Shakespeare's Demonology: A Dictionary

Abstract

Shakespeare's Demonology: A Dictionary By Marion Gibson and Jo Ann Esra London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Marion Gibson and Jo Ann Esra's dictionary of Shakespeare's demonological language is part of the topic-centered Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries series, edited by Sandra Clark, which also includes such works as Shakespeare's Medical Language, Shakespeare and the Language of Food, and Music in Shakespeare, among others. Though called a dictionary in its subtitle, Shakespeare's Demonology is in some respects more like an encyclopedia, with many longer entries that include not only definitions and examples from the plays but also extensive analytic commentary and selected references to scholarly work on each topic. A lengthy and useful bibliography is provided at the end. The dictionary covers a field with porous boundaries; as the authors point out in their introduction, demonologists of Shakespeare's time were interested in a variety of phenomena in addition to demons and devils, including ghosts, spirits, angels, astrology, witchcraft, magic, divination and prophecy. Indeed, the boundaries between the "demonic" and the "natural" or "divine"--and hence between demons and other types of beings--were exactly what was in dispute and required investigation. Gibson and Esra rightly take an inclusive approach in their dictionary, with richly satisfying results. There is, of course, no particular reason to think that Shakespeare's works were grounded in a distinct and internally consistent demonology, given the range of genres he worked in and the varying cultural and historical settings of his plays. Shakespeare does not offer us one cosmology or a single ideological stance; the Macbeth world is very different from the world of The Merry Wives of Windsor or of Henry IV, Part I, or for that matter, of most of the other tragedies. Nevertheless, this dictionary helps us identify some of Shakespeare's characteristic themes and tendencies and see more clearly the cross-currents of early modern thought that engaged his imagination. In so doing, it very successfully fulfills the authors' wish to provide "both a useful reference point and a stimulus to further scholarly work on key terms and ideas" (6). What, then, are some characteristics of the Shakespearean supernatural that can be teased out from this book? One thing stands out clearly: Shakespeare embraces diversity in his conceptualization of the spirit world, in contrast to the more polarized views of Calvinist contemporaries and indeed, most demonologists, whatever their doctrinal affiliation. As the authors put it in their introduction, the "oversimplifying binary structure" of demonological thought "may perhaps be seen as going against the grain of most of his work" (5). Hence, this dictionary calls our attention not only to demons and angels but to a range of intermediate or indeterminate beings, from the relatively familiar (the fairies of Midsummer Night's Dream, Ariel, the ghost of Hamlet's father) to more obscure--ouphs, bugs, urchins, hedge-pigs, goblins, sibyls, mermaids, nymphs, and spirits of many sorts. Such beings could not be easily classified as either good or evil. The highly inclusive term "spirit," very common in Shakespeare, embraced a wide variety of beings across the moral spectrum, making it "a term fizzing with dangerous, anxious energy" (175). Often, a spirit's exact nature was hard to pin down. Puck, for example, is variously called fairy, spirit, and goblin; though not as benign as Ariel and a trickster like many devils, he stops short of being truly cruel or destructive, instead retaining what the authors aptly call an "indefinable edginess" (158). Other beings straddled boundaries of natural and supernatural. Mermaids, as half-human sea-creatures were natural if monstrous, but also sometimes interchangeable with sea-nymphs or water spirits and seductively dangerous like female demons. Shakespeare sometimes associates mermaids with benevolence and harmony, the authors note, but other times with a predatory, siren-like power that makes them resemble witches (134). …