Early modern Europeans associated the night with its “black agents” of human and diabolical evil.15 The dark hours of the day framed the most intense fears: “At night, the flying phantoms / Champing ferocious jaws, / Do by their whistling terrify my soul,” as Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) pronounced.16 Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99) addressed “Night, thou foule mother of annoyaunce sad / Sister of heavie Death, and nourse of Woe” in similar terms:
Under thy mantle black there hidden lye
Light-shonning thefte, and traiterous intent,
Abhorred bloodshed, and vile felony,
Shamefull deceipt, and daunger imminent.17
The age-old identification of night with fear and danger resonated with German poets like Simon Dach (1605–69) and Andreas Gryphius (1616–64). Writing during the Thirty Years War, they described a night of “terror, silence and dark horror”: Gryphius spoke of “the hours of sad loneliness,” when “black cold covers the land / and now sleep all, from labor and pain exhausted.”18 Dach expanded on the theme in the poem “Heart-Felt Lament” (“Hertzliche klage”) of 1641:
Fear I bear before the night
I keep myself awake with fright
My sleep is pain and sorrow,
I long so much
as no other
night watchman, for tomorrow.19
This pre-modern topos has been documented by Jean Delumeau, Piero Camporesi, A. Roger Ekirch, and many others.20 Shakespeare’s contemporary, the writer Thomas Nashe, regarded this view of the night as a cliché: “When any poet would describe a horrible tragical accident,” Nashe intoned, “to add the more probability and credence unto it he dismally begins to tell how it was dark night when it was done, and cheerful daylight had quite abandoned the firmament.”21 Shakespeare parodies this dismal view of the night in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1) when Bottom, playing Pyramus, awkwardly declaims:
O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night! alack, alack, alack.
Clearly, one would not want to mistake this topos for unmediated, direct evidence of the experience of the night in this period, but cliché and parody alike show its ubiquity. Can we explore this venerable identification of the night with evil, death, and despair for its distinctly early modern emphases and inflections?
Several key works reveal the developments within the continuity. Thomas Nashe described the night as a hellish time of fear and danger in his 1594 tract on The Terrors of the Night: “Well have poets termed night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair, the daughter of hell.”22 But Nashe expanded on these traditional associations of the night by evoking in personal, spiritual terms a night that terrified in part because it reflected the darkness within: “As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins.” Nashe’s night linked infernal evil, diabolical temptation, and human sin:
The devil is the special predominant planet of the night, and … Like a cunning fowler … he spreads his nets of temptation in the dark, that men might not see to avoid them.
For Nashe the “danger imminent” of the night was less physical than spiritual; less assault and more temptation. It was a time when one’s sins were reckoned, and when diabolical trials (both of temptation and of despair) were the strongest:
In the quiet silence of the night he will be sure to surprise us, when he infallibly knows we shall be unarmed to resist, and that there will be full auditory granted him to undermine or persuade what he lists.23
Nashe concluded his tract by asserting that “the terrors of the night [are] more than of the day, because the sins of the night surmount the sins of the day.” Nashe here represents a trend that makes nocturnal danger more personal, internal, and subjective: “we that live in his [the devil’s] nightly kingdom of darkness must needs taste some disquiet.” This interior view of the night contrasts with the traditional emphasis on the external threats, natural and supernatural, that arose at night.
Nashe’s Terrors of the Night seems to have served as a source for Shakespeare’s Macbeth (first performed c. 1603–06).24 In this tragedy several characters comment on the night and mark its passing, while the playwright thematizes it repeatedly.25 I argue that the play illustrates a distinctive early modern emphasis on the night as a site of temptation and surrender to the forces of darkness. Darkness is indeed the setting for much of Macbeth, which rehearses the older identification of the night with physical danger while building upon Nashe’s association of night with temptation and sin. Each main character in Macbeth reminds the audience of the power of the night to tempt and corrupt, to – in Banquo’s words – “win us to our harm.” Shakespeare takes care to show how the dark crimes of the play are in each case preceded by dark desires, as signaled by Macbeth musing “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires” (1.4.50). Lady Macbeth fairly personifies the power of the night to tempt in act 1, scene 7: Macbeth wavers but then succumbs to the temptation to murder Donald. This onstage scene of nocturnal persuasion, signaled by the torches in the stage directions (1.7), appears distinct from the crime itself, committed offstage. Prior to these wicked deeds come “wicked dreams” as Macbeth observes that “o’er one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / That curtained sleep” (2.1.48–50). In contrast to the nocturnal assaults by demons or the Devil described above, the night poses no physical danger to Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. They succumb instead to nocturnal temptation.
Scholars have also noted in Macbeth the influence of a well-known Protestant denunciation of ghosts and purgatorial spirits, Ludwig Lavater’s 1570 treatise De spectris. The Zurich theologian wrote to deny Catholic claims that ghosts and purgatorial spirits proved the reality of Purgatory. Widely influential, Lavater’s work appeared in several Latin editions and was translated into French, German, Dutch, and English (published in 1572 under the title Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght).26 Lavater argued that any seeming ghost or magical spirit was in reality a deception of the Devil, intended to tempt Christians into false belief. “Spirits and other strange sights,” he explained, “be not the souls of Men, but be either good or evil Angels, or else some secret and hidden operations.”27 These apparitions, Lavater explained repeatedly, “do appear still in these days both day and night, but especially in the night.” Their affinity to the night suggested their diabolical source: “Neither may we marvel, that they are heard more in the night, than in the day time. For he who is the author of these things, is called in the holy Scriptures the Prince of darkness, and therefore he shuns the light of Gods word.”28 Lavater described a vast nocturnal conspiracy, both diabolical and human, to lure individuals into a false, “Popish” belief in ghosts and spirits. Lavater’s remarks seem to frame the first meeting with the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, and in fact the closest parallel between Macbeth and Lavater’s Ghostes and spirites walking by nyght concerns nocturnal temptation. After the encounter with the Weird Sisters Banquo warns Macbeth that
… oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequence.29
Here the playwright echoes Lavater’s warning that “The devil sometimes utters the truth, that his words may have the more credit, and that he may the more easily beguile them.”30 Alongside fears of danger from night’s black agents grew the fear that one might be tempted to become the Devil’s own.
This association of the night with temptation and the darkness of one’s own sin appears in a range of contemporary works. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), the protagonist Vindice comments on lust and the temptation to incest, explaining that “if any thing / Be damn’d, it will be twelve o’clock at night.” “That twelve,” he adds, “is the Judas of the hours, wherein, / Honest salvation is betray’d to sin.” The dark temptation represented by the Weird Sisters in Macbeth also appeared on the English stage through the nocturnal temptations of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and in the form of the Black Dog in The Witch of Edmonton (c. 1621).31
The growing emphasis on temptation and the night is especially clear in the development of Doctor Faustus. In contrast with Marlowe’s later version, neither the German Historia von Johann Fausten of 1587 nor the English Faust Book of 1588/89 connects Faust’s initial temptation and fall with the night. In the German text Faustus “summoned the devil at night between nine and ten o’clock,” and at midnight ordered the spirit to appear to him the next morning at his home. After this morning “disputation” Faustus bade the spirit return in the evening. Only the following morning, described in the text as “The Third Conference of Doctor Faustus with the Spirit and the Promise He Made” does Faust sign in blood the fatal contract.32 The English Faust Book repeats this sequence of events.33 In the A-text of Doctor Faustus, written and first performed in late 1588 or 1589, Marlowe compresses the action into two night scenes: Faust’s conjuring of Mephistopheles (“Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, / … dims the welkin with her pitchy breath, / Faustus, begin thine incantations”), and the subsequent conversation (“Go and return to mighty Lucifer, / And meet me in my study at midnight”) in which Faustus signs away his soul.34 In Marlowe’s account Mephistopheles works to seduce Faustus by night with the full array of temptations and illusions at his disposal. The questions asked by Faustus underscore this association: “Is it not midnight? Come, Mephistopheles” (2.1.28); “Is that the reason he tempts us thus?” (2.1.40).35 The B-text of the play, first published in 1616, emends the setting of Faustus’s first conjuration to “Now that the gloomy shadow of the night, / … dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,” consonant with this emphasis on nocturnal diabolical temptation.36