CHAPTER NINE

Summary

The part of the whole subject which attracted most attention just at the time Shakespeare was at the height of his career was, however, the relation between melancholy (with incidentally other forms of madness) and various supernatural appearances. Primarily this discussion was concerned with setting forth the rival positions of those who considered ghosts and dreams and witchcraft to be traceable to the effects of melancholy, and those who considered them as direct manifestations of the supernatural. The full story of this conflict would have to be told in history, in philosophy, in literature, and the full story I make no attempt to tell here. But the signs of the conflict are so deeply imprinted in all the literature of melancholy as well as of demonology in the immediate period under consideration that to the student of Shakespearean tragedy they transcend in interest all else in that literature. When witches were burned, when the whole nation was stirred over the authenticity of witchcraft, it was inevitable that those who wrote on the subject should write vividly and earnestly.

Briefly, the physicians and the realists insisted that the supernatural manifestations variously reported were most often, if not the result of actual fraud, the result of the effect of melancholic humours, apparently either the excess of the natural melancholy humour unduly increased by disease or sympathetic passions, or the melancholy adust burned from one of the natural humours through the influence of a hot passion like anger; the advocates of the supernatural insisted either that ghosts were spirits released temporarily from purgatory, or that ghosts and all the subtleties of witchcraft were manifestations of God and the good angels or Satan and the evil angels.