Folk-lore of Shakespeare

“Next the clown doth out-rushWith the beard of the bush.”

According to an old superstition, much hair on the head has been supposed to indicate an absence of intellect, a notion referred to by Antipholus of Syracuse, in the “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 2): “there’s many a man hath more hair than wit.” In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1), the same proverbial sentence is mentioned by Speed. Malone quotes the following lines upon Suckling’s “Aglaura,” as an illustration of this saying:915

“This great voluminous pamphlet may be saidTo be like one that hath more hair than head;More excrement than body: trees which sproutWith broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit.”

Steevens gives an example from “Florio:” “A tisty-tosty wag-feather, more haire than wit.”

Excessive fear has been said to cause the hair to stand on end: an instance of which Shakespeare records in “Hamlet” (iii. 4), in that celebrated passage where the Queen, being at a loss to understand her son’s strange appearance during his conversation with the Ghost, which is invisible to her, says:

“And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,Starts up, and stands on end.”

A further instance occurs in “The Tempest” (i. 2), where Ariel, describing the shipwreck, graphically relates how

“All, but mariners,Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,Then all a-fire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,With hair up-staring – then like reeds, not hair —Was the first man that leap’d.”

Again, Macbeth says (i. 3):

“why do I yield to that suggestionWhose horrid image doth unfix my hair?”

And further on he says (v. 5):

“The time has been, my senses would have cool’dTo hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hairWould at a dismal treatise rouse, and stirAs life were in’t.”

In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) it is referred to by Suffolk as a sign of madness:

“My hair be fix’d on end, as one distract.”

And, once more, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), Hastings declares:

“My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses.”

Another popular notion mentioned by Shakespeare is, that sudden fright or great sorrow will cause the hair to turn white. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Falstaff, in his speech to Prince Henry, tells him: “thy father’s beard is turned white with the news.”

Among the many instances recorded to establish the truth of this idea, it is said that the hair and beard of the Duke of Brunswick whitened in twenty-four hours upon his hearing that his father had been mortally wounded in the battle of Auerstadt. Marie Antoinette, the unfortunate queen of Louis XVI., found her hair suddenly changed by her troubles; and a similar change happened to Charles I., when he attempted to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. Mr. Timbs, in his “Doctors and Patients” (1876, p. 201), says that “chemists have discovered that hair contains an oil, a mucous substance, iron, oxide of manganese, phosphate and carbonate of iron, flint, and a large proportion of sulphur. White hair contains also phosphate of magnesia, and its oil is nearly colourless. When hair becomes suddenly white from terror, it is probably owing to the sulphur absorbing the oil, as in the operation of whitening woollen cloths.”

Hair was formerly used metaphorically for the color, complexion, or nature of a thing. In “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1), Worcester says:

“I would your father had been here,The quality and hair of our attemptBrooks no division.”

In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Nice Valour” it is so used:

“A lady of my hair cannot want pitying.”

Hands. Various superstitions have, at different times, clustered round the hand. Thus, in palmistry, a moist one is said to denote an amorous constitution. In “Othello” (iii. 4) we have the following allusion to this popular notion:

“Othello. Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.Desdemona. It yet has felt no age, nor known no sorrow.Othello. This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart.”

Again, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2), Iras says: “There’s a palm presages chastity;” whereupon Charmian adds: “If an oily palm be not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot scratch mine ear.” And, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 2), Dromio of Syracuse speaks of barrenness as “hard in the palm of the hand.”

A dry hand, however, has been supposed to denote age and debility. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2) the Lord Chief Justice enumerates this among the characteristics of such a constitution.916

In the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), Launcelot, referring to the language of palmistry, calls the hand “the table,” meaning thereby the whole collection of lines on the skin within the hand: “Well, if any man in Italy have a fairer table, which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have good fortune.” He then alludes to one of the lines in the hand, known as the “line of life:” “Go to, here’s a simple line of life.”

In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 5) palmistry is further mentioned:

“Gaoler’s Daughter. Give me your hand.Gerrold. Why?Gaoler’s Daughter. I can tell your fortune.”

It was once supposed that little worms were bred in the fingers of idle servants. To this notion Mercutio refers in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), where, in his description of Queen Mab, he says:

“Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,Not half so big as a round little wormPrick’d from the lazy finger of a maid.”

This notion is alluded to by John Banister, a famous surgeon in Shakespeare’s day, in his “Compendious Chyrurgerie” (1585, p. 465): “We commonly call them worms, which many women, sitting in the sunshine, can cunningly picke out with needles, and are most common in the handes.”

A popular term formerly in use for the nails on the ten fingers was the “ten commandments,” which, says Nares,917 “doubtless led to the swearing by them, as by the real commandments.” Thus, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the Duchess of Gloster says to the queen:

“Could I come near your beauty with my nailsI’d set my ten commandments in your face.”

In the same way the fingers were also called the “ten bones,” as a little further on in the same play, where Peter swears “by these ten bones.”

The phrase “of his hands” was equivalent to “of his inches, or of his size, a hand being the measure of four inches.” So, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), Simple says: “Ay, forsooth: but he is as tall a man of his hands as any is between this and his head,” “the expression being used probably for the sake of a jocular equivocation in the word tall, which meant either bold or high.”918

Again, in the “Winter’s Tale” (v. 2), the Clown tells the Shepherd: “I’ll swear to the prince, thou art a tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk; but I’ll swear it, and I would thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands.”

A proverbial phrase for being tall from necessity was “to blow the nail.” In “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 5) the king says:

“When dying clouds contend with growing light,What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,Can neither call it perfect day, nor night.”

It occurs in the song at the end of “Love’s Labour’s Lost:”

“And Dick the shepherd blows his nail.”

“To bite the thumb” at a person implied an insult; hence, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 1), Sampson says: “I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.”

The thumb, in this action, we are told, “represented a fig, and the whole was equivalent to a fig for you.”919 Decker, in his “Dead Term” (1608), speaking of the various groups that daily frequented St. Paul’s Church, says: “What swearing is there, what shouldering, what justling, what jeering, what byting of thumbs, to beget quarrels?”

Hare-lip. A cleft lip, so called from its supposed resemblance to the upper lip of a hare. It was popularly believed to be the mischievous act of an elf or malicious fairy. So, in “King Lear” (iii. 4), Edgar says of Gloster: “This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he … squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip.” In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 2), Oberon, in blessing the bridal-bed of Theseus and Hippolyta, says:

“Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,*****Shall upon their children be.”

The expression “hang the lip” meant to drop the lip in sullenness or contempt. Thus, in “Troilus and Cressida” (iii. 1), Helen explains why her brother Troilus is not abroad by saying: “He hangs the lip at something.” We may compare, too, the words in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4): “a foolish hanging of thy nether lip.”

Head. According to the old writers on physiognomy, a round head denoted foolishness, a notion to which reference is made in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 3), in the following dialogue, where Cleopatra, inquiring about Octavia, says to the Messenger:

“Bear’st thou her face in mind? Is’t long, or round?Messenger. Round, even to faultiness.Cleopatra. For the most part, too, they are foolish that are so.”

In Hill’s “Pleasant History,” etc. (1613), we read: “The head very round, to be forgetful and foolish.” Again: “The head long, to be prudent and wary.”

Heart. The term “broken heart,” as commonly applied to death from excessive grief, is not a vulgar error, but may arise from violent muscular exertion or strong mental emotions. In “Macbeth” (iv. 3), Malcolm says:

“The grief, that does not speak,Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”

We may compare, too, Queen Margaret’s words to Buckingham, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), where she prophesies how Gloster

“Shall split thy very heart with sorrow.”

Mr. Timbs, in his “Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity” (1861, p. 149), has given the following note on the subject: “This affection was, it is believed, first described by Harvey; but since his day several cases have been observed. Morgagni has recorded a few examples: among them, that of George II., who died suddenly of this disease in 1760; and, what is very curious, Morgagni himself fell a victim to the same malady. Dr. Elliotson, in his Lumleyan Lectures on Diseases of the Heart, in 1839, stated that he had only seen one instance; but in the ‘Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine’ Dr. Townsend gives a table of twenty-five cases, collected from various authors.”

In olden times the heart was esteemed the seat of the understanding. Hence, in “Coriolanus” (i. 1), the Citizen speaks of “the counsellor heart.” With the ancients, also, the heart was considered the seat of courage, to which Shakespeare refers in “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 2):

“Servant. Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,They could not find a heart within the beast.Cæsar. The gods do this in shame of cowardice:Cæsar should be a beast without a heart,If he should stay at home to-day for fear.”

Liver. By a popular notion, the liver was anciently supposed to be the seat of love, a superstition to which Shakespeare frequently alludes. Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3), Biron, after listening to Longaville’s sonnet, remarks:

“This is the liver vein, which makes flesh a deity,A green goose, a goddess; pure, pure idolatry.”

In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iv. 1), Friar Francis says:

“If ever love had interest in his liver.”

Again, in “As You Like It” (iii. 2), Rosalind, professing to be able to cure love, which, he says, is “merely a madness,” says to Orlando, “will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.” In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 4), the Duke, speaking of women’s love, says:

“Their love may be call’d appetite,No motion of the liver, but the palate,” etc.

And Fabian (ii. 5), alluding to Olivia’s supposed letter to Malvolio, says: “This wins him, liver and all.”

Once more, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), Pistol alludes to the liver as being the inspirer of amorous passions, for, speaking of Falstaff, he refers to his loving Ford’s wife “with liver burning hot.”920 Douce says, “there is some reason for thinking that this superstition was borrowed from the Arabian physicians, or at least adopted by them; for, in the Turkish tales, an amorous tailor is made to address his wife by the titles of ‘thou corner of my liver, and soul of my love;’ and, in another place, the King of Syria, who had sustained a temporary privation of his mistress, is said to have had ‘his liver, which had been burnt up by the loss of her, cooled and refreshed at the sight of her.’”921 According to an old Latin distich:

“Cor sapit, pulmo loquitur, fel commoret irasSplen ridere facit, cogit amare jecur.”

Bartholomæus, in his “De Proprietatibus Rerum” (lib. v. 39), informs us that “the liver is the place of voluptuousness and lyking of the flesh.”

Moles. These have, from time immemorial, been regarded as ominous, and special attention has been paid by the superstitious to their position on the body.922 In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), a mole on a child is spoken of by Oberon as a bad omen, who, speaking of the three couples who had lately been married, says:

“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.”

Iachimo (“Cymbeline,” ii. 2) represents Imogen as having

“On her left breastA mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson dropsI’ the bottom of a cowslip.”

And we may also compare the words of Cymbeline (v. 5):

“Guiderius hadUpon his neck a mole, a sanguine star;It was a mark of wonder.”

Spleen. This was once supposed to be the cause of laughter, a notion probably referred to by Isabella in “Measure for Measure” (ii. 2), where, telling how the angels weep over the follies of men, she adds:

“who, with our spleens,Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

In “Taming of the Shrew” (Induction, sc. i.), the Lord says:

“haply my presenceMay well abate the over-merry spleen,Which otherwise would grow into extremes.”

And Maria says to Sir Toby, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 2): “If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me.”

Wits. With our early writers, the five senses were usually called the “five wits.” So, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1), Beatrice says: “In our last conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed with one.” In Sonnet cxli., Shakespeare makes a distinction between wits and senses:

“But my five wits, nor my five senses canDissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.”

The five wits, says Staunton, are “common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, memory.” Johnson says, the “wits seem to have been reckoned five, by analogy to the five senses, or the five inlets of ideas.” In “King Lear” (iii. 4) we find the expression, “Bless thy five wits.”

According to a curious fancy, eating beef was supposed to impair the intellect, to which notion Shakespeare has several allusions. Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), Sir Andrew says: “Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian, or an ordinary man has: but I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.” In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 1), Thersites says to Ajax: “The plague of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel beef-witted lord!”

CHAPTER XXI

FISHES

Although it has been suggested that Shakespeare found but little recreation in fishing,923 rather considering, as he makes Ursula say, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1):

“The pleasant’st angling is to see the fishCut with her golden oars the silver stream,And greedily devour the treacherous bait,”

and that it would be difficult to illustrate a work on angling with quotations from his writings, the Rev. H. N. Ellacombe, in his interesting papers924 on “Shakespeare as an Angler,” has not only shown the strong probability that he was a lover of this sport, but further adds, that “he may be claimed as the first English poet that wrote of angling with any freedom; and there can be little doubt that he would not have done so if the subject had not been very familiar to him – so familiar, that he could scarcely write without dropping the little hints and unconscious expressions which prove that the subject was not only familiar, but full of pleasant memories to him.” His allusions, however, to the folk-lore associated with fishes are very few; but the two or three popular notions and proverbial sayings which he has quoted in connection with them help to embellish this part of our subject.

Carp. This fish was, proverbially, the most cunning of fishes, and so “Polonius’s comparison of his own worldly-wise deceit to the craft required for catching a carp” is most apt (“Hamlet,” ii. 1):925

“See you now;Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.”

This notion is founded on fact, the brain of the carp being six times as large as the average brain of other fishes.

Cockle. The badge of a pilgrim was, formerly, a cockle-shell, which was worn usually in the front of the hat. “The habit,” we are told,926 “being sacred, this served as a protection, and therefore was often assumed as a disguise.” The escalop was sometimes used, and either of them was considered as an emblem of the pilgrim’s intention to go beyond the sea. Thus, in Ophelia’s ballad (“Hamlet,” iv. 5, song), the lover is to be known:

“By his cockle hat and staff,And his sandal shoon.”

In Peele’s “Old Wives’ Tale,” 1595, we read, “I will give thee a palmer’s staff of ivory, and a scallop-shell of beaten gold.” Nares, too, quotes from Green’s “Never Too Late” an account of the pilgrim’s dress:

“A hat of straw, like to a swain,Shelter for the sun and rain,With a scallop-shell before.”

Cuttle. A foul-mouthed fellow was so called, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,927 because this fish is said to throw out of its mouth, upon certain occasions, an inky and black juice that fouls the water; and, as an illustration of its use in this sense, he quotes Doll Tearsheet’s words to Pistol, “2 Henry IV.” ii. 4: “By this wine, I’ll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me.” Dyce says that the context would seem to imply that the term is equivalent to “culter, swaggerer, bully.”928

Gudgeon. This being the bait for many of the larger fish, “to swallow a gudgeon” was sometimes used for to be caught or deceived. More commonly, however, the allusion is to the ease with which the gudgeon itself is caught, as in the “Merchant of Venice” (i. 1), where Gratiano says:

“But fish not, with this melancholy bait,For this fool-gudgeon.”

Gurnet. The phrase “soused gurnet” was formerly a well-known term of reproach, in allusion to which Falstaff, in “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 2), says, “If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet.” The gurnet, of which there are several species, was probably thought a very coarse and vulgar dish when soused or pickled.

Loach. A small fish, known also as “the groundling.” The allusion to it by one of the carriers, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1), who says, “Your chamber-lie breeds fleas like a loach,” has much puzzled the commentators. It appears, however, from a passage in Holland’s translation of Pliny’s “Natural History” (bk. ix. c. xlvii.), that anciently fishes were supposed to be infested with fleas: “Last of all some fishes there be which of themselves are given to breed fleas and lice; among which the chalcis, a kind of turgot, is one.” Malone suggests that the passage may mean, “breeds fleas as fast as a loach breeds loaches;” this fish being reckoned a peculiarly prolific one. It seems probable, however, that the carrier alludes to one of those fanciful notions which make up a great part of natural history among the common people.929 At the present day there is a fisherman’s fancy on the Norfolk coast that fish and fleas come together. “Lawk, sir!” said an old fellow, near Cromer, to a correspondent of “Notes and Queries” (Oct. 7th, 1865), “times is as you may look in my flannel-shirt, and scarce see a flea, and then there ain’t but a very few herrin’s; but times that’ll be right alive with ’em, and then there’s sartin to be a sight o’ fish.”

Mr. Houghton, writing in the Academy (May 27th, 1882) thinks that in the above passage the small river loach (Cobitis barbatula) is the fish intended. He says, “At certain times of the year, chiefly during the summer months, almost all fresh-water fish are liable to be infested with some kind of Epizoa. There are two kinds of parasitic creatures which are most commonly seen on various fish caught in the rivers and ponds of this country; and these are the Argulus foliaccus, a crustacean, and the Piscicola piscium, a small, cylindrical kind of leech.”

Mermaids. From the earliest ages mermaids have had a legendary existence – the sirens of the ancients evidently belonging to the same remarkable family. The orthodox mermaid is half woman, half fish, the fishy half being sometimes depicted as doubly-tailed. Shakespeare frequently makes his characters talk about mermaids, as in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 2), where Antipholus of Syracuse says:

“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note,To drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears;Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote:Spread o’er the silver waves thy golden hairs,And as a bed I’ll take them and there lie,And, in that glorious supposition, thinkHe gains by death, that hath such means to die.”

And, again, further on, he adds:

“I’ll stop mine ears against the mermaid’s song.”

Staunton considers that in these passages the allusion is obviously to the long-current opinion that the siren, or mermaid, decoyed mortals to destruction by the witchery of her songs. This superstition has been charmingly illustrated by Leyden, in his poem, “The Mermaid” (see Scott’s “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” vol. iv. p. 294):

“Thus, all to soothe the chieftain’s woe,Far from the maid he loved so dear,The song arose, so soft and slow,He seem’d her parting sigh to hear.*****That sea-maid’s form of pearly lightWas whiter than the downy spray,And round her bosom, heaving bright,Her glossy, yellow ringlets play.Borne on a foaming, crested wave,She reached amain the bounding prow,Then, clasping fast the chieftain brave,She, plunging, sought the deep below.”

This tradition gave rise to a curious custom in the Isle of Man, which, in Waldron’s time, was observed on the 24th of December, though afterwards on St. Stephen’s Day. It is said that, once upon a time, a fairy of uncommon beauty exerted such undue influence over the male population that she induced, by the enchantment of her sweet voice, numbers to follow her footsteps, till, by degrees, she led them into the sea, where they perished. This barbarous exercise of power had continued for a great length of time, till it was apprehended that the island would be exhausted of its defenders. Fortunately, however, a knight-errant sprang up, who discovered a means of counteracting the charms used by this siren – even laying a plot for her destruction, which she only escaped by taking the form of a wren. Although she evaded instant annihilation, a spell was cast upon her, by which she was condemned, on every succeeding New Year’s Day, to reanimate the same form, with the definite sentence that she must ultimately perish by human hand. Hence, on the specified anniversary, every effort was made to extirpate the fairy; and the poor wrens were pursued, pelted, fired at, and destroyed without mercy, their feathers being preserved as a charm against shipwreck for one year. At the present day there is no particular time for pursuing the wren; it is captured by boys alone, who keep up the old custom chiefly for amusement. On St. Stephen’s Day, a band of boys go from door to door with a wren suspended by the legs, in the centre of two hoops crossing each other at right angles, decorated with evergreens and ribbons, singing lines called “Hunt the Wren.”930

In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), Oberon speaks of hearing “a mermaid on a dolphin’s back;” and in “Hamlet,” the Queen, referring to Ophelia’s death, says (iv. 7):

“Her clothes spread wide;And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.”

In two other passages Shakespeare alludes to this legendary creature. Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) Gloster boasts that he will “drown more sailors than the mermaid shall,” and in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 2), Enobarbus relates how

“Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes,And made their bends adornings: at the helmA seeming mermaid steers.”

In all these cases Shakespeare,931 as was his wont, made his characters say what they were likely to think, in their several positions and periods of life. It has been suggested,932 however, that the idea of the mermaid, in some of the passages just quoted, seems more applicable to the siren, especially in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” where the “mermaid on a dolphin’s back” could not easily have been so placed, had she had a fish-like tail instead of legs.