Elizabethan Demonology / An Essay in Illustration of the Belief in the Existence of Devils, and the Powers Possessed By Them, as It Was Generally Held during the Period of the Reformation, and the Times Immediately Succeeding; with Special Reference to Shakspere and His Works

by Thomas Alfred Spalding

[Footnote 1: Act v. sc. I.]

Now, the only remedy that would occur to the mind of the reader of the present day under such circumstances, would be an action for breach of promise of marriage, and he would probably be aware of the very recent origin of that method of procedure. The only reply, therefore, that he would expect from Roberto would be a mild and sympathetic assurance of inability to interfere; and he must be somewhat taken aback to find this claim of Camiola admitted as indisputable. The riddle becomes somewhat further involved when, having established her contract, she immediately intimates that she has not the slightest intention of observing it herself, by declaring her desire to take the veil.

5. This can only be explained by the rules current at the time regarding spousals. The betrothal, or handfasting, was, in Massinger's time, a ceremony that entailed very serious obligations upon the parties to it. There were two classes of spousals—sponsalia de futuro and sponsalia de praesenti: a promise of marriage in the future, and an actual declaration of present marriage. This last form of betrothal was, in fact, marriage, as far as the contracting parties were concerned.[1] It could not, even though not consummated, be dissolved by mutual consent; and a subsequent marriage, even though celebrated with religious rites, was utterly invalid, and could be set aside at the suit of the injured person.

[Footnote 1: Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals, 1686, p. 236. In England the offspring were, nevertheless, illegitimate.]

The results entailed by sponsalia de futuro were less serious. Although no spousals of the same nature could be entered into with a third person during the existence of the contract, yet it could be dissolved by mutual consent, and was dissolved by subsequent sponsalia in praesenti, or matrimony. But such spousals could be converted into valid matrimony by the cohabitation of the parties; and this, instead of being looked upon as reprehensible, seems to have been treated as a laudable action, and to be by all means encouraged.[1] In addition to this, completion of a contract for marriage de futuro confirmed by oath, if such a contract were not indeed indissoluble, as was thought by some, could at any rate be enforced against an unwilling party. But there were some reasons that justified the dissolution of sponsalia of either description. Affinity was one of these; and—what is to the purpose here, in England before the Reformation, and in those parts of the continent unaffected by it—the entrance into a religious order was another. Here, then, we have a full explanation of Camiola's conduct. She is in possession of evidence of a contract of marriage between herself and Bertoldo, which, whether in praesenti or in futuro, being confirmed by oath, she can force upon him, and which will invalidate his proposed marriage with the duchess. Having established her right, she takes the only step that can with certainty free both herself and Bertoldo from the bond they had created, by retiring into a nunnery.

[Footnote 1: Swinburne, p. 227.]

This explanation renders the action of the play clear, and at the same time shows that Shakspere in his conduct with regard to his marriage may have been behaving in the most honourable and praiseworthy manner; as the bond, with the date of which the date of the birth of his first child is compared, is for the purpose of exonerating the ecclesiastics from any liability for performing the ecclesiastical ceremony, which was not at all a necessary preliminary to a valid marriage, so far as the husband and wife were concerned, although it was essential to render issue of the marriage legitimate.

6. These are instances of the deceptions that are likely to arise from the two fertile sources that have been specified. There can be no doubt that the existence of errors arising from the former source—misapprehension of the meaning of words—is very generally admitted, and effectual remedies have been supplied by modern scholars for those who will make use of them. Errors arising from the latter source are not so entirely recognized, or so securely guarded against. But what has just been said surely shows that it is of no use reading a writer of a past age with merely modern conceptions; and, therefore, that if such a man's works are worth study at all, they must be read with the help of the light thrown upon them by contemporary history, literature, laws, and morals. The student must endeavour to divest himself, as far as possible, of all ideas that are the result of a development subsequent to the time in which his author lived, and to place himself in harmony with the life and thoughts of the people of that age: sit down with them in their homes, and learn the sources of their loves, their hates, their fears, and see wherein domestic happiness, or lack of it, made them strong or weak; follow them to the market-place, and witness their dealings with their fellows—the honesty or baseness of them, and trace the cause; look into their very hearts, if it may be, as they kneel at the devotion they feel or simulate, and become acquainted with the springs of their dearest aspirations and most secret prayers.

7. A hard discipline, no doubt, but not more hard than salutary. Salutary in two ways. First, as a test of the student's own earnestness of purpose. For in these days of revival of interest in our elder literature, it has become much the custom for flippant persons, who are covetous of being thought "well-read" by their less-enterprising companions, to skim over the surface of the pages of the wisest and noblest of our great teachers, either not understanding, or misunderstanding them. "I have read Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton," is the sublimely satirical expression constantly heard from the mouths of those who, having read words set down by the men they name, have no more capacity for reading the hearts of the men themselves, through those words, than a blind man has for discerning the colour of flowers. As a consequence of this flippancy of reading, numberless writers, whose works have long been consigned to a well-merited oblivion, have of late years been disinterred and held up for public admiration, chiefly upon the ground that they are ancient and unknown. The man who reads for the sake of having done so, not for the sake of the knowledge gained by doing so, finds as much charm in these petty writers as in the greater, and hence their transient and undeserved popularity. It would be well, then, for every earnest student, before beginning the study of any one having pretensions to the position of a master, and who is not of our own generation, to ask himself, "Am I prepared thoroughly to sift out and ascertain the true import of every allusion contained in this volume?" And if he cannot honestly answer "Yes," let him shut the book, assured that he is not impelled to the study of it by a sincere thirst for knowledge, but by impertinent curiosity, or a shallow desire to obtain undeserved credit for learning.

8. The second way in which such a discipline will prove salutary is this: it will prevent the student from straying too far afield in his reading. The number of "classical" authors whose works will repay such severe study is extremely limited. However much enthusiasm he may throw into his studies, he will find that nine-tenths of our older literature yields too small a harvest of instruction to attract any but the pedant to expend so much labour upon them. The two great vices of modern reading will be avoided—flippancy on the one hand, and pedantry on the other.