Kitabı oku: «Folk-lore of Shakespeare», sayfa 2

It would seem that the fairies disliked irreligious people: and so, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), the mock fairies are said to chastise unchaste persons, and those who do not say their prayers. This coincides with what Lilly, in his “Life and Times,” says: “Fairies love a strict diet and upright life; fervent prayers unto God conduce much to the assistance of those who are curious hereways,” i. e., who wish to cultivate an acquaintance with them.

Again, fairies are generally represented as great lovers and patrons of cleanliness and propriety, for the observance of which they were frequently said to reward good servants, by dropping money into their shoes in the night; and, on the other hand, they were reported to punish most severely the sluts and slovenly, by pinching them black and blue.³⁵ Thus, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Puck says:

 
“I am sent, with broom, before,
To sweep the dust behind the door.”
 

In “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Pistol, speaking of the mock fairy queen, says:

 
“Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery;”
 

and the fairies who haunt the towers of Windsor are enjoined:

 
“About, about,
Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out:
Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room:
 

*****

 
The several chairs of order look you scour
With juice of balm and every precious flower.”
 

In Ben Jonson’s ballad of “Robin Goodfellow”³⁶ we have a further illustration of this notion:

 
“When house or hearth cloth sluttish lie,
I pinch the maidens black and blue,
The bed clothes from the bed pull I,
And lay them naked all to view.
’Twixt sleep and wake
I do them take,
And on the key-cold floor them throw;
If out they cry,
Then forth I fly,
And loudly laugh I, ho, ho, ho!”
 

In “Round About our Coal Fire,” we find the following passage bearing on the subject: “When the master and mistress were laid on the pillows, the men and maids, if they had a game at romps, and blundered up stairs, or jumbled a chair, the next morning every one would swear ’twas the fairies, and that they heard them stamping up and down stairs all night, crying, ‘Waters lock’d, waters lock’d!’ when there was no water in every pail in the kitchen.” Herrick, too, in his “Hesperides,” speaks of this superstition:

 
“If ye will with Mab find grace,
Set each platter in his place;
Rake the fire up, and set
Water in, ere sun be set,
Wash your pales and cleanse your dairies,
Sluts are loathesome to the fairies:
Sweep your house; who doth not so,
Mab will pinch her by the toe.”
 

While the belief in the power of fairies existed, they were supposed to perform much good service to mankind. Thus, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Oberon says:

 
“With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait;
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest,
Ever shall in safety rest” —
 

the object of their blessing being to bring peace upon the house of Theseus. Mr. Douce³⁷ remarks that the great influence which the belief in fairies had on the popular mind “gave so much offence to the holy monks and friars, that they determined to exert all their power to expel these imaginary beings from the minds of the people, by taking the office of the fairies’ benedictions entirely into their own hands;” a proof of which we have in Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath:”

 
“I speke of many hundred yeres ago;
But now can no man see non elves mo,
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitoures and other holy freres
That serchen every land and every streme,
As thikke as motes in the sonne beme,
Blissing halles, chambres, kichenes, and boures,
Citees and burghes, castles highe and toures,
Thropes and bernes, shepenes and dairies,
This maketh that ther ben no faeries:
For ther as wont to walken was an elf
Ther walketh now the limitour himself.”
 

Macbeth, too (v. 8), in his encounter with Macduff, says:

 
“I bear a charmed life, which must not yield
To one of woman born.”
 

In the days of chivalry, the champion’s arms were ceremoniously blessed, each taking an oath that he used no charmed weapon. In Spenser’s “Fairy Queen” (book i. canto 4) we read:

 
“he bears a charmed shield,
And eke enchanted arms, that none can pierce.”
 

Fairies were amazingly expeditious in their journeys. Thus, Puck goes “swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow,” and in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” he answers Oberon, who was about to send him on a secret expedition:

 
“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.”
 

Again, the same fairy addresses him:

 
“Fairy king, attend, and mark:
I do hear the morning lark.
 
 
Oberon. Then, my queen, in silence sad,
Trip we after the night’s shade:
We the globe can compass soon,
Swifter than the wand’ring moon.”
 

Once more, Puck says:

 
“My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,” etc.
 

It was fatal, if we may believe Falstaff in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5) to speak to a fairy: “They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die.”

Fairies are accustomed to enrich their favorites; and in “A Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3) the shepherd says: “It was told me I should be rich by the fairies;”³⁸ and in “Cymbeline” (v. 4), Posthumus, on waking and finding the mysterious paper, exclaims:

 
“What fairies haunt this ground? A book? O rare one!
Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment
Nobler than that it covers,” etc.
 

At the same time, however, it was unlucky to reveal their acts of generosity, as the shepherd further tells us: “This is fairy gold, boy; and ’twill prove so; up with’t, keep it close, home, home, the next way. We are lucky, boy; and to be so still requires nothing but secrecy.”

The necessity of secrecy in fairy transactions of this kind is illustrated in Massinger and Field’s play of “The Fatal Dowry,” 1632 (iv. 1),³⁹ where Romont says:

 
“But not a word o’ it; ’tis fairies’ treasure,
Which, but reveal’d, brings on the blabber’s ruin.”
 

Among the many other good qualities belonging to the fairy tribe, we are told that they were humanely attentive to the youthful dead.⁴⁰ Thus Guiderius, in “Cymbeline,” thinking that Imogen is dead (iv. 2), says:

 
“With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
And worms will not come to thee;”⁴¹
 

there having been a popular notion that where fairies resorted no noxious creature could be found.

In the pathetic dirge of Collins a similar allusion is made:

 
“No wither’d witch shall here be seen,
No goblin lead their nightly crew;
The female fays shall haunt the green,
And dress thy grave with pearly dew.”
 

It seems, however, that they were also supposed to be malignant; but this, “it may be,” says Mr. Ritson, “was merely calumny, as being utterly inconsistent with their general character, which was singularly innocent and amiable.” Thus, when Imogen, in “Cymbeline” (ii. 2), prays on going to sleep, it must have been, says Mr. Ritson,⁴² the incubus she was so afraid of.

 
“From fairies and the tempters of the night,
Guard me, beseech ye,”⁴³
 

Hamlet, too, notices this imputed malignity of the fairies (i. 1):

 
“Then no planet strikes,
Nor fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm.”⁴⁴
 

That the fairies, however, were fond of indulging in mischievous sport at the expense of mortals is beyond all doubt, the merry pranks of Puck or Robin Goodfellow fully illustrating this item of our fairy-lore. Thus, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1) this playful fairy says:

 
“I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon and make him smile,
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:
And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab;
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,
And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough.”
 

A fairy, in another passage, asks Robin:

 
“Are you not he
That frights the maidens of the villagery,
 

*****

 
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?”
 

We have already mentioned how Queen Mab had the same mischievous humor in her composition, which is described by Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4):

 
“This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”
 

Another reprehensible practice attributed to the fairies was that of carrying off and exchanging children, such being designated changelings.⁴⁵ The special agent in transactions of the sort was also Queen Mab, and hence Mercutio says:

 
“She is the fairies’ midwife.”
 

And “she is so called,” says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, “because it was her supposed custom to steal new-born babes in the night and leave others in their place.” Mr. Steevens gives a different interpretation to this line, and says, “It does not mean that she was the midwife to the fairies, but that she was the person among the fairies whose department it was to deliver the fancies of sleeping men in their dreams, those children of an idle brain.”

CHAPTER II
WITCHES

In years gone by witchcraft was one of the grossest forms of superstition, and it would be difficult to estimate the extent of its influence in this and other countries. It is not surprising that Shakespeare should have made frequent allusions to this popular belief, considering how extensively it prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the religious and dramatic literature of the period being full of it. Indeed, as Mr. Williams⁴⁶ points out, “what the vulgar superstition must have been may be easily conceived, when men of the greatest genius or learning credited the possibility, and not only a theoretical but possible occurrence, of these infernal phenomena.” Thus, Francis Bacon was “not able to get rid of the principles upon which the creed was based. Sir Edward Coke, his contemporary, the most acute lawyer of the age, ventured even to define the devil’s agents in witchcraft. Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Matthew Hale, in 1664, proved their faith – the one by his solemn testimony in open court, the other by his still more solemn sentence.” Hence, it was only to be expected that Shakespeare should introduce into his writings descriptions of a creed which held such a prominent place in the history of his day, and which has made itself famous for all time by the thousands of victims it caused to be sent to the torture-chamber, to the stake, and to the scaffold. Thus he has given a graphic account of the celebrated Jeanne D’Arc, the Maid of Orleans, in “1 Henry VI.,” although Mr. Dowden⁴⁷ is of opinion that this play was written by one or more authors, Greene having had, perhaps, a chief hand in it, assisted by Peele and Marlowe. He says, “It is a happiness not to have to ascribe to our greatest poet the crude and hateful handling of the character of Joan of Arc, excused though to some extent it may be by the occurrence of view in our old English chronicles.”

Mr. Lecky,⁴⁸ too, regards the conception of Joan of Arc given in “1 Henry VI.” as “the darkest blot upon the poet’s genius,” but it must be remembered that we have only expressed the current belief of his day – the English vulgar having regarded her as a sorceress, the French as an inspired heroine. Talbot is represented as accusing her of being a witch, serving the Evil One, and entering Rouen by means of her sorceries (iii. 2):

 
“France, thou shalt rue this treason with thy tears,
If Talbot but survive thy treachery.
Pucelle, that witch, that damned sorceress,
Hath wrought this hellish mischief unawares,
That hardly we escaped the pride of France.”
 

Further on (v. 3) she is made to summon fiends before her, but she wishes them in vain, for they speak not, hanging their heads in sign of approaching disaster.

 
“Now help, ye charming spells and periapts;
And ye choice spirits that admonish me
And give me signs of future accidents.
You speedy helpers, that are substitutes
Under the lordly monarch of the north,
Appear and aid me in this enterprise.”
 

But she adds:

 
“See, they forsake me! Now the time is come
That France must vail her lofty-plumed crest,
And let her head fall into England’s lap.
My ancient incantations are too weak,
And hell too strong for me to buckle with:
Now, France, thy glory droopeth to the dust.”
 

Finally, convicted of practising sorcery, and filling “the world with vicious qualities,” she was condemned to be burned. Her death, however, Sir Walter Scott⁴⁹ says, “was not, we are sorry to say, a sacrifice to superstitious fear of witchcraft, but a cruel instance of wicked policy, mingled with national jealousy and hatred. The Duke of Bedford, when the ill-starred Jeanne fell into his hands, took away her life in order to stigmatize her memory with sorcery, and to destroy the reputation she had acquired among the French.”

The cases of the Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore, also immortalized by Shakespeare, are both referred to in the succeeding pages.

The Witch of Brentford, mentioned by Mrs. Page in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 2), was an actual personage, the fame, says Staunton,⁵⁰ of whose vaticinations must have been traditionally well known to an audience of the time, although the records we possess of her are scant enough. The chief of them is a black-letter tract, printed by William Copland in the middle of the sixteenth century, entitled “Jyl of Braintford’s Testament,” from which it appears she was hostess of a tavern at Brentford.⁵¹ One of the characters in Dekker and Webster’s “Westward Ho”⁵² says, “I doubt that old hag, Gillian of Brainford, has bewitched me.”

The witches in “Macbeth” are probably Scottish hags. As Mr. Gunnyon remarks,⁵³ “They are hellish monsters, brewing hell-broth, having cats and toads for familiars, loving midnight, riding on the passing storm, and devising evil against such as offend them. They crouch beneath the gibbet of the murderer, meet in gloomy caverns, amid earthquake convulsions, or in thunder, lightning, and rain.” Coleridge, speaking of them, observes that “the weird sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare’s as his Ariel and Caliban – fates, fairies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good, they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, elemental avengers without sex or kin.”

It has been urged, however, by certain modern critics, that these three sisters, “who play such an important part in ‘Macbeth,’ are not witches at all, but are, or are intimately allied to, the Norns or Fates of Scandinavian paganism.”⁵⁴ Thus, a writer in the Academy (Feb. 8, 1879) thinks that Shakespeare drew upon Scandinavian mythology for a portion of the material he used in constructing these characters, and that he derived the rest from the traditions of contemporary witchcraft; in fact, that the “sisters” are hybrids between Norns and witches. The supposed proof of this is that each sister exercises the special function of one of the Norns. “The third,” it is said, “is the special prophetess, while the first takes cognizance of the past, and the second of the present, in affairs connected with humanity. These are the tasks of Urda, Verdandi, and Skulda. The first begins by asking, ‘When shall we three meet again?’ The second decides the time: ‘When the battle’s lost and won.’ The third the future prophesies: ‘That will be ere the set of sun.’ The first again asks, ‘Where?’ The second decides: ‘Upon the heath.’ The third the future prophesies: ‘There to meet with Macbeth.’”

It is further added that the description of the sisters given by Banquo (i. 3) applies to Norns rather than witches:

 
“What are these
So wither’d and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,
And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her chappy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips: you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.”
 

But, as Mr. Spalding truly adds, “a more accurate poetical counterpart to the prose descriptions given by contemporary writers of the appearance of the poor creatures who were charged with the crime of witchcraft could hardly have been penned.” Scot, for instance, in his “Discovery of Witchcraft” (book i. chap. iii. 7), says: “They are women which commonly be old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; they are leane and deformed, showing melancholie in their faces.” Harsnet, too, in his “Declaration of Popish Impostures” (1603, p. 136), speaks of a witch as “an old weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, un-toothed, furrowed, having her limbs trembling with palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her paternoster, yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab.”

The beard, also, to which Shakespeare refers in the passage above, was the recognized characteristic of the witch. Thus, in the “Honest Man’s Fortune” (ii. 1), it is said, “The women that come to us for disguises must wear beards, and that’s to say a token of a witch.” In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 2), Sir Hugh Evans says of the disguised Falstaff: “By yea and no, I think the ’oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a ’oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler.”

It seems probable, then, that witches are alluded to by Shakespeare in “Macbeth,” the contemporary literature on the subject fully supporting this theory. Again, by his introduction of Hecate among the witches in “Macbeth” (iii. 5), Shakespeare has been censured for confounding ancient with modern superstitions. But the incongruity is found in all the poets of the Renaissance. Hecate, of course, is only another name for Diana. “Witchcraft, in truth, is no modern invention. Witches were believed in by the vulgar in the time of Horace as implicitly as in the time of Shakespeare. And the belief that the pagan gods were really existent as evil demons is one which has come down from the very earliest ages of Christianity.”⁵⁵ As far back as the fourth century, the Council of Ancyra is said to have condemned the pretensions of witches; that in the night-time they rode abroad or feasted with their mistress, who was one of the pagan goddesses, Minerva, Sibylla, or Diana, or else Herodias.⁵⁶ In Middleton’s “Witch,” Hecate is the name of one of his witches, and she has a son a low buffoon. In Jonson’s “Sad Shepherd” (ii. 1) Maudlin the witch calls Hecate, the mistress of witches, “Our dame Hecate.” While speaking of the witches in “Macbeth,” it may be pointed out that⁵⁷ “the full meaning of the first scene is the fag-end of a witch’s Sabbath, which, if fully represented, would bear a strong resemblance to the scene at the commencement of the fourth act. But a long scene on such a subject would be tedious and uninteresting at the commencement of the play. The audience is therefore left to assume that the witches have met, performed their conjurations, obtained from the evil spirits the information concerning Macbeth’s career that they desired to obtain, and perhaps have been commanded by the fiends to perform the mission they subsequently carry through.” Brand⁵⁸ describes this “Sabbath of the witches as a meeting to which the sisterhood, after having been anointed with certain magical ointments, provided by their infernal leader, are supposed to be carried through the air on brooms,” etc. It was supposed to be held on a Saturday, and in past centuries this piece of superstition was most extensively credited, and was one of the leading doctrines associated with the system of witchcraft.

Referring, in the next place, to the numerous scattered notices of witches given by Shakespeare throughout his plays, it is evident that he had made himself thoroughly acquainted with the superstitions connected with the subject, many of which he has described with the most minute accuracy. It appears, then, that although they were supposed to possess extraordinary powers, which they exerted in various ways, yet these were limited, as in the case of Christmas night, when, we are told in “Hamlet” (i. 1), “they have no power to charm.” In spite, too, of their being able to assume the form of any animal at pleasure, the tail was always wanting. In “Macbeth” (i. 3), the first witch says:

 
“And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”
 

One distinctive mark, also, of a were-wolf, or human being changed into a wolf, was the absence of a tail. The cat was said to be the form most commonly assumed by the familiar spirits of witches; as, for instance, where the first witch says, “I come, Graymalkin!”⁵⁹ (i. 1), and further on (iv. 1), “Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.” In German legends and traditions we find frequent notice of witches assuming the form of a cat, and displaying their fiendish character in certain diabolical acts. It was, however, the absence of the tail that only too often was the cause of the witch being detected in her disguised form. There were various other modes of detecting witches: one being “the trial by the stool,” to which an allusion is made in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 1), where Ajax says to Thersites,

 
“Thou stool for a witch!”
 

– a practice which is thus explained in Grey’s “Notes” (ii. 236): “In one way of trying a witch, they used to place her upon a chair or a stool, with her legs tied cross, that all the weight of her body might rest upon her seat, and by that means, after some time, the circulation of the blood would be much stopped, and her sitting would be as painful as the wooden horse; and she must continue in this pain twenty-four hours, without either sleep or meat; and it was no wonder that, when they were tired out with such an ungodly trial, they would confess themselves many times guilty to free themselves from such torture.”

Again, it was a part of the system of witchcraft that drawing blood from a witch rendered her enchantments ineffectual. Thus, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 5), Talbot says to the Maid of Orleans:

 
“I’ll have a bout with thee;
Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee:
Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch.”
 

An instance of this superstition occurred some years ago in a Cornish village, when a man was summoned before the bench of magistrates and fined, for having assaulted the plaintiff and scratched her with a pin. Indeed, this notion has by no means died out. As recently as the year 1870, a man eighty years of age was fined at Barnstaple, in Devonshire, for scratching with a needle the arm of a young girl. He pleaded that he had “suffered affliction” through her for five years, had had four complaints on him at once, had lost fourteen canaries, and about fifty goldfinches, and that his neighbors told him this was the only way to break the spell and get out of her power.⁶⁰

It was, also, a popular belief that a great share of faith was a protection from witchcraft. Hence, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 2), Dromio of Syracuse says of Nell:

 
“if my breast had not been made of faith and my heart of steel,
She had transform’d me to a curtail-dog, and made me turn i’ the wheel.”
 

In order, moreover, to check the power of witches, it was supposed to be necessary to propitiate them, a ceremony which was often performed. It is alluded to further on in the same play (iv. 3), where Dromio of Syracuse says —

 
“Some devils ask but the parings of one’s nail,
A rush, a hair, a drop of blood, a pin,
A nut, a cherry-stone;”
 

and in “Macbeth” we read of their being propitiated by gifts of blood. Witches were supposed to have the power of creating storms and other atmospheric disturbances – a notion to which much prominence is given in “Macbeth.” Thus, the witches elect to meet in thunder, lightning, or rain. They are represented as being able to loose and bind the winds (v. 3), to cause vessels to be tempest-tossed at sea. Hence Macbeth addresses them (iv. 1):

 
“Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of nature’s germins tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken.”
 

Thus, by way of illustration, we may quote a curious confession made in Scotland, about the year 1591, by Agnes Sampson, a reputed witch. She vowed that “at the time his majesty [James VI.] was in Denmark, she took a cat and christened it, and afterwards bound to each part of that cat the chiefest parts of a dead man, and several joints of his body; and that in the night following, the said cat was conveyed into the midst of the sea, by herself and other witches, sailing in their riddles, or crieves, and so left the said cat right before the town of Leith, in Scotland. This done, there arose such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been seen, which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a boat or vessel coming from the town of Brunt Island to the town of Leith, wherein were sundry jewels and rich gifts, which should have been presented to the new Queen of Scotland at his majesty’s coming to Leith. Again, it is confessed that the said christened cat was the cause of the king’s majesty’s ship, at his coming forth of Denmark, having a contrary wind to the rest of the ships then being in his company, which thing was most strange and true, as the king’s majesty acknowledged.” It is to this circumstance that Shakespeare probably alludes in “Macbeth” (i. 3), where he makes the witch say:

 
“Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.”
 

Witches were also believed to be able to sell or give winds, a notion thus described in Drayton’s “Moon-Calf” (865):

 
“She could sell winds to any one that would
Buy them for money, forcing them to hold
What time she listed, tie them in a thread,
Which ever as the seafarer undid
They rose or scantled, as his sails would drive
To the same port whereas he would arrive.”
 

So, in “Macbeth” (i. 3):

 
“2 Witch. I’ll give thee a wind.
1 Witch. Thou’rt kind.
3 Witch. And I another.”
 

Singer quotes from Sumner’s “Last Will and Testament:”

 
“In Ireland, and in Denmark both,
Witches for gold will sell a man a wind,
Which, in the corner of a napkin wrapp’d,
Shall blow him safe unto what coast he will.”
 

At one time the Finlanders and Laplanders drove a profitable trade by the sale of winds. After being paid they knitted three magical knots, and told the buyer that when he untied the first he would have a good gale; when the second, a strong wind; and when the third, a severe tempest.⁶¹

The sieve, as a symbol of the clouds, has been regarded among all nations of the Aryan stock as the mythical vehicle used by witches, nightmares, and other elfish beings in their excursions over land and sea.⁶² Thus, the first witch in “Macbeth” (i. 3), referring to the scoff which she had received from a sailor’s wife, says:

 
“Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger:
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail.”⁶³
 

Stories of voyages performed in this way are common enough in Germany. A man, for instance, going through a corn-field, finds a sieve on the path, which he takes with him. He does not go far before a young lady hurries after him, and hunts up and down as if looking for something, ejaculating all the time, “How my children are crying in England!” Thereupon the man lays down the sieve, and has hardly done so ere sieve and lady vanish. In the case of another damsel of the same species, mentioned by Mr. Kelly, the usual exclamation is thus varied: “My sieve rim! my sieve rim! how my mother is calling me in England!” At the sound of her mother’s voice the daughter immediately thinks of her sieve. Steevens quotes from the “Life of Doctor Fian,” “a notable sorcerer,” burned at Edinburgh, January, 1591, how that he and a number of witches went to sea, “each one in a riddle or cive.” In the “Discovery of Witchcraft,” Reginald Scot says it was believed that “witches could sail in an egg-shell, a cockle or muscle-shell, through and under the tempestuous seas.” Thus, in “Pericles” (iv. 4), Gower says:

 
“Thus time we waste, and longest leagues make short;
Sail seas in cockles, have, and wish but for’t.”
 

Their dance is thus noticed in “Macbeth” (iv. 1):

 
“I’ll charm the air to give a sound
While you perform your antic round.”
 

Witches also were supposed to have the power of vanishing at will, a notion referred to in “Macbeth” (i. 3), where, in reply to Banquo’s inquiry as to whither the witches are vanished, Macbeth replies:

 
“Into the air; and what seem’d corporal melted
As breath into the wind.”
 

In his letter to his wife he likewise observes: “They made themselves air, into which they vanished.” Hecate, in the third act, fifth scene, after giving instructions to the weird host, says:

 
“I am for the air; this night I’ll spend
Unto a dismal and a fatal end.”
 

To this purpose they prepared various ointments, concerning which Reginald Scot⁶⁴ says: “The devil teacheth them to make ointment of the bowels and members of children, whereby they ride in the air and accomplish all their desires. After burial they steal them out of their graves and seethe them in a caldron till the flesh be made potable, of which they make an ointment by which they ride in the air.” Lord Bacon also informs us that the “ointment the witches use is reported to be made of the fat of children digged out of their graves, of the juices of smallage, wolf bane, and cinquefoil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat; but I suppose the soporiferous medicines are likest to do it, which are henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moonshade – or rather nightshade – tobacco, opium, saffron,”⁶⁵ etc. These witch recipes, which are very numerous, are well illustrated in Shakespeare’s grim caldron scene, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), where the first witch speaks of