CHAPTER VII

THE WITCH IN DRAMATIC LITERATURE The English theatre, in common with every other form of the world’s drama, had a religious, or even more exactly a liturgical, origin. At the Norman Conquest as the English monasteries began to be filled with cultured French scholars there is evidence that Latin dialogues, the legends of saints and martyrs, something after the fashion of Hrotsvitha’s comedies, which we do not imagine to have been a unique phenomenon, found their way here also, and from recitation to the representation of these was an easy and indeed inevitable step. For it is almost impossible to declaim without appropriate action. From the very heart of the liturgy itself arose the Mystery Play. The method of performing these early English guild plays has been frequently and exactly described, and I would only draw attention to one feature of the movable scaffold which passed from station to station, that is the dark cavern at the side of the last of the three sedes, Hell-mouth. No pains were spared to make this as horrible and realistic as might be. Demons with hideous heads issued from it, whilst ever and anon lurid flames burst forth and dismal cries were heard. Thus the Digby S. Mary Magdalen play has the stage-direction: “a stage, and Helle ondyrneth that stage.” At Coventry the Cappers had a “hell-mouth” for the Harrowing of Hell, and the Weavers another for Doomsday. This was provided with fire, a windlass, and a barrel for the earthquake. In the stage-directions to Jordan’s Cornish Creation of the World Lucifer descends to hell “apareled fowle wᵗʰ fyre about hem” and the place is filled with “every degre of devylls of lether and spirytis on cordis.” Among the “establies” required for the Rouen play of 1474 was “Enfer fait en maniere d’une grande gueulle se cloant et ouvrant quant besoing en est.” The last stage-direction of the _Sponsus_, a liturgical play from Limoges,—assigned by M. M. W. Cloetta and G. Paris to the earlier half of the twelfth century—which deals with the Wise and Foolish Virgins runs as follows: “_Modo accipiant eas [fatuas uirgines] dæmones et præcipitentur in infernum_.” The Devil himself is one of the most prominent characters in the Mystery, the villain of the piece. So the York cycle commences with _The Creation and the Fall of Lucifer_. Whilst the Angels are singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” before the throne of God, Satan appears exulting in his pride to be cast down speedily into hell whence he howls his complaint beginning “Owte, owte! harrowe!” There is a curious incident in the episode of the Dream of Pilate’s wife. Whilst she sleeps Satan whispers in her ear the vision which moves her to try to stay the condemnation of Jesus whereby mankind is to be redeemed. The last play of the York cycle is the _Day of Judgement_. In like manner the Towneley cycle opens with _The Creation_, and presently we have the stage-direction _hic deus recedit à suo solio & lucifer sedebit in eodem solio_. The scene soon shifts to hell when we hear the demons reproaching Lucifer for his pride. After the creation of Adam and Eve follows Lucifer’s lament. In the long episode of _Doomsday_ a number of demons appear and are kept inordinately busy. The Devil was represented as black, with goat’s horns, ass’s ears, cloven hoofs, and an immense phallus. He is, in fact, the Satyr of the old Dionysiac processions, a nature-spirit, the essence of joyous freedom and unrestrained delight, shameless if you will, for the old Greek knew not shame. He is the figure who danced light-heartedly across the Aristophanaic stage, stark nude in broad midday,[1] animally physical, exuberant, ecstatic, crying aloud the primitive refrain, Φαλῆς, ἑταῖρε Βακχίου, ξύγκωμε, νυκτεροπλάνητε, μοιχε, παιδεραστά, (Phales, boon mate of Bacchus, joyous comrade in the dance, wanton wanderer o’ nights, fornicating Phales), in a word he was Paganism incarnate, and Paganism was the Christian’s deadliest foe; so they took him, the Bacchic reveller, they smutted him from horn to hoof, and he remained the Christian’s deadliest foe, the Devil.[2] It was long before the phallic demon was banished the stage, for strange as it may seem, positive evidence exists that he was known there as late as Shakespeare’s day. In 1620 was published in London by Edward Wright _A Courtly Masque: The Deuice called, The World tost at Tennis_. “As it hath beene diuers times Presented to the Contentment of many Noble and Worthy Spectators: By the Prince his Seruants.” It was “Inuented and set downe by Tho: Middleton, Gent, and William Rowley, Gent.” The title-page presents a rough engraving of the various characters in this masque, doubtless from a sketch made at the actual performance. Outside the main group stands a hideous black figure “The Diuele,” who made his appearance towards the end to take part in the last dance, furnished with horns, hoofs, talons, tail, and a monstrous phallus. It may be remarked that these horns are prominent on the goat-like head (a clear satyr) of the Devil in _Doctor Faustus_ as depicted on the title-page of the Marlovian quarto. A phallus, to which reference is made in the text, was also worn by the character dressed up as the monkey (_Bavian_) in the May-dance scene in Shakespeare & Fletcher’s _The Two Noble Kinsman_, Act III, 5, 1613. It is worth remembering that troops of phallic demons formed a standing characteristic of the old German carnival comedy. Moreover, several of the grotesque types of the Commedia dell’ arte in the second decade of the seventeenth century were traditionally equipped in like manner.[3] That the Devil was so represented in the English theatre is important. It gives us the popular idea of the Prince of Evil, and incidentally throws a side-light upon much of the grotesque and obscene evidence in the contemporary witch-trials. In Skelton’s lost _Nigramansir_ one of the stage directions is stated to have been “Enter Balsebub with a beard,” no doubt the black vizard with an immense goatish beard familiar to the old religious drama. Presumably the chief use of the Necromancer, who gives his name to this play, was indeed but to speak the Prologue which summons the Devil who buffets and kicks him for his pains. However, we only know the play from Warton, who describes it as having been shown him by William Collins, the poet, at Chichester, about 1759. He says: “It is the Nigramansir, a morall _Enterlude_ and a pithie, written by Maister Skelton laureate, and plaid before the King and other estatys at Woodstoke on Palme Sunday. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in a thin quarto, in the year 1504. It must have been presented before Henry VII, at the royal manor or palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire, now destroyed. The characters are a Necromancer or conjurer, the devil, a notary public, Simony, and Philargyria or Avarice. It is partly a satire on some abuses in the Church.... The story, or plot, is the trial of Simony and Avarice.” Beyond what Warton tells us nothing further is known of the play. Ritson, _Bibliographia Poetica_, 106, declared: “it is utterly incredible that the _Nigramansir_ ... ever existed.” It has been shown, too, that Warton as a literary historian is not infrequently suspect, and E. G. Duff, _Hand Lists of English Printers_, can trace no extant copy of this “morall _Enterlude_.” In the English moralities the Devil plays an important part, and, as in their French originals or analogues, he is consistently hampering and opposing the moral purpose or lesson which the action of these compositions is designed to enforce. In the later English plays also which evolved with added regularity from these interludes the Devil is always a popular character. He is generally attended by the Vice, who although in some sort a serving-man or jester in the fiend’s employ, devotes his time to twitting, teazing, tormenting, and thwarting his master for the edification, not unmixed with fun, of the audience. In _The Castell of Perseverance_ Lucifer appears shouting in good old fashion “Out herowe I rore,” just as he was wont to announce himself in the Mysteries, and he is wearing his “devil’s array” over the habit of a “prowde galaunt.” Wever’s _Lusty Juventus_ has unmistakable traces of the slime of the evil days of Edward VI, in whose reign it was written, and when the Devil calls Hipocrisy to his aid we are prepared for a flood of empty but bitter abuse which embodies the sour Puritan hatred against the Catholic Church, and towards the end, under the misnomer God’s Merciful Promises, we are not surprised to meet a tiresome old gentleman who cantingly expounds the doctrine of Justification by Faith. In the interlude to which Collier has assigned the name _Mankind_ Mischief summons to her aid the fiend Titivillus, who had appeared in the _Judicium_ of the Towneley Mysteries. Once the Devil’s registrar and tollsman, he is best known as “Master Lollard.” According to a silly old superstition Titivillus was an imp whose business it was to pick up the words any priest might drop and omit whilst saying Mass. When we pass to the beginnings of the regular drama we find an extremely interesting play that introduces, if not magic, at least fortune-telling, John Lyly’s “Pleasant Conceited Comedie” _Mother Bombie_, acted by the children of Paul’s and first printed in 1594. Although the plot is of the utmost complexity and artificiality it does not seem to be derived, as are most of Lyly’s stories, from any classical or pseudo-classical source, whilst the cunning old woman of Rochester, who supplies the title, has in fact little to say or do, except that her intervention helps to bring about the unravelling of a perfect maze and criss-cross of incidents. When Selena addresses the beldame with “They say, you are a witch,” Mother Bombie quickly retorts “They lie, I am a cunning woman,” a passage not without significance. Upon a very different level from Lyly’s play stands Marlowe’s magnificent drama _The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus_. The legend of a man who sells his soul to the Devil for infinite knowledge and absolute power seems to have crystallized about the sixth century, when the story of _Theophilus_ was supposed to have been related in Greek by his pupil Eutychianus. Of course, every warlock had bartered his soul to Satan, and throughout the whole of the Middle Ages judicial records, the courts of the Inquisition, to say nothing of popular knowledge, could have told of a thousand such. But this particular legend seems to have captured the imagination of both Western and Eastern Christendom; it is met with in a variety of forms; it was introduced into the collections of Jacopo à Voragine; it found its way into the minstrel repertory through Rutebeuf, a French _trouvère_ of the thirteenth century; it reappeared in early English narrative and in Low-German drama. Icelandic variants of the story have been traced. It was made the subject of a poem by William Forrest, priest and poet, in 1572; and it also formed the material for two seventeenth-century Jesuit “comedies.” That the original Faust was a real personage,[4] a wandering conjurer and medical quack, who was well known in the south-west of the German Empire, as well as in Thuringia, Saxony, and the adjoining countries somewhere between the years 1510-1540, does not now admit of any serious doubt. Philip Begardi, a physician of Worms, author of an _Index Sanitatis_ (1539), mentions this charlatan, many of whose dupes he personally knew. He says that Faust was at one time frequently seen, although of later years nothing had been heard of him. It has indeed been suggested the whole legend originated in the strange history of Pope S. Clement I and his father Faustus, or Faustinianus, as related in the _Recognitions_, which were immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages. But Melanchthon knew a Johannes Faustus born at Knütlingen, in Wurtemberg, not far from his own home, who studied magic at Cracow, and afterwards “roamed about and talked of secret things.” There was a doctor Faustus in the early part of the sixteenth century, a friend of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, a scholar who won an infamous reputation for the practice of necromancy. In 1513 Conrad Mutt, the Humanist, came across a vagabond magician at Erfurt named Georgius Faustus Hermitheus of Heidelberg. Trithemius in 1506, met a Faustus junior whose boast it was that if all the works of Plato and Aristotle were burned he could restore them from memory. It seems probable that it was to the Dr. Faustus, the companion of Paracelsus and Cornelius[5] Agrippa, that the legend became finally and definitely attached. The first literary version of the story was the _Volksbuch_, which was published by Johann Spies in 1587, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, who tells us that he obtained the manuscript “from a good friend at Spier,” and it soon afterwards appeared in England as _The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus_, a chap-book to which Marlowe mainly adhered for the incidents in his play. The tragedy was carried across to Germany by the English actors who visited that country in the last years of the sixteenth and the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and thus, while it was itself derived from a German source, it greatly influenced, if it did not actually give rise to, the treatment of the same theme by the German popular drama and puppet-play. These were seldom printed, and usually for the most part extemporized, keeping all the while more or less closely to the theme. Scheible in his _Kloster_ (1847), Volume V, gives the excellent Ulm piece, and there are marionette versions edited by W. Hamm (1850; English translation by T. C. H. Hedderwick, 1887), O. Schade (1856), K. Engel (1874), Bielschowsky (1882), and Kralik and Winter (1885). Lessing projected two presentations of the story, and Klinger worked the subject into a romance, _Fausts Leben, Thaten, und Höllenfahrt_ (1791; translated into English by George Barrow in 1826). A bombast tragedy was published by Klingemann in 1815, whilst Lenau issued his epico-dramatic _Faust_ in 1836. Heine’s ballet _Der Doctor Faust, ein Tanzpoem_ appeared in 1851. The libretto for Spohr’s opera (1814) was written by Bernard. Goethe’s masterpiece, planned as early as 1774, was given to the world in 1808, but the second part was delayed until 1831. General evidence points to 1588 as the date of the first production of Marlowe’s _Doctor Faustus_, for it seems certain that the ballad of the _Life and Death of Doctor Faustus the great Conjurer_, entered in the Stationers’ Register, February, 1589, did not precede but was suggested by the drama. The first extant quarto is 1604, but already it had been subjected to more than one revision. Upon the stage _Doctor Faustus_ long remained popular, and in England, at least, however fragmentary Marlowe’s tragedy may be it has never been supplemented by any other literary handling of its theme. Old Prynne in his _Histriomastix_ (1633) retails an absurd story to the effect that the Devil _in propria persona_ “appeared on the stage at the _Belsavage_ Playhouse in Queen _Elizabeth’s_ days” whilst the tragedy was being performed, “the truth of which I have heard from many now alive who well remember it.” It was revived after the Restoration, and on Monday, 26 May, 1662, Pepys and his wife witnessed the production at the Red Bull, “but so wretchedly and poorly done that we were sick of it.” It was being performed at the Theatre Royal in the autumn of 1675, but no details are recorded. In 1685-6 at Dorset Garden appeared William Mountfort’s _The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Made into a Farce, with the Humours of Harlequin and Scaramouch_, a queer mixture of Marlowe’s scenes with the Italian _commedia dell’ arte_. Harlequin was acted by nimble Thomas Jevon, the first English harlequin, and Scaramouch by Antony Leigh, the most whimsical of comedians. At the end of the third act after Faustus has been carried away by Lucifer and Mephistopheles, his body is discovered torn in pieces. Then “Faustus _Limbs come together. A Dance and Song_.” This farce was continually revived with great applause, and during the whole of the eighteenth century Faust was the central figure of pantomime after pantomime. Nearly forty dramatic versions of the Faust legend might be enumerated. Many are wildly romantic and were especially beloved of the minor theatres: such are _Faustus_ by G. Soane and D. Terry, produced at Drury Lane 16 May, 1825, with “O” Smith as Mephistopheles; H. P. Grattan’s _Faust, or The Demon of the Drachenfels_ performed at Sadlers Wells, 5 September, 1842, with Henry Marston, Mephistopheles, T. Lyon, Faust, “the Magician of Wittenberg,” Caroline Rankley, Marguerite; T. W. Robertson’s _Faust and Marguerite_, played at the Princess’s Theatre in April, 1854: some are operatic; the ever-popular _Faust_ of Gounod, with libretto by Barbier and Carré, first seen at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, in 1859; and Hector Berlioz’ _The Damnation of Faust_, which, adapted to the English stage by T. H. Friend, was performed at the Court, Liverpool, 3 February, 1894; many more are burlesques, descendants of the eighteenth-century farces, amongst which may be remembered F.