A counterpart to the idea of possession by demons is found in a belief, common at this time and earlier, in the inspired utterances of the frenzied prophetess. Neither here nor with the witches was any curative treatment undertaken. For with the oracle no such treatment was thought to be necessary or even advisable, and with the witches none except death was supposed to avail. Occasionally a “witch” might be subjected, like other mad folk, to “chains” and “whips,” but the road more often taken was the short one. In simple cases of demoniacal possession the means of cure was patent: the demon must be cast out and the patient will return to his right mind. The exorcisation of the “conjuror” was commonly accompanied by pseudo-medical treatment, the nature of which will presently appear. Now the influence of the demonological conception of insanity is clearly seen in our dramas. Everyone is familiar, to go no farther than Shakespeare, with the famous exorcisation scene in “Twelfth Night,”[10:1] where the clown, disguised as “Sir Topas the curate,” comes to visit “Malvolio the lunatic,” and drives out the “hyperbolical fiend” which is supposed to vex him. Everything Malvolio does can be expressed in terms of Satan. When the wretched man speaks, it is the “fiend” speaking “hollow” within him. His disgusted exclamation when Maria urges him to “say his prayers” is construed into the fiend’s repugnance to things sacred. Fabian advises “no way (of treatment) but gentleness . . . the fiend is rough and will not be roughly used.” While Sir Toby protests that it is “not for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan; hang him, foul collier.” A more complete and far more famous illustration may be found in “Lear,”[10:2] where Edgar attributes his assumed madness to possession by the various spirits which he names. Almost his first words in his disguise tell of the “foul fiend” leading him “through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire.”[11:1] He names “the foul Flibbertigibbet,” the fiend of “mopping and mowing,”[11:2] who “gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip;”[11:3] of “the prince of darkness . . . a gentleman; Modo he’s called and Mahu”;[11:4] of “Hobbididence prince of dumbness;” of “Hoppedance” who “cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring”[11:5] and many others—culled from the flowery page of Harsnet’s “Popish Impostures.” A more modern idea of insanity is that which attributes it to natural physical causes, and this finds expression in our dramas—often in the same play—side by side with the conception just mentioned. The capriciousness of heredity, for instance, is recognised by the author of “A Fair Quarrel”: “Wise men beget fools and fools are the fathers To many wise children . . . A great scholar may beget an idiot, And from the ploughtail may come a great scholar.”[11:6]