"I look down to his feet, but that's a fable."[2]
And when Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester that he has in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes the being from whom he is supposed to have just parted, thus:—
"As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons: he had a thousand noses;
Horns whelked and wavèd like the enridgèd sea:
It was some fiend."[3]
It can hardly be but that the "thousand noses" are intended as a satirical hit at the enormity of the popular belief.
[Footnote 1: Act I. sc. 2.]
[Footnote 2: Act V. sc. ii. l. 285.]
[Footnote 3: Lear, IV. vi. 69.]
43. In addition to this normal type, common to all these devils, each one seems to have had, like the greater devils, a favourite form in which he made his appearance when conjured; generally that of some animal, real or imagined. It was telling of
"the moldwarp and the ant,
Of the dreamer Merlin, and his prophecies;
And of a dragon and a finless fish,
A clipwinged griffin, and a moulten raven,
A couching lion, and a ramping cat,"[1]
that annoyed Harry Hotspur so terribly; and neither in this allusion, which was suggested by a passage in Holinshed,[2] nor in "Macbeth," where he makes the three witches conjure up their familiars in the shapes of an armed head, a bloody child, and a child crowned, has Shakspere gone beyond the fantastic conceptions of the time.