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

assume some other horrible form: Spirits could take on what shape they pleased. 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 a fiend [spirit shape] led him to the edge of a cliff, and 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).