The Late Lancashire Witches
Textual IntroductionCollaborative Authorship1About the collaboration of Heywood and Brome, I propose to say as little as possible. Ink has been spilt on this question of who wrote what before, with no clear evidence beyond what I consider obvious and definitive: the title page itself says ‘Written, By Thom. Heywood, and Richard Broome.’ It does not qualify that partnership, any more than other collaborating playwrights since the Queen’s Men qualified who wrote what, but merely assigns authorship in alphabetical order, as in the 1605 title page of Eastward Ho (‘Made by Geo: Chapman. Ben: Ionson. Ioh: Marston.’) or in any order (perhaps of age) as in the delayed 1658 publication of The Witch of Edmonton (‘A known true Story. Composed into A Tragi-comedy By divers well-esteemed Poets; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c.’), adding as tidbits of pertinent information that it played ‘often at the Cock-Pit in Drury-Lane, once at Court, with singular Applause’ and ‘Never printed till now’. The Late Lancashire Witches’ title page also points out that the comedy was ‘well received’ when it was performed at the Globe by the King’s Men, and the one theatre review that survives, Nathaniel Tomkyns’ letter of 16 August 1634 to Sir Robert Phelips in Somerset, tells us that the play was ‘acted by reason of the great concourse of people three days together’. A hit, in other words, written by two popular playwrights: Heywood of venerable age and Brome still young, but known to theatre-goers since his mentor Jonson mentioned him in the Induction of Bartholomew Fair.2The debate over attribution has not attracted much acrimony, possibly because the best essay on the subject, Robert Grant Martin’s fully persuasive evaluation of the play’s authorship, was published almost 100 years ago.n9894 He shreds an earlier view of the authorship as primarily an old play by Heywood revised with minor additions by Brome, which C.E. Andrews published a couple of years earlier,n9895 despite Wallace Notestein’s compendious and already published A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington, 1911), in which the events of the 1612 and 1633/4 cases are meticulously set out and the play itself mentioned as a product of that second case. The idea of the play as a revision of a much earlier Jacobean play based on the 1612 case, using Potts’s The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, belongs to Fleay, and Martin presents measured evidence for rejecting much of Fleay’s view. This discussion takes up most of the article, before Martin arrives at the key question of how to assign shares to each playwright. And his conclusion, based on the errors of Andrews and Fleay, historical information ignored by earlier scholars, and German research on dialect usage in English drama, is that Heywood and Brome probably did (as Fleay originally conjectured) broadly divide the work into the Generous plot (Heywood) and the Seely plot (Brome) with considerable consultation and overlap by both men together: ‘In short, I regard the play as a straight piece of collaboration by the two men, done in the summer of 1634’ (89).3A final word: Heather Hirschfeld has done an admirable follow-up on this play-text by analysing the collaborative method itself.n9896 She discusses the differences in style and background between the two playwrights at length, and then moves on to the particular political challenges of their material for this play: ‘To write a play about a contemporaneous Lancashire witchcraft trial in 1634, then, was to get involved in - and to seem to take a stand on - not only the roots and meanings of the occult, but also on issues about the long reach of central bureaucracy into the provinces’ - especially when that particular shire was filled with recusants, assumed to be more rustic and superstitious than elsewhere, and resistant to rulings from London. Hirschfeld positions the play between two significant publications of the period: Charles I’s reissue of his father’s Book of Sports (1634), and the puritanical William Prynne’s ‘antitheatrical invective, Histriomastix (1633), which took the theatre to task not only for its anarchic licentiousness and impiousness, the usual antitheatrical complaint, but also for its ideological connection to a profligate king and capricious queen’ (354). The final third of Hirschfeld’s essay analyses Heywood and Brome’s clever balancing act, which shifts the burden of decisions on witchcraft and its place in the ecclesiastical or criminal court system onto the shoulders of the multitudes who came to enjoy the play. Her discussion emphasizes what to me is delightfully as obvious as it was to Tomkyns: the play celebrates all facets of life, from philosophical quandaries concerning hospitality, money, and marriage to ‘ribaldry and … things improbable and impossible’, where the ‘newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here)’ and ‘laughter, … mixed with divers songs and dances’ make for an utterly satisfying and multivalent theatrical experience.Print History4The first extant printed edition of The Late Lancashire Witches, called The Witches of Lancashire in the running titles, appeared as a quarto in 1634, the same year it was performed, thus taking advantage of the ‘current events’ status of its content. The title page (A3) lists the senior playwright Thomas Heywood first and then ‘Richard Broome’, followed by the Latin inscription ‘Aut prodesse solent, aut delectare’; that is, expressing a variation on the Horatian ideal for poetry, either to profit or to delight. Horace, as understood by Jonson, Brome’s mentor, saw the profit and delight as inseparable (a both … and statement, not an either …or); here, the playwrights suggest that one or the other will win the reader/audience. The prologue appears on A4 after a blank page (A3v) and A4v is also blank; the printer does not supply a list of characters in the comedy or the location. The first page of the text is B, with an ornament at the top of the page, followed by ACTVS, 1. SCENA, 1. This practice is repeated for the start of each act; no other scenes within the acts are numbered. The printing runs from A3 - L4v.5The title page also tells us that it was ‘Printed by Thomas Harper for Benjamin Fisher, and are to be sold at his Shop at the Signe of the Talbot, without Aldersgate.’ Thomas Harper worked as a printer between 1614 and 1656. He printed Jonson’s The New Inn in octavo for Thomas Alchorne in 1631, and The Devil is an Ass in folio in 1641.n9897 So Brome is following in the steps of his master, both in the Horatian epigraph and in his choice of printer. Benjamin Fisher also orchestrated the printing of a biography written by William Camden, Jonson’s teacher and friend, The historie of the most renowned and victorious princesse Elizabeth, late Queene of England in 1630; and later produced Milton’s pamphlet, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (February 1651). The extant copies of The Late Lancashire Witches (two at the British Library, one at the Bodleian) show no corrections at the press, a fact which suggests the speed with which this play was printed, despite the difficulties of reproducing the Lancashire dialect in the scenes with Lawrence and Parnell. The extensive use of italic I and J to stand in for roman I also suggests haste in the printing, using whatever letters came quickly to hand: see E2v, E3v, E4, F, F1v, F2, F2v, G3, G4, G4v, H1v, H2, H2v, I4v, K2, K2v, K3, K3v, K4, K4v, L1v, and L3v. The song identified as from ‘II. Act’ appears on L4, and epilogue follows on L4v. These three copies are the only early printings until James Halliwell-Phillipps published the play in 1853. R.H. Shepherd printed it as The Lancashire Witches in old spelling and without notes in Volume 4 of his six-volume edition of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 1874; the Latin epigraph of the play appears on the title page of Volume 1 as the epigraph for the whole set. Subsequently, Laird H. Barber produced his edition of 1979n9898 as a facsimile and transcription, with copious notes. Gabriel Egan prepared the first modern-spelling edition for Globe Quartos,n9899 but ‘translated’ the Lancashire dialect into standard English, thus wiping out part of the play’s charm. His edition has minimal notes, especially troubling when verse is regularized, or when verse is set as prose, or prose as verse.Dating6There is no doubt that the play was performed in the summer of 1634; G.E. Bentley originally thought the dates were between 20 July and 28 October 1634,n9900 but Herbert Berry’s discovery of Nathaniel Tompkyns’ letter to Sir Robert Phelips, 16 August 1634, confirms the date more likely as being between 20 July and 15 August.n9901 Tompkyns’ vivid description suggests he saw it close to the date of writing his letter. Although we do not know when Tompkyns saw the play, he did say that the play was performed three days in a row thanks to ‘the great concourse of people’ who wanted to see it, and that he attended the show on the third day. The publication clearly followed shortly thereafter, perhaps suggesting why the play is so open-ended; the verdict may not then have been available when the play went to the printer. Perhaps Bentley’s later date of 28 October is the print date; it would have gone to the printer perhaps two months earlier.Printer’s errors7Although the text of the play is well put together, there are errors, as I have already suggested, that may be the result of the speed with which the printer readied the play for publication. There are several variations in speech headings. Bantam appears as Banth., Bantham, and Bant. all in the course of B1v, although the last of these is the one commonly used, and later Ban. or Ba. appears (H3v) to save space when three characters speak at once. Shakestone is usually Shak. but sometimes Sha. (H3v), and in stage directions may variously appear as Shakestone or Shakston. Doughty appears as Doughty (B4v), Dough. or Dou. (C1), the latter most frequently, but also as Doug. or Dought. (E3v). Joan Seely appears as Joane, Ioane, Ioan, and even Ioa.(C2v, C3) or Joan (F1). Generous is sometimes Gener. and sometimes Gen. (both are used on D2). His wife may be designated as Mrs. Gener., Mrs., or Mrs. Gen. (see G1v, G2). The Miller is variously represented in full, or as Ml. or as Mil. (D3v, D4). Robert the groom is sometimes Rob. and sometimes Robin (E2). Arthur appears mostly as Arth., but sometimes as Ar. (F4). Among the witches, Goody Dickieson is often inscribed in full as Gooddy Dickison, but Maud may appear as Mawd without warning. These are all minor variations, as are the punctuation points following speech headings, usually a period, but sometimes a comma, and sometimes nothing at all. All the speech headings suffer some of these inconsistencies, but the errors merely seem to be the result of speed or space-saving. On the other hand, the text’s appearance is well set out, with spaces around entrances and special effects, whether centred on the page, or relegated to the margins. Speech headings are rarely misapplied, as on D1v, when Generous has two speeches in a row, although the second of those should logically be spoken by Arthur.Stage History8The Late Lancashire Witches has no record of performance beyond August of 1634, when it was staged by the King’s Men at the Globe. Thomas Shadwell created his own play called The Lancashire Witches and Tegue O Divelly, the Irish Priest (1681), which picks up on witches from both the 1612 and the 1634 cases - Demdike, Dickenson, Hargrave, Mal Spencer, and unnamed others - as well as the Heywood and Brome character Doughty (spelled Doubty), and a variation on Shakestone in Shadwell’s Tom Shacklehead and family. Beyond these spurious borrowings, the play has nothing to do with the original, and is instead concerned to attack ‘popery’ and problematic politics. In the eighteenth century, Charles Dibdin created a pantomime called The Lancashire Witches, or The Distresses of Harlequin (1782); it was printed along with Shadwell’s play in The Poetry of Witchcraft (1853). Dibdin’s work too is merely playing off the public interest in witchcraft, and is not specifically interested in the Lancashire cases or in Heywood and Brome’s play.9The Egan edition contains a note by James Wallace on the staged reading of the play at the Globe in August 2001, the only recorded performance of the play since 1634. In preparing the staged reading, Wallace was surprised to discover the play’s ‘subtly-executed scenes’, particularly finding ‘The repentance of Mistress Generous was genuinely moving and her subsequent betrayal … all the more shocking for the effect she produced by her plausible act of contrition’.n9902 Wallace’s experience of the play was similar to that of the Brome editors and actors working on scenes for this edition. The comedy is cleverly crafted and seems spontaneous; characters are eccentric, and have space to develop, whether we look at the relationships between the Seely father and son, or husbands and wives, and among the three gentlemen, the servants in relation to masters, or the witches themselves: all have depths that flout conventional assumptions about witchcraft, social status, domestic relationships, and community life. Wallace comments particularly on the play’s theatrical concern with timing, also a feature of witchcraft as we can see throughout the play in the witches’ games during the hunt in acts 1 and 2, the confusions at the wedding feast in act 3, the Boy’s escape from the witches’ feast in act 4, as well as Whetstone’s ‘short banquet’ at the end of act 4, and the ‘handy’ defeat of Mistress Generous in act 5. All demonstrate witty comic timing and delightful, sometimes shocking, visual and verbal surprises.
n9894 The debate over attribution has not attracted much acrimony, possibly because the best essay on the subject, Robert Grant Martin’s fully persuasive evaluation of the play’s authorship, was published almost 100 years ago.
n9895 He shreds an earlier view of the authorship as primarily an old play by Heywood revised with minor additions by Brome, which C.E. Andrews published a couple of years earlier,
n9896 Heather Hirschfeld has done an admirable follow-up on this play-text by analysing the collaborative method itself.
n9897 He printed Jonson’s The New Inn in octavo for Thomas Alchorne in 1631, and The Devil is an Ass in folio in 1641.
n9898 Laird H. Barber produced his edition of 1979
n9899 Gabriel Egan prepared the first modern-spelling edition for Globe Quartos,
n9900 G.E. Bentley originally thought the dates were between 20 July and 28 October 1634,
n9901 Herbert Berry’s discovery of Nathaniel Tompkyns’ letter to Sir Robert Phelips, 16 August 1634, confirms the date more likely as being between 20 July and 15 August.
n9902 Wallace was surprised to discover the play’s ‘subtly-executed scenes’, particularly finding ‘The repentance of Mistress Generous was genuinely moving and her subsequent betrayal … all the more shocking for the effect she produced by her plausible act of contrition’.