Folk-lore of Shakespeare

“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 JoveWill o’er some high-viced city hang his poisonIn 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. Bucknill609 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.”

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.610

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.”611 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.”

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.612 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 handWill whisper music to my weary spirit.Warwick. Call for the music in the other room.”

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 soulsThat stay his cure; their malady convincesThe 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 leavesThe healing benediction. With this strange virtueHe 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.613 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 1058.614 The custom was also observed by French kings; and on Easter Sunday, 1686, Louis XIV. is said to have touched 1600 persons.

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).615

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 lungsCoin words till their decay, against those measles,Which we disdain should tetter us, yet soughtThe 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 bloodThe earth when it is sick, and cur’st the worldO’ 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 outBy 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.616 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.”617 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 skilfulConserv’d of maidens’ hearts.”

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 followersHave 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 mummy618 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.”

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”619 the following:

“Sweet S. Withold, of thy lenitie, defend us from extremitie.”

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 alightAnd her troth plight,And, aroint thee, witch, aroint thee!”

For what purpose, as Mr. Singer620 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.”

Paralysis. An old term for chronic paralysis was “cold palsies,” which is used by Thersites in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1).621

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 hathWith 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,622 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.623

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 itCry – ‘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 strongAs 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:624

“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.”

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.625 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.”

The belief in slow poisoning was general in bygone times, although no better founded on fact, remarks Dr. Bucknill,626 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 hadFor 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:627 “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,628 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.”

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,629 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:

“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.630

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,631 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: