42.  The dramatists of the period make frequent references to this belief, but nearly always by way of ridicule.  It is hardly to be expected that they would share in the grosser opinions held by the common people in those times—­common, whether king or clown.  In “The Virgin Martyr,” Harpax is made to say—­

        “I’ll tell you what now of the devil;
    He’s no such horrid creature, cloven-footed,
    Black, saucer-eyed, his nostrils breathing fire,
    As these lying Christians make him."[1]

But his opinion was, perhaps, a prejudiced one.  In Ben Jonson’s “The Devil is an Ass,” when Fitzdottrell, doubting Pug’s statement as to his infernal character, says, “I looked on your feet afore; you cannot cozen me; your shoes are not cloven, sir, you are whole hoofed;” Pug, with great presence of mind, replies, “Sir, that’s a popular error deceives many.”  So too Othello, when he is questioning whether Iago is a devil or not, says—­

     “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 waved like the enridged 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.

[Footnote 1:  I Hen.  IV.  III. i. 148.]

[Footnote 2:  p. 521, c. 2.]

44. (iii.) But the third proposed section, which deals with the powers and functions exercised by the evil spirits, is by far the most interesting and important; and the first branch of the series is one that suggests itself as a natural sequence upon what has just been said as to the ordinary shapes in which devils appeared, namely, the capacity to assume at will any form they chose.