The Late Lancashire Witches
Critical Introduction1The single most unusual feature of The Late Lancashire Witches as historical evidence worthy of cultural and theatrical study is not simply its topicality, or its quasi-documentary recycling of reported events, but specifically the description of the play in performance that appeared in Nathaniel Tomkyns’ letter of 16 August 1634 to Sir Robert Phelips in Somerset, detailing his experience of watching this current hit. The letter is unique as a contemporary theatre review. No other equivalent document of audience response to any play in the early modern period exists in such exquisite and penetrating detail - the most we might find elsewhere is a reference to a title or playhouse, but Tomkyns goes far beyond that in his informal account of his excursion to Bankside:Here hath been lately a new comedy at the Globe called The Witches of Lancashire, acted by reason of the great concourse of people three days together. The third day I went with a friend to see it, and found a greater appearance of fine folk, gentlemen and gentlewomen, than I thought had been in town in the vacation. The subject was of the sleights and passages [episodes, actions] done or supposed to be done by these witches, sent from thence hither, and other witches and their familiars: of their nightly meetings in several places; their banqueting with all sorts of meat and drink conveyed unto them by their familiars upon the pulling of a cord; the walking of pails of milk by themselves and (as they say of children) all alone; the transforming of men and women into the shapes of several creatures and especially of horses by putting an enchanted bridle into their mouths; their posting to and from places far distant in an incredible short time; the cutting off of a witch-gentlewoman’s hand in the form of a cat, by a soldier turned miller, known to her husband by a ring thereon (the only tragical part of the story); the representing of wrong and putative fathers in the shape of mean persons to gentlemen by way of derision; the tying of a knot at a marriage (after the French manner) to cassate [nullify] masculine ability; and the conveying away of the good cheer and bringing in a mock feast of bones and stones instead thereof, and the filling of pies with living birds and young cats, etc. And though there be not in it (to my understanding) any poetical genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state or tenet of witches (which I expected), or application to virtue, but full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible, yet in respect of the newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the end of odd passages and fopperies [foolish or absurd actions] to provoke laughter, and is mixed with divers songs and dances, it passeth for a merry and excellent new play. Per acta est fabula. Vale.n99382The wealth of information we can glean from this letter is extraordinary. We learn that the play - which Tomkyns defines as a ‘new comedy’, not a history or chronicle, despite the pamphlet literature available on Lancashire witchcraft - ran for at least three days in a row, a surprising fact in itself. We learn that people were flocking to see it, and that many in the audience were gentry, including gentlewomen. Tomkyns is surprised to see so many during ‘vacation’; that is, when courts were not in session in London. The comment is a throw-away reminder that the four so-called witches and their accusers were being re-examined in London, with a view to challenging the local Lancashire legal verdicts, but the women were not specifically retried.3According to Tomkyns, the plot consists of ‘sleights and passages’; tricks and episodes of various kinds, as the word ‘passages’ (a term that Tomkyns uses twice) implies not only incidents or actions, but also digressions, twists and turns, bouts of combat, flirtatious conversations, and amorous relations. Tomkyns is sceptical about the play as documentary drama: its action involves events that were ‘done or supposed to be done by these witches, sent from thence hither’ - that is, those witches sent down from Lancaster - and by the other witches and familiars left behind in Lancaster. So, Tomkyns points out twice in his letter, the ‘newness’ of the subject matter, a current event involving people who could actually be seen in the city or its environs, prompted audiences to go to the theatre to discover the details for themselves. And Tomkyns duly lists all the amazing kinds of magic attributed to these women in the play, although such magic had been a staple of witchcraft plays since Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Endymion, and The Old Wives Tale. Only some of the magic staged had actually been reported in legal examinations, but both the play and the legal evidence depend on comically bizarre (mis)information. Most convincing of all, the spectacular effects as staged at the Globe apparently overwhelmed the senses with scenes of transportation and transformation, visions of personal history, displays of enchanted objects and tools, festivities and special foods disrupted by demons, culminating in the cutting off of a cat’s paw, which turns out to be a woman’s hand bearing a wedding ring subsequently recognized by her husband. Tomkyns describes this moment parenthetically as ‘the only tragical part of the story’. This shift in the play’s emotional impact on the audience is probably another reason - magic aside - that spectators crammed into the theatre. The vividness of Tomkyns’ recall suggests that the success of the play as comedy, magic show, song and dance routines, with that little touch of tragic recognition, had a long afterlife in his imagination.The History of the Pendle Witches4Why was the play so stunningly popular, only to disappear from the stage once the Privy Council successfully challenged the Lancashire verdicts? Lancashire was the site of two wildly publicized witchcraft events in the early seventeenth century: the trials of the so-called Pendle witches in 1612 and the later trials of 1633/4. The contrast between the two events is stronger than the similarities, although both cases involved a large network of people in the community accusing, giving testimony, and attempting to justify actions taken. Most importantly, perhaps, both events resulted in guilty verdicts based on the evidence given by children. In the 1612 case, nine-year-old Jennet Device, or Davies, gave evidence against members of her own family - her grandmother (Old Demdike), her mother, her sister, and her brother - as well as against neighbours. In the 1633/4 case, 10-year-old Edmund Robinson gave evidence against people in the neighbourhood, but did not implicate members of his family. Rather, he implicated people with whom his father had had disputes and significantly against Jennet who had testified in the first trial.5In the 1612 case, of the sixteen who faced trial (Old Demdike died in Lancaster Castle prison before the prosecution), eleven were found guilty, of whom ten were hanged, and one suffered the lesser penalty of standing in the pillory and making public confessions in various locations. The remaining five were acquitted. But, during the legal process, the turmoil in the community was considerable, with supporters of the Demdike clan meeting at the family home, Malkin Tower, to discuss anarchic plans for freeing those held in prison, including a plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. In an associated trial at Samlesburyn9939, three other witches accused by a fourteen-year-old girl, Grace Sowerbutts, of crimes ranging from physical abuse to infanticide and cannibalism, accompanied by demonic dancing, sexual orgies, and aerial transportation, were also acquitted. This girl, unlike Jennet Device, was questioned carefully by a sceptical judge until she admitted that her evidence was a tangle of lies suggested to her by a Catholic priest, Christopher Southworth. Both of these related cases were reported in Thomas Potts’s ‘official’ case study of the trials, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster, a document that conveys a certain urgency about controlling witchcraft belief and Roman Catholic subversions (the Gunpowder Plot to blow up king and parliament occurred only seven years earlier, and the same man, Sir Thomas Knyvet, who helped thwart that plot, also commissioned Potts’s pamphlet).6In her explorations of his work, Marion Gibson points out that ‘Potts routinely presents written pre-trial documents as an account of what went on verbally at the trial itself, which is clearly inaccurate. He frequently edits and pastes together material within examinations and informations, which destroys their internal coherence and logic and conceals patterns of questioning and storytelling’ - particularly in his frequent repetitions of the Device children’s testimony, and his omissions of other significant testimony.n9940 Potts’s chief objective seems to have been to establish a rationale for witch-behaviour as either economic (based on the charity-refused model that seemed apparent in Alizon Device’s begging from the pedlar John Law) or vengeful (based on apparently motiveless malice believed to be encouraged by the devil).n9941 Particularly in ‘motiveless’ revenge narratives, the story tends to involve injury to the gentry, whom the narrator constructs as innocent victims, whereas the witch-aggressors are regularly exposed as unchaste, ill-educated, lower-class, impoverished, foul-mouthed, and spiteful hate-mongers.n9942 The testimony of John Law, apparently bewitched by Alizon Device for refusing to give her pins, appears in two versions: one by Law himself, who claims he immediately became ill after denying her free goods, one by Law’s son Abraham, who swore that Alizon confessed before both the Laws and their neighbours that she had bewitched John Law and asked him for forgiveness, which he then gave. The result, however, proved nothing, since Device could not relieve his illness, and neither could any other accused witch.n9943 That is, although the refusal of charity and consequent cursing seem to have caused John Law to fall ill, in fact he just as likely had a pre-existing condition; there is no evidence that his collapse was caused by witchcraft, although it may have been caused by his fear, translated into physical trauma, of arguing with a woman suspected as a witch.7Although the motives for witchcraft accusations or practices might be multiple, the weight of blame tended to fall on those who could least defend themselves. In the 1612 ‘voluntary Confession and Examination of Anne Whittle, alias Chattox’, Potts records the following, in reviewing evidence of the plan to murder young Robert Nutter by witchcraft, suborned by Elizabeth Nutter, who wanted to see her husband’s estate pass to her own kin, but complicated for the witch in question by young Nutter’s threats against Chattox’s daughter:And this Examinate further sayth, that Robert Nutter did desire her Daughter one Redfearns wife, to have his pleasure of her, being then in Redfearns house: but the sayd Redfearns wife denyed the sayd Robert; whereupon the sayd Robert seeming to be greatly displeased therewith, in a great anger tooke his Horse, and went away, saying in a great rage, that if ever the Ground came to him, shee should never dwell upon his Land. Whereupon this Examinate called Fancie [her familiar] to her; ... asking this Examinate, what shee would have him to doe? And this Examinate bade him goe revenge her of the sayd Robert Nutter. After which time, the sayd Robert Nutter lived about a quarter of a yeare, and then dyed.n99448Potts implies that the death is a direct result of a witchcraft attack, but in fact Nutter lived for another three months, and the death itself provides no evidence except that it followed, albeit at a distance, a witch’s curse - a logical error of post hoc, ergo propter hoc thinking. As Jonathan Lumby suggests, family trauma can seem to support witchcraft accusations although the one may have little to do with the other, and more to do with other social or economic circumstances. The inequities of the 1612 trials, especially the resulting high number of executions, demonstrate problems of class warfare, domestic embarrassment, emotional responses to events, possible ulterior motives, and later justifications of those responses and motives as attempts to recover face, both on the part of the accused, the witnesses, and the magistrates themselves.n99459By contrast, the trials of 1634 with which the play concerns itself were resolved without executions, although some of the accused witches died in prison before and after their exoneration. The trials did not have a Potts to record the ‘official’ view, but despite the lack of detailed documentation, enough remains to be clear about the story itself. After four witches were executed in 1633, setting the scene, as it were, for the 1634 case, young Edmund Robinson accused almost twenty people of witchcraft; another sixty were suspected as a result. He told the court the following story:n9946The Examination of Edmund Robinson, son of Edmund Robinson of Pendle Forest, eleven years of age, taken at Padiham before Richard Shuttleworth and John Starkey, esquires, two of his majesty’s justices of the peace within the county of Lancaster, the 10th day of February, 1633 [1634]
Who upon oath informeth, being examined concerning the great meeting of the witches of Pendle, saith that upon All Saints Day last past, he, this informer, being with one Henry Parker, a near-door neighbour to him in Wheatley Lane, desired the said Parker to give him leave to gather some bulloes [wild plums], which he did; in gathering whereof, he saw two greyhounds, viz., a black and a brown, [who] came running over the next field towards him, he verily thinking the one of them to be Mr. Nutter’s and the other to be Mr. Robinson’s, the said gentlemenn9947 then having such-like. And saith, the said greyhounds came to him; and fawned on him, they having about their necks either of them a collar, unto each of which was tied a string; which collars (as this informer affirmeth) did shine like gold. And he thinking that some either of Mr. Nutter’s or Mr. Robinson’s family should have followed them; yet seeing nobody to follow them, he took the same greyhounds thinking to course with them. And presently a hare did rise very near before him. At the sight whereof he cried, ‘Loo, loo, loo!’, but the dogs would not run. Whereupon he, being very angry, took them and, with the strings that were about their collars, tied them to a little bush at the next hedge, and with a switch that he had in his hand he beat them. And instead of the black greyhound, one Dickenson’s wife stood up, a neighbour whom this informer knoweth. And instead of the brown one, a little boy, whom this informer knoweth not. At which sight this informer, being afraid, endeavoured to run away, but being stayed by the woman, viz., by Dickenson’s wife, she put her hand into her pocket, and pulled forth a piece of silver much like to a fair shilling, and offered to give him it to hold his tongue and not to tell; which he refused, saying, ‘Nay, thou art a witch.’ Whereupon she put her hand into her pocket again, and pulled out a thing like unto a bridle that jingled, which she put on the little boy’s head; which said boy stood up in the likeness of a white horse and in the brown greyhound’s stead. Then immediately Dickenson’s wife took this informer before her upon the said horse and carried him to a new house called Hoarstones, being about a quarter of a mile off. Whither when they were come, there were divers persons about the door, and he saw divers others riding on horses of several colours towards the said house, who tied their horses to a hedge near to the said house. Which persons went into the said house, to the number of threescore or thereabouts, as this informer thinketh, where they had a fire, and meat roasting in the said house, whereof a young woman (whom this informer knoweth not) gave him flesh and bread upon a trencher and drink in a glass, which after the first taste he refused and would have no more, but said it was naught.And presently after, seeing divers of the said company going into a barn near adjoining, he followed after them, and there he saw six of them kneeling, and pulling all six of them six several ropes, which were fastened or tied to the top of the barn. Presently after which pulling, there came into this informer’s sight flesh smoking, butter in lumps, and milk as it were flying from the said ropes. All which fell into basins which were placed under the said ropes. And after that these six had done, there came other six which did so likewise. And during all the time of their several pulling they made such ugly faces as scared this informer, so that he was glad to run out and steal homewards; who immediately finding they wanted one that was in their company, some of them ran after him near to a place in a highway called Boggardn9948 Hole, where he this informer met two horsemen. At the sight whereof, the said persons left following of him. But the foremost of those persons that followed him he knew to be one Loynd's wife, which said wife together with one Dickenson’s wife, and one Jennet Davies he hath seen since at several times in a croftn9949 or closen9950 adjoining to his father’s house, which put him in great fear.And further this informer saith, upon Thursday after New Year’s Day last past, he saw the said Loynd's wife sitting upon a cross-piece of woodn9951 being within the chimney of his father’s dwelling house; and he, calling to her, said, ‘Come down, thou Loynd's wife.’ And immediately the said Loynd's wife went up out of his sight. And further this informer saith that after he was come from the company aforesaid to his father’s house, being towards evening, his father bade him go and fetch home two kine to seal.n9952 And in the way in a field called the Ellers, he chanced to hap upon a boy who began to quarrel with him, and they fought together till the informer had his ears and face made up very bloody by fighting, and looking down he saw the boy had a cloven foot. At which sight he, being greatly affrighted, came away from him to seek the kine. And in the way he saw a light like to a lantern towards which he made haste, supposing it to be carried by some of Mr. Robinson’s people; but when he came to the place, he only found a woman standing on a bridge, whom when he saw he knew her to be Loynd's wife, and knowing her he turned back again: and immediately he met with the aforesaid boy, from whom he offered to run, which boy gave him a blow on the back that made him to cry:And further this informer saith that when he was in the barn, he saw three women take six pictures from off the beam, in which pictures were many thorns or such like things sticked in them, and that Loynd's wife took one of the pictures down; but the other two women that took down the rest he knoweth not.n9953 And being further asked what persons were at the aforesaid meeting, he nominated these persons following; viz., Dickenson’s wife; Henry Priestley’s wife and his lad; Alice Hargreene, widow; Jane Davies;n9954 William Davies; and the wife of Henry Fackes and her sons, John and Miles; the wife of Denneries; James Hargreene of Marsdead; Loynd's wife; one James his wife; Saunders his wife and Saunders himself, sicut credit;n9955 one Lawrence his wife; one Saunder Pyn's wife of Barraford; one Holgate and his wife of Leonards of the West Close.*****Edmund Robinson of Pendle, father of the aforesaid Edmund Robinson, mason, informeth,
That upon All-Saints Day last he sent his son, the aforesaid informer, to fetch home two kine to seal, and saith that his son staying longer than he thought he should have done, he went to seek him, and in seeking of him heard him cry pitifully, and found him so affrighted and distracted that he neither knew his father, nor did know where he was, and so continued very near a quarter of an hour before he came to himself. And he told this informer his father all the particular passages that are before declared in the said Robinson his son’s information.10When the jury returned guilty verdicts, the assize judges apparently set aside the decision, remanded those convicted, and consulted the Bishop of Chester, John Bridgeman. The bishop re-examined Edmund Robinson and his father, and then sent them to London for interrogation along with seven convicted witches: Margaret Johnson (the only self-confessed witch, but not present in Edmund’s tale), Frances Dicconson or Dickieson (as pronounced in the play), Jennet Hargreaves, Mary Spencer, her husband John (in the play, Mary Spencer is single and John is conveniently forgotten), Alice Higgin, and Jennet Loynd. Because the latter three died in Lancaster Castle prison, only four witches, including the now-ill Jennet Hargreaves, moved on to the next judicial hearing. The bishop’s rationale seems to have been the lack of support for anything in the boy’s story, aside from the mad confession of Margaret Johnson:n9956The examination and voluntary confession of Margaret Johnson, widow, taken at Padiham, the 9th day of March 1633 [1634] before Richard Shuttleworth and John Starkey, esquires, two of his majesty’s justices of the peace within the county of Lancaster.
Who saith that between seven or eight years since, she being in her house at Marsden in great passion and anger, and distracted and withal oppressed with some want, there appeared unto her a spirit or devil in the similitude or proportion of a man apparelled in a suit of black tied about with silk points, who offered her, if she would give him her soul, he would supply all her wants and bring her whatsoever she wanted or needed and at her appointment would help her to kill and revenge her either of man or beast or what she desired, and after a solicitation or two, she contracted and coadunated with the said devil or spirit for her soul. And the said devil had her call him by the name of Mamillion, and in all her talk and conference she called the said Mamillion her god. And she further saith that the said spirit or devil did by her consent defile her body by committing wicked uncleanness together. And she further saith that she was not at the great meeting of the witches at Hoarestones in the Forest of Pendle on All Saints Day last past, but saith that she was at a second meeting the Sunday after All Saints Day at the place aforesaid where there was at that time between thirty and forty witches who did all ride to the said meeting. And the end of the said meeting was to consult for the killing and hurting of man and beasts, and that there was one devil or spirit that was more great and grand devil than the rest. ... And further saith that the devil can raise foul weather and storms, and so he did at their meeting.n9957 And she further saith that when the devil came to suck her pap, he came to her in the likeness of a cat, sometimes of one colour and sometimes of another. And since this trouble befell her, her spirit hath left her and she never saw him since.11This testimony is suspiciously like Mother Sawyer’s, as recounted in Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet, The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, 1621, particularly the details of the devil appearing as an animal in different colours, and of his abandonment of her once Sawyer was about to be arrested. That is, folklore, gossip, local memory of the actual event, and old wives’ tales had more to do with these details than any factual evidence. When the Bishop of Chester reviewed the testimony, he found Johnson incapacitated and incoherent. Similarly, he found that other testimony told a different story of jealousy, malice, and attempted bribery among the accusers.n995812Bishop Bridgeman believed Mary Spencer’s report of the game she used to play while doing her chores, when he questioned her about transporting her pail by witchcraft, one of the charges against her:when she was a young girl and went to the well for water, she used to trundle the collock, or pail, down the hill, and she would run after it to overtake it, and did overtake it sometimes, and then she might call it to come to her, but utterly denies that she could ever make it come to her by any witchcraft.n995913The other suspicious circumstances involving witnesses and the accused had to do with the economic relations between the Richardsons and the Dickiesons. In the bishop’s examination of Frances Dickieson, 13 June 1634, she alleged that Edmund Robinson Sr ‘bought’ a cow from her husband, but that her husband would not release the cow without a cash payment, which apparently Robinson did not have. Animosity was the result. She also mentions a 40 shilling bribe in connection with another accusation against the Dickiesons brought by Edmund Stevenson of Stainskow in Pendle concerning a dispute over butter they sold him. Robinson claimed he would get her off, if her husband paid the 40 shillings, implying that the butter case was a trumped-up charge being used as leverage against the Dickiesons for blackmail. On 15 June 1634 Mary Fisher corroborated the Dickiesons’ testimony, asserting in her deposition that Robinson wanted the Dickiesons to pay him 40 shillings to drop the witchcraft charges, but that Goody Dickieson refused to let her husband pay. The bishop saw these events as evidence of local revenge for financial losses that could not in legal fact be laid at the Dickiesons’ door.14The bishop’s view was supported further by investigations in London. When the four witches arrived in Greenwich, they were examined by a medical team headed by William Harvey,n9960 who announced that no unusual marks were found on their bodies. Subsequently, on 10 July 1634, Edmund Robinson Jr broke down under sceptical questioning, and admitted he had lied. The father, Robinson Sr now claimed that he had rebuked boy for lying and praised the Dickiesons as honest. The same cannot be said for Robinson: he said he had paid the full amount for the cow he purchased from Dickieson, had no hard feelings against them, and denied any blackmailing. But John Webster remembers in The Displaying of Witchcraft, 1667, that the Robinsons came to his parish during a witch-finding tour of the county - and got paid, whether in return for finding witches, or perhaps, in some cases, for not finding witches. Webster asserts that Robinson was able to buy cows after his witch-finding expeditions, although he could not afford them before; this statement is not strictly true, since the Robinsons had kept at least two cows which his son was supposed to return to their stalls in the evenings. The boy’s slackness in doing so was the beginning of the 1634 witchcraft trials. John Swain emphasizes this economic angle of the case by asking a key question that pertains to the Robinsons’ veracity: why did the parents believe their son’s story about being abducted by named witches, and why did it take them three months to report the incident?n996115These questions do not enter explicitly into Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s play, but the scepticism behind the questions is an over-arching feature of the comedy. Some earlier critics have not paid close enough attention to the tone, locale, and time scheme of the play. Although the play refers to events of the 1634 trials in Lancaster, the play itself, as the prologue and epilogue make clear, sums up the evidence while the witches and their accusers were being re-examined in London. By the end of June 1634, Robinson Sr was finding out what it was like to spend a night in a London jail; the witches, on the other hand, were housed at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich. By mid-July, both Robinsons admitted lying. On July 10, the boy confessed that ‘all that tale is false and feigned, and has no truth at all, but only as he has heard tales and reports made by women’ and that ‘he had framed the tale out of his own invention’ because he was late bringing the cows back to the shed, and ‘told these tales [including the fight with the demon-boy and the visions of Loynd’s wife] to excuse himself when he had been at play’.n9962 On July 16 he added that ‘he had heard neighbours talk of a witch feast that was kept at Mocking [that is, Malkin] Tower in Pendle Forest about twenty years since and thereupon he framed those tales concerning the persons aforesaid’.n9963 Although the play retells some of the events recorded in the Lancaster trials and invents more, largely as evidence of the credulity of northerners, the expectation in London - where the verdict was not yet announced by the time the play was performed in mid-August - was as the epilogue suggests: ‘Perhaps great mercy may / ... give them day / Of longer life’ [LW 5.epilogue.speech1084].16Nathaniel Tomkyns’ witty letter, then, is invaluable for its sceptical tone, its appreciation of ludicrous comedy, and especially his fascination with specific spectacular moments, many of which I will discuss in the next section. Although Tomkyns expresses mild disappointment in what he saw as the play’s failure to argue a legal or moral position, he was certainly not disappointed in its eccentricity or its comic excesses. Possibly he was too amused by the comedy’s visual surprises to recognize its sharper critiques of credulity, especially concerning the conversion of sceptics into fervent believers. The judges of the cases - and perhaps many in the playhouse audience as well - were certainly not so easily converted.Sport and game in The Late Lancashire Witches17As Alison Findlay remarks both of the historic events and of the play, ‘The witches became a locus of outlawed desires and energies and the bewitching narratives took on a life of their own’ in challenging authority, defying and mocking patriarchal anxieties.n9964 In The Late Lancashire Witches, men hunt and gamble to satisfy their appetite for dominance; the witches hunt for ways to upset that dominance by means of various pranks that trivialize male sport and give women the advantage in domination. The witches’ shape-shifting into domestic or wild animals experiments with different means of satisfying their appetites; and readers or audiences of the play need to think about why it is important to recognize (a) the bestial focus of these changes (which originated in Edmund Robinson Jr’s story) and (b) the male attempts to suppress this animality, the sign of the beast in man, who prefers to think of himself as rational. As I explore these issues, I try to place Heywood’s and Brome’s position on their quasi-journalistic material and their attitudes to divisions of gender, class, and geographical location in the formation and formulation of opinion. My exploration begins with act 2 scene 5, a transformation scene on which Brome editors worked with three Royal Shakespeare Company actors in June 2006 to try to figure out how the scene could be performed to bring out divisions in gender, class, and geography; and how the shape-shifting explores the sexuality of the scene in boundary-pushing ways that might elicit genuine horror in a London audience largely disposed to enjoy the witches’ antics.18Although Nathaniel Tomkyns expressed brief regret at the play’s lack of poetry, art, or high rhetoric in refusing to appeal to arguments of law or morality, he did enjoy its primary ingredients, ‘full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible’. There he puts his finger on the key relationship between the context of shape-shifting and its connection to sexuality. The play begins with three gentlemen out hunting for hares which vanish before the men or their dogs can fix on their location. This initial sequence begins a series of animal references to a hare, dogs, a meuse (hole or gap, lair of various animals), fox, pug (monkey), mouse, porcupine, badger, bear, various horses, even a dragon (5.2). Male endearments for women, such as ‘coney’ or ‘cunny’ (rabbit) and ‘mousie’ or ‘mawsy’ (the name of one familiar in the play), have sexual implications.n9965 Arthur immediately assumes that the hare is female and that witchcraft has rendered it invisible. His friends disagree, but the conversation veers in tone when Whetstone, the ‘by-blow’ nephew-by-marriage of Master Generous, joins them. They jeer him as a witch and as a bastard of a ‘lusty young’ and ‘wanton’ witch, thus explicitly connecting witchcraft with sexuality, a common early modern trope. According to Malleus Maleficarum, the locus classicus of witchcraft beliefs: ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable’; the argument rests on Eve, blamed for original sin, and on such biblical passages as Proverbs 30, which asserts of women: ‘for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils’.n996619The hunt is also associated with class distinction and privilege, gentlemanly sport, not need, although it turns out that Arthur needs a mortgage from Generous in order to recuperate his estate. The men’s sport also hinges on gambling: discovering whose dog has most prowess, thus implying the same about its manly owner. Arthur, despite his poverty, declares, when their hare disappears, ‘I durst have laid / My life to gage my dog had pinched her’ [LW 1.1.speech8]. After they dine with Generous (and Arthur gets his mortgage), the young men return to the hunt in act 2 scene 4. They bet on whose dog will be faster at catching the hare, but this time the bastardy-jokes increase at Whetstone’s expense, particularly in linking hares with whores homophonically as a way of jeering at the facts of Whetstone’s birth. Bracketing this scene are two scenes with an unnamed boy, understood by those who know the actual case of the Lancashire witches in 1634, then being re-examined by the Privy Council, as Edmund Robinson, the boy whose lies caused the imprisonment and death of many accused witches. Introduced in the stage direction only as ‘Boy with a switch’, he confesses to having stuffed his belly with wild plums instead of doing his chores, and now plans ‘to see some sport’ by following the gentlemen’s hunt. He is interrupted by two greyhounds, still wearing collars and leashes, which cross the stage, held by an invisible spirit. The boy believes he recognizes them as Master Robinson’s dogs (the mention of the name clearly signalling the case to the audience) and even speaks to one dog by name, ‘Hector’. His reaction to the dogs is immediate and opportunistic: he will return the dogs in expectation of reward from their ‘liberal’ owner, but first he will use the dogs to catch a hare for his dinner. That is, unlike the gentlemen who gamble on sport, this boy’s ‘gamble’ is based more closely on knowing the real value of greyhounds and needing food for the family table. In act 2 scene 5, like the gentlemen, the boy is disappointed in the hunt, but finds instead that he himself is the object of a witch’s hunt and will shortly share with the witch the riding of a shape-shifted horse.20This experience and its association with the sexual mark several scenes in the play, of which this incident is the first. In 2.6, the lovers Mall Spencer (a witch) and Robin (Generous’s groom) transform Generous’s small gelding into a large white stallion which they ride together to London and back; in this transformation, as in the Mall-Robin love affair generally, Mall is in control of the ‘ride’ and of the horse’s recreated phallic power. In 3.2, after Mistress Generous is denied her husband’s gelding, she uses a magic bridle to transform Robin, her husband’s substitute in conveying the refusal, into the horse she rides to the witches’ feast. That is, she annuls her husband’s order regarding his horse - and her preference for his gelding has sexual implications for her marriage - and forces her husband’s servant to serve her pleasure, equivocally as transport and as sexual service-provider. In 4.1, all the witches - including Mall - laugh at Robin’s predicament, but at the end of this scene, Robin, resentful of being ‘jaded’, manages to reverse the charm, and rides Mistress Generous home to the stable. In 4.2, Master Generous sees the (off-stage) transformation of an old mare into his wife, and Robin burns the magic bridle. Master Generous forgives Robin for riding his wife, an event he may not understand as an adulterous contamination of the domestic in sexualizing a household servant or turning him into a farm animal with which she becomes intimate; but he keeps a watchful eye on his wife subsequently, despite his apparent forgiveness of her sin. In 4.3 a skimmington ride uses a horse, but the result of the skimmington is an unexpected reversal; as is also the case in 4.4, when Mistress Generous tells the story of her transformation in the stable to the other witches, laughing at the ease with which her husband believes her duplicitous promise to repent and leave witchcraft: ‘but once and ever / A witch, thou know’st’ [LW 4.4.speech801]. In 4.5, as part of a class-based revenge trick, Arthur is made to believe that his biological father is Robin the groom (depicted as in charge of horses and their breeding), not the gentleman from whom he inherited his estate. And finally the last words to Mistress Generous before she goes to trial is Robin’s witticism, ‘And, mistress, the horse that stays for you rides better with a halter than your jingling bridle’ [LW 5.5.speech1078], halter here referring to the hangman’s noose and the death throes of its victim.21The representation of the horse, in other words, is a vital spectacle that guides meaning: who is riding whom, and for what purpose? Such riding is a vivid reference to marital relations in domestic conduct books, such as A Bride Bush. William Whately declares that the first principle of married life is chastity: ‘Was not marriage invented to prevent whoredom?’ he asks (3).n9967 Here Mistress Generous fails to meet the prime criterion. Whately suggests that marital sexuality, like meat and drink at table, should be preceded by prayers of thankfulness, warning that a man should not bring himself to dinner or to the bedroom in the ‘brutish profaneness’ of a horse to a manger, to ‘cram’ without God’s blessing (16); and husbandly household government depends upon acknowledging his ‘yoke-fellow’ as sharing in all things of that household:Even as he that is to ride an horse must make his bridle fit for the mouth of the poor beast, a snaffle for one, a bit for another; an hard and heavy bit for one, a lesser and lighter for another, for every bridle will not agree to the mouth of every beast. In like case it fareth with women…. Did you never see a drunken man on horse-back? Have you not marked his ill ordered ordering of the poor reasonless (but sober) beast under him? (130, 137)22In such a ride, even the best of horses fails to content the rider whose mismanagement - galloping, stopping, turning, or frisking - leads to folly and distress. When gendered assumptions about horse and rider are inverted - female riders, male horses - the commentary assumes disastrous proportions. The Late Lancashire Witches’ bestial transformations, journeying, and feeding, including illicit sexuality, suggest the failure of male authority in the local economy, when women, using their natural influence over children but expanding it to include nurseling demons, supplant that failed authority with their own vigorous agency. Indeed, as Whately himself points out, a man who cannot govern his own wife is like a rider without a bridle; the horse ‘cannot chose but either run out of the way, or stumble and cast the rider: so the wife of such a man must be of extraordinary meekness and patience; or else she must needs either rebel against him, or contemn him, or both’ (153). The woman as rebel, bridle in hand, is ready to seize control for her own pleasure, social and sexual.23Let us return to the hunt. At the beginning of 2.5, the boy seems to be in charge of the situation: he has taken hold the dogs and tries to incite them to hunt, but they are ‘so lither and so lazy’ that they will not stir. He ties them to a bush, and ‘As he beat them, there appears before him GOODY DICKIESON’ and another boy ‘upon the dogs’ going in’ [LW 2.5.speech326] (SD). The editors and actors involved in the performance of this scene speculated that the bush could have been thrust through a stage door or (better) through the trap, allowing for the dogs’ exit into the trap hidden by the bush, and the actors’ entrance through the trap as well, perhaps yipping and barking as though at the pain of being lashed, or comically of competing for first access to the stage. The boy gives us a sense of the immediacy of this transformation: ‘Now bless me heaven! One of the greyhounds turned into a woman, the other into a boy!’ At second glance he recognizes Goody Dickieson, but not the other boy. Thus the first complex reaction we see is the switch from the boy’s anger at the dogs to his surprise and fear at the sight of Goody Dickieson, who herself expresses more powerfully the anger just a moment ago associated with the boy’s attempt to control the situation. ‘You young rogue,’ she grumbles, ‘you have used me like a dog!’24One of the things witchcraft readers and spectators have to keep in mind is the principle of inversion at work in all parts of this play. At issue here is the credibility of what Stuart Clark calls ‘the language of early modern witchcraft beliefs’.n9968 He warns that we should not assume that believers in witchcraft are irrational and perhaps therefore suitable subjects for comedy - a possibility that London playwrights played on with their audiences, contrasting the sophistication of the south with the rusticity of the north. Nor should we forget that The Late Lancashire Witches played for three consecutive days, a considerable run in 1634.n9969 Part of the popularity of the show, made clear in Nathaniel Tomkyns’ ‘review’ of the play in his letter to Sir Robert Phelips, had to do with its current events content and its bawdy comedy, but a significant part of that audience fascination had to do with the stage-magic: in Tomkyns’ words ‘the transforming of men and women into the shapes of several creatures and especially of horses by putting an enchanted bridle into their mouths, their posting to and from places far distant in an incredible short time’, shifting reason into passion, ritual community sport or ceremony into depraved opposites, including backwardness, dizzy dancing, discordant music, and inedible food, the sights and sounds we see detailed in the act 3 wedding of Parnell and Lawrence and then see translated into the witches’ feast in act 4. The key factor in such witchcraft stories is ‘the stress on contrariness and inverse behaviour’ expected in representations of the demonic, especially those that identify and contrast the key conditions of order and disorder, and whose intelligibility depends on the success of audiences able to interpret a feature of witchcraft as ‘an actual or symbolic inversion of a traditional form of life’.n9970 The idea that witches could transform themselves and others into animals is one example of that inversion: stories of witches emphasize the power of devils, the opposites of God, to reverse good into evil, civility into brutishness, the humane into horror. If a devil can turn the world upside down, as indeed comedy is said to do, then the understanding of maleficia in the coherent universe of early modern discourse is that they were “conventional manifestations of disorder’n9971 that show the audience the orderly world in reverse, a mirror world in which the practices of witches are as recognizable in their misrule as ordinary people’s behaviour is in the everyday world of legitimate order. The problem in The Late Lancashire Witches arises from the odd combination of the ordinary and instantly recognizable with the uncomfortable opposites, which frequently appear to us from a liminal position: we can see both sides of the coin at once. Like the boy face-to-face with Goody Dickieson, we see his relief at recognizing a village ‘gammer’ or grandmotherly figure - not a threat at first - at the same time as his suspicion and terror at what her presence implies, what her reputation implies, and worse, what her words and actions imply.25So, in terms of performance and understanding the impact of this scene and the other witchcraft scenes that show interaction with mere humans, the first question is: how frightened is the boy? He recognizes Goody Dickieson, becomes self-defensive (she looked like a dog - how was he to know she wasn’t a dog?) but then becomes frightened when he remembers, ‘But gammer, are not you a witch? If you be, I beg upon my knees you will not hurt me’ [LW 2.5.speech328]. He refuses the witch’s bribe of a shilling - a significant amount for a young boy, part of Edmund Robinson’s compelling testimony of a ‘fair shilling’ - to be quiet about what he has seen, and tries to run away. But the witch charms him so that he cannot move away, although he is running (on the spot) as fast as he can - ‘You are not so nimble, nor I so lame, But I can overtake you,’ she cackles as she hauls him to her with an invisible cord (the actors came up with this performance option almost immediately). And it is really at this point that the scene becomes distinctly uncomfortable. The boy, clearly helpless, asks, ‘But gammer, what do you mean to do with me now you have me?’ Goody Dickieson’s reply is both funny and shocking - keeping in mind the doubleness of the early modern male stage: we were using three male RSC actors, 22 year old Alan Morrissey (the Boy), 33 year old Adam Kay (the boy who becomes a horse), and 60 year old Robert Lister with a grey beard and a red rehearsal skirt (Goody Dickieson). The boy’s question provokes a lascivious answer: ‘To hug thee, stroke thee, and embrace thee thus, And teach thee twenty thousand pretty things, So thou tell no tales’ [LW 2.5speeches332-333]. This is a different kind of bribery: sexual initiation, a proposition that both fascinates and terrifies the boy, partly because the familiarity of the old village gammer becomes unfamiliar in the pleasure with which she strokes and hugs him. We argued over how sexualized this behaviour is, particularly the witch’s repeated demand for secrecy, often the demand adults place on children they abuse. Is Goody Dickieson just being tender and affectionate like a ‘gammer’? If so, the impact on the boy might still be squirm-inducing and uncomfortable. But the combination of the boy’s refusal ‘Not I, gammer’ and the transformation of the other boy into a horse suggest that perverse sexuality is the issue here, and the bearded witch increases the impact of that sexuality because of the gender confusion of adult male playing crone playing sexual games with a boy. Her tone changes with the boy’s refusal: ‘“Not”, sirrah? Then perforce thou shalt along’ [LW 2.5.speech335]. She turns on him aggressively, makes him observe the transformation of the other boy into a white horse, so that he knows her power, and then makes him mount. As Tomkyns remarks, many scenes of the play are ‘full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible’ with ‘odd passages ... to provoke laughter’.26The key to the ribaldry in 2.5 is the witch’s description of the other boy, now a vehicle for devilish pleasure:And that’s the horse we must bestride,
On which both thou and I must ride,
Thou, boy, before and I behind.27How were we to stage this image? First, is the transformation to a horse actually part of the staging? Unlike the business with the dogs, we could not expect a literal horse on stage. The easy way to stage the moment is to have the transformation off-stage, with a mimed suggestive riding on-stage. We decided to try an on-stage transformation in order to get a better effect of the implied sexuality. It took a while for Adam, the puzzled actor, to find his inner horse, but he did find ways of snorting, shaking his head, pawing the ground and chewing the imaginary bridle to bring his horse to life. The complete stage effect happened with the mounting of the riders. Adam knelt as the horse’s head, facing the audience and dancing his ‘fore-legs’ impatiently; the younger boy is thrown up apparently on the horse’s back, and the witch ‘catches him up’ by the middle, leaping behind him onto the ‘horse’ at the ass-end, and they begin a galloping motion in a bizarre 3-D-of-invisible-horse effect that convinces because it is so unexpected and yet so graphic. Combined with the boy’s exit line ‘Help! Help!’ this staging is more than enough to suggest sexual/paedophilic activity in this threesome. Would an early modern actor turn into a horse on stage? Why not? An actor plays a dog in The Witch of Edmonton. Ariel plays a harpy in The Tempest. At what point do we decide what early modern actors would and would not do? In any case, even if the transformation into horse is off-stage, the motion of ‘riding’ with the witch holding the boy before her and her promise of teaching him ‘twenty thousand pretty things’ is more than enough to convey sexuality to any audience. In the light of the play’s implicit sceptical message that witchcraft is in the eyes of the beholders, it is crucial that the human actors are still visible as such in the bestial transformations. These too are evidently the creations of over-active imaginations on the part of characters and, self-consciously, members of the audience.n9972 The moment is excruciatingly funny, horrific, and ludicrous, with its submerged reminders of puritan sermons railing against the theatre, boy-actors, and cross-dressing - although not in the imaginative inversion that Heywood and Brome create in this scene.28The witch’s final promise, ‘And I will bring thee to such fare / As thou ne’er saw’st’ [LW 2.5.speech337], conflates food with other appetites of the body that later scenes elaborate on. As an introduction to witch/human interaction, 2.5 creates an atmosphere that arouses audience expectation of later witch perversity, even though the playwrights show us only acceptable and consensual pleasures in the Robin/Mall love affair of 2.6. The disappearance of the wedding feast in 3.1, leaving behind ‘a mock feast of bones and stones instead ... and the filling of pies with living birds and young cats, etc.’, as Tomkyns writes, does not end the celebration of the nuptials, since the key disruptive fact of Parnell’s discovery that her husband has become a ‘do-nought’ occurs later at bedtime. The feast reappears at the witches’ barn-dance of 4.1, where they pull in courses one by one, stuffing themselves with stolen food and drink, singing and dancing until dawn. The boy escapes during the merriment, not because of sexual abuse but because he has been ignored. The celebrating witches prefer their familiars as partners to ‘dandle and clip, ... stroke and leap’ [LW 2.1.speech196] (song, second stanza), in jolly excess.29But the plot of The Late Lancashire Witches depends on the sustained belief (and the play’s willingness to expose that over-readiness to believe) in sexual and bestial deviance. The sexually consenting Robin in 2.6 rides with Mall on a shared horse in the same galloping movement as the one in 2.5 (are they face to face, or spooning, like the witch and the boy?); and Robin becomes the unwilling vehicle of Mistress Generous’s riding in 3.2, just as she becomes the unwilling mare that he rides home at the end of 4.1. The skimmington ride attempts to perform a traditional community sanction against a wife who beats her husband - Parnell’s response to her do-nought husband - but the newliweds do not accept criticism or interference from others. Traditionally the skimmington ride shows ‘a man riding behind a woman, with his face to the horse’s tail, holding a distaff in his hand, at which he seems to work, the woman all the while beating him with a ladle; a smock displayed on a staff is carried before them as an emblematical standard, denoting female superiority; they are accompanied by what is called the rough music, that is frying-pans, bulls horns, marrow-bones and cleavers, &c.’n9973 But in the play, Parnell pulls the male skimmington off the horse, Lawrence pulls down the ‘wife’, and ‘they beat ’em ... [while] the clowns make a ring’ around Parnell and the skimmington to egg on the combat. The match ends with the celebration of Parnell’s victory. This result is not the intended outcome of a skimmington ride. Traditionally the ill-used husband and his ill-using wife must conform to community standards, following their public humiliation; instead, this husband and wife destroy the credibility of the skimmington ride, rejecting it as a vehicle for personal criticism, and Arthur praises Parnell on behalf of the local gentry and farmers: ‘Parnell, thou didst bravely.’ So, her female superiority is intact, and her husband’s marital equipment is about to be restored with the undoing of Mall’s wedding gift, the knotted cod-piece point that rendered him impotent - the important fact of witchcraft mischief that Doughty finally recognizes.30Witches connect sexuality and bestiality in a way that suggests female domination of men is an appropriate reversal of the patriarchal dismissal of a woman as the body of an animal to be mounted and otherwise regulated. In most of the play’s transformations (the exception is Robin’s trick of reversing the charm on Mistress Generous), women serve their own pleasure, and their magic bridle punningly inverts the transformation of maiden into subservient wife in the bridal ceremony. It also comments on male fears of being ‘jaded’ by a faithless woman, or of discovering the stain of illegitimacy (as in Mistress Generous’s visions of the ‘true’ paternity of Arthur and his gentleman friends, thus establishing to Whetstone’s delight that all gentlemen are bastards, 4.5). The power dynamics of horse and rider is familiar from Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘Woman on Top’ argument, drawn in part from the image of Phyllis riding Aristotle as a key motif in stories of female abusers of patriarchal power from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.n9974 The play loses its comic edge when the witches’ pranks, until now having done no permanent or serious harm (depending on whether you understand paedophilia as part of Goody Dickieson’s actions in 2.5 or not), end at the mill, where the witches, transformed into cats, have been regularly scratching successive millers out of business. Given the bad reputations of millers as thieves and liars in medieval and early modern stories, the cat-attacks would have a certain support from early audiences. But when the mill’s defender, a humourless soldier, fights off the cats and cuts off one cat’s paw, the play reverts to male control. Mistress Generous, un-handed, significantly deprived of the hand bearing her wedding ring, the sign that protected her reputation in the community but now exposing her as a shape-shifter, is sent to Lancaster Castle prison for trial along with her fellow witches, and the female games are over.31The play that began with male anxiety about the disturbed hunt, upside down family dynamics (the Seely family), potential loss of male property (Arthur’s need for a mortgage which his bewitched Seely uncle cannot give him), and reversals of female subservience ends with males back on top, a no-fun situation for the play’s women. Returned to a bestial state by male reviling, the witches now are ‘creatures, women I dare not call ’em’ [LW 5.5.speech1034], ‘a whole kennel of witches!’ [LW 5.5.speech1010]. The men recover their masculinity through a ritual of public confrontation of their female victimizers, although all the witches but one (Meg or Margaret Johnson, the one documented case of dementia in the trial records) retain some dignity in shared silence, until Meg’s desperate cries for her familiar Mamillion cause the other witches to “storm” [LW 5.5.speech1055] (SD). This description reduces them all to violent brutal commotion, a visual rhetoric that persuades more than the poetry of Epilogue. We have returned to the world of male order controlling female disorder, but as the Epilogue points out, the witches are still expecting “their due / By lawful justice” - which might include the possibility of ‘great mercy’ despite the comedy’s representation of their apparent guilt, given that the guilt is only obvious to dwellers of Lancashire, ‘a paradoxical place so alien to London as to be hardly part of the same country’.n9975 And, in fact, the Lancaster witches were reprieved, not executed, and after their re-examination in London, exonerated, although they continued to be kept in Lancaster Castle on their return from London in December, 1634, apparently for their own protection, and were still there in 1637.n9976 Henry Burton was imprisoned in Lancaster Castle in 1642, above the ‘darke room’ in which five witches and one of their children were even then imprisoned (he complained about the ‘hellish noise night and day’), but how long they were detained thereafter is uncertain.n9977Hospitality, Food, and Social Dynamics32Sport is not the only patriarchal privilege mocked in Heywood and Brome’s play. Male notions of hospitality and the connection between hospitality and the honour of a gentleman are also the butts of female derision. Master Generous’s hospitality is a local byword, and may explain why Mistress Generous married him: he is wealthy, and by reputation unlikely to refuse charity or to think ill of anyone in his social sphere. Generous’s generosity is the first thing we learn about him: in Arthur’s words, he is a man at whose house ‘a loving welcome is presumed, / Whose liberal table’s never unprepared, / Nor he of guests unfurnished’ [LW 1.1.speech18]. Bantam describes him as ‘A character not common / In this age’ [LW 1.1.speech19]. So, the hospitality offered at Generous’s house is the old-fashioned kind, perhaps the kind that never existed but was always praised nostalgically as part of the world we have lost. Jonson’s country-house poem ‘To Penshurst’ is the early modern model for this paean of the ideal host that goes back to classical times. Felicity Heal quotes George Wheler, looking back from the end of the seventeenth century, to sum up this sentimental longing for a host’s unstinting and unforced kindness to others: ‘Hospitality is a Liberal Entertainment of all sorts of Men, at ones House, whether Neighbours or Strangers, with kindness, especially with Meat, Drink and Lodgings. Hospitality is an excellent Christian Practice’.n9978 The emphasis is on a male concept of liberality: the open door to all and the serving of food first as the marks of a charitable Christian gentleman. The witches co-opt this liberality for themselves, taking pleasure not only in the food, drink, and entertainment, but also in the jeering and shaming of gentlemanly pretention - with such lavish and over-the-top mockery that Tomkyns, who must have been aware that he and Phelips were types of the play’s gentlemanly targets, still found the experience hilarious and memorable.33The Late Lancashire Witches is full of variations on this theme, both straight and ironic. We begin with dinner at Generous’s table, move on to the Boy snacking on wild plums and hunting (poaching?) hares for his family’s dinner; Robin stuffing himself with Mall’s cream-cakes; the wedding feast; the witches’ feast, and finally Whetstone’s ‘short banquet’. Generous sets the tone for food throughout the play in his comments on the hospitality of his household. He defines himself as a plain dealer whose plain provisions for his guests speak louder than words. He refuses to flatter his guests or apologize for the meal, since he can never be taken ‘unprovided’. When he says ‘welcome!’ to his guests, he means what he says: ‘From me expect no further compliment,’ he declares, because he is always ‘provided for my worthy friends, / Amongst whom you are listed’ [LW 1.1.speech64]. And the unworthy are welcome as well: Whetstone, his wife’s nephew, is ‘weak and shallow, / Dull as his name’ but Generous asks his guests to ‘seem to wink at these his wants, / At least at table before us, his friends’ [LW 1.1.speech72]. In asking his guests to perform this ‘courtesy’, he contradicts, perhaps constrains, his own liberality, or at least rationalizes it, puts it into the context of politic behaviour: he sees Whetstone’s flaws as ‘grossly visible’ but, since Whetstone is a blood relative of the house, illicit or not, his shortcomings have to be tolerated. Generous’s request of the other gentlemen is strictly noblesse oblige, or in the crude contemporary lingo, ‘ka me, ka thee’, an expression of mutual support or assistance that excludes Whetstone while merely seeming to include him. Arthur calls Generous ‘the sole surviving son / Of long since banished hospitality’ (sp 67), but as we see here, Generous’s hospitality has limits, and we see no other guests of questionable class arrive to sit at his table. His representation of hospitality is not identical to the figure of Hospitality in The Three Ladies of London (c.1583), a man who invites the poor and victimized to his table in London, where he is consequently murdered by Usury, with the support of Lucre and her friends, Dissimulation, Simony, and Simplicity. As an expression of hospitality, Generous is charitable (willing to protect Arthur from a usurer) without going beyond reasonable bounds that protect his house, his rank, and his estate from damage. As we see in this scene, he helps Arthur with a mortgage, provided the paperwork, witnessed by the other gentlemen, makes it clear that responsibility for the money stops with Arthur, and can never cause Generous a loss. I am not arguing that he should suffer a loss for Arthur’s sake, merely that as a host and a patron, he will do only what is comfortable for himself, just as with Whetstone he is unwilling to suffer embarrassment for a kinsman he is ashamed of. In later acts of similar caution or self-restraint, he discredits Robin’s story of how the wine was brought from his favourite London tavern, and distances himself from his wife’s story of repentance for witchcraft; in the first instance, he is wrong (the evidence of the receipt), but in the second his suspicions are confirmed by his wife’s continued absence during the night, and by the soldier’s evidence. At that point, he casts his wife off completely. So, his generosity has clear limits, and is mostly reserved for gentlemen of his own class who, for whatever reason, cannot compete with him on his scale of living. When the gentlemen depart after dinner, offering ‘Our love and service to you’ [LW 2.2.speech236], Generous accepts the first and rejects the second. This reply refuses reciprocity in giving; the hospitable gentleman expects no return on his gifts, any more than he expects to earn interest on any loan he makes. The difference between these two representations of the good man, Hospitality and Generous, fifty years apart, demonstrates how hospitality has fallen or decayed, part of ‘a vanished golden age of pastoral life’, now that gentry prefer London, charity is unfashionable, and rural homes are left to decay or mortgaged to finance city life. Heal sees this period of major change in hospitality between the 1580s and the 1630s as an argument about merit: how does one distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor? Brome examines this ethical problem again in A Jovial Crew (1641) by exploring the old-fashioned Oldrents household, which includes his permanent guest Hearty, as well as his two daughters, his ancient household servants, his larger estate of tenants, and his young steward Springlove, whose generosity to the jovial crew of beggars is where the play begins and ends. The answer in both plays seems to be the same as Voltaire’s: one should tend one’s own garden with a modest return to rural virtue and a rejection of depravity caused by pride and gluttony, especially causes of money spent only on the pursuit of selfish pleasure: on building, clothes, and banquets.n9979 But Generous does not make this particular distinction. He assists a soldier, but does not dine with him, nor does he intervene in the household of Arthur’s uncle, although that family clearly needs help. Generous’s circle is very small indeed, concerned only with business, on which he frequently travels, and with admiring young local gentlemen who drop by. He does not seek out company on his own, even with his wife. In fact, we learn that they sleep apart. He has no private life. The only leisure time activity he mentions is drinking with his groom Robin in London at the Mitre.34This gentlemanly point of view does not, however, agree with the witches’ attitude, who place ‘mirth’ above ‘gain’ [LW 2.1.speech193]. Although superficially it seems that the witches simply invert the principle of patriarchal hospitality, inversion is not always the exact assumption at work. Like her husband, Mistress Generous has a young friend, but hers is a young woman of a different class: Mall Spencer is a dairymaid at a neighbouring farm, a ‘husbandsman’s daughter’ [LW 3.3speech480], not a young gentlewoman, and Mall’s lovers, formerly Lawrence and now Robin, are both servants. Mistress Generous has many friends in her coven, women of all ages that cross middle- and lower-class barriers, but these friendships are secret, as are the times of meeting, usually at night when the rest of her world is sleeping. Mistress Generous has no children, but her nephew provides a good substitute: he is loyal to her interests, and she supports his wishes, especially when he has been insulted.n9980 In that sense her action on Whetstone’s behalf parallels her husband’s action on Arthur’s behalf, but Mistress Generous requires no paperwork, and her witness, Mall, is merely a spectator, not a legal testifier. The system of inversion works, but what it shows is that the women’s circle is carefree, joyous, and welcoming to one another in a way that makes Generous seem priggish and puritanically controlling.35A more direct case of inversion appears in the Seely family woes, in which the hierarchy of domestic rule has been turned upside-down by witchcraft, for causes unknown. In 2.1, the witches tell us that their ‘feat ... shall beget / Wonder and sorrow ’mongst our foes, / Whilst we make laughter of their woes’ [LW 2.1.speech204]. Possibly the object was an act of malice, whether to prevent Arthur from getting a mortgage from his uncle, or perhaps to seem to empower Lawrence, giving Mall the opportunity of making a fool of him on his wedding-day - and on his wedding-night too. Neither of these suggestions has explicit textual support as primary motive. But the initial source of the witches’ mirth - like the audience’s - seems to be the inversion of normal household life in which we can guess at the father’s normal tone with his son by Gregory’s complaints about his father, whose feeble apologies indicate Gregory’s usual response to paternal criticism; and the servants’ irritation with parents and children suggest what they might have thought earlier, but would not have spoken. Gregory accuses his father of trying to ‘beggar’ him by agreeing to sponsor Arthur’s mortgage, an action Gregory has prevented, even though it could not have caused a loss, according to their neighbour Doughty: ‘Why, if he had done it, had he not been sufficiently secured in having the mortgage made over to himself?’ [LW 2.1.speech126]. But Gregory insists on seeing his father as a ‘spendthrift, a prodigal sire’, whose hospitality and sociability (a ‘fourpenny club’ at the ale, a few pence to pay the piper, or mere farthings as a stake in a rubber of lawn bowling with ‘idle’ companions, including the curate) indicate serious flaws. Although these activities seem harmless, Charles I had just issued a confirmation of his father’s Book of Sports, asserting that subjects should be free to divert themselves after divine service on Sundays for two good reasons: ‘lawful recreation’ will lessen discontentment with the Church of England (Lancashire was known as a hotbed of catholics and puritans); and will keep men fit for war, in performing the following exercises:Such as dauncing, either men or women, Archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-Games, Whitson Ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles & other sports therewith used, so as the same be had in due & convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service .... But with all we do here account still as prohibited all unlawful games to be used upon Sundays only as Bear and Bull-baitings, Interludes, and at all times in the meaner sort of people by law prohibited, bowling.n998136Gregory’s opposition to treating friends to drinks, then, is too severe, but his horror at bowling is in line with the king’s policy. Similarly, mother and daughter bicker constantly over the mother’s clothing - apparently she dresses as though she were ‘one o’ the Scottish weyward sisters’ [LW 1.1.speech155]. The mother Joan pacifies her daughter with a song, but not a song most mothers would consider appropriate for unmarried daughters, as it tells the story of a girl who becomes pregnant out of wedlock.37This upside-down household, however, has one merit: it allows the servants Lawrence and Parnell to marry, an occasion that enables the wedding feast, the social event of the year, even after it is disrupted by further witchcraft. The menu Seely reads out indicates the intended hospitality of this feast, offered to all guests from country lasses to gentlemen:For forty people of the best quality, four messes of meat: viz., a leg of mutton in plum broth, a dish of marrow-bones, a capon in white broth, a sirloin of beef, a pig, a goose, a turkey, and two pies: for the second course, to every mess, four chickens in a dish, a couple of rabbits, custard, flan, Florentines, and stewed prunes — all very good country fare, and for my credit—— .
[LW 3.1.speech401]38This menu is particularly lavish in that the 1630s was a decade of food shortages, especially in the north where wheat was used only on special occasions (oatcakes were the preferred bread), even for the upper classes.n9982 So the fate of the wedding-cake, transformed into the ingredient that would have been milled out of white flour, is particularly shocking: it turns into bran. The other items of fare were common at English tables: mutton was the most frequently served meat, considered especially nourishing if simmered in broth - the plum broth of the play is a reminder of the ready availability of bullaces or French prunes in the area - and was the kind of classless dish, like rabbit, that was available to all.n9983 Pig, pullets, marrow bones, pigeon, pigeon pie, and fish or seafood pie were also common, although capon was thought old-fashioned by the 1630s.n9984 In Lancashire, veal was served frequently, a by-product of their large dairy herds in which bull-calves were an inconvenience.n9985 There, the milkers were usually women (like Mall) who would be concerned about the transformation of milk into curds, whey, cheese (Mall’s cream-cakes are probably soft young cheeses, and may explain Edmund Robinson Jr’s ‘butter in lumps’ which he claimed the witches pulled down by ropes at their barn feast), butter and cream for custards, flans, and possets, the customary end of a large dinner, along with fruit tarts. In 1633, people made little distinction between butter and cream; either was used for dressing poultry and fish ‘in white broth’.n998639The transformation of the wedding food follows the tradition of the devil’s cold touch, in line with the belief, mentioned in 5.2, that witches come from Lapland, and confirmed later by Margaret Johnson’s confession that her familiar Mamillion pleased her sexually, ‘Only his flesh felt cold’ [LW 5.5.speech1070]. Lawrence feels his platter cooling in his hands, and discovers horns instead of boiled mutton under the cover; that is, like the wedding cake, the items on the menu are reverting to what was either thrown out during preparation or simply inedible. Other platters, according to Tomkyns, have only bones and stones; one pie contains kittens and, like the nursery rhyme, another holds live birds who fly away. Joan reports that other meat is flying up the kitchen chimney like smoke, leaving behind ‘snakes, bats, frogs, beetles, hornets, and humble-bees’ [LW 3.1.speech417]. What’s more, the salads - these would include vegetables eaten cold, like lettuces, radishes, and rocket, as well as those eaten hot, such as parsnips or Jerusalem artichokes - have become fungi,n9987 and the custards cowdung. That is, like the connection between animals and sexuality, food and sexuality also meet in the arena of appetite, a common metaphor in many early modern plays from Jonson and Middleton to Brome. In Bartholomew Fair, Ursula’s greasy pig-restaurant fronts a brothel; in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a woman hides her baby in a basket under a leg of mutton, the symbol of illicit sex. In Brome’s Mad Couple, the servant Wat argues with the disapproving Phoebe that his appetite for her needs no sauce: ‘’Tis true I am your creature, as I am my master’s; and sometimes the serving creature breaks his fast with a bit off the spit before the same meat is served up to his master’s table, but is never denied to dine upon his master’s leavings. You cannot think what an appetite that frown gives me’ [LW 1.1.speech104]. Later Careless rejects a seductress as slim pickings compared to Phoebe’s voluptuous charms:I am one you cannot live and lie withal
A fortnight; you, alas you’re but a gristle,
Weak picking meat. Here’s one will hold me tack
Seven constant ordinaries every night,
Noonings and inter-mealiary lunchings
At freedom every day. Hold, belly, hold,
The cupboard never shut.[LW 5.2.speech1058]40In Sparagus Garden, Sir Hugh Moneylacks attempts to answer Rebecca Brittleware's cravings for a child by means of a very literal consumption of asparagus: 'Of all plants, roots, and fruits it is the most provocative’ [LW 2.1.speech208]. And in The Demoiselle, Wat tries to persuade Frances that pre-marital sex is quite acceptable:Here’s a coil
For a poor bit aforehand! Is it so?
Heart! If a man bespeak a tavern feast
For next-day dinner, and give earnest for’t
To half the value - as my faith and troth,
I think, is somewhat towards your marriage payment -
To be tomorrow, will not the hostess give him
A modicum o’ernight to stay his stomach?[LW 3.1.speech421]41In The Late Lancashire Witches’ wedding feast, one that should have provoked the bride and groom’s appetite for each other, instead sends contrary messages, terrifying the guests who would normally share, at least vicariously, in the wedding-night. Although many guests run away, Arthur saves the bridal day when he refuses to abandon the celebration at his uncle’s house, and both Whetstone and Doughty support the gesture. Joan Seely then offers the remaining guests relatively sober cold meat and wine from her cellar (that is, ordinary items not acquired for the wedding feast), and hospitality re-asserts itself temporarily so that the day’s mirth can continue. Joan Seely’s open-handed gesture is more generous than Master Generous’s hospitality in act 1, because, having prepared a feast that was stolen, she is now prepared to give away the rest of the household’s food in order to satisfy her guests and assure those who remain of their welcome. That is, she is not placing limits on her hospitality or deciding how her guests may respond to her generosity: she offers a genuinely open house.42By 3.3, however, witchcraft contamination returns to spoil this hospitality with loss of inhibition, and the wedding party becomes ‘a medley of mirth, madness, and drunkenness shuffled together’ [LW 3.3.speech472] as the Seelys move from one extreme of inverted family heirarchy to another. The elderly Seelys ‘kiss and play like monkeys’ and their children ‘overdo their obedience’ to their parents, who now ‘over-dote upon them’; that is, whereas before they were bickering to excess, now they are loving to excess. Their familial condition is not stable; at any moment the parents will turn on the children, and old Seely even threatens to ‘ship you all to New England’, wife included, for failing in their duty. Similarly, Parnell and Lawrence are ‘both mad to be a-bed before suppertime’ one minute, and repudiate each other the next. Even elderly Master Doughty has fallen in love with Mall Spencer, not recognizing in her the witch he blames for all the turmoil, although he is startled by what he thinks might be a familiar on her nose [LW 3.3.speeches493-495]. The last straw is the musicians’ failure to control their instruments, as they find themselves playing several tunes at once, then cannot make a sound, and then smash their instruments in frustration: a very clear message that harmony has become demonic chaos at this wedding feast. Only the piper can still play, and he vanishes with Mall after the final dance, returning the Seely household to its originally bewitched state. Although the Seelys and their guests make a valiant effort to maintain standards of hospitality with food, drink, and the lodging of the bride and groom, witchcraft frustrates their desires by disrupting the foundational social structures of the neighbourhood: marriage, family relationships, and the community’s celebration of a positive and potentially procreative occasion.43The witches’ idea of the normal workings of society is to disrupt, invert, and parody patriarchal hospitality for their own enjoyment. Is their hostess Mistress Generous, ‘the lady of the feast’ [LW 4.1.speech569], a female Robin Hood, giving to the poor what is taken from the rich? Certainly we are seeing a merry band of women enjoying themselves in rural retirement as they flout mainstream society’s rules. But if Margaret Johnson is one of the poor, the same cannot be said of Goody Dickieson or Jennet Hargreaves, and certainly not of Mistress Generous. They are hospitable among themselves, even though they furnish their dinner-party by stealing the food and kidnapping some of the guests, the Boy who ‘must along’ with Goody Dickieson to the barn-feast, and Robin who comes as Mistress Generous’s horse. The food that went up the Seely chimney and flew away is here pulled down out of the air by ropes into the barn, usually a place for feeding animals, not humans. Everything appears in the order listed on the bridal menu, from ‘Doughty’s sirloin of roast beef’, and ‘bottles of wine and beer’, to the ‘bride’s posset’, all made tastier by the malicious notion that the bride and groom are vexed, and ‘That [their guests] vomit up their gall, / For lack o’th’wedding cheer’ [LW 4.1.speech607] - an inaccurate view of what was happening at the Seely household. Although the witches, like good hosts, offer the Boy food and drink, he rejects both as having neither ‘taste’ nor ‘relish’ [LW 4.1.speech598]; Robin is left outside to graze on thistles - ‘nothing but cold salads’ [LW 4.1.speech585]. As at the wedding party, after food and drink comes dancing, and here the playwrights’ reliance on Edmund Robinson indicates his possible drawing on local gossip for details from Grace Sowerbutts’ testimony at Samelsbury back in 1612/13 - not the charges of infanticide and cannibalism, but possibly of witches’ transporting Grace over a river to a sabbat where she danced with ‘foure black things’ with whom, after dancing, she had sexual relations. Given the hints at paedophilia in the Boy’s scene with Goody Dickieson, possibly this fate was to be fulfilled here, but he escaped before further harm was done - as indeed the wedding guests of act 3 managed to do. The similarities between the wedding feast and the barn feast are instructive: both festivities encourage mirth, laughter, dining, drinking, music, dancing, and community solidarity. Both are events that would perhaps normally have ended with sexual activities, but both are disrupted: the wedded pair by the magical codpiece point and the witches by the sound of horsemen approaching (again, part of Edmund’s evidence). So, both parties end with the guests in full flight.44In terms of witchcraft fears, the more astonishing dinner-party is Whetstone’s ‘short banquet’ [LW 4.5.speech809], held after the supper to which, in his uncle’s absence, he invites the gentlemen, Arthur, Shakestone, and Bantam. They had insulted him in the past (see 1.1) for being illegitimate; now Mistress Generous means to teach them a lesson, but not the physically painful penalty associated with a witch’s curse: ‘’Tis all for mirth; we mean no hurt’ [LW 4.4.speech806]. She knows nevertheless exactly where a gentleman can be hurt - in blots on the family’s escutcheon. Following his aunt’s instructions, Whetstone inverts hospitality by treating the guests to insult when he offers to show them their ‘fathers’, an offer they accept. This scene inverts other social conventions as well, particularly the gentlemen’s assumption that they are far superior in birth and understanding to Whetstone, the bastard. By questioning his guests’ paternity, Whetstone questions the patriarchal ordering of society in which wealth and status pass through the father. As he demonstrates, it’s a wise child that knows his own father; and this attack on paternity (his aunt’s invention) echoes the disruption of the Parnell/Lawrence wedding night, caused by the codpiece point that makes Lawrence impotent, thus interfering in legitimate acts of reproduction. Mistress Generous has also disrupted the Generous family line by failing to produce a Generous heir - although that may be the problem of her ‘gelding’ husband, if we understand her joke about his horse. Although the gentlemen laugh at first, each time another of the three is pushed down the social ladder by discovering his father is a pedant, a tailor, or a groom, the sound of their laughter diminishes until only Whetstone grins at the sight of his own ‘father’, the sole gallant of the bunch. As he points out to his now angry guests, ‘You see there are more by-blows than bear the name. It is grown a great kindred in the kingdom’ [LW 4.5.speech852]. Are these gentlemen really bastards? Is their society already broken, perishing on false premises, or are the witches attempting to break it through suspicion and fruitless rage against parentage that cannot be proved?45The easy answer is in act 5. The soldier uses manly violence to maim a cat - he thinks - and takes the trophy to Generous. The paw becomes a hand, and the hand is wearing Mistress Generous’s wedding ring, certain confirmation that the flaws of society are caused by women. Once Generous confronts his wife and renounces her, all the other witches are immediately apprehended, and all those persecuted by witchcraft find their lives in order again. The Parnell/Lawrence marriage is now healthy since they burned the codpiece point. The Seely family is restored as a result, and now old Seely recalls ‘Some three months since, I crossed a weird woman’ for permitting her son to misbehave; she cursed him in return with disobedience in his household [LW 5.5.speech1001]. This recollection does not have the status of evidence; it is simply a convenient explanation that ends the story. Gregory points out reassuringly that witches, once arrested, lose their power - ‘all their spells are instantly dissolved’ [LW 5.5.speech1002] - and the proof appears as the constable bring the rest of the witches onstage to join the already arrested Mistress Generous and Mall. The Boy repeats his ‘evidence’, Meg Johnson ‘confesses’, and the remaining witches attempt and fail to invoke their familiars. But this display of witchcraft confounded has not convinced everyone. Bantam and Shakestone are not sure. Shakestone cannot believe a spirit’s pronouncements on bastardy - ‘a false illusive apparition?’ [LW 5.5.speech973]. He is not worried about his own birthright. Bantam reserves his fear for the devil, not for the devil’s foolish followers. He asks a good question: can anyone who is wise believe in witches? - ‘Can any but fools be drawn into a covenant with the greatest enemy of mankind?’ [LW 5.5.speech976]. Apparently many people in Lancashire can be so drawn, even though these two sceptical gentleman cannot.46This low-key opposition to the overblown display of witchcraft in the comedy is the play’s final note, and it is not unequivocal. Bantam and Shakestone are sneering young gallants when we first meet them in act 1, deliberately baiting Arthur over witchcraft belief, and baiting Whetstone for being a bastard - a proper pair of sportsmen. In the presence of Master Generous, however, they are obsequious and relatively silent. When they return to their sport of hunting hares, Bantam finds himself ‘in a cold sweat’, now frightened of Whetstone; Shakestone is dismissive. At the wedding feast in 3.1, Bantam is just as terrified as Arthur by the transformation of the wedding cake, and even Shakestone is ‘amazed’ [LW 3.1.speech390] - until the platter he brings in from the dresser reveals yet another transformation; then he joins the others in running out of the Seely house to escape demonic repercussions. By 3.3, the gentlemen are restored to their usual sardonic mockery of others. But when the musicians lose their ability to play, and Whetstone brings in a Lancashire bagpipe, ‘for itself is able to charm the devil’ [LW 3.3.speech549], the screeching, wailing sounds plunge everyone into a wild reel before the piper and Mall vanish. The wedding guests are now in a panic:Doughty.Now do I plainly perceive again, here has been nothing but witchery all this day; therefore, [To the Seely household] in to your posset, and agree among yourselves as you can. I’ll out o’the house. And, gentlemen, if you love me or yourselves, follow me.Arthur, Bantam, Shakestone, and Whetstone.Ay, ay! Away, away!
Exeunt [Doughty, Arthur, Bantam, Shakestone, and Whetstone].[LW 3.3.speeches554-555]47Although Arthur and Doughty behave well as kinsman and neighbour in housing the Seelys until their home can be exorcised, Bantam and Shakestone merely assume the roles of mocking narrators of neighbourhood scandal, describing the violence let loose when Parnell discovers that Lawrence is ‘unprovided of’ the necessary tool to consummate their marriage ([LW 4.3.speech741]) - an interesting echo of Generous’s hospitality, never to be found lacking [LW 1.1.speech64]. In fact, Arthur signals Shakestone’s role as neighbourhood gossip with the question, ‘Tom Shakestone, how now! Canst tell the news?’ [LW 4.3.speech708], thus placing Shakestone as a type of fool whose news is the basis for jigs and comic routines.n9988 Despite his class-confidence, Shakestone’s status veers closer to Whetstone’s than he would like to think. All three gentlemen react like prigs to Parnell’s complaints about her do-nought husband, and Arthur and Bantam believe she is ‘bewitched too into this immodesty’: ‘She would never talk so else’ [LW 4.3.speeches754-755]. Shakestone is more interested in the skimmington ‘show’ [LW 4.3.speech762], and gratified, like all the spectators, with the result: the violent bride and groom defeat the skimmington couple intended to belittle them. Shakestone’s enjoyment of the local theatrics prepares for his later decision to view the spirit of his father as yet another theatrical moment in which he need invest no serious thought. His first reaction to Whetstone’s spirits was to attempt violence - ‘I fain would strike, but cannot!’ [LW 4.5.speech853] - but his comments in act 5 suggest that he has taken Arthur’s advice, although Arthur himself cannot follow it at first: ‘Here then let all anger end. / Let none be mad at what they cannot mend’ [LW 4.5.speech855]. The last time we see Bantam and Shakestone, Bantam continues to believe in the power of the devil, while expressing relief at the miraculous escape of the community, and Shakestone continues his pose as spectator at an entertainment, uttering restrained disbelief in a series of mild questions (see [LW 5.5.speech973] and [LW 5.5.speech975]) or comments (‘it seems’, 977; ‘I protest’, 983), notably here:Bantam.’Tis wondrous well.Shakestone.And are they well again?[LW 5.5.speeches995-966]48Bantam has moved on to acceptance of wonder, but Shakestone retains his earlier sceptical ‘Is’t possible?’ [LW 5.5.speech987], a comment he shared with Bantam but with very different attitude. The last comments of the play come from Bantam, who still has not given up baiting Whetstone for his loyalty to his aunt, now exposed as a leader of witches. If Shakestone is the model that the audience is supposed to follow in holding on to rational discounting of superstition and folklore, then the playwrights have done their best to hide his light under a bushel. Although the London audience may incline towards Shakestone’s views (as indeed Tomkyns seems to do), the fun of the play is the spectacle of magic and the teasing comedy of witchcraft, which in this play is by no means as reprehensible as the brutality of the soldier or the ungenerous Generous who finally has a good excuse for abandoning his wife and her embarrassing nephew. Shakestone provides the audience with another alternative in the selfish young gentleman who loves sport and mockery above all else, so long as he himself is not injured by it. His arrogance is something the audience can recognize as real, marking the border between foolish belief in magic and intelligent scepticism by which evidence should be judged. Testing those borders - including the audience’s credulity and consciousness of its gullibility - is precisely what the play is playing with. Fun is fun, but credulity has to begin and end with the willing suspension of disbelief at a performance of a play or show. No sensible gentleman will allow it to permeate his understanding of the world he lives in. That attitude is in line with the verdict on the Lancashire witch trials of 1634 in London. The problem of maleficent witchcraft in Lancashire belongs to another world, which Heywood and Brome place as rustic comedy, not meant to be taken seriously by the intelligent and sophisticated.
n9938 Here hath been lately a new comedy at the Globe called The Witches of Lancashire, acted by reason of the great concourse of people three days together. The third day I went with a friend to see it, and found a greater appearance of fine folk, gentlemen and gentlewomen, than I thought had been in town in the vacation. The subject was of the sleights and passages [episodes, actions] done or supposed to be done by these witches, sent from thence hither, and other witches and their familiars: of their nightly meetings in several places; their banqueting with all sorts of meat and drink conveyed unto them by their familiars upon the pulling of a cord; the walking of pails of milk by themselves and (as they say of children) all alone; the transforming of men and women into the shapes of several creatures and especially of horses by putting an enchanted bridle into their mouths; their posting to and from places far distant in an incredible short time; the cutting off of a witch-gentlewoman’s hand in the form of a cat, by a soldier turned miller, known to her husband by a ring thereon (the only tragical part of the story); the representing of wrong and putative fathers in the shape of mean persons to gentlemen by way of derision; the tying of a knot at a marriage (after the French manner) to cassate [nullify] masculine ability; and the conveying away of the good cheer and bringing in a mock feast of bones and stones instead thereof, and the filling of pies with living birds and young cats, etc. And though there be not in it (to my understanding) any poetical genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state or tenet of witches (which I expected), or application to virtue, but full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible, yet in respect of the newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the end of odd passages and fopperies [foolish or absurd actions] to provoke laughter, and is mixed with divers songs and dances, it passeth for a merry and excellent new play. Per acta est fabula. Vale.
I have modernized the letter based on Herbert Berry, ‘The Globe bewitched and El hombre fiel’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984), p. 215, and Shakespeare’s Playhouses, pp. 123-4, both of which reproduce the full original letter Berry discovered.
n9939 In an associated trial at Samlesbury
n9940 Marion Gibson points out that ‘Potts routinely presents written pre-trial documents as an account of what went on verbally at the trial itself, which is clearly inaccurate. He frequently edits and pastes together material within examinations and informations, which destroys their internal coherence and logic and conceals patterns of questioning and storytelling’ - particularly in his frequent repetitions of the Device children’s testimony, and his omissions of other significant testimony.
n9941 Potts’s chief objective seems to have been to establish a rationale for witch-behaviour as either economic (based on the charity-refused model that seemed apparent in Alizon Device’s begging from the pedlar John Law) or vengeful (based on apparently motiveless malice believed to be encouraged by the devil).
n9942 Particularly in ‘motiveless’ revenge narratives, the story tends to involve injury to the gentry, whom the narrator constructs as innocent victims, whereas the witch-aggressors are regularly exposed as unchaste, ill-educated, lower-class, impoverished, foul-mouthed, and spiteful hate-mongers.
n9943 The result, however, proved nothing, since Device could not relieve his illness, and neither could any other accused witch.
n9944 And this Examinate further sayth, that Robert Nutter did desire her Daughter one Redfearns wife, to have his pleasure of her, being then in Redfearns house: but the sayd Redfearns wife denyed the sayd Robert; whereupon the sayd Robert seeming to be greatly displeased therewith, in a great anger tooke his Horse, and went away, saying in a great rage, that if ever the Ground came to him, shee should never dwell upon his Land. Whereupon this Examinate called Fancie [her familiar] to her; ... asking this Examinate, what shee would have him to doe? And this Examinate bade him goe revenge her of the sayd Robert Nutter. After which time, the sayd Robert Nutter lived about a quarter of a yeare, and then dyed.
n9945 The inequities of the 1612 trials, especially the resulting high number of executions, demonstrate problems of class warfare, domestic embarrassment, emotional responses to events, possible ulterior motives, and later justifications of those responses and motives as attempts to recover face, both on the part of the accused, the witnesses, and the magistrates themselves.
n9946 He told the court the following story:
n9947 the said gentlemen
n9948 Boggard
n9949 croft
n9950 close
n9951 a cross-piece of wood
n9952 his father bade him go and fetch home two kine to seal.
n9953 And further this informer saith that when he was in the barn, he saw three women take six pictures from off the beam, in which pictures were many thorns or such like things sticked in them, and that Loynd's wife took one of the pictures down; but the other two women that took down the rest he knoweth not.
The manner of their enchantments, whereby four of the persons aforenamed were murdered, was thus: – Mother Dutten made four pictures of red wax, about a span long, and three or four fingers broad, for Longford, for his maid, for Master Gallis, and for Switcher; and the thorn prick against the left sides of the breasts of the images, directly there where they thought the hearts of the persons to be set whom the same pictures did represent, and thereupon within short space, the said four persons, being suddenly taken, died. … Further [Elizabeth Stiles confessed] that one George Whitting, a servant to Matthew Glover of Eton, had one picture of [that is, from] herself for one Foster, for that the said George and Foster fell out at variance; and the picture was made in Mother Dutten’s house and that Mother Dutten, Mother Devell and herself were at the making; and that Mother Devell did say to her Bun or evil spirit ‘Plague him and spare him not!’ and she did thrust a hawthorn prick against the heart of him, and so he lay at the point of death a long time, but Mother Dutten recovered him again.
See A Rehearsal both strange and true, of hainous and horrible acts committed by Elizabeth Stile, Alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, Mother Margaret, Four Notorious Witches, apprehended at Windsor in the country of Barks. and at Abbington arraigned, condemned, and executed on the 26 day of February last (London, 1579) in Barbara Rosen, ed., Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618 (1969; rpt Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 87.
In another case published as The Witches of Northhamptonshire, 1612, Helen Jenkenson, ‘noted a long time to be of an evil life and much suspected of this crime’ [bewitching a child to death] was accused by Mistress Moulsho of bewitching her laundry, because when the maid hung the clothes out to dry, they were found,
but especially Mistress Moulsho’s smock, to be all bespotted with the pictures of toads, snakes and other ugly creatures. Which making her aghast, she went presently and told her mistress who, looking on them smiled, saying nothing else but this, ‘Here are fine hobgoblins indeed!’ And being a gentlewoman of a stout courage, went immediately to the house of the said Helen Jenkenson, and with an angry countenance told her of this matter, threatening her that if her linen were not shortly cleared from those foul spots, she would scratch out both her eyes; and so, not staying for any answer, went home and found her linen as white as it was at first. (Rosen, pp. 353-4)
Mistress Moulsho, incidentally, was also appointed chief of the searchers who examined Jenkenson’s body for the devil’s teat, and supplied evidence of guilt, but she does not appear to be an unbiased appointee of the court. Jenkenson was executed, despite her plea ‘that she was guiltless’.
Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584 (rpt Arundel: Centaur Press, 1964), recounts a story about a local Kentish wise woman, Mother Baker of Stone Street in Romney, who claims that a bad neighbour of the victim, ‘the daughter of one Master L. Stuppeny’, made ‘a heart of wax and pricking the same with pins and needles’ in order to kill the girl. Subsequently the image was found ‘in a corner which by others had been most diligently searched and looked into’ and the witch arrested. Scot suspects that the wise woman dropped the image herself in order to prove her own cunning (Bk 12, ch. 16, p. 221).
n9954 Jane Davies;
n9955 sicut credit;
n9956 The bishop’s rationale seems to have been the lack of support for anything in the boy’s story, aside from the mad confession of Margaret Johnson:
n9957 And further saith that the devil can raise foul weather and storms, and so he did at their meeting.
n9958 Similarly, he found that other testimony told a different story of jealousy, malice, and attempted bribery among the accusers.
n9959 when she was a young girl and went to the well for water, she used to trundle the collock, or pail, down the hill, and she would run after it to overtake it, and did overtake it sometimes, and then she might call it to come to her, but utterly denies that she could ever make it come to her by any witchcraft.
n9960 William Harvey,
n9961 John Swain emphasizes this economic angle of the case by asking a key question that pertains to the Robinsons’ veracity: why did the parents believe their son’s story about being abducted by named witches, and why did it take them three months to report the incident?
n9962 had been at play’.
n9963 concerning the persons aforesaid’.
n9964 The witches became a locus of outlawed desires and energies and the bewitching narratives took on a life of their own’ in challenging authority, defying and mocking patriarchal anxieties.
n9965 Male endearments for women, such as ‘coney’ or ‘cunny’ (rabbit) and ‘mousie’ or ‘mawsy’ (the name of one familiar in the play), have sexual implications.
n9966 fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils’.
n9967 William Whately declares that the first principle of married life is chastity: ‘Was not marriage invented to prevent whoredom?’ he asks (3).
n9968 At issue here is the credibility of what Stuart Clark calls ‘the language of early modern witchcraft beliefs’.
n9969 a considerable run in 1634.
n9970 ‘an actual or symbolic inversion of a traditional form of life’.
n9971 “conventional manifestations of disorder’
n9972 These too are evidently the creations of over-active imaginations on the part of characters and, self-consciously, members of the audience.
n9973 they are accompanied by what is called the rough music, that is frying-pans, bulls horns, marrow-bones and cleavers, &c.’
n9974 The power dynamics of horse and rider is familiar from Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘Woman on Top’ argument, drawn in part from the image of Phyllis riding Aristotle as a key motif in stories of female abusers of patriarchal power from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
n9975 so alien to London as to be hardly part of the same country’.
n9976 apparently for their own protection, and were still there in 1637.
n9977 but how long they were detained thereafter is uncertain.
n9978 excellent Christian Practice’.
n9979 the pursuit of selfish pleasure: on building, clothes, and banquets.
n9980 especially when he has been insulted.
n9981 all unlawful games to be used upon Sundays only as Bear and Bull-baitings, Interludes, and at all times in the meaner sort of people by law prohibited, bowling.
n9982 This menu is particularly lavish in that the 1630s was a decade of food shortages, especially in the north where wheat was used only on special occasions (oatcakes were the preferred bread), even for the upper classes.
n9983 that was available to all.
n9984 capon was thought old-fashioned by the 1630s.
n9985 In Lancashire, veal was served frequently, a by-product of their large dairy herds in which bull-calves were an inconvenience.
n9986 either was used for dressing poultry and fish ‘in white broth’.
n9987 have become fungi,
n9988 thus placing Shakestone as a type of fool whose news is the basis for jigs and comic routines.