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.
