Kitabı oku: «Folk-lore of Shakespeare», sayfa 17

 
“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.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 skilful
Conserv’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 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 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 alight
And 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 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,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 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: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 had
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: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:

 
“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.’”
 

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,⁶³² 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.”
 

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”⁶³³ 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.”

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.”⁶³⁴ 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.”
 

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, an^ce 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,”⁶³⁵ 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.⁶³⁶

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,⁶³⁷ 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.”
 

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!”