In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, Sir
Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is
only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and
a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad
sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine's
ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done
battle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fight
against Modred on a certain day. In the romance of _Sir Amadas_,
the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously
redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The
shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser's
fairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon dark
caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start
fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous
hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful
beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead
man's skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. The
Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the
invisible world. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, round whose name are
clustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between man
and the devil, the apparitions and witches in _Macbeth_, the dead
hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmaker
and the passing-bell in Webster's sombre tragedy, _The Duchess of
Malfi_, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror.
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