47. The second theory, therefore, became the more popular amongst the learned, because it left no one point unexplained. The divines held that although the power of the Creator had in no wise been delegated to the devil, yet he was, in the course of providence, permitted to exercise a certain supernatural influence over the minds of men, whereby he could persuade them that they really saw a form that had no material objective existence.[1] Here was a position incontrovertible, not on account of the arguments by which it could be supported, but because it was impossible to reason against it; and it slowly, but surely, took hold upon the popular mind. Indeed, the elimination of the diabolic factor leaves the modern sceptical belief that such apparitions are nothing more than the result of disease, physical or mental.
[Footnote 1: Dialogicall Discourses, by Deacon and Walker, 4th Dialogue.
Bullinger, p. 361. Parker Society.]
48. But the semi-sceptical state of thought was in Shakspere's time making its way only amongst the more educated portion of the nation. The masses still clung to the old and venerated, if not venerable, belief that devils could at any moment assume what form soever they might please—not troubling themselves further to inquire into the method of the operation. They could appear in the likeness of an ordinary human being, as Harpax[1] and Mephistopheles[2] do, creating thereby the most embarrassing complications in questions of identity; and if this belief is borne in mind, the charge of being a devil, so freely made, in the times of which we write, and before alluded to, against persons who performed extraordinary feats of valour, or behaved in a manner discreditable and deserving of general reprobation, loses much of its barbarous grotesqueness. There was no doubt as to Coriolanus,[3] as has been said; nor Shylock.[4] Even "the outward sainted Angelo is yet a devil;"[5] and Prince Hal confesses that "there is a devil haunts him in the likeness of an old fat man … an old white-bearded Satan."[6]
[Footnote 1: In The Virgin Martyr.]
[Footnote 2: In Dr. Faustus.]
[Footnote 3: Coriolanus, I. x. 16.]
[Footnote 4: Merchant of Venice, III. i. 22.]
[Footnote 5: Measure for Measure, III. i. 90.]
[Footnote 6: I Hen. IV., II. iv. 491-509.]
49. The devils had an inconvenient habit of appearing in the guise of an ecclesiastic[1]—at least, so the churchmen were careful to insist, especially when busying themselves about acts of temptation that would least become the holy robe they had assumed. This was the ecclesiastical method of accounting for certain stories, not very creditable to the priesthood, that had too inconvenient a basis of evidence to be dismissed as fabricatious. But the honest lay public seem to have thought, with downright old Chaucer, that there was more in the matter than the priests chose to admit. This feeling we, as usual, find reflected in the dramatic literature of our period. In "The Troublesome Raigne of King John," an old play upon the basis of which Shakspere constructed his own "King John," we find this question dealt with in some detail. In the elder play, the Bastard does "the shaking of bags of hoarding abbots," coram populo, and thereby discloses a phase of monastic life judiciously suppressed by Shakspere. Philip sets at liberty much more than "imprisoned angels"—according to one account, and that a monk's, imprisoned beings of quite another sort. "Faire Alice, the nonne," having been discovered in the chest where the abbot's wealth was supposed to be concealed, proposes to purchase pardon for the offence by disclosing the secret hoard of a sister nun. Her offer being accepted, a friar is ordered to force the box in which the treasure is supposed to be secreted. On being questioned as to its contents, he answers—