George Peele’s charming piece of folk-lore _The Old Wives’ Tale_ introduces among its quaint commixture of episodes the warlock Sacripant, son of a famous witch Meroe,[8] who has stolen away and keeps under a spell the princess Delia. His power depends upon a light placed in a magic glass which can only be broken under certain conditions. Eventually Sacripant is overcome by the aid of a friendly ghost, Jack, the glass broken, the light extinguished, and the lady restored to her lover and friends. Other magicians who appear in various dramas of the days of Elizabeth and her immediate successors are Brian Sansfoy in the primitive _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, 4to, 1599; the Magician in _The Wars of Cyrus_; Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay, and Jaques Vandermast in Greene’s _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, Merlin and Proximus in the pseudo-Shakespearean _The Birth of Merlin_, where the Devil also figures; Ormandini and Argalio in _The Seven Champions of Christendom_, where we likewise have Calib, a witch, her incubus Tarpax, and Suckabus their clownish son; Comus in Milton’s masque; Mago the conjurer with his three familiars Eo, Meo, and Areo in Cokain’s _Trappolin Creduto Principe, Trappolin suppos’d a Prince_, 4to, 1656, excellent light fare, which Nahum Tate turned into _A Duke and No Duke_ and produced at Drury Lane in November, 1684, and which in one form or another, sometimes “a comic melodramatic burletta,” sometimes a ballad opera, sometimes a farce, was popular until the early decades of the nineteenth century. Seeing that actors are “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time,” it is not surprising to find that Witchcraft has a very important part in the theatre of Shakespeare. Setting aside such a purely fairy fantasy as _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, such figures as the “threadbare juggler” Pinch in _The Comedy of Errors_, such scenes as the hobgoblin mask beneath Herne’s haunted oak, such references as that to Mother Prat, the old woman of Brainford, who worked “by charms, by spells, by the figure,” or the vile abuse by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, of “Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch, Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,” we have one historical drama _King Henry VI_, Part II, in which an incantation scene plays no small part; we have one romantic comedy _The Tempest_, one tragedy _Macbeth_, the very motives and development of which are due to magic and supernatural charms. It must perhaps be remarked that _King Henry VI_, Part I, is defiled by the obscene caricature of S. Joan of Arc, surely the most foul and abominable irreverence that shames English literature. It is too loathsome for words, and I would only point out the enumeration in one scene where various familiars are introduced of the most revolting details of contemporary witch-trials, but to think of such horrors in connexion with S. Joan revolts and sickens the imagination.