“My poverty, but not my will, consents”.
And giving Romeo the poison:—
“Put this in any liquid thing you will,
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would despatch you straight”.
The poet gives no indication of the nature of the poison beyond that its effect was very rapid, as when the distracted lover drinks to his lady love in the deadly draught he exclaims:—
“O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”
In the early part of the sixteenth century the practice of the black art was carried on throughout England, mostly by old women, who also sold charms and love philtres. Shakespeare’s description of the witches’ incantations in Macbeth presents some idea of a seance, and the gruesome articles in which they dealt. To know the properties of the most poisonous herbs (often quite fictitious) was part of their trade.
“Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under coldest stone,
Days and nights hast thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
“Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble;
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
“Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock, digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew,
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-delivered by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab;
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
The method here used by the witches to measure the time that the cauldron should boil by singing their incantation is, according to Dr. Lauder Brunton, an ancient mode of calculating time still used in some parts of the country at the present day. By thus repeating several verses they could regulate the time of boiling fairly well. The old apothecaries used the moon as a method of calculating the time certain processes should take, and the word “menstruum,” still commonly used, was employed because certain drugs were allowed to macerate a month in the liquid to extract the active constituents.
In the toad that had been lying under a stone for thirty-one days and nights, we have another curious instance how the empirical practitioners of mediæval times acted on a certain traditional knowledge, which modern science has since proved to be correct.
We have again in the toad which has lain dormant for a month, the idea that it was the best time for his use, when his venom would be most active, besides the advantage also of catching him napping, when he would have no opportunity of getting rid of the poisonous principle contained in his skin. Dr. Lauder Brunton remarks with respect to this practice: “I remember reading as a child a story of how King John was poisoned by a friar who dropped a toad into his wine, but some books of natural history forty or fifty years ago scouted the idea of toads being poisonous at all. A little while ago, however, Dr. Leonard Guthie sent me an interesting account of a wicked Italian woman whose husband was dying of dropsy. He took so long about it that his wife became tired of the process, and thought that she would help him on. She accordingly caught a toad and put it in his wine, so that he should drink the liquid and die, but instead of dying he, to her astonishment and disgust, completely recovered. Forty years ago this story would have been scouted as equally mythical with that of King John, but now we know that it is precisely what the woman would have expected if she had only been acquainted with the researches of modern pharmacology. For the skin of a toad secretes a poison, the active principle of which, phrynin, has an action very much resembling that of digitalis, which is the remedy par excellence for dropsy depending on heart disease.”