Folk-lore of Shakespeare

Owing to the supposed highly venomous character of the toad, “superstition,” says Pennant,584 “gave it preternatural powers, and made it a principal ingredient in the incantations of nocturnal hags.” Thus, in Macbeth (iv. 1), the witch says:

“Toad that under cold stone,Days and nights has thirty-oneSwelter’d venom sleeping got,Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.”

Pennant adds that this was intended “for a design of the first consideration, that of raising and bringing before the eyes of Macbeth a hateful second-sight of the prosperity of Banquo’s line. This shows the mighty power attributed to this animal by the dealers in the magic art.”

The evil spirit, too, has been likened by one of our master bards to the toad, as a semblance of all that is devilish and disgusting (“Paradise Lost,” iv. 800):

“Him they found,Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,Assaying with all his devilish art to reachThe organs of her fancy.”

In “Macbeth” (i. 1), the paddock or toad is made the name of a familiar spirit:

“Paddock585 calls. – Anon!”

Wasp. So easily, we are told,586 is the wrathful temperament of this insect aroused, that extreme irascibility can scarcely be better expressed than by the term “waspish.” It is in this sense that Shakespeare has applied the epithet, “her waspish-headed son,” in the “Tempest” (iv. 1), where we are told that Cupid is resolved to be a boy outright. Again, in “As You Like It” (iv. 3), Silvius says:

“I know not the contents; but, as I guessBy the stern brow and waspish actionWhich she did use as she was writing of it,It bears an angry tenor.”

Again, in the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1), Petruchio addresses his intended spouse in language not highly complimentary:

“Pet. Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry.Kath. If I be waspish, best beware my sting.Pet. My remedy is, then, to pluck it out.”

In the celebrated scene in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), in which the reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius is effected, the word is used in a similar sense:

“I’ll use you for my mirth, yea, for my laughter,When you are waspish.”587

Water-Fly. This little insect, which, on a sunny day, may be seen almost on every pool, dimpling the glassy surface of the water, is used as a term of reproach by Shakespeare. Thus, Hamlet (v. 2), speaking of Osric, asks Horatio, “Dost know this water-fly?” In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), Thersites exclaims: “Ah, how the poor world is pestered with such water-flies, diminutives of nature.” Johnson says it is the proper emblem of a busy trifler, because it skips up and down upon the surface of the water without any apparent purpose.

CHAPTER 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 skinsOf ill-shap’d fishes; and about his shelvesA 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 streamHe 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.”588

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.”589

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,590 and in Nares’s “Glossary”591 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.592

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:593

“Thou sun, that comfort’st, burn! – Speak, and be hang’d;For each true word, a blister! and each falseBe as a caut’rizing to the root o’ the tongue,Consuming it with speaking!”

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 beThe trumpet any more.”594

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.595 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.596

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,597 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.598 Thus, in “King John” (iii. 1), Pandulph speaks of it:

“And falsehood falsehood cures; as fire cools fireWithin the scorched veins of one new burn’d.”

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 loveIs 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-bloodWhich 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 blindWith 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.”599 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.”600 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.

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 nativityThe 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 stigmaticMark’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 handShall not in their issue stand;Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,Nor mark prodigious, such as areDespised in nativity,Shall upon their children be.”601

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 superstition602 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?’”

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.603 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 1566.604 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.”

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 nurseInto a rapture lets her baby cryWhile 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.”605

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 dependingHath 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 theyFind 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.606 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.

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.”607

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, he had in view the subjoined passages from Harsnet’s “Declaration of Popish Impostures” (1603), a work which, it has been suggested,608 “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.”

“O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow,Thy element’s below! – Where is this daughter?”

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 returnsTo 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: