CHAPTER VII. The Witch in Dramatic Literature

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, 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.

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. 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, 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 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. C. Burnard’s Faust and Marguerite, S. James, 9 July, 1864; C. H. Hazlewood’s Faust: or Marguerite’s Mangle, Britannia Theatre, 25 March, 1867; Byron’s Little Doctor Faust (1877); Faust in Three Flashes (1884); Faust in Forty Minutes (1885); and the most famous of all the travesties Faust Up to Date, produced at the Gaiety, 30 October, 1888, with E. J. Lonnen as Mephistopheles and Florence St. John as Marguerite. In France the Faust—après Goethe—of Theaulou and Gondelier first seen at the Nouveautés, 27 October, 1827, had a great success, and in the following year no less than three pens, Antony Béraud, Charles Nodier, and Merle, combined to produce a Faust in three acts, the music of which is by Louis Alexandre Piccini, the grandson of Gluck’s famous rival. In 1858 Adolphe Dennery gave the Parisian stage Faust, a “drame fantastique” in five acts and sixteen tableaux, a drama of the Grattan school, effective enough in a lurid Sadlers Wells way, which is, at any rate, a vein greater dramatists have exploited with profit and applause.

Of more recent English dramas which have the Faust legend as their theme the most striking is undoubtedly the adaptation by W. G. Wills from the first part of Goethe’s tragedy, which was produced at the Lyceum 19 December, 1885, with H. H. Conway as Faust; George Alexander, Valentine; Mrs. Stirling, Martha; Miss Ellen Terry, Margaret; and Henry Irving, Mephistopheles. Not merely in view of the masterpieces of Marlowe and Goethe, but even by the side of theatrical versions of the legend from far lesser men the play itself was naught, a superb pantomime, a thing helped out by a witches’ kitchen, by a bacchanalia of demons, by chromo-lithographic effects, by the mechanist and the brushes of Telbin and Hawes Craven, but it was informed throughout and raised to heights of greatness, nay, even to awe and terror, by the genius of Irving as the red-plumed Mephistopheles, that sardonic, weary, restless figure, horribly unreal yet mockingly alert and alive, who dominated the whole.

To attempt a comparison between Marlowe and Goethe were not a little absurd, and it is superfluous to expatiate upon the supreme merits of either masterpiece. In Goethe’s mighty and complex work the story is in truth refined away beneath a wealth of immortal philosophy. Marlowe adheres quite simply to the chap-book incidents, and yet in all profane literature I scarcely know words of more shuddering dread and complete agony than Faust’s last great speech:

Ah, Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live. And then thou must be damned perpetually!

The scene becomes intolerable. It is almost too painful to be read, too overcharged with hopeless darkness and despair.

As it is in some sense at least akin to the Faust story it may not be impertinent briefly to mention here an early Dutch secular drama, which has been called “one of the gems of Dutch mediæval literature,” A Marvellous History of Mary of Nimmegen, who for more than seven years lived and had ado with the Devil, printed by William Vorsterman of Antwerp about 1520. It is only necessary to call attention to a few features of the legend. Mary, the niece of the old priest Sir Gysbucht, one night meets the Devil in the shape of Moonen with the single eye. He undertakes to teach her all the secrets of necromancy if she will but refrain from crossing herself and change her name to Lena of Gretchen. But Mary, who has had a devotion to our Lady, insists upon retaining at least the M in her new nomenclature, and so becomes Emmekin. “Thus Emma and Moonen lived at Antwerp at the sign of the Golden Tree in the market, where daily of his contrivings were many murders and slayings together with every sort of wickedness.” Emma then resolves to visit her uncle, and insists upon Moonen accompanying her to Nimmegen. It is a high holiday and she sees by chance the mystery of Maskeroon on a pageant-waggon in a public square. Our Lady is pleading before the throne of God for mankind, and Emma is filled with strange remorse to hear such blessed words. Moonen carries her off, but she falls and is found in a swoon by the old priest, her uncle. No priest of Nimmegen dared shrive her, not even the Bishop of Cologne, and so she journeyed to Rome, where the Holy Father heard her confession and bade her wear in penitence three strong bands of iron fastened upon neck and arms. Thus she returned to Maestricht to the cloister of the Converted Sinners, and there her sorrow was so prevailing and her humility so unfeigned that an Angel in token of Divine forgiveness removed the irons as she slept.

And go ye to Maestricht, an ye be able And in the Converted Sinners shall ye see The grave of Emma, and there all three The rings be hung above her grave.

Magic and fairy-land loom large in the plays of Robert Greene, whose place in English literature rests at least as much upon his prose-tracts as on his dramas. It seems to me fairly obvious that The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which almost certainly dates from 1589, although the first quarto is 1594, was composed owing to the success of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Greene was not the man to lose an opportunity of exploiting fashion, and with his solid British bent I have no doubt he considered an old English tale of an Oxford magician would be just as effective as imported legends from Frankfort and Wittenberg. To say that the later play is on an entirely different level is not to deny it interest and considerable charm. But in spite of Bacon’s avowal

Thou know’st that I have divèd into hell And sought the darkest palaces of fiends; That with my magic spells great Belcephon, Hath left his lodge and kneeled at my cell,

his sorceries are in lighter vein than those of Faustus; moreover neither his arts nor the magic of Friar Bungay form the essential theme of the play, which also sketches the love of Edward, Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward I) for Margaret, “the fair Maid of Fressingfield.” It is true Bacon conjures up spirits enough, and we are shown his study at Brasenose with the episode of the Brazen Head. It may be noted that Miles, Bacon’s servant, is exactly the Vice of the Moralities, and at the end he rides off farcically enough on the Devil’s back, whilst Bacon announces his intention of spending the remainder of his years in becoming penitence for his necromancy and magic.

In Greene’s Orlando Furioso, 4to, 1594, which is based on Ariosto,