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4 The Witch of Edmonton Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621) departs from the conventions established in previous witchcraft drama in relation to the depiction of scepticism. Macbeth and Dr Faustus depicted the scepticism and credulity of witches, using the discourse of demonology to illustrate the psychology of witch and devil’s servant – a psychology which is characterised by both inappropriate and excessive credulity (towards the devil) and inappropriate and excessive scepticism (towards God). While the delusions of the
This book situates witchcraft drama within its cultural and intellectual context, highlighting the centrality of scepticism and belief in witchcraft to the genre. It is argued that these categories are most fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the debate around witchcraft, but as rhetorical tools used within it. In drama, too, scepticism and belief are vital issues. The psychology of the witch character is characterised by a combination of impious scepticism towards God and credulous belief in the tricks of the witch’s master, the devil. Plays which present plausible depictions of witches typically use scepticism as a support: the witch’s power is subject to important limitations which make it easier to believe. Plays that take witchcraft less seriously present witches with unrestrained power, an excess of belief which ultimately induces scepticism. But scepticism towards witchcraft can become a veneer of rationality concealing other beliefs that pass without sceptical examination. The theatrical representation of witchcraft powerfully demonstrates its uncertain status as a historical and intellectual phenomenon; belief and scepticism in witchcraft drama are always found together, in creative tension with one another.
… and yet … this is what our Shakespeare himself has frequently been guilty of’ Sewell vii; see also Maguire 103–4). Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Rowley/Dekker/Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton mark two ends of the spectrum of tragicomedy in their discussion of ghostly resurrections and monstrous creatures, pushing the form towards romance and domestic realism respectively
kind of scepticism that eventually ensures the end of the successful prosecution of the witch’ (The Witch in History, p. 283). Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), suggests that plays ‘might ultimately have helped to spare women’s lives’ (p. 217). Lisa Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), makes the case for The Witch of Edmonton specifically (p. 98), while Greenblatt makes similar claims for Macbeth. 6 Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama scepticism can
. The play and the case In The Witch of Edmonton many popular beliefs about witches are ridiculed or shown to be false. In The Late Lancashire Witches, by contrast, everything is true. The powers the eponymous witches are able to command are varied and spectacular: they are able to transform themselves into large cats, summon spirits to impersonate real people, magically steal food from a wedding feast, cause impotence, and make milk pails walk by themselves (this last effect was apparently reproduced on stage in performances). The chief witch, Mistress Generous, is
’s scenes as the clown Cuddy Banks, in Thomas Dekker, John Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621); (ii): Orlando and Rosalind’s rehearsal in As You Like It ; (iii): Falstaff’s list, discovered in his pocket in King Henry IV Part 1 ; (iv): Lancelot Gobbo and Old Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice (2.2). 16 These routines belonged to Moryson’s ‘peeces and Patches of
groups, physical features deemed ugly often resonate as markers of the self. 18 Witches, for example, are seen to betray their evil nature in their twisted, warty bodies. Elizabeth Sawyer, the ‘lean old beldame’ in The Witch of Edmonton (performed 1621, publ. 1658) is ‘shunned/And hated like a sickness’ in large part because she is ‘like a bow buckled and bent together’. 19 Anything but skin
England (Harlow: Longman, 2001); Victoria Bladen, ‘Shaping Supernatural Identity in The Witch of Edmonton (1621)’, in Marcus Harmes and Victoria Bladen (eds), Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 76 For an in-depth examination of this issue with reference to Julie Taymor's career, see Ralph Turner, ‘Taymor's tempests: sea change, or seeing little change in responses to gender and
witchcraft both extends and departs from the earlier Restoration plays discussed in Chapter 6. Shadwell’s play has not received much critical attention in the present day, largely because of its author’s poor reputation following Dryden’s attacks on him, but perhaps also because it has often been perceived to be unoriginal. The Lancashire Witches draws on previous witchcraft plays, including The Late Lancashire Witches, The Witch of Edmonton, and The Masque of Queens. The situation of the Shacklehead and Hartfort children resembles that in Lyly’s Mother Bombie, in that the
’s The Devil’s Charter was at the Globe in the same season as Macbeth , 1606, and Marston’s The Wonder of Women , with its sorcery scenes, was at the Blackfriars. Jonson’s antimasque of witches in The Masque of Queens , performed at court in 1609, inaugurated a decade of sorcery plays and masques, including The Tempest , The Alchemist , The Witch , The Witch of