Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (6 page)

Nashe’s
Terrors of the Night
seems to have served as a source for Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
(first performed
c
. 1603–06).
²⁴
In this tragedy several characters comment on the night and mark its passing, while the playwright thematizes it repeatedly.
²⁵
I argue that the play illustrates a distinctive early modern emphasis on the night as a site of temptation and surrender to the forces of darkness. Darkness is indeed the setting for much of
Macbeth
, which rehearses the older identification of the night with physical danger while building upon Nashe’s association of night with temptation and sin. Each main character in
Macbeth
reminds the audience of the power of the night to tempt and corrupt, to – in Banquo’s words – “win us to our harm.” Shakespeare takes care to show how the dark crimes of the play are in each case preceded by dark desires, as signaled by Macbeth musing “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires” (1.4.50). Lady Macbeth fairly personifies the power of the night to tempt in act 1, scene 7: Macbeth wavers but then succumbs to the temptation to murder Donald. This onstage scene of nocturnal persuasion, signaled
by the torches in the stage directions (1.7), appears distinct from the crime itself, committed offstage. Prior to these wicked deeds come “wicked dreams” as Macbeth observes that “o’er one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / That curtained sleep” (2.1.48–50). In contrast to the nocturnal assaults by demons or the Devil described above, the night poses no physical danger to Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. They succumb instead to nocturnal temptation.

Scholars have also noted in
Macbeth
the influence of a well-known Protestant denunciation of ghosts and purgatorial spirits, Ludwig Lavater’s 1570 treatise
De spectris
. The Zurich theologian wrote to deny Catholic claims that ghosts and purgatorial spirits proved the reality of Purgatory. Widely influential, Lavater’s work appeared in several Latin editions and was translated into French, German, Dutch, and English (published in 1572 under the title
Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght
).
²⁶
Lavater argued that any seeming ghost or magical spirit was in reality a deception of the Devil, intended to tempt Christians into false belief. “Spirits and other strange sights,” he explained, “be not the souls of Men, but be either good or evil Angels, or else some secret and hidden operations.”
²⁷
These apparitions, Lavater explained repeatedly, “do appear still in these days both day and night, but especially in the night.” Their affinity to the night suggested their diabolical source: “Neither may we marvel, that they are heard more in the night, than in the day time. For he who is the author of these things, is called in the holy Scriptures the Prince of darkness, and therefore he shuns the light of Gods word.”
²⁸
Lavater described a vast nocturnal conspiracy, both diabolical and human, to lure individuals into a false, “Popish” belief in ghosts and spirits. Lavater’s remarks seem to frame the first meeting with the Weird Sisters in
Macbeth
, and in fact the closest parallel between
Macbeth
and Lavater’s
Ghostes and spirites walking by nyght
concerns nocturnal temptation. After the encounter with the Weird Sisters Banquo warns Macbeth that

… oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths;

win us with honest trifles, to betray us

In deepest consequence.
²⁹

Here the playwright echoes Lavater’s warning that “The devil sometimes utters the truth, that his words may have the more credit, and that he may the more easily beguile them.”
³⁰
Alongside fears of danger from night’s black agents grew the fear that one might be tempted to become the Devil’s own.

This association of the night with temptation and the darkness of one’s own sin appears in a range of contemporary works. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy
(1607), the protagonist Vindice comments on lust and the temptation to incest, explaining that “if any thing / Be damn’d, it will be twelve o’clock at night.” “That twelve,” he adds, “is the
Judas
of the hours, wherein, / Honest salvation is betray’d to sin.” The dark temptation represented by the Weird Sisters in
Macbeth
also appeared on the English stage through the nocturnal temptations of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
and in the form of the Black Dog in
The Witch of Edmonton
(
c
. 1621).
³¹

The growing emphasis on temptation and the night is especially clear in the development of
Doctor Faustus
. In contrast with Marlowe’s later version, neither the German
Historia von Johann Fausten
of 1587 nor the
English Faust Book
of 1588/89 connects Faust’s initial temptation and fall with the night. In the German text Faustus “summoned the devil at night between nine and ten o’clock,” and at midnight ordered the spirit to appear to him the next morning at his home. After this morning “disputation” Faustus bade the spirit return in the evening. Only the following morning, described in the text as “The Third Conference of Doctor Faustus with the Spirit and the Promise He Made” does Faust sign in blood the fatal contract.
³²
The
English Faust Book
repeats this sequence of events.
³³
In the A-text of
Doctor Faustus
, written and first performed in late 1588 or 1589, Marlowe compresses the action into two night scenes: Faust’s conjuring of Mephistopheles (“Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, / … dims the welkin with her pitchy breath, / Faustus, begin thine incantations”), and the subsequent conversation (“Go and return to mighty Lucifer, / And meet me in my study at midnight”) in which Faustus signs away his soul.
³⁴
In Marlowe’s account Mephistopheles works to seduce Faustus by night with the full array of temptations and illusions at his disposal. The questions asked by Faustus underscore this
association: “Is it not midnight? Come, Mephistopheles” (2.1.28); “Is that the reason he tempts us thus?” (2.1.40).
³⁵
The B-text of the play, first published in 1616, emends the setting of Faustus’s first conjuration to “Now that the gloomy shadow of the
night
, / … dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,” consonant with this emphasis on nocturnal diabolical temptation.
³⁶

The emphasis by Lavater, Nashe, Marlowe, and Shakespeare on the power of the “cunning fowler … [who] spreads his nets of temptation in the dark” was fundamental to the narratives of witchcraft which flourished in this period, especially in the understanding of the witch’s pact with the Devil and the nocturnal sabbath. When our perspective on witchcraft moves from the stage to the stake we are confronted with the grim reality of witch persecution in early modern Europe. In recent decades, scholars of early modern witchcraft have given some order to the bleak record of suspicion, accusation, torture, and confession that remains from the early modern witch persecutions.
³⁷
These scholars have identified several key aspects of early modern witchcraft, starting with witchcraft beliefs and practices in popular magic, and in rumors and accusations at the local level, where almost all trials for witchcraft began. They have also contextualized the legal sources created by the witch trials: witness testimony and the statements and confessions of defendants, coerced by torture or its threat. Demonological works and discussions of Satan and witchcraft in a broad range of other texts and images provide the intellectual and cultural background of the witch persecutions. In the crucible of the witch trials these aspects intersected to produce vivid scenes of nocturnal seduction by the Devil and shadowy gatherings in his service. Early modern theologians and jurists described the initial temptation by the Devil as leading to a pact or contract, often physically consummated, followed by participation in the witches’ sabbath. Suspended between the demonology of the learned and the confessions of the accused, accounts of nocturnal temptation by the Devil and descriptions of witches gathering at night were fundamental to early modern
popular culture, to the legal mechanisms of witch persecutions, and to learned demonology.

When we consider the night in each aspect of the early modern construction and persecution of witchcraft, we see some of its most distinctive contours. Here I will draw much of my evidence from the heartland of persecution for witchcraft, the area of eastern France and the Holy Roman Empire from the duchies of Luxemburg and Lorraine to the prince-bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg.
³⁸
Over half of all known trials for witchcraft in all of early modern Europe took place in this politically and confessional fragmented area.
³⁹
Influential demonological works of the period were written in the region or made reference to it, foremost Jean Bodin’s
De la démonomanie des sorciers
(1580), Peter Binsfeld’s
Tractat von Bekantnuss der Zauberer und Hexen
(1590), and the
Démonolâtrie
(1595) of Nicolas Remy. French, German, and English historians have published thorough local and regional studies of witchcraft in the area.
⁴⁰

The universal belief in magic and spirits was the foundation of all witch persecution. “Popular beliefs” about magic and
maleficia
were held by people of all ranks, even if they sometimes clashed with learned views on witchcraft. Witchcraft was real and threatening. From this point a key observation emerges: time and again we see peasants and other common people demonstrating both the knowledge and the desire to initiate a prosecution for witchcraft. Scholars have uncovered both a wide knowledge of demonology and demon lore and a pattern of initiative “from below” in the witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and villagers often sought magical aid against witchcraft before turning to local authorities for help.
⁴¹

In the witch persecutions common and learned views of witchcraft met, but they did not necessarily agree. Authorities inscribed “the witch of the church” over “the witch of the people”; the latter was dangerous but hardly diabolical.
⁴²
In popular beliefs about magic and witchcraft, the night played an ambiguous role, corresponding to the place of the night in folk beliefs in general. One cannot generalize about the extraordinary range of associations of the night found in the multi-volume German folklore guide, the
Handwörterbuch des
deutschen Aberglaubens
, except to say that the night was not uniformly associated with evil, nor did the clear light of day guarantee any protection against the Devil or his agents. Certain spells and rituals were best performed by night, but these practices were usually intended to help, not harm.
⁴³
The extensive accounts of popular magic in Saxon witch trials show no particular correlation between
maleficia
, beneficial magic, night, and day.
⁴⁴

Specific studies in the history of folklore reveal several deep and positive associations with the night in early modern Europe. Strange references to “night journeys” in Alpine folklore and witchcraft trials give us glimpses of local popular belief in the “phantoms of the night” (
Nachtschar
), a nocturnal group of mysterious people who “danced joyously on remote meadows and mountain pastures, [and] met in certain houses for sumptuous dinners.”
⁴⁵
Those who saw the night phantoms and opened their homes to them received magical gifts: good luck, the ability to play music, or perhaps second sight. The idea of the phantoms of the night is not easily distinguished from other folk beliefs documented in northern Italy, the Alps, Germany, and France from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, such as references to the
Benandanti
, “the good society” or “the blessed people.” In all of these cases the groups are described as nocturnal and beneficent. Indeed, as Carlo Ginzburg’s work on the
Benandanti
of Friuli and Wolfgang Behringer’s study of Chonrad Stoeckhlin, a village “shaman” in the Bavarian Alps, reveal, in their first encounters with church and state authorities, these “good people” of the night did not even think to hide their nocturnal associations, so sure were they of the legitimacy of their magical night companions and journeys.
⁴⁶

But what stood behind the magical beliefs of the common people? By the middle of the sixteenth century, intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political authorities worked hard to demonstrate that the Devil underwrote all magical practices, and that all “phantoms of the night” were witches. In his
Guide to Grand-Jury Men
(1627) Richard Bernard presented the diabolical covenant as the basis of all magic: “an expressed league is made with the Devil … that is, the Witch with spirits … Now what other can that be, with whom the Enchanter is in league, but the Devil? … The story of Faustus confirms it, and all the
relations of Witches with us.”
⁴⁷
This view meant diabolizing nocturnal phantoms, practices, and symbols traditionally seen as benign or even beneficial. For scholars today, the best-known examples of this demonization appear in the work of Carlo Ginzburg and Wolfgang Behringer. Both have shown how rural folk described their roles as
Benandanti
or travelers with the
Nachtschar
, and how officials of the church and state forced these men and women into the framework of learned demonology, then condemned them.
⁴⁸