Once more, in the next act (ii. 2), Hamlet again expresses his doubts:
“The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.”
In the Elizabethan times, too, no superstitious belief exerted a more pernicious and baneful influence on the credulous and ignorant than the notion that evil spirits from time to time entered into human beings, and so completely gained a despotic control over them as to render them perfectly helpless. Harsnet, in his “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures” (1603), has exposed this gross superstition; and a comparison of the passages in “King Lear,” spoken by Edgar when feigning madness, with those given by Harsnet, will show that Shakespeare has accurately given the contemporary belief on the subject. Mr. Spalding also considers that nearly all the allusions in “King Lear” refer to a youth known as Richard Mainey, a minute account of whose supposed possession has been given by Harsnet.
Persons so possessed were often bound and shut up in a dark room, occasionally being forced to submit to flagellation—a treatment not unlike that described in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2):
“Not mad, but bound more than a madman is;
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whipp’d and tormented.”
In the “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 4) we have an amusing scene, further illustrative, probably, of the kind of treatment adopted in Shakespeare’s day:
“Courtesan. How say you now? is not your husband mad?
Adriana. His incivility confirms no less—
Good doctor Pinch, you are a conjurer;
Establish him in his true sense again,
And I will please you what you will demand.
Luciana. Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!
Courtesan. Mark how he trembles in his ecstasy!