickly, “for suffering flesh to be eaten in thy house, contrary to the law; for the which I think thou wilt howl.” Whereupon she replies, “All victuallers do so: what’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?”
The sparing fare in olden days, during Lent, is indirectly referred to by Rosencrantz in “Hamlet” (ii. 2): “To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive.” We may compare, too, Maria’s words in “Twelfth Night” (i. 5), where she speaks of a good lenten answer, i. e., short.
By a scrap of proverbial rhyme quoted by Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4), and the speech introducing it, it appears that a stale hare might be used to make a pie in Lent; he says:
“No hare, sir: unless a hare, sir, in a lenten pie, that is something stale and hoar ere it be spent.
An old hare hoar, And an old hare hoar, Is very good meat in Lent,” etc.
Scambling days. The days so called were Mondays and Saturdays in Lent, when no regular meals were provided, and our great families scambled. There may possibly be an indirect allusion to this custom in “Henry V.” (v. 2), where Shakespeare makes King Henry say: “If ever thou beest mine, Kate, as I have a saving faith within me tells me thou shalt, I get thee with scambling.” In the old household book of the fifth Earl of Northumberland there is a particular section appointing the order of service for these days, and so regulating the licentious contentions of them. We may, also, compare another passage in the same play (i. 1), where the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of “the scambling and unquiet time.”
Good Friday. Beyond the bare allusion to this day, Shakespeare makes no reference to the many observances formerly associated with it. In “King John” (i. 1) he makes Philip the Bastard say to Lady Faulconbridge:
“Madam, I was not old Sir Robert’s son: Sir Robert might have eat his part in me Upon Good Friday, and ne’er broke his fast.”
And, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Poins inquires: “Jack, how agrees the devil and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good Friday last, for a cup of Madeira and a cold capon’s leg?”
Easter. According to a popular superstition, it is considered unlucky to omit wearing new clothes on Easter Day, to which Shakespeare no doubt alludes in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 1), when he makes Mercutio ask Benvolio whether he did “not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter.” In East Yorkshire, on Easter Eve, young folks go to the nearest market-town to buy some new article of dress or personal adornment to wear for the first time on Easter Day, as otherwise they believe that birds—notably rooks or “crakes”—will spoil their clothes.[648] In “Poor Robin’s Almanac” we are told:
“At Easter let your clothes be new, Or else be sure you will it rue.”
[648] “Notes and Queries,” 4th series, vol. v. p. 595.
Some think that the custom of “clacking” at Easter—which is not quite obsolete in some counties—is incidentally alluded to in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 2) by Lucio: “his use was, to put a ducat in her clack-dish.”[649] The clack or clap dish was a wooden dish with a movable cover, formerly carried by beggars, which they clacked and clattered to show that it was empty. In this they received the alms. Lepers and other paupers deemed infectious originally used it, that the sound might give warning not to approach too near, and alms be given without touching the person.
[649] See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i. p. 362; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 164: Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 94.
A popular name for Easter Monday was Black Monday, so called, says Stow, because “in the 34th of Edward III. (1360), the 14th of April, and the morrow after Easter Day, King Edward, with his host, lay before the city of Paris; which day was full dark of mist and hail, and so bitter cold, that many men died on their horses’ backs with the cold. Wherefore unto this day it hath been call’d the Blacke Monday.” Thus, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), Launcelot says, “it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o’clock i’ the morning.”
St. David’s Day (March 1). This day is observed by the Welsh in honor of St. David, their patron saint, when, as a sign of their patriotism, they wear a leek. Much doubt exists as to the origin of this custom. According to the Welsh, it is because St. David ordered his Britons to place leeks in their caps, that they might be distinguished from their Saxon foes. Shakespeare introduces the custom into his play of “Henry V.” (iv. 7), where Fluellen, addressing the monarch, says:
“Your grandfather of famous memory, an’t please your majesty, and your great uncle Edward the Plack Prince of Wales, as I have read in the chronicles, fought a most prave pattle here in France.
K. Henry. They did, Fluellen.
Flu. Your majesty says very true: if your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did goot service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honourable padge of the service; and I do pelieve, your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.”
It has been justly pointed out, however, that this allusion by Fluellen to the Welsh having worn the leek in battle under the Black Prince is not, as some writers suppose, wholly decisive of its having originated in the fields of Cressy, but rather shows that when Shakespeare wrote Welshmen wore leeks.[650] In the same play, too (iv. 1), the well-remembered Fluellen’s enforcement of Pistol to eat the leek he had ridiculed further establishes the wearing as a usage. Pistol says:
“Tell him I’ll knock his leek about his pate Upon Saint Davy’s day.”
[650] See Hone’s “Every Day Book,” vol. i. p. 318; “British Popular Customs,” pp. 110-113.
In days gone by this day was observed by royalty; and in 1695 we read how William III. wore a leek on St. David’s Day, “presented to him by his sergeant, Porter, who hath as perquisites all the wearing apparel his majestie had on that day, even to his sword.” It appears that formerly, among other customs, a Welshman was burned in effigy upon “St. Tavy’s Day,” an allusion to which occurs in “Poor Robin’s Almanack” for 1757:
“But it would make a stranger laugh, To see th’ English hang poor Taff: A pair of breeches and a coat, Hat, shoes, and stockings, and what not, Are stuffed with hay, to represent The Cambrian hero thereby meant.”
St. Patrick’s Day (March 17). Shakespeare, in “Hamlet” (i. 5), makes the Danish prince swear by St. Patrick, on which Warburton remarks that the whole northern world had their learning from Ireland.[651] As Mr. Singer[652] observes, however, it is more probable that the poet seized the first popular imprecation that came to his mind, without regarding whether it suited the country or character of the person to whom he gave it. Some, again, have supposed that there is a reference here to St. Patrick’s purgatory, but this does not seem probable.
[651] St. Patrick rids Ireland of snakes; see p. 257.
[652] Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1870, vol. ix. p. 168.
St. George’s Day (April 23). St. George, the guardian saint of England, is often alluded to by Shakespeare. His festival, which was formerly celebrated by feasts of cities and corporations, is now almost passed over without notice. Thus, Bedford, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 1), speaks of keeping “our great Saint George’s feast withal.” “God and St. George” was once a common battle-cry, several references to which occur in Shakespeare’s plays. Thus, in “Henry V.” (iii. 1), the king says to his soldiers:[653]
“Cry, God for Harry, England, and Saint George.”
[653] Cf. “Henry V.,” v. 2; “3 Henry VI.,” ii. 1, 2; “Taming of the Shrew,” ii. 1; “Richard II.,” i. 3.
Again, in “1 Henry VI.” (iv. 2), Talbot says:
“God and Saint George, Talbot and England’s right, Prosper our colours in this dangerous fight!”
The following injunction, from an old act of war, concerning the use of St. George’s name in onsets, is curious: “Item, that all souldiers entering into battaile, assault, skirmish, or other faction of armes, shall have for their common crye and word, St. George, forward, or, Upon them, St. George, whereby the souldier is much comforted, and the enemie dismaied, by calling to minde the ancient valour of England, with which that name has so often been victorious.”[654]
[654] Cited by Warton in a note on “Richard III.,” v. 3.
The combat of this saint on horseback with a dragon has been very long established as a subject for sign-painting. In “King John” (ii. 1) Philip says:
“Saint George, that swing’d the dragon, and e’er since Sits on his horseback at mine hostess’ door.”
It is still a very favorite sign. In London alone[655] there are said to be no less than sixty-six public-houses and taverns with the sign of St. George and the Dragon, not counting beer-houses and coffee-houses.
[655] Hotten’s “History of Sign-boards,” 1866, 3d ed., p. 287.
May Day. The festival of May day has, from the earliest times, been most popular in this country, on account of its association with the joyous season of spring. It was formerly celebrated with far greater enthusiasm than nowadays, for Bourne tells us how the young people were in the habit of rising a little after midnight and walking to some neighboring wood, accompanied with music and the blowing of horns, where they broke down branches from the trees, which, decorated with nosegays and garlands of flowers, were brought home soon after sunrise, and placed at their doors and windows. Shakespeare, alluding to this practice, informs us how eagerly it was looked forward to, and that it was impossible to make the people sleep on May morning. Thus, in “Henry VIII.” (v. 4), it is said:
“Pray, sir, be patient: ’tis as much impossible— Unless we sweep ’em from the door with cannons— To scatter ’em, as ’tis to make ’em sleep On May-day morning.”
Again, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), Lysander, speaking of these May-day observances, says to Hermia:
“If thou lov’st me, then, Steal forth thy father’s house to-morrow night; And in the wood, a league without the town, Where I did meet thee once with Helena, To do observance to a morn of May, There will I stay for thee.”
And Theseus says (iv. 1):
“No doubt they rose up early to observe The rite of May.”[656]
[656] Cf. “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4): “More matter for a May morning.”
In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (ii. 3), one of the four countrymen asks: “Do we all hold against the Maying?”
In Chaucer’s “Court of Love” we read that early on May day “Fourth goth al the Court, both most and lest, to fetche the flowris fresh and blome.” In the reign of Henry VIII. it is on record that the heads of the corporation of London went out into the high grounds of Kent to gather the May, and were met on Shooter’s Hill by the king and his queen, Katherine of Arragon, as they were coming from the palace of Greenwich. Until within a comparatively recent period, this custom still lingered in some of the counties. Thus, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the following doggerel was sung:
“Rise up, maidens, fie for shame! For I’ve been four long miles from hame, I’ve been gathering my garlands gay, Rise up, fair maidens, and take in your May.”
Many of the ballads sung nowadays, in country places, by the village children, on May morning, as they carry their garlands from door to door, undoubtedly refer to the old practice of going a-Maying, although fallen into disuse.
In olden times nearly every village had its May-pole, around which, decorated with wreaths of flowers, ribbons, and flags, our merry ancestors danced from morning till night. The earliest representation of an English May-pole is that published in the “Variorum Shakespeare,” and depicted on a window at Betley, in Staffordshire, then the property of Mr. Tollet, and which he was disposed to think as old as the time of Henry VIII. The pole is planted in a mound of earth, and has affixed to it St. George’s red-cross banner and a white pennon or streamer with a forked end. The shaft of the pole is painted in a diagonal line of black colors upon a yellow ground, a characteristic decoration of all these ancient May-poles, as alluded to by Shakespeare in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 2), where it gives point to Hermia’s allusion to her rival Helena as “a painted May-pole.”[657] The popularity of the May-pole in former centuries is shown by the fact that one of our London parishes, St. Andrew Undershaft, derives its name from the May-pole which overhung its steeple, a reference to which we find made by Geoffrey Chaucer, who, speaking of a vain boaster, says:
“Right well aloft, and high ye bear your head, As ye would bear the great shaft of Cornhill.”
[657] “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 575; see “British Popular Customs,” pp. 228-230, 249.
London, indeed, had several May-poles, one of which stood in Basing Lane, near St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a large fir pole, forty feet high and fifteen inches in diameter, and fabled to be the justing staff of Gerard the Giant. Only a few, however, of the old May-poles remain scattered here and there throughout the country. One still supports a weathercock in the churchyard at Pendleton, Manchester; and in Derbyshire, a few years ago, several were to be seen standing on some of the village greens. The rhymes made use of as the people danced round the May-pole varied according to the locality, and oftentimes combined a curious mixture of the jocose and sacred.
Another feature of the May-day festivities was the morris-dance, the principal characters of which generally were Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Scarlet, Stokesley, Little John, the Hobby-horse, the Bavian or Fool, Tom the Piper, with his pipe and tabor. The number of characters varied much at different times and places. In “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 2), the clown says: “As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney ... a morris for May-day.”[658]
[658] See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. i. pp. 247-270; “Book of Days,” vol. i. pp. 630-633.
In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1) the Duke of York says of Cade:
“I have seen Him caper upright, like a wild Morisco, Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells.”
In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 5) Gerrold, the schoolmaster, thus describes to King Theseus the morris-dance:
“If you but favour, our country pastime made is. We are a few of those collected here, That ruder tongues distinguish villagers; And, to say verity and not to fable, We are a merry rout, or else a rable, Or company, or, by a figure, choris, That ’fore thy dignity will dance a morris. And I, that am the rectifier of all, By title Pædagogus, that let fall The birch upon the breeches of the small ones, And humble with a ferula the tall ones, Do here present this machine, or this frame: And, dainty duke, whose doughty dismal fame, From Dis to Dædalus, from post to pillar, Is blown abroad, help me, thy poor well willer, And, with thy twinkling eyes, look right and straight Upon this mighty morr—of mickle weight— Is—now comes in, which being glu’d together Makes morris, and the cause that we came hether, The body of our sport, of no small study. I first appear, though rude, and raw, and muddy, To speak, before thy noble grace, this tenner; At whose great feet I offer up my penner: The next, the Lord of May and Lady bright, The chambermaid and serving-man, by night That seek out silent hanging: then mine host And his fat spouse, that welcomes to their cost The galled traveller, and with a beck’ning, Inform the tapster to inflame the reck’ning: Then the beast-eating clown, and next the fool, The bavian, with long tail and eke long tool; Cum multis aliis that make a dance: Say ‘Ay,’ and all shall presently advance.”
Among the scattered allusions to the characters of this dance may be noticed that in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3): “and for womanhood, Maid Marian may be the deputy’s wife of the ward to thee”—the allusion being to “the degraded Maid Marian of the later morris-dance, more male than female.”[659]
[659] Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 550.
The “hobby-horse,” another personage of the morris-dance on May day, was occasionally omitted, and appears to have given rise to a popular ballad, a line of which is given by “Hamlet” (iii. 2):
“For, O, for, O, the hobby-horse is forgot.”
This is quoted again in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iii. 1). The hobby-horse was formed by a pasteboard horse’s head, and a light frame made of wicker-work to join the hinder parts. This was fastened round the body of a man, and covered with a foot-cloth which nearly reached the ground, and concealed the legs of the performer, who displayed his antic equestrian skill, and performed various juggling tricks, to the amusement of the bystanders. In Sir Walter Scott’s “Monastery” there is a spirited description of the hobby-horse.
The term “hobby-horse” was applied to a loose woman, and in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2) it is so used by Leontes, who says to Camillo:
“Then say My wife’s a hobby-horse; deserves a name As rank as any flax-wench, that puts to Before her troth-plight.”
In “Othello” (iv. 1), Bianca, speaking of Desdemona’s handkerchief, says to Cassio: “This is some minx’s token, and I must take out the work! There, give it your hobby-horse.” It seems also to have denoted a silly fellow, as in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), where it is so used by Benedick.
Another character was Friar Tuck, the chaplain of Robin Hood, and as such is noticed in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iv. 1), where one of the outlaws swears:
“By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar.”
He is also represented by Tollet as a Franciscan friar in the full clerical tonsure, for, as he adds, “When the parish priests were inhibited by the diocesan to assist in the May games, the Franciscans might give attendance, as being exempted from episcopal jurisdiction.”[660]
[660] See Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” 1817, vol. i. p. 163.
It was no uncommon occurrence for metrical interludes of a comic species, and founded on the achievements of the outlaw Robin Hood, to be performed after the morris, on the May-pole green. Mr. Drake thinks that these interludes are alluded to in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), where Fabian exclaims, on the approach of Sir Andrew Aguecheek with his challenge, “More matter for a May morning.”
Whitsuntide. Apart from its observance as a religious festival, Whitsuntide was, in times past, celebrated with much ceremony. In the Catholic times of England it was usual to dramatize the descent of the Holy Ghost, which this festival commemorates—a custom which we find alluded to in Barnaby Googe’s translation of Naogeorgus:
“On Whit-Sunday white pigeons tame in strings from heaven flie, And one that framed is of wood still hangeth in the skie, Thou seest how they with idols play, and teach the people too: None otherwise than little girls with puppets used to do.”
This custom appears to have been carried to an extravagant height in Spain, for Mr. Fosbroke[661] tells us that the gift of the Holy Ghost was represented by “thunder from engines which did much damage.” Water, oak leaves, burning torches, wafers, and cakes were thrown down from the church roof; pigeons and small birds, with cakes tied to their legs, were let loose; and a long censer was swung up and down. In our own country, many costly pageants were exhibited at this season. Thus, at Chester, the Whitsun Mysteries were acted during the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in Whitsun week. The performers were carried from one place to another by means of a scaffold—a huge and ponderous machine mounted on wheels, gayly decorated with flags, and divided into two compartments—the upper of which formed the stage, and the lower, defended from vulgar curiosity by coarse canvas draperies, answered the purposes of a green-room. To each craft in the city a separate mystery was allotted. Thus, the drapers exhibited the “Creation,” the tanners took the “Fall of Lucifer,” the water-carriers of the Dee acted the “Deluge,” etc. The production, too, of these pageants was extremely costly; indeed, each one has been set down at fifteen or twenty pounds sterling. An allusion to this custom is made in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iv. 4), where Julia says:
“At Pentecost, When all our pageants of delight were play’d, Our youth got me to play the woman’s part, And I was trimm’d in Madam Julia’s gown.”
[661] “Encyclopædia of Antiquities,” 1843, vol. ii. p. 653.
The morris-dance, too, was formerly a common accompaniment to the Whitsun ales, a practice which is still kept up in many parts of the country. In “Henry V.” (ii. 4), the Dauphin thus alludes to it:
“I say, ’tis meet we all go forth, To view the sick and feeble parts of France: And let us do it with no show of fear; No, with no more than if we heard that England Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance.”
And once more, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), Perdita says to Florizel:
“Methinks I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals.”
A custom formerly kept up in connection with Whitsuntide was the “Whitsun ale.” Ale was so prevalent a drink among us in olden times as to become a part of the name of various festal meetings, as Leet ale, Lamb ale, Bride ale (bridal), and, as we see, Whitsun ale. Thus our ancestors were in the habit of holding parochial meetings every Whitsuntide, usually in some barn near the church, consisting of a kind of picnic, as each parishioner brought what victuals he could spare. The ale, which had been brewed pretty strong for the occasion, was sold by the churchwardens, and from its profits a fund arose for the repair of the church.[662] These meetings are referred to by Shakespeare in “Pericles” (i. 1):
“It hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves and holy-ales.”
[662] See “British Popular Customs,” p. 278; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. p. 276.
In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 5), when Launce tells Speed, “thou hast not so much charity in thee as to go to the ale with a Christian,” these words have been explained to mean the rural festival so named, though, as Mr. Dyce remarks (“Glossary,” p. 10), the previous words of Launce, “go with me to the ale-house,” show this explanation to be wrong.
In the old miracle-plays performed at this and other seasons Herod was a favorite personage, and was generally represented as a tyrant of a very overbearing, violent character. Thus Hamlet says (iii. 2): “O, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod.” On this account Alexas mentions him as the most daring character when he tells Cleopatra (“Antony and Cleopatra,” iii. 3):
“Good majesty, Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you But when you are well pleas’d.”
In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), Mrs. Page speaks of him in the same signification: “What a Herod of Jewry is this!”
Mr. Dyce, in his “Glossary” (p. 207), has this note: “If the reader wishes to know what a swaggering, uproarious tyrant Herod was represented to be in those old dramatic performances, let him turn to ‘Magnus Herodes’ in ‘The Towneley Mysteries,’ p. 140, ed. Surtees Society; to ‘King Herod’ in the ‘Coventry Mysteries,’ p. 188, ed. Shakespeare Society; and to ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’ in ‘The Chester Plays,’ vol. i. p. 172, ed. Shakespeare Society.”
Like Herod, Termagant[663] was a hectoring tyrant of the miracle-plays, and as such is mentioned by Hamlet in the passage quoted above. Hence, in course of time, the word was used as an adjective, in the sense of violent, as in “1 Henry IV.” (v. 4), “that hot termagant Scot.” Hall mentions him in his first satire:
“Nor fright the reader with the Pagan vaunt Of mighty Mahound and great Termagaunt.”
[663] According to the crusaders and the old romance writers a Saracen deity. See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. ix. p. 214.
While speaking of the old mysteries or miracle-plays we may also here refer to the “moralities,” a class of religious plays in which allegorical personifications of the virtues and vices were introduced as dramatis personæ. These personages at first only took part in the play along with the Scriptural or legendary characters, but afterwards entirely superseded them. They continued in fashion till the time of Queen Elizabeth. Several allusions are given by Shakespeare to these moral plays. Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (iv. 1), the clown sings:
“I am gone, sir, And anon, sir, I’ll be with you again In a trice, Like to the old Vice, Your need to sustain;
Who, with dagger of lath, In his rage and his wrath, Cries, Ah, ha! to the devil,” etc.
Again, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Prince Henry speaks of “that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity;” and in “2 Henry IV.” (iii. 2), Falstaff says, “now is this Vice’s dagger become a squire.”
Again, further allusions occur in “Richard III.” (iii. 1). Gloster says:
“Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralize two meanings in one word.”
And once more, Hamlet (iii. 4), speaks of “a Vice of kings,” “a king of shreds and patches.”
According to Nares, “Vice” had the name sometimes of one vice, sometimes of another, but most commonly of Iniquity, or Vice itself. He was grotesquely dressed in a cap with ass’s ears, a long coat, and a dagger of lath. One of his chief employments was to make sport with the devil, leaping on his back, and belaboring him with his dagger of lath, till he made him roar. The devil, however, always carried him off in the end. He was, in short, the buffoon of the morality, and was succeeded in his office by the clown, whom we see in Shakespeare and others.[664]
[664] See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 482.
Again, there may be a further allusion to the moralities in “King Lear” (ii. 2), where Kent says to Oswald, “take Vanity, the puppet’s, part, against the royalty of her father.”
Then, too, there were the “pageants”—shows which were usually performed in the highways of our towns, and assimilated in some degree to the miracle-plays, but were of a more mixed character, being partly drawn from profane history. According to Strutt, they were more frequent in London, being required at stated periods, such as the setting of the Midsummer Watch, and the Lord Mayor’s Show.[665] Among the allusions to these shows given by Shakespeare, we may quote one in “Richard III.” (iv. 4), where Queen Margaret speaks of
“The flattering index of a direful pageant”
—the pageants displayed on public occasions being generally preceded by a brief account of the order in which the characters were to walk. These indexes were distributed among the spectators, that they might understand the meaning of such allegorical representations as were usually exhibited. In the “Merchant of Venice” (i. 1), Salarino calls argosies “the pageants of the sea,” in allusion, says Douce,[666] “to those enormous machines, in the shapes of castles, dragons, ships, giants, etc., that were drawn about the streets in the ancient shows or pageants, and which often constituted the most important part of them.” Again, in “As You Like It” (iii. 4), Corin says:
“If you will see a pageant truly play’d, Between the pale complexion of true love And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain, Go hence a little, and I shall conduct you, If you will mark it.”
[665] “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 25-28; see Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” vol. ii. p. 202.
[666] “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 154.
And in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 14), Antony speaks of “black vesper’s pageants.”
The nine worthies, originally comprising Joshua, David, Judas Maccabæus, Hector, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, appear from a very early period to have been introduced occasionally in the shows and pageants of our ancestors. Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), the pageant of the nine worthies is introduced. As Shakespeare, however, introduces Hercules and Pompey among his presence of worthies, we may infer that the characters were sometimes varied to suit the circumstances of the period, or the taste of the auditory. A MS. preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, mentions the “Six Worthies” having been played before the Lord Deputy Sussex in 1557.[667]
[667] Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” 1864, vol. i. pp. 147, 148.
Another feature of the Whitsun merry-makings were the Cotswold games, which were generally on the Thursday in Whitsun week, in the vicinity of Chipping Campden. They were instituted by an attorney of Burton-on-the-Heath, in Warwickshire, named Robert Dover, and, like the Olympic games of the ancients, consisted of most kinds of manly sports, such as wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar, handling the pike, dancing, and hunting. Ben Jonson, Drayton, and other poets of that age wrote verses on this festivity, which, in 1636, were collected into one volume, and published under the name of “Annalia Dubrensia.”[668] In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 1), Slender asks Page, “How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say, he was outrun on Cotsall.” And in “2 Henry IV.”[669] (iii. 2), Shallow, by distinguishing Will Squele as “a Cotswold man,” meant to imply that he was well versed in manly exercises, and consequently of a daring spirit and athletic constitution. A sheep was jocularly called a “Cotsold,” or “Cotswold lion,” from the extensive pastures in that part of Gloucestershire.
[668] See “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 712.
[669] See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. v. p. 206.
While speaking of Whitsuntide festivities, we may refer to the “roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly,” to which Prince Henry alludes in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4). It appears that Manningtree, in Essex, formerly enjoyed the privilege of fairs, by the tenure of exhibiting a certain number of Stage Plays yearly. There were, also, great festivities there, and much good eating, at Whitsun ales and other times. Hence, it seems that roasting an ox whole was not uncommon on such occasions. The pudding spoken of by Prince Henry often accompanied the ox, as we find in a ballad written in 1658:[670]
“Just so the people stare At an ox in the fair Roasted whole with a pudding in ’s belly.”
[670] See Nichol’s “Collection of Poems,” 1780, vol. iii. p. 204.
Sheep-shearing Time commences as soon as the warm weather is so far settled that the sheep may, without danger, lay aside their winter clothing; the following tokens being laid down by Dyer, in his “Fleece” (bk. i), to mark out the proper time:[671]
“If verdant elder spreads Her silver flowers; if humble daisies yield To yellow crowfoot and luxuriant grass Gay shearing-time approaches.”
[671] See Knight’s “Life of Shakespeare,” 1845, p. 71; Howitt’s “Pictorial Calendar of the Seasons,” 1854, pp. 254-267.
Our ancestors, who took advantage of every natural holiday, to keep it long and gladly, celebrated the time of sheep-shearing by a feast exclusively rural. Drayton,[672] the countryman of Shakespeare, has graphically described this festive scene, the Vale of Evesham being the locality of the sheep-shearing which he has pictured so pleasantly:
“The shepherd king, Whose flock hath chanc’d that year the earliest lamb to bring, In his gay baldric sits at his low, grassy board, With flawns, curds, clouted cream, and country dainties stored; And whilst the bag-pipe plays, each lusty, jocund swain Quaffs syllabubs in cans, to all upon the plain, And to their country girls, whose nosegays they do wear; Some roundelays do sing; the rest the burthen bear.”
[672] “Polyolbion,” song 14; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 34; Timbs’s “A Garland for the Year,” pp. 74, 75.
In the “Winter’s Tale,” one of the most delicious scenes (iv. 4) is that of the sheep-shearing, in which we have the more poetical “shepherd-queen.” Mr. Furnivall,[673] in his introduction to this play, justly remarks: “How happily it brings Shakespeare before us, mixing with his Stratford neighbors at their sheep-shearing and country sports, enjoying the vagabond pedler’s gammon and talk, delighting in the sweet Warwickshire maidens, and buying them ‘fairings,’ telling goblin stories to the boys, ‘There was a man dwelt in a churchyard,’ opening his heart afresh to all the innocent mirth, and the beauty of nature around him.” The expense attaching to these festivities appears to have afforded matter of complaint. Thus, the clown asks, “What am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast?” and then proceeds to enumerate various things which he will have to purchase. In Tusser’s “Five Hundred Points of Husbandry” this festival is described under “The Ploughman’s Feast-days:”
“Wife, make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corne, Make wafers and cakes, for our sheep must be shorne; At sheepe-shearing, neighbours none other things crave, But good cheere and welcome like neighbours to have.”
[673] Introduction to the “Leopold Shakespeare,” p. xci.
Midsummer Eve appears to have been regarded as a period when the imagination ran riot, and many a curious superstition was associated with this season. Thus, people gathered on this night the rose, St. John’s wort, vervain, trefoil, and rue, all of which were supposed to have magical properties. They set the orpine in clay upon pieces of slate or potsherd in their houses, calling it a “Midsummer man.” As the stalk was found next morning to incline to the right or left, the anxious maiden knew whether her lover would prove true to her or not. Young men sought, also, for pieces of coal, but, in reality, certain hard, black, dead roots, often found under the living mugwort, designing to place these under their pillows, that they might dream of themselves.[674] It was also supposed that any person fasting on Midsummer-eve, and sitting in the church-porch, would at midnight see the spirits of those persons of that parish who would die that year come and knock at the church-door, in the order and succession in which they would die. Midsummer was formerly thought to be a season productive of madness. Thus, Malvolio’s strange conduct is described by Olivia in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4) as “A very midsummer madness.” And, hence, “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” is no inappropriate title for “the series of wild incongruities of which the play consists.”[675] The Low-Dutch have a proverb that, when men have passed a troublesome night, and could not sleep, “they have passed St. John Baptist’s night”—that is, they have not taken any sleep, but watched all night. Heywood seems to allude to a similar notion when he says:
“As mad as a March hare: where madness compares, Are not midsummer hares as mad as March hares?”
[674] “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 816; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. i. p. 314; Soane’s “Book of the Months.”
[675] See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. pp. 336, 337.
A proverbial phrase, too, to signify that a person was mad, was, “’Tis midsummer moon with you”—hot weather being supposed to affect the brain.
Dog-days. A popular superstition—in all probability derived from the Egyptians—referred to the rising and setting of Sirius, or the Dog-star, as infusing madness into the canine race. Consequently, the name of “Dog-days” was given by the Romans to the period between the 3d of July and 11th of August, to which Shakespeare alludes in “Henry VIII.” (v. 3), “the dog-days now reign.” It is obvious that the notion is utterly groundless, for not only does the star vary in its rising, but is later and later every year. According to the Roman belief, “at the rising of the Dog-star the seas boil, the wines ferment in the cellars, and standing waters are set in motion; the dogs, also, go mad, and the sturgeon is blasted.” The term Dog-days is still a common phrase, and it is difficult to say whether it is from superstitious adherence to old custom or from a belief of the injurious effect of heat upon the canine race that the magistrates, often unwisely, at this season of the year order them to be muzzled or tied up.
Lammas-day (August 1). According to some antiquarians, Lammas is a corruption of loaf-mass, as our ancestors made an offering of bread from new wheat on this day. Others derive it from lamb-mass, because the tenants who held lands under the Cathedral Church of York were bound by their tenure to bring a live lamb into the church at high mass.[676] It appears to have been a popular day in times past, and is mentioned in the following dialogue in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 3), where the Nurse inquires:
“How long is it now To Lammas-tide?
Lady Capulet. A fortnight, and odd days.
Nurse. Even or odd, of all days in the year, Come Lammas-eve at night, shall she be fourteen?”
[676] See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 347-351.
In Neale’s “Essays on Liturgiology” (2d. ed., p. 526), the Welsh equivalent for Lammas-day is given as “dydd degwm wyn,” lamb-tithing day.
St. Charity (August 1). This saint is found in the Martyrology on the 1st of August: “Romæ passio Sanctaram Virginum Fidei, Spei, et Charitatis, quæ sub Hadriano principe martyriæ coronam adeptæ sunt.”[677] She is alluded to by Ophelia, in her song in “Hamlet” (iv. 5):
“By Gis,[678] and by Saint Charity, Alack, and fie for shame!” etc.
[677] Douglas’s “Criterion,” p. 68, cited by Ritson; see Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 475.
[678] This is, perhaps, a corrupt abbreviation of “By Jesus.” Some would read “By Cis,” and understand by it “St. Cicely.”
In the “Faire Maide of Bristowe” (1605) we find a similar allusion:
“Now, by Saint Charity, if I were judge, A halter were the least should hamper him.”
St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24). The anniversary of this festival was formerly signalized by the holding of the great Smithfield Fair, the only real fair held within the city of London. One of the chief attractions of Bartholomew Fair were roasted pigs. They were sold “piping hot, in booths and on stalls, and ostentatiously displayed to excite the appetite of passengers.” Hence, a “Bartholomew pig” became a popular subject of allusion. Falstaff, in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), in coaxing ridicule of his enormous figure, is playfully called, by his favorite Doll: “Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig.” Dr. Johnson, however, thought that paste pigs were meant in this passage; but this is improbable, as the true Bartholomew pigs were real roasted pigs, as may be seen from Ben Jonson’s play of “Bartholomew Fair” (i. 6), where Ursula, the pig-woman, is an important personage.[679] Gay, too, speaks of the pig-dressers: “Like Bartholomew Fair pig-dressers, who look like the dams, as well as the cooks, of what they roasted.” A further allusion to this season is found in “Henry V,” (v. 2), where Burgundy tells how “maids, well-summered and warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes; and then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on.”
[679] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 57; Morley’s “Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair,” 1859.
Harvest Home. The ceremonies which graced the ingathering of the harvest in bygone times have gradually disappeared, and at the present day only remnants of the old usages which once prevailed are still preserved. Shakespeare, who has chronicled so many of our old customs, and seems to have had a special delight in illustrating his writings with these characteristics of our social life, has given several interesting allusions to the observances which, in his day, graced the harvest-field. Thus, in Warwickshire, the laborers, at their harvest-home, appointed a judge to try misdemeanors committed during harvest, and those who were sentenced to punishment were placed on a bench and beaten with a pair of boots. Hence the ceremony was called “giving them the boots.” It has been suggested that this custom is alluded to in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (i. 1), where Shakespeare makes Proteus, parrying Valentine’s raillery, say, “nay, give me not the boots.”
In Northamptonshire, when any one misconducted himself in the field during harvest, he was subjected to a mock-trial at the harvest-home feast, and condemned to be booted, a description of which we find in the introduction to Clare’s “Village Minstrel:” “A long form is placed in the kitchen, upon which the boys who have worked well sit, as a terror and disgrace to the rest, in a bent posture, with their hands laid on each other’s backs, forming a bridge for the ‘hogs’ (as the truant boys are called) to pass over; while a strong chap stands on each side with a boot-legging, soundly strapping them as they scuffle over the bridge, which is done as fast as their ingenuity can carry them.” Some, however, think the allusion in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” is to the diabolical torture of the boot. Not a great while before this play was written, it had been inflicted, says Douce,[680] in the presence of King James, on one Dr. Fian, a supposed wizard, who was charged with raising the storms that the king encountered in his return from Denmark. The unfortunate man was afterwards burned. This horrible torture, we are told,[681] consisted in the leg and knee of the criminal being enclosed within a tight iron boot or case, wedges of iron being then driven in with a mallet between the knee and the iron boot. Sir Walter Scott, in “Old Mortality,” has given a description of Macbriar undergoing this punishment. At a later period “the boot” signified, according to Nares,[682] an instrument for tightening the leg or hand, and was used as a cure for the gout, and called a “bootikins.” The phrase “to give the boots” seems to have been a proverbial expression, signifying “Don’t make a laughing-stock of me; don’t play upon me.”
[680] “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 21.
[681] Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 47; Douce has given a representation of this instrument of torture from Millœus’s “Praxis Criminis Persequendi,” Paris, 1541.
[682] “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 95.
In the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), where Lorenzo says:
“Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn: With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear, And draw her home with music,”
we have, doubtless, an allusion to the “Hock Cart” of the old harvest-home. This was the cart which carried the last corn away from the harvest-field,[683] and was generally profusely decorated, and accompanied by music, old and young shouting at the top of their voices a doggerel after the following fashion:
“We have ploughed, we have sowed, We have reaped, we have mowed, We have brought home every load, Hip, hip, hip! harvest home.”[684]
[683] Cf. “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3):
“His chin, new reap’d, Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home.”
[684] See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 16-33.
In “Poor Robin’s Almanack” for August, 1676, we read:
“Hoacky is brought home with hallowing, Boys with plumb-cake the cart following.”
Holyrood Day (September 14). This festival,[685] called also Holy-Cross Day, was instituted by the Romish Church, on account of the recovery of a large piece of the supposed cross by the Emperor Heraclius, after it had been taken away, on the plundering of Jerusalem, by Chosroes, king of Persia. Among the customs associated with this day was one of going a-nutting, alluded to in the old play of “Grim, the Collier of Croydon” (ii. 1):
“To morrow is Holy-rood day, When all a-nutting take their way.”
[685] See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 372, 373. In Lincolnshire this day is called “Hally-Loo Day.”
Shakespeare mentions this festival in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 1), where he represents the Earl of Westmoreland relating how,
“On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there, Young Harry Percy and brave Archibald, That ever-valiant and approved Scot, At Holmedon met.”
St. Lambert’s Day (September 17). This saint, whose original name was Landebert, but contracted into Lambert, was a native of Maestricht, in the seventh century, and was assassinated early in the eighth.[686] His festival is alluded to in “Richard II.” (i. 1), where the king says:
“Be ready, as your lives shall answer it, At Coventry, upon Saint Lambert’s day.”
[686] See Butler’s “Lives of the Saints.”
Michaelmas (September 29). In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 1), this festival is alluded to by Simple, who, in answer to Slender, whether he had “the Book of riddles” about him, replies: “Why, did you not lend it to Alice Shortcake upon All-hallowmas last, a fortnight afore Michaelmas,”—this doubtless being an intended blunder.
In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Francis says: “Let me see—about Michaelmas next I shall be.”
St. Etheldreda, or Audry, commemorated in the Romish Calendar on the 23d of June, but in the English Calendar on the 17th of October, was daughter of Annas, King of the East Angles. She founded the convent and church of Ely, on the spot where the cathedral was subsequently erected. Formerly, at Ely, a fair was annually held, called in her memory St. Audry’s Fair, at which much cheap lace was sold to the poorer classes, which at first went by the name of St. Audry’s lace, but in time was corrupted into “tawdry lace.” Shakespeare makes an allusion to this lace in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), where Mopsa says: “Come, you promised me a tawdry lace, and a pair of sweet gloves;” although in his time the expression rather meant a rustic necklace.[687] An old English historian makes St. Audry die of a swelling in her throat, which she considered as a particular judgment for having been in her youth addicted to wearing fine necklaces.[688]
[687] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 868; Brady’s “Clavis Calendaria.”
[688] Nich. Harpsfield, “Hist. Eccl. Anglicana,” p. 86.
St. Crispin’s Day (October 25) has for centuries been a red-letter day in the calendar of the shoemakers, being the festival of their patron saint. According to tradition, the brothers Crispin and Crispinian, natives of Rome, having become converted to Christianity, travelled to Soissons, in France, in order to preach the gospel. Being desirous, however, of rendering themselves independent, they earned their daily bread by making shoes, with which, it is said, they furnished the poor, at an extremely low price. When the governor of the town discovered that they maintained the Christian faith, and also tried to make proselytes of the inhabitants, he ordered them to be beheaded. From this time the shoemakers have chosen them for their tutelary saints. Shakespeare has perpetuated the memory of this festival by the speech which he has given to Henry V. (iv. 3), before the battle of Agincourt:
“This day is call’d the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say, ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’”
St. Dennis has been adopted as the patron saint of France (October 9), in the same manner as the English have chosen St. George. The guardianship of the two countries is thus expressed in the chorus to the old ballad:
“St. George he was for England, St. Denis was for France, Singing, Honi soit qui mal y pense.”
King Henry (“Henry V.,” v. 2) says to Princess Katherine: “Shall not thou and I, between Saint Dennis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English,” etc. In “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), Charles says:
“Saint Dennis bless this happy stratagem, And once again we’ll sleep secure in Rouen.”
Hallowmas (November 1) is one of the names for the feast of All-hallows, that is, All-Saints. Shakespeare alludes to a custom relative to this day, some traces of which are still to be found in Staffordshire, Cheshire, and other counties. The poor people go from parish to parish a-souling, as they term it, that is, begging, in a certain lamentable tone, for soul-cakes, at the same time singing a song which they call the souler’s song. This practice is, no doubt, a remnant of the Popish ceremony of praying for departed souls, especially those of friends, on the ensuing day, November 2, the feast of All-Souls.[689] The following is a specimen of the doggerel sung on these occasions:
“Soul! soul! for a soul-cake; Pray, good mistress, for a soul-cake. One for Peter, and two for Paul, Three for them who made us all.
Soul! soul! for an apple or two: If you’ve got no apples, pears will do. Up with your kettle, and down with your pan, Give me a good big one, and I’ll be gone. Soul! soul! for a soul-cake, etc.
An apple, a pear, a plum, or a cherry, Is a very good thing to make us merry.”
[689] See “British Popular Customs,” p. 404.
In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 1), Speed thus speaks of this practice: “To watch, like one that fears robbing; to speak puling,[690] like a beggar at Hallowmas.”
[690] Puling, or singing small, as Bailey explains the word.
The season of Hallowmas, having been frequently mild, has been, from time immemorial, proverbially called “All-hallown summer,” i. e., late summer. Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Prince Henry, likening Falstaff, with his old age and young passions, to this November summer, addresses him: “Farewell, thou latter spring! Farewell, All-hallown summer.”[691] In some parts of Germany there is a proverb, “All-Saints’ Day brings the second summer;” and in Sweden there is often about this time a continuance of warm, still weather, which is called “the All-Saints’ rest.”
[691] See Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” 1873, pp. 141-143.
There is another reference to this festival in “Richard II.” (v. 1), where the king says of his wife:
“She came adorned hither like sweet May, Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.”
All-Souls’ Day (November 2)—which is set apart by the Roman Catholic Church for a solemn service for the repose of the dead—was formerly observed in this country, and among the many customs celebrated in its honor were ringing the passing bell, making soul-cakes, blessing beans, etc.[692] In “Richard III.” (v. 1), Buckingham, when led to execution, says:
“This is All-Souls’ day, fellows, is it not?
Sheriff. It is, my lord.
Buckingham. Why, then, All-Souls’ day is my body’s doomsday.”
[692] See “British Popular Customs,” p. 409.
Lord Mayor’s Day (November 9). A custom which was in days gone by observed at the inauguration dinner was that of the Lord Mayor’s fool leaping, clothes and all, into a large bowl of custard. It is alluded to in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 5), by Lafeu: “You have made shift to run into’t, boots and spurs and all, like him that leaped into the custard.” Ben Jonson, in his “Devil’s an Ass” (i. 1), thus refers to it:
“He may, perchance, in tail of a sheriff’s dinner, Skip with a rime o’ the table, from new nothing, And take his almain leap into a custard, Shall make my lady mayoress and her sisters, Laugh all their hoods over their shoulders.”
St. Martin’s Day (November 11). The mild weather about this time has given rise to numerous proverbs; one of the well-known ones being “St. Martin’s little summer,” an allusion to which we find in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 2), where Joan of Arc says:
“Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days.”
which Johnson paraphrases thus: “Expect prosperity after misfortune, like fair weather at Martlemas, after winter has begun.” As an illustration, too, of this passage, we may quote from the Times, October 6, 1864: “It was one of those rare but lovely exceptions to a cold season, called in the Mediterranean St. Martin’s summer.”
A corruption of Martinmas is Martlemas. Falstaff is jocularly so called by Poins, in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 2), as being in the decline, as the year is at this season: “And how doth the martlemas, your master?”
This was the customary time for hanging up provisions to dry, which had been salted for winter use.
St. Nicholas (December 6). This saint was deemed the patron of children in general, but more particularly of all schoolboys, among whom his festival used to be a very great holiday. Various reasons have been assigned for his having been chosen as the patron of children—either because the legend makes him to have been a bishop while yet a boy, or from his having restored three young scholars to life who had been cruelly murdered,[693] or, again, on account of his early abstinence when a boy. In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1) he is alluded to in this capacity:
“Speed. Come, fool, come; try me in thy paper.
Launce. There; and Saint Nicholas be thy speed.”
[693] See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 25; “The Church of Our Fathers,” by D. Rock, 1853, vol. iii. p. 215; Gent. Mag., 1777, vol. xliii. p. 158; see Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. pp. 601, 602; Brady’s “Clavis Calendaria.”
Nicholas’s clerks was, and still is, a cant term for highwaymen and robbers; but though the expression is very common, its origin is a matter of uncertainty. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1) it is thus alluded to:
“Gadshill. Sirrah, if they meet not with Saint Nicholas’ clerks, I’ll give thee this neck.
Chamberlain. No. I’ll none of it: I pr’thee, keep that for the hangman: for I know thou worshippest Saint Nicholas as truly as a man of falsehood may.”
Christmas. Among the observances associated with this season, to which Shakespeare alludes, we may mention the Christmas Carol, a reference to which is probably made in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), by Titania:
“No night is now with hymn or carol blest.”
Hamlet (ii. 2) quotes two lines from a popular ballad, entitled the “Song of Jephthah’s Daughter,” and adds: “The first row of the pious chanson will show you more.”[694]
[694] Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. i. p. 198.
In days gone by, the custom of carol-singing was most popular, and Warton, in his “History of English Poetry,” notices a license granted in 1562 to John Tysdale for printing “Certayne goodly carowles to be songe to the glory of God;” and again “Crestenmas Carowles auctorisshed by my lord of London.”[695]
[695] See Sandy’s “Christmastide, its History, Festivities, and Carols;” also Athenæum, Dec. 20, 1856.
In the “Taming of the Shrew” (Ind., sc. 2) Sly asks whether “a comonty[696] is not a Christmas gambold.” Formerly the sports and merry-makings at this season were on a most extensive scale, being presided over by the Lord of Misrule.[697] Again, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Biron speaks of “a Christmas comedy.”
[696] His blunder for comedy.
[697] See “British Popular Customs,” 1876, pp. 459, 463; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 943; “Antiquarian Repertory,” vol. i. p. 218.
As we have noticed, too, in our chapter on Plants, a gilt nutmeg was formerly a common gift at Christmas, and on other festive occasions, to which an allusion is probably made in the same scene. Formerly, at this season, the head of the house assembled his family around a bowl of spiced ale, from which he drank their healths, then passed it to the rest, that they might drink too. The word that passed among them was the ancient Saxon phrase wass hael[698], i. e., to your health. Hence this came to be recognized as the wassail or wassel bowl; and was the accompaniment to festivity of every kind throughout the year. Thus Hamlet (i. 4) says:
“The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail.”
[698] This was a deep draught to the health of any one, in which it was customary to empty the glass or vessel.
And in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Biron speaks of:
“wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs.”
In “Macbeth” (i. 7), it is used by Lady Macbeth in the sense of intemperance, who, speaking of Duncan’s two chamberlains, says:
“Will I with wine and wassail so convince, That memory, the warder of the brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only.”
In “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 4), Cæsar advises Antony to live more temperately, and to leave his “lascivious wassails.”[699]
[699] See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 441-449.
In the same way, a “wassail candle” denoted a large candle lighted up at a festival, a reference to which occurs in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2):
“Chief-Justice. You are as a candle, the better part burnt out.
Falstaff. A wassail candle, my lord; all tallow.”
A custom which formerly prevailed at Christmas, and has not yet died out, was for mummers to go from house to house, attired in grotesque attire, performing all kinds of odd antics.[700] Their performances, however, were not confined to this season. Thus, in “Coriolanus” (ii. 1) Menenius speaks of making “faces like mummers.”
[700] See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 461, 469, 478, 480.
Cakes and Ale. It was formerly customary on holidays and saints’ days to make cakes in honor of the day. In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 3), Sir Toby says: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” To which the Clown replies: “Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.”
Wakes. In days gone by, the church wake was an important institution, and was made the occasion for a thorough holiday. Each church, when consecrated, was dedicated to a saint, and on the anniversary of that day was kept the wake. In many places there was a second wake on the birthday of the saint. At such seasons, the floor of the church was strewed with rushes and flowers, and in the churchyard tents were erected, to supply cakes and ale for the use of the merrymakers on the following day, which was kept as a holiday. They are still kept up in many parishes, but in a very different manner.[701] In “King Lear” (iii. 6), Edgar says: “Come, march to wakes and fairs, and market towns.” We may also compare “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2) and “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 2). In “Hamlet” (i. 4) it is used in the sense of revel.
[701] See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. pp. 1-15.
XII. BIRTH AND BAPTISM
As every period of human life has its peculiar rites and ceremonies, its customs and superstitions, so has that ever all-eventful hour which heralds the birth of a fresh actor upon the world’s great stage. From the cradle to the grave, through all the successive epochs of man’s existence, we find a series of traditional beliefs and popular notions, which have been handed down to us from the far-distant past. Although, indeed, these have lost much of their meaning in the lapse of years, yet in many cases they are survivals of primitive culture, and embody the conceptions of the ancestors of the human race. Many of these have been recorded by Shakespeare, who, acting upon the great principle of presenting his audience with matters familiar to them, has given numerous illustrations of the manners and superstitions of his own country, as they existed in his day. Thus, in “Richard III.” (iii. 1), when he represents the Duke of Gloster saying,
“So wise so young, they say, do never live long,”
he alludes to the old superstition, still deeply rooted in the minds of the lower orders, that a clever child never lives long. In Bright’s “Treatise of Melancholy” (1586, p. 52), we read: “I have knowne children languishing of the splene, obstructed and altered in temper, talke with gravity and wisdom surpassing those tender years, and their judgments carrying a marvellous imitation of the wisdome of the ancient, having after a sort attained that by disease, which others have by course of yeares; whereof I take it the proverb ariseth, that ‘they be of shorte life who are of wit so pregnant.’” There are sundry superstitious notions relating to the teething of children prevalent in our own and other countries. In “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6), the Duke of Gloster, alluding to the peculiarities connected with his, birth, relates how
“The midwife wonder’d; and the women cried ‘O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!’ And so I was; which plainly signified That I should snarl, and bite, and play the dog.”
It is still believed, for instance, in many places, that if a child’s first tooth appears in the upper jaw it is an omen of its dying in infancy; and when the teeth come early it is regarded as an indication that there will soon be another baby. In Sussex there is a dislike to throwing away the cast teeth of children, from a notion that, should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the child’s new tooth would be exactly like the animal’s that had bitten the old one. In Durham, when the first teeth come out the cavities must be filled with salt, and each tooth burned, while the following words are repeated:
“Fire, fire, burn bone, God send me my tooth again.”
In the above passage, then, Shakespeare simply makes the Duke of Gloster refer to that extensive folk-lore associated with human birth, showing how careful an observer he was in noticing the whims and oddities of his countrymen.
Again, one of the foremost dangers supposed to hover round the new-born infant was the propensity of witches and fairies to steal the most beautiful and well-favored children, and to leave in their places such as were ugly and stupid. These were usually called “changelings.” Shakespeare alludes to this notion in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), where Puck says:
“Because that she, as her attendant, hath A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king; She never had so sweet a changeling.”
And further on, in the same scene, Oberon says:
“I do but beg a little changeling boy, To be my henchman.”
As a fairy is, in each case, the speaker, the changeling in this case denotes the child taken by them. So, too, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3), in the passage where the Shepherd relates: “it was told me, I should be rich by the fairies; this is some changeling:—open’t.” As the child here found was a beautiful one, the changeling must naturally mean the child stolen by the fairies, especially as the gold left with it is conjectured to be fairy gold. The usual signification, however, of the term changeling is thus marked by Spenser (“Fairy Queen,” I. x. 65).
“From thence a faery thee unweeting reft, There as thou slepst in tender swadling band, And her base elfin brood there for thee left: Such men do chaungelings call, so chaunged by faeries theft.”
Occasionally fairies played pranks with new-born children by exchanging them. To this notion King Henry refers (“1 Henry IV.” i. 1) when, speaking of Hotspur compared with his own profligate son, he exclaims:
“O that it could be prov’d That some night-tripping fairy had exchang’d In cradle-clothes our children where they lay, And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!”
To induce the fairies to restore the stolen child, it was customary in Ireland either to put the one supposed of being a changeling on a hot shovel, or to torment it in some other way. It seems that, in Denmark, the mother heats the oven, and places the changeling on the peel, pretending to put it in, or whips it severely with a rod, or throws it into the water. In the Western Isles of Scotland idiots are supposed to be the fairies’ changelings, and, in order to regain the lost child, parents have recourse to the following device. They place the changeling on the beach, below high-water mark, when the tide is out, and pay no heed to its screams, believing that the fairies, rather than suffer their offspring to be drowned by the rising water, will convey it away, and restore the child they had stolen. The sign that this has been done is the cessation of the child’s screaming. The most effectual preservative, however, against fairy influence, is supposed to be baptism; and hence, among the superstitious, this rite is performed as soon as possible.
A form of superstition very common in days gone by was the supposed influence of the “Evil eye,” being designated by the terms “o’erlooked,” “forelooked,” or “eye-bitten,” certain persons being thought to possess the power of inflicting injury by merely looking on those whom they wished to harm. Even the new-born child was not exempt from this danger, and various charms were practised to avert it. In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Pistol says of Falstaff:
“Vile worm, thou wast o’erlook’d, even in thy birth.”
This piece of folk-lore may be traced back to the time of the Romans, and, in the late Professor Conington’s translation of the “Satires of Persius,” it is thus spoken of: “Look here! a grandmother or a superstitious aunt has taken baby from his cradle, and is charming his forehead against mischief by the joint action of her middle-finger and her purifying spittle; for she knows right well how to check the evil eye.”[702] Is is again alluded to in the “Merchant of Venice” (iii. 2), where Portia, expressing to Bassanio her feelings of regard, declares:
“Beshrew your eyes, They have o’erlook’d me, and divided me; One half of me is yours, the other half yours;”
and in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 1), Aaron speaks of Tamora as:
“faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus.”
[702] See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 383; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 44-46, 326.
This superstition, however, is not yet obsolete, but lingers on in many country places.
We may also compare a similar phrase made use of by Cleopatra (“Antony and Cleopatra,” iii. 7), in answer to Enobarbus:
“Thou hast forspoke my being in these wars,”
the word forespeak having anciently had the meaning of charm or bewitch, like forbid in “Macbeth” (i. 3):
“He shall live a man forbid.”[703]
[703] See Napier’s “Folk-Lore of West of Scotland,” 1879, pp. 34-40; Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology;” Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 73, 74.
Among the numerous customs associated with the birth of a child may be mentioned the practice of giving presents at the announcement of this important event. In “Henry VIII.” (v. 1), on the old lady’s making known to the king the happy tidings of the birth of a princess, he says to Lovell:
“Give her an hundred marks. I’ll to the queen.”
The old lady, however, resents what she considers a paltry sum:
“An hundred marks! By this light, I’ll ha’ more. An ordinary groom is for such payment. I will have more, or scold it out of him.”
It was an ancient custom—one which is not quite out of use—for the sponsors at christenings to offer silver or gilt spoons as a present to the child. These were called “apostle spoons,” because the extremity of the handle was formed into the figure of one or other of the apostles. Such as were opulent and generous gave the whole twelve; those who were moderately rich or liberal escaped at the expense of the four evangelists, or even sometimes contented themselves with presenting one spoon only, which exhibited the figure of any saint, in honor of whom the child received its name. In “Henry VIII.” (v. 2) it is in allusion to this custom that, when Cranmer professes to be unworthy of being a sponsor to the young princess, Shakespeare makes the king reply:
“Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons.”
A story is related of Shakespeare promising spoons to one of Ben Jonson’s children, in a collection of anecdotes entitled “Merry Passages and Jests,” compiled by Sir Nicholas L’Estrange (MSS. Harl. 6395): “Shakespeare was godfather to one of Ben Jonson’s children, and after the christ’ning, being in a deepe study, Jonson came to cheere him up, and ask’t him why he was so melancholy. ‘No faith, Ben (sayes he), not I; but I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I have resolv’d at last.’ ‘I pr’y thee, what?’ sayes he. ‘I’ faith, Ben, I’le e’en give him a douzen good Latin spoones, and thou shalt translate them.’” “Shakespeare,” says Mr. Thoms,[704] “willing to show his wit, if not his wealth, gave a dozen spoons, not of silver, but of latten, a name formerly used to signify a mixed metal resembling brass, as being the most appropriate gift to the child of a father so learned.” In Middleton’s “Chaste Maid of Cheapside,” 1620:
“2 Gossip. What has he given her? What is it, gossip?
3 Gossip. A fair, high-standing cup, and two great ’postle spoons, one of them gilt.”
[704] “Anecdotes and Traditions,” 1839, p. 3.
And Beaumont and Fletcher, in the “Noble Gentleman” (v. 1):
“I’ll be a gossip, Beaufort, I have an odd apostle spoon.”
The gossip’s feast, held in honor of those who were associated in the festivities of a christening, was a very ancient English custom, and is frequently mentioned by dramatists of the Elizabethan age. The term gossip or godsip, a Saxon word signifying cognata ex parte dei, or godmother, is well defined by Richard Verstegan, in his “Restitution of Decayed Intelligence.” He says: “Our Christian ancestors, understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents and such as undertooke for the child at baptism, called each other by the name of godsib, which is as much as to say that they were sib together, that is, of kin together through God. And the childe, in like manner, called such his godfathers or godmothers.”
As might be expected, it is often alluded to by Shakespeare. Thus, in the “Comedy of Errors” (v. 1), we read:
“Abbess. Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons: and till this present hour My heavy burthen ne’er delivered. The duke, my husband, and my children both, And you the calendars of their nativity, Go to a gossip’s feast, and go with me; After so long grief, such festivity!
Duke. With all my heart I’ll gossip at this feast.”
And again, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), the mischievous Puck says:
“sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab; And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob, And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.”
And, once more, we find Capulet, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), saying to the Nurse:
“Peace, you mumbling fool! Utter your gravity o’er a gossip’s bowl; For here we need it not.”
Referring to entertainments at christenings, we find the following in the “Batchelor’s Banquet,” 1603 (attributed to Dekker): “What cost and trouble it will be to have all things fine against the Christening Day; what store of sugar, biskets, comphets, and caraways, marmalet, and marchpane, with all kinds of sweet-suckers and superfluous banqueting stuff, with a hundred other odd and needless trifles, which at that time must fill the pockets of dainty dames,” by which it appears the ladies not only ate what they pleased, but pocketed likewise. Upon this and the falling-off of the custom of giving “apostle spoons” at the christening, we read in “Shipman’s Gossip,” 1666:
“Especially since gossips now Eat more at christenings than bestow. Formerly when they us’d to troul Gilt bowls of sack, they gave the bowl; Two spoons at least; an use ill kept; ’Tis well now if our own be left.”
Strype tells us that, in 1559, the son of Sir Thomas Chamberlayne was baptized at St. Benet’s Church, Paul’s Wharf, when “the Church was hung with cloth of arras, and after the christening were brought wafers, comfits, and divers banqueting dishes, and hypocras and Muscadine wine, to entertain the guests.”
In “Henry VIII.” (v. 4), the Porter says: “Do you look for ale and cakes here, you rude rascals?”
A term formerly in use for the name given at baptism was “Christendom,” an allusion to which we find in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (i. 1), where Helena says:
“with a world Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips,”
the meaning evidently being, a number of pretty, fond, adopted appellations or Christian names to which blind Cupid stands godfather. The expression is often used for baptism by old writers; and Singer[705] quotes from “King John” (iv. 1):
“By my christendom, So I were out of prison, and kept sheep, I should be as merry as the day is long.”
[705] “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. iv. p. 314.
Steevens observes that, in the Puritanical times, it was usual to christen children with the names of moral and religious virtues—a practice to which allusion seems to be made in “The Tempest” (ii. 1) by Antonio:
“Temperance was a delicate wench.”
So Taylor, the Water-Poet, in his description of a strumpet, says:
“Though bad they be, they will not bate an ace, To be call’d Prudence, Temperance, Faith, or Grace.”
In days gone by a “chrisom” or “christom child” was one who had recently been baptized, and died within the month of birth, the term having originated in the “face-cloth, or piece of linen, put upon the head of a child newly baptized.” The word was formed from the chrism, that is, the anointing, which formed a part of baptism before the Reformation. Thus, in “Henry V.” (ii. 3), the hostess, Mrs. Quickly, means “chrisom child” in the following passage, where she speaks of Falstaff’s death: “’A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child.” In a beautiful passage of Bishop Taylor’s “Holy Dying” (chap. i. sec. 2), this custom is thus spoken of: “Every morning creeps out of a dark cloud, leaving behind it an ignorance and silence deep as midnight, and undiscerned as are the phantoms that made a chrisom child to smile.” Referring to the use of the chrisom-cloth in connection with baptism, it appears that, after the usual immersion in water, the priest made a cross on the child’s head with oil, after which the chrisom was put on, the priest asking at the same time the infant’s name, and saying, “Receive this white, pure, and holy vestment, which thou shalt wear before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest inherit eternal life. Amen.” It was to be worn seven days; but after the Reformation, however, the use of oil was omitted, and the chrisom was worn by the child till the mother’s churching, when it was returned to the church. If the child died before the churching, it was buried in the chrisom, and hence it may be that the child itself was called a chrisom or chrisomer.[706] Thus, it will be seen that Dame Quickly simply compares the manner of Falstaff’s death to that of a young infant. In registers and bills of mortality we find infants alluded to under the term “Chrisoms.” Burn, in his “History of Parish Registers” (1862, p. 127), gives the subjoined entry from a register of Westminster Abbey: “The Princess Ann’s child a chrissome bu. in ye vault, Oct. 22, 1687.”
[706] Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1859, pp. 299, 300; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 160; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 84, 85.
In Graunt’s “Bills of Mortality,” cited in Johnson’s Dictionary, we read: “When the convulsions were but were but few, the number of chrisoms and infants was greater.” The “bearing-cloth” was the mantle which generally covered the child when it was carried to the font. It is noticed in the “Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3), by the Shepherd, who, on the discovery of Perdita, says to the Clown: “Here’s a sight for thee: look thee, a bearing-cloth for a squire’s child! Look thee here; take up, take up, boy: open’t.” In Stow’s “Chronicle” (1631, p. 1039), we are told that about this time it was not customary “for godfathers and godmothers generally to give plate at the baptisme of children, but only to give ‘christening shirts,’ with little bands and cuffs, wrought either with silk or blue thread. The best of them, for chief persons, were edged with a small lace of black silk and gold, the highest price of which, for great men’s children, was seldom above a noble, and the common sort, two, three, or four, and six shillings a piece.”
XIII. MARRIAGE
The style of courtship which prevailed in Shakespeare’s time, and the numerous customs associated with the marriage ceremony, may be accurately drawn from the many allusions interspersed through his plays. From these, it would seem that the mode of love-making was much the same among all classes, often lacking that polish and refined expression which are distinguishing characteristics nowadays. As Mr. Drake remarks,[707] the amatory dialogues of Hamlet, Hotspur, and Henry V. are not more refined than those which occur between Master Fenton and Anne Page, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” between Lorenzo and Jessica, in the “Merchant of Venice,” and between Orlando and Rosalind, in “As You Like It.” These last, which may be considered as instances taken from the middle class of life, together with a few drawn from the lower rank of rural manners, such as the courtship of Touchstone and Audrey, and of Silvius and Phœbe, in “As You Like It,” are good illustrations of this subject, although it must be added that, in point of fancy, sentiment, and simplicity, the most pleasing love-scenes in Shakespeare are those of Romeo and Juliet and of Florizel and Perdita.
[707] “Shakespeare and His Times,” 1817, vol. i. p. 220.
The ancient ceremony of betrothing seems still to have been in full use in Shakespeare’s day. Indeed, he gives us several interesting passages upon the subject of troth-plight. Thus, in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 1), we learn that the unhappiness of the poor, dejected Mariana was caused by a violation of the troth-plight:
“Duke. She should this Angelo have married; was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed: between which time of the contract, and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister. But mark how heavily this befell to the poor gentlewoman: there she lost a noble and renowned brother, in his love toward her ever most kind and natural; with him, the portion and sinew of her fortune, her marriage-dowry; with both, her combinate husband, this well-seeming Angelo.
Isabella. Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?
Duke. Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort; swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonour; in few, bestowed her on her own lamentation, which she yet wears for his sake; and he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but relents not.”
It is evident that Angelo and Mariana were bound by oath; the nuptial was appointed; there was a prescribed time between the contract and the performance of the solemnity of the Church. The lady, however, having lost her dowry, the contract was violated by her “combinate” or affianced husband—the oath, no doubt, having been tendered by a minister of the Church, in the presence of witnesses. In “Twelfth Night” (iv. 3) we have a minute description of such a ceremonial; for, when Olivia is hastily espoused to Sebastian, she says:
“Now go with me and with this holy man Into the chantry by: there, before him, And underneath that consecrated roof, Plight me the full assurance of your faith; That my most jealous and too doubtful soul May live at peace. He shall conceal it, Whiles you are willing it shall come to note: What time we will our celebration keep According to my birth.”
This, then, was a private ceremony before a single witness, who would conceal it till the proper period of the public ceremonial. Olivia, fancying that she has thus espoused the page, repeatedly calls him “husband;” and, being rejected, she summons the priest to declare (v. 1):
“what thou dost know Hath newly pass’d between this youth and me.”
The priest answers:
“A contract of eternal bond of love, Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands, Attested by the holy close of lips, Strengthen’d by interchangement of your rings; And all the ceremony of this compact Seal’d in my function, by my testimony: Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave I have travell’d but two hours.”
Again, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), which contains many a perfect picture of real rustic life, it appears that, occasionally, the troth-plight was exchanged without the presence of a priest; but that witnesses were essential to the ceremony:
“Florizel. ... O, hear me breathe my life Before this ancient sir, who, it should seem, Hath sometime lov’d: I take thy hand, this hand, As soft as dove’s down and as white as it, Or Ethiopian’s tooth, or the fann’d snow, that’s bolted By the northern blasts twice o’er.
Polixenes. What follows this?— How prettily the young swain seems to wash The hand, was fair before!—I have put you out:— But, to your protestation; let me hear What you profess.
Florizel. Do, and be witness to’t.
Polixenes. And this my neighbour too?
Florizel. And he, and more Than he, and men; the earth, the heavens, and all; That, were I crown’d the most imperial monarch, Thereof most worthy; were I the fairest youth That ever made eye swerve; had force and knowledge More than was ever man’s, I would not prize them Without her love; for her employ them all; Commend them, and condemn them, to her service, Or to their own perdition.
Polixenes. Fairly offer’d.
Camillo. This shows a sound affection.
Shepherd. But, my daughter, Say you the like to him?
Perdita. I cannot speak So well, nothing so well; no, nor mean better: By the pattern of mine own thoughts I cut out The purity of his.
Shepherd. Take hands, a bargain! And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to’t: I give my daughter to him, and will make Her portion equal his.[708]
Florizel. O, that must be I’ the virtue of your daughter: one being dead, I shall have more than you can dream of yet; Enough then for your wonder. But, come on, Contract us ’fore these witnesses.
Shepherd. Come, your hand; And, daughter, yours.”
[708] On entering into any contract, or plighting of troth, the clapping of the hands together set the seal, as in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2), where Leontes says:
“Ere I could make thee open thy white hand, And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter I am yours forever.”
So, too, in “The Tempest” (iii. 1):
“Miranda. My husband, then?
Ferdinand. Ay, with a heart as willing As bondage e’er of freedom: here’s my hand.
Miranda. And mine, with my heart in’t.”
And in the old play of “Ram Alley,” by Barry (1611), we read, “Come, clap hands, a match.” The custom is not yet disused in common life.
To the argument of Polixenes, that the father of Florizel ought to know of his proceeding, the young man answers:
“Come, come, he must not. Mark our contract.”
And then the father, discovering himself, exclaims:
“Mark your divorce, young sir.”
Here, then, as Mr. Knight remarks,[709] in the publicity of a village festival, the hand of the loved one is solemnly taken by her lover, who breathes his love before the ancient stranger who is accidentally present. The stranger is called to be a witness to the protestation, and so is the neighbor who has come with him. The maiden is called upon by her father to speak, and then the old man adds:
“Take hands, a bargain!”
[709] “The Stratford Shakespeare,” 1854, vol. i p. 70.
The friends are to bear witness to it:
“I give my daughter to him, and will make Her portion equal his.”
The impatient lover then again exclaims:
“Contract us ’fore these witnesses.”
The shepherd takes the hands of the youth and the maiden. Again the lover exclaims:
“Mark our contract.”
The ceremony is left incomplete, for the princely father discovers himself with:
“Mark your divorce, young sir.”
It appears, therefore, that espousals before witnesses were considered as constituting a valid marriage, if followed up within a limited time by the marriage of the Church. However much the Reformed Church might have endeavored to abrogate this practice, it was unquestionably the ancient habit of the people.[710] It was derived from the Roman law, and still prevails in the Lutheran Church.
[710] Knight’s “Stratford Shakespeare,” p. 73.
Besides exchanging kisses,[711] accompanied with vows of everlasting affection, and whispering lovers’ reassurances of fidelity, it was customary to interchange rings. In Shakespeare’s plays, however, espousals are made with and without the use of the ring. Thus, in the case of Ferdinand and Miranda, we read of their joining hands only (“Tempest,” iii. 1):
“Ferdinand. Ay, with a heart as willing As bondage e’er of freedom; here’s my hand.
Miranda. An mine, with my heart in’t; and now farewell, Till half an hour hence.”
[711] Cf. “King John” (ii. 2):
“King Philip. Young princes, close your hands.
Austria. And your lips too; for, I am well assured, That I did so, when I was first assured.”
In the passage already quoted from “Twelfth Night” (v. 1) there seems to have been a mutual interchange of rings.
Some, indeed, considered that a betrothal was not complete unless each spouse gave the other a circlet. Lady Anne, in “Richard III.” (i. 2), is made to share in this misconception:
“Gloster. Vouchsafe to wear this ring.
Anne. To take, is not to give.
Gloster. Look, how my ring encompasseth thy finger, Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart: Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.”
In “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 2) we read:
“Julia. Keep this remembrance for thy Julia’s sake (giving a ring).
Proteus. Why, then, we’ll make exchange: here, take you this.
Julia. And seal the bargain with a holy kiss.”
A joint, or gimmal, ring was anciently a common token among lovers, an allusion to which is made by Emilia, in “Othello” (iv. 3): “I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring.” Their nature will be best understood by a passage in Dryden’s “Don Sebastian” (1690, act v.):
“A curious artist wrought them, With joints so close, as not to be perceiv’d; Yet are they both each other’s counterpart, ... and in the midst, A heart, divided in two halves, was plac’d.”
They were generally made of two or three hoops, so chased and engraved that, when fastened together by a single rivet, the whole three formed one design, the usual device being a hand. When an engagement was contracted, the ring was taken apart, each spouse taking a division, and the third one being presented to the principal witness of the contract.[712] Hence such a ring was known as a “Sponsalium Annulis,” to which Herrick thus refers:
“Thou sent’st me a true-love knot, but I Returned a ring of jimmals, to imply Thy love hath one knot, mine a triple tye.”
[712] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 363; “Archæologia,” vol. xiv. p. 7; Jones’s “Finger Ring Lore,” 1877, pp. 313-318.
The term is used by the Duke of Anjou, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 2):
“I think, by some odd gimmors or device, Their arms are set like clocks, still to strike on; Else ne’er could they hold out so as they do.”
Again, in “Henry V.” (iv. 2), Grandpré tells how,
“in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit Lies foul with chew’d grass, still and motionless.”
Most readers of the “Merchant of Venice” remember the mirthful use which Shakespeare makes of lovers’ rings. Portia says (iii. 2), when giving her wealth and self to Bassanio:
“I give them with this ring; Which when you part from, lose, or give away, Let it presage the ruin of your love.”
The last act, too, gives several particulars about lovers’ rings, which, in Elizabethan England,[713] often had posies engraved on them, and were worn by men on the left hand. Gratiano, for example, says:
“About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring That she did give me; whose posy was For all the world like cutlers’ poetry Upon a knife, ‘Love me and leave me not.’”
[713] See Jeaffreson’s “Brides and Bridals,” 1873, vol. i. pp. 77, 78.
Again Bassanio exclaims:
“Why, I were best to cut my left hand off, And swear I lost the ring defending it.”
In “Taming of the Shrew” Shakespeare gives numerous allusions to the customs of his day connected with courtship and marriage. Indeed, in the second act (sc. 2) we have a perfect betrothal scene:
“Petruchio. Give me thy hand, Kate: I will unto Venice, To buy apparel ’gainst the wedding-day.— Provide the feast, father, and bid the guests; I will be sure my Katharine shall be fine.
Baptista. I know not what to say: but give me your hands; God send you joy, Petruchio! ’tis a match.
Gremio. Tranio. Amen, say we; we will be witnesses.
Petruchio. Father, and wife, and gentlemen, adieu; I will to Venice; Sunday comes apace. We will have rings, and things, and fine array; And, kiss me, Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday.”
Although Katharina is only his spouse, and Baptista not yet his father-in-law, Petruchio, in accordance with fashion, calls her “wife” and him “father.” The spouses of old times used to term one another “husband” and “wife,” for, as they argued, they were as good as husband and wife.
Formerly there was a kind of betrothal or marriage contract prevalent among the low orders called “hand-fasting,” or “hand-festing,” said to have been much in use among the Danes, and which is mentioned by Ray in his “Glossary of Northumbrian Words.” It simply means hand-fastening or binding. In “Cymbeline” (i. 5) the phrase is used in its secondary sense by the Queen, who, speaking of Pisanio, declares that he is
“A sly and constant knave, Not to be shak’d; the agent for his master, And the remembrancer of her, to hold The hand-fast to her lord.”
In the “Christian State of Matrimony,” 1543, we find the following illustration of this custom: “Yet in this thing almost must I warn every reasonable and honest person to beware that in the contracting of marriage they dissemble not, nor set forth any lie. Every man, likewise, must esteem the person to whom he is ‘handfasted’ none otherwise than for his own spouse; though as yet it be not done in the church, nor in the street. After the handfasting and making of the contract, the church-going and wedding should not be deferred too long.” The author then goes on to rebuke a custom “that at the handfasting there is made a great feast and superfluous banquet.” Sir John Sinclair, in the “Statistical account of Scotland” (1794, vol. xii. p. 615), tells us that at a fair annually held at Eskdalemuir, Dumfriesshire, “it was the custom for the unmarried persons of both sexes to choose a companion according to their liking, with whom they were to live till that time next year. This was called ‘handfasting,’ or hand-in-fist. If they were pleased with each other at that time then they continued together for life; if not, they separated, and were free to make another choice as at the first.”
Shakespeare has given us numerous illustrations of the marriage customs of our forefathers, many of which are interesting as relics of the past, owing to their having long ago fallen into disuse. The fashion of introducing a bowl of wine into the church at a wedding, which is alluded to in the “Taming of the Shrew” (iii. 2), to be drunk by the bride and bridegroom and persons present, immediately after the marriage ceremony, is very ancient. Gremio relates how Petruchio
“stamp’d and swore, As if the vicar meant to cozen him. But after many ceremonies done, He calls for wine:—‘A health!’ quoth he, as if He had been aboard, carousing to his mates After a storm:—quaff’d off the muscadel, And threw the sops[714] all in the sexton’s face; Having no other reason But that his beard grew thin and hungerly, And seem’d to ask him sops as he was drinking.”
[714] Sops in wine.
It existed even among our Gothic ancestors, and is mentioned in the ordinances of the household of Henry VII., “For the Marriage of a Princess:—‘Then pottes of ipocrice to be ready, and to be put into cupps with soppe, and to be borne to the estates, and to take a soppe and drinke.’” It was also practised at the magnificent marriage of Queen Mary and Philip, in Winchester Cathedral, and at the marriage of the Elector Palatine to the daughter of James I., in 1612-13. Indeed, it appears to have been the practice at most marriages. In Jonson’s “Magnetic Lady” it is called a “knitting cup;” in Middleton’s “No Wit like a Woman’s,” the “contracting cup.” In Robert Armin’s comedy of “The History of the Two Maids of More Clacke,” 1609, the play begins with:
“Enter a maid strewing flowers, and a serving-man perfuming the door.
Maid. Strew, strew.
Man. The muscadine stays for the bride at church: The priest and Hymen’s ceremonies tend To make them man and wife.”
Again, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Scornful Lady” (i. 1), the custom is referred to:[715]
“If my wedding-smock were on, Were the gloves bought and given, the license come, Were the rosemary branches dipp’d, and all The hippocras and cakes eat and drunk off.”
[715] See “Brand’s Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 136, 139.
We find it enjoined in the Hereford missal. By the Sarum missal it is directed that the sops immersed in this wine, as well as the liquor itself, and the cup that contained it, should be blessed by the priest. The beverage used on this occasion was to be drunk by the bride and bridegroom and the rest of the company.
The nuptial kiss in the church was anciently part of the marriage ceremony, as appears from a rubric in one of the Salisbury missals. In the “Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare has made an excellent use of this custom, where he relates how Petruchio (iii. 2)
“took the bride about the neck And kiss’d her lips with such a clamorous smack That, at the parting, all the church did echo.”
Again, in “Richard II.” (v. 1), where the Duke of Northumberland announces to the king that he is to be sent to Pomfret, and his wife to be banished to France, the king exclaims:
“Doubly divorc’d!—Bad men, ye violate A twofold marriage,—’twixt my crown and me, And then, betwixt me and my married wife.— Let me unkiss the oath twixt thee and me; And yet not so, for with a kiss ’twas made.”
Marston, too, in his “Insatiate Countess,” mentions it:
“The kisse thou gav’st me in the church, here take.”
The practice is still kept up among the poor; and Brand[716] says it is “still customary among persons of middling rank as well as the vulgar, in most parts of England, for the young men present at the marriage ceremony to salute the bride, one by one, the moment it is concluded.”
[716] “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 140.
Music was the universal accompaniment of weddings in olden times.[717] The allusions to wedding music that may be found in the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Elizabethan dramatists, testify, as Mr. Jeaffreson points out, that, in the opinion of their contemporaries, a wedding without the braying of trumpets and beating of drums and clashing of cymbals was a poor affair. In “As You Like It” (v. 4), Hymen says:
“Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing.”
[717] “Brides and Bridals,” 1873, vol. i. p. 252.
And in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet says:
“Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast; Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change.”
It seems to have been customary for the bride at her wedding to wear her hair unbraided and hanging loose over her shoulders. There may be an allusion to this custom in “King John” (iii. 1), where Constance says:
“O Lewis, stand fast! the devil tempts thee here In likeness of a new untrimmed bride.”
At the celebration of her marriage with the Palatine, Elizabeth Stuart wore “her hair dishevelled and hanging down her shoulders.” Heywood speaks of this practice in the following graphic words:
“At length the blushing bride comes, with her hair Dishevelled ’bout her shoulders.”
It has been suggested that the bride’s veil, which of late years has become one of the most conspicuous features of her costume, may be nothing more than a milliner’s substitute, which in old time concealed not a few of the bride’s personal attractions, and covered her face when she knelt at the altar. Mr. Jeaffreson[718] thinks it may be ascribed to the Hebrew ceremony; or has come from the East, where veils have been worn from time immemorial. Some, again, connect it with the yellow veil which was worn by the Roman brides. Strange, too, as it may appear, it is nevertheless certain that knives and daggers were formerly part of the customary accoutrements of brides. Thus, Shakespeare, in the old quarto, 1597, makes Juliet wear a knife at the friar’s cell, and when she is about to take the potion. This custom, however, is easily accounted for, when we consider that women anciently wore a knife suspended from their girdle. Many allusions to this practice occur in old writers.[719] In Dekker’s “Match Me in London,” 1631, a bride says to her jealous husband:
“See, at my girdle hang my wedding knives! With those dispatch me.”
[718] “Brides and Bridals,” vol. i. p. 177.
[719] See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 131-133.
In the “Witch of Edmonton,” 1658, Somerton says:
“But see, the bridegroom and bride come; the new Pair of Sheffield knives fitted both to one sheath.”
Among other wedding customs alluded to by Shakespeare we may mention one referred to in “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1), where Katharina, speaking of Bianca, says to her father:
“She is your treasure, she must have a husband: I must dance bare-foot on her wedding-day, And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell,”
it being a popular notion that unless the elder sisters danced barefoot at the marriage of a younger one, they would inevitably become old maids, and be condemned “to lead apes in hell.” The expression “to lead apes in hell,” applied above to old maids, has given rise to much discussion, and the phrase has not yet been satisfactorily explained. Steevens suggests that it might be considered an act of posthumous retribution for women who refused to bear children to be condemned to the care of apes in leading-strings after death. Malone says that “to lead apes” was in Shakespeare’s time one of the employments of a bear-ward, who often carried about one of these animals with his bear. Nares explains the expression by reference to the word ape as denoting a fool, it probably meaning that those coquettes who made fools of men, and led them about without real intention of marriage, would have them still to lead against their will hereafter. In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Beatrice says: “therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-ward, and lead his apes into hell.” Douce[720] tells us that homicides and adulterers were in ancient times compelled, by way of punishment, to lead an ape by the neck, with their mouths affixed in a very unseemly manner to the animal’s tail.
[720] “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 203.
In accordance with an old custom, the bride, on the wedding-night, had to dance with every guest, and play the amiable, however much against her own wishes. In “Henry VIII.” (v. 2), there seems to be an allusion to this practice, where the king says:
“I had thought, They had parted so much honesty among them, At least, good manners, as not thus to suffer A man of his place, and so near our favour, To dance attendance on their lordships’ pleasures.”
In the “Christian State of Matrimony” (1543) we read thus: “Then must the poor bryde kepe foote with a dauncers, and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude, and shameless soever he be.”
As in our own time, so, too, formerly, flowers entered largely into the marriage festivities. Most readers will at once call to mind that touching scene in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), where Capulet says, referring to Juliet’s supposed untimely death:
“Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse.”
It seems, too, in days gone by to have been customary to deck the bridal bed with flowers, various allusions to which are given by Shakespeare. Thus, in “Hamlet” (v. 1), the queen, speaking of poor Ophelia, says:
“I hop’d thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid.”
In “The Tempest” (iv. 1) we may compare the words of Prospero, who, alluding to the marriage of his daughter Miranda with Ferdinand, by way of warning, cautions them lest
“barren hate, Sour-ey’d disdain and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both.”
In the Papal times no new-married couple could go to bed together till the bridal-bed had been blessed—this being considered one of the most important of the marriage ceremonies. “On the evening of the wedding-day,” says Mr. Jeaffreson,[721] “when the married couple sat in state in the bridal-bed, before the exclusion of the guests, who assembled to commend them yet again to Heaven’s keeping, one or more priests, attended by acolytes swinging to and fro lighted censers, appeared in the crowded chamber to bless the couch, its occupants, and the truckle-bed, and fumigate the room with hallowing incense.” In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Oberon says:
“Now, until the break of day, Through this house each fairy stray. To the best bride-bed will we, Which by us shall blessed be; And the issue there create Ever shall be fortunate.”
[721] “Brides and Bridals,” vol. i. p. 98; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 175.
Steevens, in illustration of this custom, quotes from Chaucer’s “The Merchant’s Tale” (ed. Tyrwhitt), line 9693:
“And when the bed was with the preest yblessed.”
The formula for this curious ceremony is thus given in the Manual for the use of Salisbury: “Nocte vero sequente cum sponsus et sponsa ad lectum pervenerint, accedat sacerdos et benedicat thalamum, dicens. Benedic, Domine, thalamum istum et omnes habitantes in eo; ut in tua pace consistant, et in tua voluntate permaneant: et in tuo amore vivant et senescant et multiplicentur in longitudine dierum. Per Dominum.—Item benedictio super lectum. Benedic, Domine, hoc cubiculum, respice, quinon dormis neque dormitas. Qui custodis Israel, custodi famulos tuos in hoc lecto quiescentes ab omnibus fantasmaticis demonum illusionibus. Custodi eos vigilantes ut in preceptis tuis meditentur dormientes, et te per soporem sentiant; ut hic et ubique depensionis tuæ muniantur auxilio. Per Dominum.—Deinde fiat benedictio super eos in lecto tantum cum oremus. Benedicat Deus corpora vestra et animas vestras; et det super eos benedictionem sicut benedixit Abraham, Isaac, et Jacob, Amen. His peractis aspergat eos aqua benedicta, et sic discedat et dimittat eos in pace.”[722]
[722] See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 123, 124.
In the French romance of Melusine, the bishop who marries her to Raymondin blesses the nuptial-bed. The ceremony is there presented in a very ancient cut, of which Douce has given a copy. The good prelate is sprinkling the parties with holy water. It appears that, occasionally, during the benediction, the married couple only sat on the bed; but they generally received a portion of the consecrated bread and wine. It is recorded in France, that, on frequent occasions, the priest was improperly detained till midnight, while the wedding guests rioted in the luxuries of the table, and made use of language that was extremely offensive to the clergy. It was therefore ordained, in the year 1577, that the ceremony of blessing the nuptial-bed should for the future be performed in the day-time, or at least before supper, and in the presence of the bride and bridegroom, and of their nearest relations only.
On the morning after the celebration of the marriage, it was formerly customary for friends to serenade a newly married couple, or to greet them with a morning song to bid them good-morrow. In “Othello” (iii. 1) this custom is referred to by Cassio, who, speaking of Othello and Desdemona, says to the musicians:
“Masters, play here; I will content your pains: Something that’s brief; and bid, ‘Good morrow, general.’”
According to Cotgrave, the morning-song to a newly married woman was called the “hunt’s up.” It has been suggested that this may be alluded to by Juliet (iii. 5), who, when urging Romeo to make his escape, tells him:
“Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes; O, now I would they had chang’d voices too! Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray, Hunting thee hence with hunt’s-up to the day. O, now be gone.”
In olden times torches were used at weddings—a practice, indeed, dating as far back as the time of the Romans. From the following lines in Herrick’s “Hesperides,” it has been suggested that the custom once existed in this country:
“Upon a maid that dyed the day she was marryed.
That morne which saw me made a bride, The ev’ning witnest that I dy’d. Those holy lights, wherewith they guide Unto the bed the bashful bride, Serv’d but as tapers for to burne And light my reliques to their urne. This epitaph which here you see, Supply’d the Epithalamie.”[723]
[723] See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 159.
Shakespeare alludes to this custom in “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), where Joan of Arc, thrusting out a burning torch on the top of the tower at Rouen, exclaims:
“Behold, this is the happy wedding torch, That joineth Rouen unto her countrymen.”
In “The Tempest,” too (iv. 1), Iris says:
“no bed-right shall be paid Till Hymen’s torch be lighted.”
According to a Roman marriage custom, the bride, on her entry into her husband’s house, was prohibited from treading over his threshold, and lest she should even so much as touch it, she was always lifted over it. Shakespeare seems inadvertently to have overlooked this usage in “Coriolanus” (iv. 5), where he represents Aufidius as saying:
“I lov’d the maid I married; never man Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart, Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold.”
Lucan in his “Pharsalia” (lib. ii. 1. 359), says:
“Translata vetuit contingere limina planta.”
Once more, Sunday appears to have been a popular day for marriages; the brides of the Elizabethan dramas being usually represented as married on Sundays. In the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1), Petruchio, after telling his future father-in-law “that upon Sunday is the wedding-day,” and laughing at Katharina’s petulant exclamation, “I’ll see thee hanged on Sunday first,” says:
“Father, and wife, and gentlemen, adieu; I will to Venice; Sunday comes apace:— We will have rings, and things, and fine array; And, kiss me, Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday.”
Thus Mr. Jeaffreson, speaking of this custom in his “Brides and Bridals,” rightly remarks: “A fashionable wedding, celebrated on the Lord’s Day in London, or any part of England, would nowadays be denounced by religious people of all Christian parties. But in our feudal times, and long after the Reformation, Sunday was of all days of the week the favorite one for marriages. Long after the theatres had been closed on Sundays, the day of rest was the chief day for weddings with Londoners of every social class.”
Love-charms have from the earliest times been much in request among the credulous, anxious to gain an insight into their matrimonial prospects.[724] In the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), we have an allusion to the practice of kneeling and praying at wayside crosses for a happy marriage, in the passage where Stephano tells how his mistress
“doth stray about By holy crosses, where she kneels and prays For happy wedlock hours.”
[724] See “Merry Wives of Windsor,” iv. 2.
The use of love-potions by a despairing lover, to secure the affections of another, was a superstitious practice much resorted to in olden times.[725] This mode of enchantment, too, was formerly often employed in our own country, and Gay, in his “Shepherd’s Week,” relates how Hobnelia was guilty of this questionable practice:
“As I was wont, I trudged, last market-day, To town with new-laid eggs, preserved in hay. I made my market long before ’twas night; My purse grew heavy, and my basket light. Straight to the ’pothecary’s shop I went, And in love-powder all my money spent. Behap what will, next Sunday after prayers, When to the ale-house Lubberkin repairs, These golden flies into his mug I’ll throw, And soon the swain with fervent love shall glow.”
[725] See Potter’s “Antiquities of Greece;” Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. iii. p. 306.
In the “Character of a Quack Astrologer,” 1673, quoted by Brand, we are told how “he trappans a young heiress to run away with a footman, by persuading a young girl ’tis her destiny; and sells the old and ugly philtres and love-powder to procure them sweethearts.” Shakespeare has represented Othello as accused of winning Desdemona “by conjuration and mighty magic.” Thus Brabantio (i. 2) says:
“thou hast practised on her with foul charms; Abus’d her delicate youth with drugs, or minerals, That weaken motion.”
And in the following scene he further repeats the same charge against Othello:
“She is abus’d, stol’n from me, and corrupted By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks; For nature so preposterously to err, Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense, Sans witchcraft could not.”
Othello, however, in proving that he had won Desdemona only by honorable means, addressing the Duke, replies:
“by your gracious patience, I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms, What conjuration, and what mighty magic,— For such proceeding I am charg’d withal,— I won his daughter.”
It may have escaped the poet’s notice that, by the Venetian law, the giving love-potions was held highly criminal, as appears in the code “Della Promission del Malefico,” cap. xvii., “Del Maleficii et Herbarie.”
A further allusion to this practice occurs in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1). where Puck and Oberon amuse themselves at Titania’s expense.[726]
[726] See page 227.
An expression common in Shakespeare’s day for any one born out of wedlock is mentioned by the Bastard in “King John” (i. 1):
“In at the window, or else o’er the hatch.”
The old saying also that “Hanging and wiving go by destiny” is quoted by Nerissa in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 9). In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Don Pedro makes use of an old popular phrase in asking Claudio: “When mean you to go to church?” referring to his marriage.
A solemn and even melancholy air was often affected by the beaux of Queen Elizabeth’s time, as a refined mark of gentility, a most sad and pathetic allusion to which custom is made by Arthur in “King John” (iv. 1):
“Methinks, nobody should be sad but I: Yet, I remember, when I was in France, Young gentlemen would be as sad as night, Only for wantonness.”[727]
[727] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 563.
There are frequent references to this fashion in our old writers. Thus, in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humor” (i. 3), we read: “Why, I do think of it; and I will be more proud, and melancholy, and gentlemanlike than I have been, I’ll insure you.”