Folk-lore of Shakespeare by Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer (year 2 reading books .txt) 📖
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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:
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:
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:
Though it do split you.”
We may also compare the following passage in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), where the king says:
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]
I left him almost speechless....
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:
Like poison given to work a great time after,
Now ’gins to bite the spirits.”
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:
For you a mortal mineral; which, being took,
Should by the minute feed on life, and, lingering,
By inches waste you.”
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.”
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,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.”
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.”
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:
Which I must act.”
So Ben Jonson employs it in “Sejanus” (i. 1):
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:
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):
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]
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.’”
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,
Three worms sting me.”
It is found, too, even in China and New Zealand,[633] the following charm being used in the latter country:
True indeed, indeed: true in sooth, in sooth.
You must eat the head
Of said spiny back.”
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.”
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