SOURCE : "Supernatural Intervention: Two Dramatic Traditions," in The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage, The Christopher Publishing House, 1965, pp. 15-53.

[In the following essay, Reed demonstrates that the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama of supernaturalism evolved from the fusion of classical sources, and especially the plays of Seneca, with the medieval Christian theater.]

The English playwrights of the Renaissance, including Shakespeare, have appropriately been described as "mundane"; this evaluation, probably more than any other factor, has tended to make obscure the unparalleled extent to which they were preoccupied with the occult world. To them, of course, the occult had a reality and a substance that are difficult for modern minds to comprehend. Their interest in supernatural phenomena—an interest that far surpasses that of the secular playwrights of any other period in England—was not, as a matter of fact, inconsistent with their mundane impulse, and does not stamp them as mystics or dreamers. Their repeated employment of sorcerers, demons, and witches as indispensable motivators of their plots was in full keeping with the Elizabethan belief that the supernatural world and the earth were not, at all points, mutually exclusive. Heaven had receded to a remote distance, but not Hell—at least not yet. Black magic was feared as never before, because of its powers over human life. As an effect of the doctrine that linked the occult with the mundane, the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, worldly as they were in temperament, composed a secular genre of drama in which supernatural agents are among the principal characters; and even in a number of plays which lie slightly outside this genre a witch, a sorcerer, or a demon is an important, though not the dominant, motivator of the plot. The drama of super-naturalism, as composed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, is characterized by degrees of intensity: thirty-one extant plays are in all essential respects homogeneous members of this genre; not less than forty others, even when we exclude plays that have ghosts in them, contain one or more important episodes common to it.

Of the plays that stress occult phenomena, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Greene's The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, and Dekker's The Witch of Edmonton, among many others, may be said to belong to the drama of supernaturalism. In each of these plays, one or more agents of the supernatural are the dominant motivators of the central plot. By contrast, tragedies such as Macbeth and Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, although they emphasize occult phenomena, belong only in part to the drama of supernaturalism. In neither of these plays is an agent of the occult world the dominant figure. The prophecies of Shakespeare's three witches are, of course, important; but more crucial to the tragic action is Macbeth's "vaulting ambition," a worldly and not an occult phenomenon. A manifest fact remains: an essay on the supernatural elements of the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama cannot exclude a discussion of the three Macbeth witches; no pertinent merit attaches to the principle that they are not the major figures of the play. They are a part of the drama of supernaturalism even though the tragedy itself does not, in several of its aspects, answer to such a precise definition.

What may properly be called the drama of supernaturalism is, of course, as ancient as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, whose plots were motivated largely by gods or avenging spirits. Among the ancient Greeks, however, and in western Europe of the late medieval period, when the drama of supernaturalism had regained forcible expression in the mystery and miracle plays, the stimulus behind it had been purely, or almost purely, religious. The case was quite different with the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean playwrights: they were motivated by secular rather than religious doctrine, and hence gave to the drama of supernaturalism a worldly color and a spirited genuineness that markedly differentiate it from its earlier forms. In Greek tragedy, and in England's mystery and morality plays, since they were products of religious doctrine, the god or demon who intervened among mankind was conceived not as a physical reality but mainly as symbolic of a superior power that governs or influences human affairs. Greek citizens who had witnessed an Artemis or a Dionysus being lowered onto the stage as the deus ex machina had no expectation of meeting the goddess or god in actual life. Likewise, in the English mystery play, the black-garmented and long-tailed Devil who packed a Herod, a Judas Iscariot, or an Antichrist off to Hell was intended customarily as a symbol of the demonic influence that had instigated the evil design of the victim. Satan, although granted embodiment, does not pretend that he dragged his victims into Hell or ever physically confronted them. He explains that he "entered into Judas"—meaning, of course, as a spirit. Of equal significance is the remark of one of the two devils, as they symbolically convey Antichrist into Hell: "Ere on earth he went, I was him within," that is, as a spirit without physical shape. A logical analysis of these episodes brings one to an obvious conclusion: for the purpose of dramatic presentation, the soul of the damned man is symbolized by the corpse; the devil, in turn, especially since there is no need of a physical force to carry a soul into Hell, is the embodiment of the malign influence that has assured the soul's damnation. This is not to say that some members of the medieval audience may not have ascribed a degree of reality to these demons; but it is doubtful that sober-minded persons expected to see the devil of religious concept—short-horned, long-tailed, cloven-footed—in actual life. If he had a physical existence—and in religious theory he was thought to have one—it was some place outside the circle of everyday society. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans, on the other hand, accepted the witch or the sorcerer whom they had seen upon the stage as the counterpart of very real witches or sorcerers whom they knew to exist, not in some far-off Heaven or less distant Hell, but in their own community. The drama that they had seen was secular and not religious, and therefore the supernatural elements in it—a conjuror attended by demons (who, according to secular theory, were thought to assume deceased human bodies) or the machinations of a familiar in the shape of a black dog—were as realistic and mundane to them as was London Bridge or the apprentice riots on Fleet Street.

To Tudor Englishmen, witches and demons were unquestioned actualities, called into doubt only by some apostate such as Reginald Scot. The infancy of witchcraft, of course, can be dated back to primitive times in almost every part of the world; the fear of witches, however, had never been, and was never again to be, so deeply embedded in English minds as it was in the second half of the sixteenth century. In almost every village there were reputed to be at least three or four witches; in several trials, as many as twenty were indicted in communities of no more than five hundred persons. Meantime, sorcerers, such as Dr. John Dee and Dr. Simon Forman, were known to call forth spirits out of crystals or, like Edmond Hartley, to bind them in conjuring circles; others, such as Archimago in The Faerie Queene or Thomas Allen in actual life, were reputed to have at their service demons in the form of flies or bees. Moreover, the fabulous story of Doctor Faust, or Faustus, which was to leave an ineffaceable mark on English literature, was almost totally the product of the sixteenth century. The historical Dr. Johannes Faustus (his Christian name was originally recorded as Georgius) had died in the year 1539; prior to his death he had been regarded by his German colleagues as a quack fortune teller and an ill-reputed master of legerdemain. But there had been sufficient bravado in his boasts that he could match the miracles of Christ or restore, if it were necessary, the works of Plato and Aristotle, to awaken emulation in the minds of his younger contemporaries. His fame as a superman was entirely posthumous: grossly exaggerated anecdotes of his command over demons were recorded as facts by Johannes Gast, Melanchthon, Johannes Manlius, and other historians. English minds were no less receptive than German to these "facts." To the Elizabethans' understanding, the full-length biography of Faustus, originally published in 1587, was a definitive history, not a legend; in consequence, when Marlowe dramatized it, he chose not to take the playwright's customary liberties of altering or unduly expanding the details of his source. To do so, in the Elizabethans' evaluation, would have been apostasy.

I

The earliest uses of supernaturalism that we encounter in the secular, or nonreligious, Elizabethan drama—as distinguished from the morality play, already in its decline—had nothing to do with the beliefs of ordinary Englishmen. Sorcerers and witches did not become important dramatic devices of supernaturalism until 1587 and later: in the meantime, the contemporary stage re-echoed to the bombast of Senecan ghosts and other infernal anachronisms. The dramatic authors in the years 1558 to 1587 were academics, usually residents of an inn of court or students at Oxford or Cambridge. The archives of their libraries, and not the village square or the county court-house, provided the material for their plays. Because they were unfamiliar with the great Grecian dramas, they sought out the ten tragedies ascribed to Seneca: in these tragedies they found a variety of supernatural devices, including Tiresias' conjuring of the reluctant ghost of Laius and the incantations of an aroused Medea. But what appealed to them most especially were the revenge ghosts which supernaturally motivate the plots of three Senecan plays—namely, Thyestes, Agamemnon, and Octavia. In the first of these plays they also took note of the vengeful fury Megaera, for whom, in their own tragedies, they sometimes substituted Até, the goddess of wrath.

The second tradition of supernatural intervention known to these student-playwrights was the Christian doctrine of demonic temptation and God-granted salvation; it had been depicted at intervals in both the mystery and the miracle plays and delineated with greater frequency in the subsequent morality plays. This tradition, despite the fact that it was native to medieval Europe, asserted no important influence on the regular—that is, the secular—Elizabethan drama until the 1580's; it was for the time being considered second-rate and confined largely to the morality interludes and to a few longer morality plays. The reason for this is clear: the English scholars' newly awakened admiration for the classics and classical doctrine precluded more than a casual interest in native literary traditions. The medieval morality play, with only a few exceptions, had dwindled to the morality interlude, a genre that was staged inconspicuously—at an inn of court or at the university—during the intermissions of a banquet or between the acts of a classicized tragedy of revenge. As a consequence of the slavish worship of ancient doctrine, the demons and the good angels of the morality plays were excluded from the new mode of regular drama in favor of two sixteen-hundred-year-old anachronisms, a goddess of wrath and a Roman ghost of vengeance. That both of these, in their classicized forms, were alien to English thought, as well as to the spontaneity of the native temper, was a matter of minor importance: as devices borrowed from the admired Seneca, they bore the stamp of intellectual acceptability.

Seneca had modeled his dramas upon those of the three most famous Greek tragedians: there were but two major elements that he failed to borrow from them, their genius and their religious motive. Of these two, only the latter is of concern here. In place of the sometimes thrilling paeans addressed to Zeus or one of the other gods and sung by the Grecian choruses, Seneca substituted moralistic choral songs that were at best hollow echoes of the religiously motivated odes of Aeschylus and Sophocles. He was not writing for a religious festival, as his predecessors had done. Here and there, Seneca preserved the god, or goddess, of the Greek original, but only as a mechanical device that would motivate his plot: in a choral ode in the Troas, for example, he denies, without reservation, both after-life and the abodes of the gods. In consequence, although his plays were adaptations of the tragic drama of the Greeks, he completely stripped the tradition of its religious significance. From Seneca, in turn, the Elizabethans took over a purely secular form of dramaturgy, in which—fortunately for their purpose—the gods or goddesses and revenging ghosts had only a single function uncomplicated by religious overtones: to motivate the plot.

Of the Senecan devices of supernatural intervention, the goddess of vengeance exerted the most important influence on the regular Elizabethan drama prior to 1587; but it is the revenge ghost that makes the earliest and perhaps most notable appearance, although it is not met again for nearly thirty years. In his liberal translation of the Troas in 1559, Jasper Heywood introduced, at the beginning of Act II , the specter of Achilles. As no actual ghost had appeared in Seneca's Troas, Heywood's experiment is the first known attempt by an English playwright to create a supernatural character in the manner of the Roman dramatist, and suggests that the revenge ghost, as derived from Seneca's Agamemnon and Thyestes, may have been a feature in a number of early Elizabethan tragedies now lost. But in the available drama it is otherwise: the Senecan ghost, despite the vigor of its eventual popularity on the English stage, remains curiously absent from the year of Heywood's experiment with it until 1587.

In the meantime, almost every early Elizabethan tragedy that survives, as well as at least one pastoral comedy, owed an evident debt to Seneca's goddesses of vengeance. They had assumed important roles in two of the Roman playwright's most influential tragedies: Megaera in Thyestes, and Juno, who vows and executes vengeance upon the central character, in Hercules Furens. Among early Elizabethan adaptations of this device, Megaera, attended by her sister Furies, appears in a dumb show of Sackville's and Norton's Gorboduc (1561) and prophesies the downfall of the royal family; both Cupid (a male transfiguration of the vengeful goddess) and Megaera plan the program of revenge in Tancred and Gismunda (1568); Venus and Cupid conspire to destroy the king in The Lamentable Tragedy of Cambyses (1569); in Appius and Virginia (1575), frequent references are made to the doom imposed by Roman gods and goddesses, especially by Pluto and Venus; and in Peek's Arraignment of Paris (1584), Até, supplanting Megaera as the goddess of vengeance, announces the imminent fall of Troy and concludes:

Done be the pleasure of the powers,
Whose hestes men must obey.

Até then sets in motion the discord that will assure the downfall of Troy. Most memorable of the devices patterned after Megaera is Revenge in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1589); but in the denotative name of the spirit, one immediately recognizes the reassertion of a native English practice common to the morality play. Indeed, so markedly out of harmony with English thought and doctrine had been the Romanized goddesses of vengeance that we rarely meet them after 1590. By that time they had yielded the stage to sorcerers and witches, who were contemporized concepts of the demons of England's medieval plays. Meanwhile the Roman goddesses had established a precedent: both playwright and audience, long accustomed to goddesses of vengeance, had learned to look upon the supernatural as an indispensable mark of the secular drama.

The Senecan ghost came of age much more slowly than had the goddess of vengeance, but it attained eventually a place of far greater importance on the English stage. As much of an anachronism as had been the Romanized goddess, it was spared an early end on the stage only because of several wise changes that were made in its character. Heywood's portrayal of Achilles' ghost in his English rendition of the Troas had been an unmitigated stereotype of the Senecan conception: introduced at the beginning of Act II , it rants in soliloquy for nearly three pages, and in the meantime makes frequent allusions to Greco-Roman mythology (for example to the "darkest deunes of Tartare" and to the "Stygian lakes"). Its worst fault, typically Senecan, is the habit of needless repetition: on at least four occasions it reminds the reader that its mission of vengeance was ordered or demanded by the infernal "sprights." Indeed, its entire message could easily have been delivered in twelve lines instead of nearly a hundred. In one respect, this ghost seems to depart from the Senecan prototype: the latter makes its customary entrance in the prologue, as illustrated by the specters of Tantalus and Thyestes; however, in the Roman play Octavia, which the Elizabethans ascribed to Seneca, the vengeful ghost of Agrippina appears at the beginning of Act III , and only there. Heywood's insertion of the ghost of Achilles at the beginning of Act II in the Troas, rather than in the prologue, was not, therefore, a departure from the Senecan rule. The established precedent was simply that the ghost of revenge should appear only once on the stage and make that appearance as verbose and prolonged as possible; its purpose was to produce an atmosphere of foreboding and create suspense.

The year 1587 marked the beginning of a long succession of Senecan ghosts. Immediately, we note the first of those alterations that were to save the ghost from an abrupt demise and make it acceptable to an audience whose criteria were to be based more and more upon a renewed appreciation of native values at the expense of classical conventions. The initial alteration in the stage behavior of the Senecan ghost is comparatively mild: its main importance is that it served as a precedent for further and more revolutionary adjustments. In Thomas Hughes' The Misfortunes of King Arthur (1587)—a thoroughly Senecan play, replete with a dumb show of Furies, bombastic speeches, and stichomythiae which are literally translated out of Seneca—we encounter the ghost of the murdered Gorlois. In the opening scene, the ghost, which has just arrived from "Pluto's pittes," steels itself to "glutte on revenge"; its soliloquy occupies the entire scene and is laden with bombast. Indeed, in this scene the specter of Gorlois is a Senecan stereotype in every detail. But Hughes added one adjustment that served as a fortunate influence upon his immediate successors, such as Thomas Kyd : he brought the ghost back for a second appearance at the end of the play. The spirit's delight that "not one hath scapt revenge" and its promise to "worke no further plagues" give to the play a unity and a balance that are not provided by Seneca's ghosts, which make only an initial appearance. Secondly, as an appeased ghost which promises no further malice, Gorlois acquires the dramatic stature that comes from a development or an alteration of character. Thus, by the simple adjustment of returning the ghost of vengeance to the stage, Hughes provided it with two important functions that are not shared by its Senecan prototype.

The ghosts of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and the anonymous Locrine (c. 1590), like the specter of Gorlois, are basically Senecan in type. The vengeful spirit of Andrea in the former tragedy and those of Albanact and Corineus in the latter are the products of a pagan hell. The appearance of Andrea and Revenge, in the opening scene of The Spanish Tragedy, was almost certainly suggested to Ky d by the prologue of Seneca's Thyestes, in which the ghost of Tantalus is goaded earthward by the Fury Megaera. Al though Andrea's ghost, on its first appearance, owes much to Senecan prototypes, and makes for example a drawnout autobiographical oration and repeated references to a Greco-Roman hell, it manifests at the same time undeniably modern traits. The most marked of these is the literal, straightforward, and nonrepetitious character of its monologue; for the first time on the English stage, a ghost is permitted to speak at considerable length without resorting to repetitions and irrelevancies, and without more-over a direct attempt to excite horror. Thus modernized, the ghost joins Revenge to serve as a chorus to the play. The spontaneity of the ghost, especially its compulsion to cry "Revenge, awake!" when Revenge is dozing at the end of Act HI , makes it the most refreshing specter found in the English drama prior to 1600. But the modernization of the ghost is confined entirely to its character. Kyd's only technical innovation was to employ the ghost as a chorus; since the chorus was an archaic device, the ghost's function in this capacity cannot be said to add to its upto-date qualities. From the opposite point of view the choice of this overlabored environment was a happy one: the spontaneous temperament of the ghost did much to revitalize the drab and shopworn Elizabethan chorus.

The anonymous author of Locrine, a dour tragedy of warfare and intrigue, was considerably more revolutionary in his employment of the Senecan ghost than was either Hughes or Kyd . Heretofore, the ghost of revenge had been permitted to appear only in the prologue, or at the beginning or the end of acts, and had consequently been kept completely detached from the main action of the play; the author of Locrine, in total disregard of tradition, introduced his two specters within the acts and thus gave to them a direct contact with the plot itself. One motive for this unprecedented use of the revenge ghost stems apparently from the fact that Até, the goddess of vengeance, is given the dominant role in both the prologue and the between-act choruses; hence, in Locrine there is no demand for a ghost in the positions normally reserved for it. In bringing his ghosts into the structural framework of the plot, the author of Locrine had the opportunity of making a second important adjustment: for the first time in the Elizabethan tragedies that have survived, a ghost confronts and speaks to a flesh-and-blood character of the play. When the Scythian Humber is eventually overthrown by the Britons, the ghost of the lately slain warrior Albanact confronts his former enemy and cries, "Revenge, revenge for blood!" After Humber threatens to drag it "through all the rivers of foule Erebus," the ghost resorts to the typical outcry of Elizabethan specters: "Vindicta, vindicta." Throughout the ensuing scenes it continues to haunt the outlawed Humber, and in doing so makes its appearances at strategic moments within the acts of the play. Like the ghost of the elderly statesman Corineus, which makes its entrance in the middle of Act V, the specter of Albanact is granted a freedom of entry and exit customarily accorded only to flesh-and-blood characters.

The innovations of Locrine had two important effects: henceforth, ghosts were not as a rule to be confined to the prologue or to positions between the acts; secondly, in contrast to their formerly detached roles, they had now become actual participants in the mechanics of the plot. Despite these advances, however, the ghosts of Locrine are themselves Senecan in that they are the products of a pagan hell. It remained for Shakespeare and John Marston to make the last and most momentous change in the specter of revenge, the change from a pagan to a Christianized ghost. This change is strongly hinted at in Shakespeare's Richard III (c. 1595): the ghosts which appear while King Richard and the Earl of Richmond are asleep make no mention of a pagan underworld; the last of the specters, that of Buckingham, concludes his exhortation with the prayer: "God and good angels fight on Richmond's side." Examination of the specters employed by Marston in Antonio's Revenge and Shakespeare in Hamlet, both written about 1600, removes any vestige of doubt as to the complete Christianization of the ghost. The specter of "ould Andrugio," witnessing the success of Antonio's plot, observes with confidence:

Now lookes down Providence
T' attend the last act of my sons revenge.

The ghost of King Hamlet is likewise Christian in conception: when it first speaks, it tells us that it must serve a term in Purgatory until, as it explains,

The foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away.

Moreover, in marked contrast to Seneca's pagan ghosts, it has been forbidden to reveal the nature of its torments; hence it leaves not the slightest doubt in the reader's mind that it comes from the mysterious underworld of Christian doctrine and not from the Greco-Roman Tartarus. No pagan ghost had hesitated to expound upon the secrets of Tartarus in the most gruesome detail.

Thus by 1600 the Senecan ghost of revenge had been completely revamped into a ghost which had the histrionic advantages of appearing at any opportune moment in the play and of speaking to whom it chose, instead of being restricted to soliloquy. Most important of all, the new ghost was no longer a Greco-Roman anachronism: it had, in the final stage of its metamorphosis, become the product of a Christian, not a Hellenic, afterworld. The ghosts of George Chapman's two D'Ambois plays and of Cyril Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedie (1611) reflect the tradition established by Marston and Shakespeare. The most Christian of all the revenge ghosts of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period is the specter of Montferrers in Tourneur's tragedy: although it alerts Charlemont to the advisability of vengeance, it does so with remarkable restraint:

Attend with patience the successe of things;
But leave revenge unto the King of kings.

The ghost, which is at all times confident of Divine retribution, later cautions Charlemont:

Let Him revenge my murder, and thy wrongs,
To whom the Justice of Revenge belongs.

Indeed, as the chief expositor of Tourneur's central thesis, namely, that God has reserved for Himself, and not for man, the right to judge and to punish human mis-deeds, the ghost attains a Christian uprightness of character which has few parallels elsewhere in the English drama.

Despite the apparent appropriateness of the modernized ghost of revenge as depicted by Marston, Shakespeare, and Tourneur, its stage history was not to be much more remarkable than had been that of its non-Christian, or Senecan, forebears. The remodeled and Christianized ghost presented immediate evidence of two flaws. The more manifest of these flaws, however, becomes upon close analysis the less important of the two; but we shall look at it first. The liberalization of the ghost-concept had transformed the specter from a stereotyped pagan device confined mainly to the prologue to one that met the demands of a comparatively modern stage; but, as is often the case, the breaking away from an established tradition was to lead to no rule or doctrine whatsoever. In the playwrights' treatment of the ghost during the early 1600's a sense of restraint was sacrificed either to dramatic spectacle or to the exigencies of plot. This loss of restraint is evident in Marston's treatment of the ghost of Andrugio, whose horror on two occasions is accentuated by the novel and hence unexpected conditions under which the specter makes its appearance. In Act III , scene one, it thrusts aside the "cerecloth" and bolts upright from its coffin; later, when the widowed Maria has drawn the curtains of her chamber, the ghost is discovered to be lounging on her bed—a revelation that is as much a shock to the spectator as it is to the startled widow. Chapman's use of ghosts, by contrast to that of Marston, is rarely horrifying; but it is unduly subtle and more often than not becomes an unnatural expedient in shaping the course of action of the flesh-and-blood characters. Whereas Marston had accentuated the element of horror, Chapman reduces his ghosts to the status of house guests and ward politicians. In Bussy D'Ambois (1598-1607), the specter of the recently deceased Friar is obsessed by its affection for Tamyra and D'Ambois: although it knows that its own "power is limited" and that it is merely the agent of an ineffective counter-fate, it repeatedly appears in order to warn its friends of D'Ambois' inevitable downfall. Once D'Ambois is murdered, the ghost delivers a spirited eulogy in behalf of its fallen friend. It then resorts to its most notable talent, that of diplomacy. At home with friend and foe alike, it asks the murderers of D'Ambois to desist henceforth from further feelings of hostility: in particular, it argues that the wronged Montsurry accept a "Christian reconcilement" with his wife Tamyra. Recognizing that the parties must meet each other halfway, it makes its ultimate plea to Tamyra: "Piety wills thee … [to] content thy husband." The character of the Friar's ghost is thus the antithesis of that of the specter of Andrugio: whereas Marston's creation is an exaggerated device of horror, the ghost of the Friar proves to be a diplomatic and kindly go-between. Its attributes, which are odd for a ghost, qualify it as the deus ex machina of the denouement.

The oddness of gregarious conduct as a dominant characteristic of the ghost is equally apparent in Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610), which is the sequel to the play just discussed. In Senecan fashion the ghost of Bussy opens Act V with an extended monologue; but later, when it takes charge of the revenge plot and mingles freely with the flesh-and-blood characters, it retains few of the normal traits of ghosthood. Upon espying the specter, Tamyra is so far from being unnerved that she seeks to embrace it. Although it has no aversion to social amenities, the ghost must warn Tamyra to desist from her purpose solely on the grounds that it is made of "air" and thus is liable to "blast." At the end of the play, when five ghosts dance a roundelay about the slain Montsurry, the spectator or the reader senses not an inkling of horror: he has become accustomed to the brotherly good nature of ghosts.

The mounting disregard of what we may term proper ghost etiquette—especially as it affected the ghost of revenge in contrast to the ghost of conscience, on which I shall comment shortly—had thus led to unusually odd and unimpressive portrayals of the specter, in particular by Chapman. Undoubtedly, this unorthodox treatment had something to do with the demise of the ghost of revenge: Marston had carried the horror of the ghost to excess, and hence to the point of ridicule; Chapman, tending toward the other extreme, had robbed the ghost of its last vestige of traditional awesomeness. There was, however, a far more impelling, though less evident, force that opposed the continued use of the specter as a supernatural agent on the stage: the Church of England had for long contested, and shortly before 1600 had denied, the Papist doctrine that the spirits of the dead could return to the living world. Thus the Christian ghost of revenge was a completely appropriate device only in the minds of those Englishmen who retained a sympathy for Roman Catholic teachings, and by 1600 these persons were few, especially in the vicinity of London. The medieval Church had held that the spirits of the dead made their return, as a rule, from Purgatory, and that they could not return from Heaven or Hell except under the most impelling circumstances. From its inception in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Church had denied the existence of Purgatory; a natural sequel to this denial was, of course, a very serious doubt as to the actuality of ghosts. In De Spectris, published in 1570, the Swiss Protestant Ludwig Lavater rejected the idea of Purgatory and cited Christ, St. Augustine, and other authorities to the effect that all departed spirits go directly to Heaven or to Hell: his unqualified conclusion was that the spirits of the dead could not return to earth. Testifying to the attitude of the Church of Scotland, King James, in Daemonologie (1597), was like-wise emphatic in denouncing the existence of ghosts, and, unlike Lavater, felt no need to rely upon the authoritative statements of the Church elders; his conclusion reflects a degree of blunt self-assurance: "Neither can the spirite of the defunct returne to his friend, or yet an Angeli use such formes." In the meantime, the Church of England had shaped a similar opinion, as is evidenced by William Perkins, a well-known Cambridge theologian, who died in 1602. In confuting "the opinion of the Church of Rome," he stated without reservation: "Dead men doe neither walke, nor appeare in bodie or soule after death." The Protestant denial of Purgatory had thus led to an outright denial of the actuality of ghosts.

Likewise within the drama of the early seventeenth century there is solid evidence that the ghost of revenge was a contradiction of current belief. Hamlet, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is not prompted by a neurotic impulse when he observes, "The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil." His doubt arises from dogma. An act and a half earlier, even before the ghost of his father has revealed its motive, Hamlet had reason to suspect that it might be "a goblin damn'd." The prince, in doubting the authenticity of the ghost, obviously reflects the Protestant distrust of the conception that the dead can return to earth; moreover, his suspicion that the ghost may be the devil is supported by a second tenet of Protestant doctrine. King James, as well as others, had pointed out that the devil, in appearing to his intended victims, had the power to appropriate the body of a newly dead person "to make them beleeve that it was some good spirit that appeared to them." Whereas Shakespeare only implies his doubt of the actuality of ghosts, Chapman and Tourneur, both of them writing ten or eleven years later, do not hesitate to make positive denials of specters, even in those plays in which they appear. In The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, Chapman allows Clermont to express the Jacobean disavowal of ghosts: "That spirits should rise in these times yet are fables." The philosophical Clermont then proceeds to qualify his statement of disbelief by presenting the opinion of some of the "learned'st men" as to the actuality of ghosts, but this is clearly an intellectual attempt to justify the minority opinion. Tourneur, in The Atheist's Tragedie, is more forthright and permits an unqualified denial of ghosts: the Puritan Chaplain Langebeau Snuffe, speaking of the dead, observes: "Tush, tush; their walking spirits are mere imaginarie fables. There's no such thing in rerum natura." The term "fable" as used by both Chapman and Tourneur in describing the ghost appears to have been borrowed from a common source—probably the mint of public sentiment. Langebeau Snuffe's comment, it might be added, is not made under conditions that would evoke his custom of hypocrisy.

The truth is that the revenge ghost, by its very nature, was foreign to Protestant and hence to English thought. The earlier playwrights, especially the author of Locrine and Shakespeare, had done all they could to modernize the Senecan ghost of vengeance, whereas Marston and Chapman had so liberalized the conception as to invite ridicule. But the revenge ghost was doomed to eventual extinction, regardless of dramatic propriety or the want of it: the idea that the dead, in the form of specters, could return to earth was direct contradiction of Protestant doctrine; for this reason no attempt to make a serious use of the unorthodox ghost of revenge is found in English drama subsequent to 1612.

The reader may object that ghosts do appear in such tragedies as Middleton's and Rowley's The Changeling, Massinger's The Unnatural Combat, and Dekker's The Witch of Edmonton—all of them written in the early 1620's. The objection cannot be refuted: what can be pointed out, however, is that all these ghosts are figments of conscience and not essentially specters of vengeance. They belong to a second Senecan tradition, but have nothing directly to do with supernatural intervention. Like the gory-locked Banquo, they have no apparent actuality or substance, outside the imagination of the beholder. In both The Trojan Women and the Medea, Seneca had made subtle use of the ghost of conscience: in each play, only one character—Andromache and Medea, respectively—perceives the ghost, which is not visible to the others who are present and obviously is an embodiment of the beholder's conscience-torn psyche. Among the Elizabethans, Shakespeare made the most extensive use of this technique, of which the ghost of King Hamlet (on its third and final stage appearance when, unseen and unheard by the Queen, it addresses itself to young Hamlet's tormented conscience) and that of Banquo are his best known and most orthodox examples. When De Flores, in The Changeling (c. 1622), tersely evaluates the apparition of Alonzo de Piracquo, whom he has murdered, as a "mist of conscience," he is alluding to a tradition practiced by Seneca and Shakespeare; there can be little doubt that Alonzo's ghost, appearing momentarily and then only to De Flores and the equally sinful Beatrice, is a fabrication of the mind. We come to the same conclusion when we evaluate the ghosts that confront Malefort, in The Unnatural Combat (c. 1621), and Frank Thorney, in The Witch of Edmonton (1622): in each instance, they appear in response to a sorely violated conscience, and are seen by no one except the guilt-stricken villain. Frank Thorney, for example, refers to the specter that he has seen as "some wind-mill in my brains." The ghost of conscience, therefore, was not a contradiction of Protestant doctrine: its lack of external reality—the fact that it was a creation of the guilty mind and not, in the strict sense, a supernatural intruder—assured it a prolonged popularity, even upon the Restoration stage.

II

The two-fold Senecan doctrine of supernatural intervention—a tradition which included the goddess of vengeance and the revenge ghost—had a parallel in the second and eventually more important tradition, the supernatural elements of the medieval drama. In shaping the development of the Elizabethan theater, the two traditions are analogous to two separate rivers which for thirty years flowed side by side before their eventual confluence into a single broad stream. The Senecan doctrine had been, as already pointed out, a major influence on the regular, or nonreligious, drama of the Elizabethan period up to 1587, and in respect of the ghost even later. In the meantime, the medieval tradition of supernaturalism—the intervention of demons and good angels—was a recurrent phenomenon of the morality interlude; with personified Virtues assuming the role of the good angel, this native tradition is the dominant mode of Richard Wever's Lusty Juventus, Thomas Inglelend's The Disobedient Child, and Ulpian Fulwel's Like Will to Like. The fact that the first two of these morality interludes were initially acted late in the reign of Edward VI , at least five years before Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, is immaterial: both these Protestant-colored interludes, having survived the short reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary, were reproduced, with revitalized popularity, after 1558.

Although performed against a secular background, the morality interludes retain several major elements of the religious character of the medieval drama: in particular, the entire theme centers upon the struggle for the soul of man. Moreover, the demon of these interludes is the symbolic product of religious doctrine: unlike the devils of popular belief, who were soon to appear on the mature Elizabethan stage, he is neither conjured by a magician nor does he assume the dead body of a person or an animal. His character is fundamentally what it had been in the medieval drama: he is intended as the personification of demonic temptation, not as a creature having physical substance. The idea of religious symbolism had been clearly expressed by Titivillus in the late morality play Mankind (c. 1475): although he appears on earth as a black devil, carrying "a net in his hand," he is careful to tell the audience, "Ever I go invysybull." The same argument applies to the demon of the mystery drama when he carries off the dead body of a Herod or an Antichrist: the physical action—which has no basis in Biblical accounts—is symbolic. It is, indeed, the only logical way in which the idea of a soul's damnation can be made intelligible to the audience. Attesting to the symbolic nature of actions of this type, Satan—as I have noted—boasts that he "entered into Judas" and thus, as a spirit, brought him to damnation. But one qualification must be stressed: in mystery plays of a remote and grandiose character, such as The Fall of Lucifer, the demon was probably thought to have some kind of actual physique. The incarnation of the abstract is limited to those episodes in which spirits, good and evil, contend for the soul of an ordinary man, as is clear from the foregoing statements made by Satan and Titivillus respectively. The demon of the morality interlude belongs to this tradition of religious symbolism; unlike the secular concept of devils, he is best interpreted as the personification of invisible demonic powers and not as a character molded of flesh and bone or other material substance. Like the post-Homeric gods and goddesses of Greek tragedy, and like the Vice and the Virtue of his own brand of drama, he was granted human embodiment—usually the unlikely shape of a clumsy buffoon—mainly because he could not otherwise be portrayed upon the stage.

In one major characteristic, the demon of the Elizabethan interlude, like that of the full-length morality play, differs from his prototype in the earlier mystery drama: in disre gard of a once venerated tradition, the archfiend of the interlude is granted unrestricted license to intervene where and when he chooses. The orthodox Christian doctrine that limited the activity of the major demons to the under-world had been precisely stated in the thirteenth-century dramatic poem The Harrowing of Hell; Christ, in a significant passage, addresses Sathanas:

Thou shalt buen in bondes ay,
O that come domesday.

For were thou among men,
Thou woldest me reven moni hem.
The small fendes that bueth not stronge,
He shulen among men yonge.

The writers of the mystery plays were at all times mindful of this doctrine. Only in the episodes which pre-date Christ's death and descent into Hades are the archdemons—especially Satan—permitted to intrude on earth; in the subsequent Biblical episodes, when they appear at all, they are confined to the environment of Hell-pit. The privilege of playing the harvester of damned souls, and as such making an occasional excursion to earth, is granted only to the lesser demons, such as those who corrupt the Antichrist in the Chester version of the New Testament account. The fifteenth-century writers of the morality plays were from the very beginning more liberal than the composers of the mystery dramas in their treatment of demons, especially the archfiend. They looked to the Old Testament mystery plays, such as The Fall of Eden and The Temptation, for the precedent of supernatural intervention by Satan or one of the other potentates of Hell; indeed, they paid little heed to the orthodox doctrine that the archfiends were to be confined to Hades, by ordinance of Christ, throughout the Christian era. In The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425) and in Wisdom (c. 1450), both of them morality plays, Belial and Lucifer respectively come to earth and directly intervene in the moral conduct of medieval men. No taboo, therefore, confronted the Elizabethan writers of morality interludes. Satan or Lucifer, and not some lesser devil, was in every surviving instance their favorite stock device of demonic intervention, even though their plays dealt with a Christian society.

Whereas the archfiend had acquired an increasingly important role in the drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, an opposite fate overtook the good angel. In the mystery plays, no character appears möre frequently than does the angel, whether he is Michael, Gabriel, or an angel unnamed; his mission, moreover, is invariably the betterment of mankind. Likewise in the miracle plays and in the moralities, the good angel is a dominant figure. In Mary Magdalene (c. 1450), he converts the wayward Mary to righteousness; in the early morality plays, such as The Castle of Perseverance, the good angel, attended by personified Virtues, is pitted against both the bad angel and the archfiend, and Mankind must make his choice between the two factions. But as strict adherence to religious doctrine was slowly relaxed, the morality playwrights tended to subordinate the good angel and give greater emphasis to the personification of virtues. Mercy in Mankind, and Knowledge and Confession in Everyman (c. 1500), are so to speak the earthly vicars of the good angel, whose own appearance, after 1460, becomes progressively less frequent; in Everyman, for example, he makes a brief appearance only for the purpose of leading the penitent central figure of the play "into the heavenly sphere." In the morality interludes written after 1550, the good angel seems never to have been portrayed; in the plays that survive, he is replaced by his viceroys, who include Good Counsel, Virtuous Living, and Conscience. There is no mystery about the eventual disappearance of the good angel from the morality plays; he had been purely a religious and not a secular concept; hence, as the drama became modernized and gradually less religious, the angel became a dramatic anachronism. Unlike the demon, whose degraded character made him adaptable to a variety of human environments, the good angel was societally much superior to the citizens of an up-to-date and realistic London, especially that of the morality interludes; in these plays were featured such settings as gambling houses, brothels, and taprooms.

The Christian doctrine of supernatural intervention had thus resulted in an apparently one-sided contest between the forces of evil and good. Because of the unacceptability of the good angel, the careful balance between the opposing factions, as it had been demonstrated in the early morality plays, was no longer possible. In the morality interludes, the demonic group, led by the archfiend, both outranks and usually outnumbers the Virtues, who are not even in the strict sense supernatural agents: they personify the divinity contained in man, but unlike the good angel of the older drama, they are not associated with a superior world. As we consider these facts, the contest for man's soul, as presented in the morality interludes, would seem to be a most uneven struggle. But the demonic faction has one serious flaw: it lacks the intensity of purpose which is the chief strength of the Virtues. The devil, despite the fact that he is Satan or Lucifer, is usually depicted as a "bottle-nosed" boaster inclined to bungling. Meantime, the Vice of the morality interludes, whether he is styled Hypocrisy or Nichol Newfangle, tends to be as clownish and irresponsible as he is clever. Thus, in a manner that gives comic distinction to their dramaturgy, the writers of the morality interlude solved the problem of preserving a dramatic balance between the opposing factions: since the good angel had to be excluded from the contemporary environment, the authors simply sprinkled ridicule on the otherwise superior demonic faction, including the arch-fiend.

As was stated earlier, the two traditions of supernatural intervention, the Senecan and the Christian, were distinct and separate influences on the drama of the Elizabethans, and did not converge into a single broad stream until late in the sixteenth century. There were, however, significant blendings of one stream into the other at a comparatively early date—in fact, as early as 1567. Whereas the majority of morality interludes, as well as Nathaniel Woodes' full-length morality play The Conflict of Conscience (1581), were pure products of the native tradition, at least two surviving interludes, John Pikeryng's The Historye of Horestes (1567) and the anonymous Appius and Virginia (1575), contain awkward blends of the Senecan and the Christian conceptions of supernatural intervention. In the former interlude, for example, the Vice is at first depicted as an English character and, while in the company of two rustics, acts the part of a witty country clown; later, when Horestes (or Orestes) has appeared, the Vice assumes the role of a Greco-Roman spirit of vengeance and, in the stage directions, his name is ultimately transformed from the Vice to Revenge. In Appius and Virginia, which I have classified as an interlude mainly because of its brevity, the incongruities are at first glance less apparent. The characterization of Haphazard, the Vice and the counselor of Appius, is consistent at all times with the Christian doctrines of supernatural intervention. Nevertheless, the background is ancient Rome, and there are repeated references to Pluto and other pagan gods as the wire-pullers of human destiny. Typical of these references is the following outcry by Appius: "The furies fell of Lymbo lake / my princely days do shorte"; he then calls upon Pluto, "caitiffe kinge of darksome dens," to assist him in the administration of "vengeaunce." When one recalls that Appius has Haphazard, the Vice of Christian belief and the deputy of Satan, in his employment, and that he himself is a pre-Christian Roman, his invocation of Pluto adds a bizarre emphasis to the fundamental incongruity.

A third hybrid play of the early Elizabethan period is Thomas Preston's regular, or full-length, drama The Lamentable Tragedy of Cambyses (c. 1569). Like its immediate predecessors, Gorboduc and Tancred and Gismunda (originally, Gismond of Salerne), it is basically Senecan, especially in its violence and bombast; but unlike them it incorporates notable characteristics of the English morality drama. A mainspring of evil in the play is the energetic Vice named Ambidexter; there are also many personifications of virtues and other vices. Preston, on the other hand, did not overlook the Greco-Roman concepts of supernatural intervention: Venus and Cupid are eventually introduced, and, by inflaming Cambyses with an incestuous love, are instrumental in bringing about his down-fall. Indeed, the introduction of Venus and Cupid into the play, at a time when Ambidexter has acquired a sizable control over the administration of evil motives, is a rather startling incongruity. The impression is that the author, fearing that he had fallen too far under the influence of native traditions, wished belatedly to stress the underlying Senecan character of his drama.

There were, then, three genres of early Elizabethan plays which relied, in varying degrees, on the ready-at-hand traditions of supernatural intervention: the tragedy modeled upon Senecan techniques; the morality interlude, as well as an occasional full-length morality; and the hybrid play, which made use of both the native and the Senecan tradition of supernaturalism. From the literary viewpoint, the least successful of the three genres was of course the hybrid drama. Its value, however, lies not in its own artistic merit but in the potentialities that it opened up to later playwrights. An examination of the dramas written after 1587 reveals an unexpectedly large number of plays which combined the Greco-Roman and the medieval doctrines of supernatural intervention and which were constructed, therefore, in the tradition first established by The Historye of Horestes. The difference in treatment is primarily one of maturity. The anonymous author of Grim, the Collier of Croydon (c. 1595), and Dekker, in both Old Fortunatus (1599) and If This Be Not A Good Play, The Devil Is In It (1612), were to make such subtle blends of the widely opposed traditions of supernaturalism that the reader is hardly aware of any doctrinal incongruity. The early Elizabethan writers of the hybrid play have a second significance, more important than their initiation of a drama that combined the two doctrines of supernatural intervention: in the broader area of dramaturgy, they were pioneers in the movement toward a centralized dramatic art in which much that was Senecan and nearly all that was medieval (not merely supernatural conceptions) were combined in a single vigorous stream.

III

It has already been shown that the two major Senecan instruments of supernatural intervention, namely, the goddess and the ghost, were anachronisms opposed to the teachings of Protestant England, and that in consequence they were destined to ultimate rejection. The supernatural figures of the medieval drama, by contrast, enjoyed the overwhelming advantage of being widely accepted throughout Christendom. In using them or modifications of them, the early Elizabethan writers of morality interludes, unlike the admirers of Seneca, did not slavishly imitate what they thought to be a higher type of drama. On the contrary, they were continuing and at times re-molding a national heritage. The differences that exist between the sixteenth-century morality interlude and the medieval drama are in direct proportion to the growing importance of secular attitudes at the expense of a strict adherence to orthodox religious doctrine. The ideas, therefore, that informed the old English drama were subject to adjustment, but not to complete rejection. Although the good angel, for example, was unacceptable in the contemporary settings of the morality interludes, he was the prototype from which the personified Virtues, such as Conscience and Virtuous Living, had descended; more-over, he reappeared, at a later date, in such plays as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (1589) and Massinger's Virgin Martyr (1622), where his presence was justified by the high religious character of the particular compositions. The simple fact that the native drama underwent an evolution which at all times reflected the religious and social mores of contemporary England, and was subject at most to appropriate modifications, gave it and its underlying ideas a permanence not shared by the alien doctrines derived from Seneca. An examination of the supernatural elements of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean drama points up the fact that the playwrights were indebted far more to indigenous than to Roman models. The ghost of revenge is not without importance, but more enduring as agents of supernatural intervention were the sorcerer, the witch, and the modernized Elizabethan devil. Each of these, moreover, is a lineal descendant of the demon of the medieval drama.

The important link between the devil of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean stage and that of the medieval drama is, as one would expect, the transitional fiend of the sixteenth-century interlude. Whether styled Satan or Lucifer, he combines the religious character of the demon of the medieval play with secular aspects that foreshadow the devil-concepts of the mature drama. The Lucifer of Fulwel's Like Will to Like (1568) is typical of the transitional demon. He is a personification of the invisible powers of evil, and is not intended to represent the "bone and flesh" devil who might assume a lately dead body and was the product of secular, not religious, doctrine; he has, more-over, only a single intent, and that is to win souls for Hell. His comic strain arises from worldly eccentricities. He is characterized as a buffoon, who is not only "bottlenosed" but also wears his name-plate on back and breast. In addition, his thinking is dictated by the secular trends of sixteenth-century London: his major objective is that the Vice, named Nichol Newfangle, arouse the people's pride in extravagant fashions, especially of apparel, and thus gain candidates for Hell. Indeed, in his boisterous behavior, the demon of the morality interlude is reminiscent of the archfiends of such mystery dramas as The Descent of Christ and The Judgment Day. But there is a distinction. Unlike the comedy of the "mystery" demons, his humorous deportment is not almost solely the product of mass hysteria imposed by an awesome dread of Christ: instead, it is an inbred and spontaneous habit capable of expressing itself without any external provocation.

For three hundred years prior to the Elizabethan period, the idea of demonic intervention had been a major device of the English theater. So potent was this tradition that it was almost inevitable that it should survive the transition from religious to secular forms of drama. The value of the morality interlude and its demon, therefore, should not be underestimated. The religious intent of the interlude links it to the older drama, but the secular environment—with its taverns, gambling rooms, and men of fashion—looks forward to the mundane settings of the mature Elizabethan drama. The writers of morality interludes were responsible for a precedent which had barely been suggested in the earlier full-length morality plays: the depiction of the devil as a figure in contemporary worldly society. In a second respect, the transitional fiend of the morality interludes paves the way for the secular demon who immediately follows him upon the stage. The liberalization of his character makes him no longer the relatively staid demon of medieval convention. His comic deportment is considerably more characteristic than had been that of his predecessors. Underneath his buffoonery, he is a clever designer of mischief, and yet can laugh as heartily at his failures as at his occasional successes. He is as ready to dance a jig with the collier as to give a paternal lecture to his deputy the Vice. By 1550 he had acquired what his forebears, in the main, had lacked: a sizable amount of human nature. The humanization of his character did much to weaken the restraints that had tended, for centuries, to make the demon of the medieval stage almost as standardized a character as was his enemy and foil, the inflexibly virtuous good angel. The flood-gates had been thrown open. The transitional fiend, along with the morality interlude, was soon to pass from the stage; but he was promptly succeeded, in the late Elizabethan drama, by a variety of demons who attest to a widespread freedom of character delineation and have but one thing in common: the fact that they are, in almost every instance, the product of secular and not religious doctrine.

So varied are the attitudes toward the devil on the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean stage that we cannot, in the present chapter, attempt to classify them. The most evident characteristic that distinguishes the demon of the mature drama from his predecessors of the mystery and the morality plays is the fact that he is compounded of bone and flesh or some other physical substance. He is not the symbolic image of invisible demonic powers, as his medieval forebears had been. He does not insist, as Titivillus had done: "Ever I go invysybull." Instead, he has power to assume the body of a recently dead person or to appear in the carcass of a cat or a dog; elsewhere, he plays the role of incubus or succubus, just as he was thought to do in real life, having first acquired a discarded body or compacted one of air. Or, like Belphagor, he may fashion for himself the physique of a Spanish noble man and live in marriage with a shrewish woman who never suspects that he is the devil. In his actual constitution, the demon was still thought to be a purely spiritual substance; for centuries, however, the secular mind had sought to explain the many reported phenomena of the devil's having visibly appeared among men. Two theories had consequently become popular in Elizabethan times—the idea that the devil could assume a recently dead body, and the alternative principle that he had power to fashion one out of air or earthen materials. As a consequence of these and other popular beliefs, the demon of the mature stage is not only the product of a three-hundred-year-old tradition of fiends as principal actors in the drama; more important, he is a radical and usually enlivened modification of his medieval forebears.

The sorcerers and witches of the late Elizabethan drama will appear, at first glance, to be innovations without obvious ancestry in the medieval drama. The fact that sorcerers had appeared, on rare occasions, in the earlier drama does not constitute a well-established precedent. In the mystery play The Coming of Anti-Christ, the central figure is charged with "sorcerye, witchcraft, and negremonscye." Likewise, in John Skelton's play The Nigramansir (1504), sorcery, including the conjuring up of Beelzebub, was an important feature. But such medieval examples of sorcery are, in my opinion, too rare to have established themselves as the prototypes of the Elizabethan "sorcerer play." More likely is the conclusion that both the sorcerer and the witch of the mature drama, as well as the modernized devil, are lineal descendants of the demon of the mystery plays. The three-hundred-year-old tradition of supernatural intervention was not interrupted; instead, under the impact of secular concepts, it was drastically revised. As the playwrights had turned more and more to secular doctrine for their material, they had taken note of a very simple fact: the widespread belief that most of the harm done by demons was perpetrated at the command of a sorcerer or a witch. To ordinary Elizabethans, the idea of witchcraft was a far more haunting reality than was the belief that demons could intrude independently in human affairs. Whether sorcerers or witches, both were to be feared, and witches the more so, if only because of their far greater numbers. The sorcerer, of course, was in a more respected tradition: Dr. John Dee and Dr. Simon Forman, like the magicians of medieval documents, were reputed to conjure up demons—sometimes an archfiend—out of crystal globes. But great learning and great prestige were essential attributes of the sorcerer, and consequently there were few of them in sixteenth-century England. It was the village witch whom the common folk most dreaded, despite the fact that she was privileged to command only the lesser demons, or "imps." As we learn from many Elizabethan sources, beginning with the report of the witch trial at Chelmsford in 1566, each imp was thought to assume the form of a small animal, most often a cat, a dog, or a toad. The uneducated people, unlike many of their intellectual compatriots, attributed both the intent and the dominant scheme of evil-doing to the witch, not to the imp; even without the help of demons she was to be feared, for she also had power to destroy her neighbors by charms, such as the waxen image made in human likeness and then mutilated. Thus, in the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean drama, especially in those plays which, like The Witch of Edmonton (c. 1622), deal with the more humble sort of persons, the growing importance of the witch as a medium of supernatural intervention is neither surprising nor in contradiction to the native dramatic traditions. As a popular conception, she had become more universally feared for her evil practices than was the devil himself; in consequence, she is a more appropriate descendant and counterpart of the medieval demon of the religious stage than is any other Elizabethan agent of the supernatural. Unlike the sorcerer, whose sphere of activity was confined to the affairs of scholars and princes, the witch was thought to assert her malefic influence upon any type of human affair, no matter how petty or how momentous.

Whereas the idea of demonic intervention had survived the transition from religious to secular drama, and indeed had been vigorously modernized, the family tree of the good angel stands withered and almost fruitless after 1587. The morality interludes, which had invariably featured one or more personified Virtues, were no longer written; and in the secular plays, which now were the only type of drama performed, there was no place for the religiously conceived Virtues or their common ancestor, the good angel. Therefore, only in a handful of plays which are committed to a religious or high moral purpose, and which thus are deviations from the normal dramatic trend, was the conception of the good angel or the personified Virtue revived. Even more rare than the revival of the good angel on the mature Elizabethan stage is the appearance of the personified Virtue: indeed, the scenes which deal with Verrue and Vice in Old Fortunatus (1599) appear to have been interpolated by Dekker at Philip Henslowe's request in preparation for the Christmastide performance at court. On November 31, 1599, Henslowe lent Dekker a sum of money "for the altrenge of the wholl history of foretewnatus"; on December 12th, he advanced another forty shillings "for the eande of fortewnatus for the corte." In the closing scene of the play, Vertue turns to Queen Elizabeth and addresses her:

Vertue alone lives still, and lives in you,
I am a counterfeit, you are the true,
I am a Shaddow, at your feet I fall.

No Virtue or Vice had appeared in the German legend entitled Fortunatas, to which Dekker was closely indebted for his material; hence, it is almost certain that the play's earlier scenes depicting Vertue and Vice were the result of Henslowe's request "for the altrenge of the wholl history of fortewnatus." It is quite probable that these scenes were suggested by the personification of Fortune, a character of moderate prominence in the German legend. At any rate, Vertue, at first derided and scorned, and eventually triumphant over Vice, appears throughout the play to be an intentional symbol of Queen Elizabeth, attesting to her ultimate ascendancy over her enemies both at home and abroad. Be that as it may, the "Vertue and Vice" scenes of Old Fortunatus tend more to interrupt the progress of the plot than to motivate it. That the Virtue had become outmoded is evident from the fact that it is portrayed in no other extant drama of the late Elizabethan period, nor does it appear on the Jacobean stage.

Neither the good angel nor the Virtues who were modeled in his likeness exerted any serious claim upon secular thought. Customarily regarded as personifications, they belonged almost wholly to religious doctrine. As with the ancient Greeks and Hindus, so was it with the medieval inhabitants of western Europe: little good did they see, and much evil, in the immediate world about them. They had a mental vision of angels, whose habitat was circumscribed by the remote walls of Heaven; they were hard put to think of them as walking upon blighted cornfields or standing over the gibbering farmhand who had been stricken with brain fever. To the minds of medieval western Europe, the withered corn and the insane farmhand were the work of the devil. The irony of human circumstances demanded an explanation of the evil in life, not of the good. In consequence, the secular mind had resort to theories of demonology that were separate from those of orthodox religious doctrine. Where no apparent explanation of illness or death or blighted cornfields existed, the men of western Europe, and especially of England, attributed the misfortune to a demon, who might act either independently or—more often—at the instigation of a witch. The relatively abrupt change from religious to secular drama, although it brought about the demise of the good angel, meant merely a recasting of demonic characters upon the stage. Secular conceptions of the devil and the witch were ready at hand, well-prepared to replace the demon of the medieval drama. An analysis of these conceptions, especially their origins, is essential to a clear understanding of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that shows the occult world, not excepting some of Shakespeare's more important work. A discussion of origins may be helpful in that it will point out four somewhat divergent attitudes toward the occult: the Greco-Roman, the medieval, the Continental, and finally the Elizabethan. Although the Tudor and Stuart composers of the drama of superaaturalism gave stress to Elizabethan conceptions, they also incorporated those of older times, as well as of the Continent, into their plays; indeed, the bizarre coloring of their drama is dependent partially on these exotic borrowings.