Part II

., Act III., Sc. 3), when Cardinal Beaufort, delirious on his deathbed, cries, “Bid the apothecary bring the strong poison that I bought of him.” Also in “Pericles” (Act III., Sc. 2), the amateur physician Cerimon, a Lord of Ephesus, who had studied medicine, and “by turning o’er authorities” had made himself familiar with “the blest infusions that dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones,” gives a prescription to his servant, saying, “Give this to the ’pothecary, and tell me how it works.” Apothecaries’ weights are used as metaphors in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (Act II., Sc. 3) when Lafeu, who has given Parolles “most egregious indignity,” which the latter says he has not deserved, replies “Yes, good faith, every dram of it; and I will not bate thee a scruple,” and by Falstaff, who, in his interview with the Chief Justice, refers rather enigmatically to drams and scruples. Falstaff again, in “Merry Wives of Windsor,” is responsible for the simile of those who “smell like Bucklersbury in simple time.” The Dr. Caius in the same play, with his “by gar” and comical English, is assumed by some interpreters to have been a burlesque on Sir Theodore Mayerne, but except that Mayerne was French and certainly spoke English with a foreign accent, there is no reason for associating him with the character. Mayerne never acquired English. In one of his later letters he writes of Lady Cherosbury, for Shrewsbury. There was a very famous Dr. Caius, who had been physician to Queen Elizabeth, who founded Caius College, Cambridge, and who died in 1573, not so very long before this play was written. But it is agreed that he could not have been the original of the caricature.

Of the drugs and pharmaceutical preparations named by Shakespeare most would be familiar to anyone acquainted with the literature of the day. “Throw physick to the dogs,” says Macbeth to the physician who is telling him of the mental illness of Lady Macbeth. Then, his mind recurring to the war in which he was engaged, he demands of the doctor “What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug would scour these English hence?” (Act V., Sc. 3). In the same play (Act I., Sc. 3), Banquo asks when the witches vanish, “Have we eaten of the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?” There are many allusions in classical literature to herbs which destroyed the reason. In Plutarch’s life of Antony, for example, there is an account of some Roman soldiers in the Parthian war eating a root which deprived them of all memory, and it is said they occupied themselves in digging, and in hurling stones from one place to another. Among the ingredients of the witches’ cauldron (Act IV., Sc. 1), the animal substances named recall much of the pharmacy of the period, but only one vegetable drug, “root of hemlock, digg’d i’ the dark,” is named. Lady Macbeth (Act II., Sc. 2) tells how she has drugg’d the possets of Duncan’s grooms, so that “death and nature do contend about them Whether they live or die.” In Act V., Sc. 1, she complains that “all the perfumes of Arabia” will not sweeten her hand from the smell of blood. It is also in this play that the description of Edward the Confessor curing the King’s Evil (see Vol. I, p. 299) occurs.

In the “Comedy of Errors” (Act IV., Sc. 1) Dromio of Syracuse tells Antipholus of Ephesus that he has found a bark for him, put the freightage on board, and bought “the oil, the balsamum, and aqua-vitae.” In Act V., Sc. 1, the Abbess declares that Antipholus having taken sanctuary in the Priory she will not let him stir, “Till I have used the approved means I have, with wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers, To make of him a formal man again.”

In “Much Ado about Nothing” (Act III., Sc. 4) Margaret recommends the love-sick Beatrice to “get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus, and lay it to your heart; it is the only thing for a qualm.” This drug was in great repute in Shakespeare’s time and was used for a multitude of complaints. Woodall says the distilled water of it “doth ease the pain of the head, conformeth the memory, cureth a quartane, provoketh sweat, and comforteth the vital spirits.” The Physician in “King Lear” (Act IV., Sc. 4), tells Cordelia there are “many simples operative whose power will close the eye of anguish.”

The story of “All’s Well that Ends Well” is based on a secret remedy for fistula which Helena had acquired from her deceased father, and with which she heals the King. The Queen in “Cymbeline” is an amateur pharmacist. In Act I., Sc. 6, she tells the doctor that he has taught her how “to make perfumes, distil, preserve”; and in Act V., Sc. 5, the doctor tells the King that on her deathbed she confessed she had “a mortal mineral” which would “by inches waste you.”

In the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Act III., Sc. 1), a fairy named Cobweb gives Bottom the opportunity of alluding to the usefulness of cobwebs for cut fingers. “In Twelfth Night” Sir Toby Belch jocularly addresses Maria as “My nettle of India” (Act II., Sc. 5), probably Indian hemp. We read of “parmaceti,” “the sovereign’st thing on earth for an inward bruise,” and also of the “villainous saltpetre” in Act I., Sc. 3, of “Henry IV.”