The Witch

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For the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, see The Witch (Buffy episode).
For the ballet by John Cranko, see The Witch (ballet).
The Witch is also the name of a side project of the band Cold.

The Witch is a Jacobean play by Thomas Middleton. It is thought to have been written sometime between 1609 and 1616; it was not printed in its own era, and existed in manuscript until it was published by Isaac Reed in 1778. The playwright's epistle prefacing the play states that it was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre — and also refers to the play as "ignorantly ill-fated." This was long taken to mean that the play failed with the audience; though modern critics allow the possibility that the play was pulled from performance for legal or censorship reasons.[1]

The still-extant manuscript — since 1821, Bodleian Library MS. Malone 12 — a small quarto-sized bundle of 48 leaves, is from the hand of Ralph Crane, the professional scribe who worked for the King's Men in this era, and who prepared several play texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays as well as two of the extant manuscripts of Middleton's A Game at Chess and other King's Men's plays. Since Middleton wrote for the King's Men in this period, the Crane connection is unsurprising. The manuscript is dedicated to Thomas Holmes, Esq.

The Witch is known chiefly because parts of the play were incorporated into Shakespeare's Macbeth after the original play's completion, perhaps around 1618. The added text involves Hecate and the Three Witches in Act III, scene v, and Act IV, scene i, lines 39-43 and 125-32, and includes two songs.[2] (Middleton's text gives the full lyrics of the songs, which are represented in Macbeth only by their first lines — the only songs in the First Folio that occur in this abbreviated form.)

Middleton's primary source for belief and folklore regarding witches was the Discovery of Witchcraft of Reginald Scot (1584),[3] from which the playwright drew invocations, demons' names, and potion ingredients. Middleton, however, ignores Scot's skeptical attitude toward much witchcraft lore, and merely mines his book for exploitable elements. He also borrowed the situation of a historical Duke and Duchess of Ravenna, related in the Florentine History of Niccolò Machiavelli and in the fiction of Matteo Bandello.

Witchcraft was a topical subject in the era Middleton wrote, and was the subject of other works like The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches. Middleton's chief witch is the 120-year-old Hecate. Her magic adheres to the Classical standard of Seneca's Medea; she specializes in love magic, and in the play's second scene supplies a soldier named Sebastian with a potion to inhibit the sexual performance of his rival Antonio, who has just married Sebastian's love interest.[4] Other sexual intrigues follow, in a lurid comic and satiric melodrama.

Middleton's witches "are lecherous, murderous and perverse in the traditional demonological way, but they are also funny, vulnerable and uncomfortably necessary to the maintenance of state power and social position by those who resort to them."[5] Middleton's choice to set the play in Italy may reflect an element of satire against witchcraft beliefs and practices in Roman Catholic societies of his era.[6]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Nicholas Brooke, in his Introduction to his edition of Macbeth, p. 64.
  2. ^ Evans, pp. 1340-1.
  3. ^ Logan and Smith, p. 66.
  4. ^ In forming this aspect of the play's plot, Middleton may have been influenced by the real contemporaneous divorce scandal of Lady Frances Howard and the Earl of Essex, which involved charges of magic-induced impotence; Brooke, pp. 64-5.
  5. ^ Gibson, p. 97.
  6. ^ Gibson, p. 98.

[edit] References

  • Bromham, A. A. "The Date of The Witch and the Essex Divorce Case." Notes and Queries 225 (1980), pp. 149-52.
  • Evans, G. Blakemore, textual editor. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, Houghton and Mifflin, 1974.
  • Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2003.
  • Greg, W. W. "Some Notes on Crane's manuscript of The Witch." The Library, 4th series, 22 (1942).
  • Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
  • Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Nicholas Brooke. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990.

[edit] External links