hey seem to have sought
further for unlikely shapes to assume.[1] Poor Caliban complains that
Prospero's spirits

"Lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark,"[2]

just as Ariel[3] and Puck[4] (Will-o'-th'-wisp) mislead their victims;
and that

"For every trifle are they set upon me:
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall. Sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
Do hiss me into madness."

And doubtless the scene which follows this soliloquy, in which Caliban,
Trinculo, and Stephano mistake one another in turn for evil spirits,
fully flavoured with fun as it still remains, had far more point for the
audiences at the Globe--to whom a stray devil or two was quite in the
natural order of things under such circumstances--than it can possibly
possess for us. In this play, Ariel, Prospero's familiar, besides
appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving
in such a manner as to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea,
crying, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!" assumes the forms
of a water-nymph,[5] a harpy,[6] and also the goddess Ceres;[7] while
the strange shapes, masquers, and even the hounds that hunt and worry
the would-be king and viceroys of the island, are Ariel's "meaner
fellows."

[Footnote 1: For instance, an eye without a head.--Ibid.]

[Footnote 2: The Tempest, II. ii. 10.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid. I. ii. 198.]

[Footnote 4: A Midsummer Night's Dream, II. i. 39; III. i. 111.]

[Footnote 5: I. ii. 301-318.]

[Footnote 6: III. iii. 53.]

[Footnote 7: IV. i. 166.]

52. Puck's favourite forms seem to have been more outlandish than
Ariel's, as might have been expected of that malicious little spirit. He
beguiles "the fat and bean-fed horse" by

"Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:
And sometimes lurk I in a gossip's bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab;
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool[1] mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her, and down topples she."

And again:

"Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, houn