Within, indeed, the last fifty years the pedagogue was still a reputed conjurer. In “Hamlet” (i. 1), Marcellus, alluding to the ghost, says:
“Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”
And in “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Benedick says:
“I would to God some scholar would conjure her.”
For the same reason exorcisms were usually practised by the clergy in Latin; and so Toby, in the “Night Walker” of Beaumont and Fletcher (ii. 1), says:
“Let’s call the butler up, for he speaks Latin,
And that will daunt the devil.”
It was also necessary that spirits, when evoked, should be questioned quickly, as they were supposed to be impatient of being interrogated. Hence in “Macbeth” (iv. 1) the apparition says:
“Dismiss me. Enough!”
The spirit, likewise, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 4) utters these words:
“Ask what thou wilt. That I had said and done!”
Spirits were supposed to maintain an obdurate silence till interrogated by the persons to whom they made their special appearance.75 Thus Hamlet, alluding to the appearance of the ghost, asks Horatio (i. 2):
“Did you not speak to it?”
Whereupon he replies:
“My lord, I did;
But answer made it none: yet once, methought
It lifted up its head and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak.”
The walking of spirits seems also to have been enjoined by way of penance. The ghost of Hamlet’s father (i. 5) says:
“I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.”
And further on (iii. 2) Hamlet exclaims:
“It is a damned ghost that we have seen.”
This superstition is referred to by Spenser in his “Fairy Queen” (book i. canto 2):
“What voice of damned ghost from Limbo lake
Or guileful spright wand’ring in empty ayre,
Sends to my doubtful eares these speeches rare?”
According to a universal belief prevalent from the earliest times, it was supposed that ghosts had some particular reason for quitting the mansions of the dead, “such as a desire that their bodies, if unburied, should receive Christian rites of sepulture, that a murderer might be brought to due punishment,” etc.76 On this account Horatio (“Hamlet,” i. 1) invokes the ghost:
“If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me.”
And in a later scene (i. 4) Hamlet says:
“Say, why is this? wherefore? What should we do?”
The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be excluded from Elysium; and thus the wandering shade of Patroclus appears to Achilles in his sleep, and demands the performance of his funeral. The younger Pliny tells a story of a haunted house at Athens, in which a ghost played all kinds of pranks, owing to his funeral rites having been neglected. A further reference to the superstition occurs in “Titus Andronicus” (i. 1), where Lucius, speaking of the unburied sons of Titus, says:
“Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
That we may hew his limbs, and, on a pile,
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh,
Before this earthy prison of their bones;
That so the shadows be not unappeased,
Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth.”
In olden times, spirits were said to have different allotments of time, suitable to the variety and nature of their agency. Prospero, in the “Tempest” (i. 2), says to Caliban:
“Be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall, for that vast77 of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee.”
According to a popular notion, the presence of unearthly beings was announced by an alteration in the tint of the lights which happened to be burning – a superstition alluded to in “Richard III.” (v. 3), where the tyrant exclaims, as he awakens:
“The lights burn blue. – It is now dead midnight,
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh —
Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
Came to my tent.”
So in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of Cæsar, exclaims:
“How ill this taper burns! Ha! who comes here?”
It has been a widespread belief from the most remote period that ghosts cannot bear the light, and so disappear at the dawn of day; their signal being the cock-crow.78 The ghost of Hamlet’s father says (i. 5):
“But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air;
Brief let me be” —
and —
“Fare thee well at once.
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire:
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.”
Again, in “King Lear” (iii. 4), Edgar says: “This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock.”
The time of night, as the season wherein spirits wander abroad, is further noticed by Gardiner in “Henry VIII.” (v. 1):
“Affairs, that walk,
As they say spirits do, at midnight.”
It was a prevalent notion that a person who crossed the spot on which a spectre was seen became subject to its malignant influence. In “Hamlet” (i. 1), Horatio says, in reference to the ghost:
“But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!
I’ll cross it, though it blast me.”
Lodge, in his “Illustrations of British History” (iii. 48), tells us that among the reasons for supposing the death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby (who died young, in 1594), to have been occasioned by witchcraft, was the following: “On Friday there appeared a tall man, who twice crossed him swiftly; and when the earl came to the place where he saw this man, he fell sick.”
Reginald Scot, in his “Discovery of Witchcraft” (1584), enumerates the different kinds of spirits, and particularly notices