Note to Hamlet, 1.4.72: "assume some other horrible form"


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Hamlet,
Act 1, Scene 4, line 72
It was thought that a spirit could take on what shape it pleased. For example, in Shakespeare's King Lear, blind Gloucester attempts to commit suicide by jumping over the edge of a cliff. Edgar, Gloucester's son, tells his father that it was a spirit in the shape of a fiend who led him to the edge of a cliff, and Edgar describes the fiend: "methought his eyes / Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses, / Horns whelk'd and waved like the enridged sea" (King Lear, 4.6.69-71).