Macbeth. Doctor Macbeth. The Physician Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Must minister to himself. Therein the patient Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it. The water of my land, find her disease, What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug Macbeth, v. iii. 40—55 [In 1607 Shakespeare's eldest daughter Susanna married the physician, John Hall.] A worthy physician is the enemy of sickness, in purging nature from corruption. His action is most in feeling of pulses, and his discourses chiefly of the nature of diseases. He is a great searcher out of simples, and accordingly makes his composition. He persuades abstinence and patience, for the benefit of health, while purging and bleeding are the chief courses of his counsel. The apothecary and the chirurgeon are his two chief attendants, with whom conferring upon time, [he] grows temperate in his cures. Surfeits and wantonness are great agents for his employment, when by the secret of his skill out of others' weakness he gathers his own strength. In sum, he is a necessary member for an unnecessary malady, to find a disease and to cure the diseased. An unlearned and so unworthy physician is a kind of horseleech, whose cure is most in drawing of blood, and a desperate purge, either to cure or kill, as it hits. His discourse is most of the cures that he hath done, and them afar off; and not a receipt under a hundred pounds, though it be not worth three halfpence. Upon the market-day he is much haunted with urinals, where if he find anything (though he know nothing), yet he will say somewhat, which if it hit to some purpose with a few fustian words, he will seem a piece of strange stuff. He is never without old merry tales and stale jests to make old folks laugh, and comfits or plums in his pocket to please little children; yea, and he will be talking of complexions, though he know nothing of their dispositions; and if his medicine do a feat, he is a made man among fools ; but being wholly unlearned, and ofttimes unhonest, let me thus briefly describe him: he is a plain kind of mountebank and a true quacksalver, a danger for the sick to deal withal, and a dizard in the world to talk withal. NICHOLAS BRETON, The Good and the Badde 1616 Death It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the proud and insolent that they are but abjects and humbles them at the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent, yea, even to hate their forepassed happiness. He takes the account of the rich and proves him a beggar, a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they acknowledge it. Oh eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise thou hast persuaded, what none hath dared thou hast done, and whom all the world hath flattered thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with those two narrow words, Hic jacet. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Historie of the World 1614 There are cozeners abroad; therefore it behoves men to be wary. My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen. My To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse: a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses. I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive....Every lane's end, every shop, church, session, hanging, yields a careful man work. Ibid. IV. iii. 686—704 Rogues and the law It will be [The law referred to below is the famous statute of 1572. noticed that it includes players among other classes of vagrants, and the passage was constantly quoted with glee by puritan opponents of the theatre. But the law was directed against wandering actors not attached to a nobleman's company such as that of the Lord Chamberlain, to which Shakespeare belonged.] With us the poor is commonly divided into three sorts, so that some are poor by impotency, as the fatherless child, the aged, blind and lame, and the diseased person that is judged to be incurable: the second are poor by casualty, as the wounded soldier, the decayed householder, and the sick person visited with grievous and painful diseases: the third consisteth of thriftless poor, as the rioter that hath consumed all, the vagabond that will abide nowhere but runneth up and down from place to place, and finally the rogue and the strumpet.... Such as are idle beggars through their own default are of two sorts, and continue their estates either by casual or mere voluntary means. Those that are such by casual means are in the beginning justly to be referred either to the first or second sort of poor aforementioned, but, degenerating into the thriftless sort, they do what they can to continue their misery, and, with such impediments as they have, to stray and wander about, as creatures abhorring all labour and every honest exercise. Certes I call these casual means, not in the respect of the original of their poverty, but of the continuance of the same, from whence they will not be delivered, such is their own ungracious lewdness and froward disposition. The voluntary means proceed from outward causes, as by making of corrosives and applying the same to the more fleshy parts of their bodies, and also laying of ratsbane, spearwort, crowfoot and such like unto their whole members, thereby to raise pitiful and odious sores and move the hearts of the goers by such places where they lie, to yearn at their misery, and thereupon bestow large alms upon them. How artificially they beg, what forcible speech, and how they select and choose out words of vehemency, whereby they do in manner conjure or adjure the goer-by to pity their cases, I pass over to remember, as judging the name of God and Christ to be more conversant in the mouths of none and yet the presence of the heavenly Majesty further off from no men than from this ungracious company. Which maketh me to think that punishment is far meeter for them than liberality or alms, and sith Christ willeth us chiefly to have a regard to himself and his poor members. Unto this nest is another sort to be referred, more sturdy than the rest, which, having sound and perfect limbs, do yet notwithstanding sometime counterfeit the possession of all sorts of diseases. Divers times in their apparel also they will be like serving-men or labourers: oftentimes they can play the mariners and seek for ships which they never lost. But in fine they are all thieves and caterpillars in the commonwealth, and by the word of God not permitted to eat, sith they do but lick the sweat from the true labourer's brows, and bereave the godly poor of that which is due unto them, to maintain their excess, consuming the charity of well-disposed people bestowed upon them, after a most wicked and detestable manner. It is not yet full threescore years since this trade began: but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed, of one sex and another, to amount unto above 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported. Moreover, in counterfeiting the Egyptian rogues, they have devised a language among themselves, which they name "canting," but others "pedlar's French," a speech compact thirty years since of English and a great number of odd words of their own devising, without all order or reason, and yet such is it as none but themselves are able to understand. The first deviser thereof was hanged by the neck—a just reward, no doubt, for his deserts, and a common end to all of that profession. A gentleman [Thomas Harman] also of late hath taken great pains to search out the secret practices of this ungracious rabble. And among other things he setteth down and describeth three and twenty sorts of them whose names it shall not be amiss to remember whereby each one may take occasion to read and know as also by his industry what wicked people they are, and what villainy remaineth in them. The several disorders and degrees amongst our idle |