The Late Lancashire Witches
Encyclopedia
The Late Lancashire Witches is a Caroline era stage play, written by Thomas Heywood
and Richard Brome
, published in 1634
. The play is a topical melodrama on the subject of the witchcraft
controversy that arose in Lancashire
in 1633.
at the Globe Theatre
. It was a popular success; it ran for three days straight in August 1634, at a time when plays were normally changed daily in a repertory system.
was printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller Benjamin Fisher, with a Prologue addressed by Heywood to the Earl of Dorset
.
that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft. The most famous of these plays is Shakespeare's
Macbeth
(c. 1603–6), though Middleton's
The Witch
(c. 1609–16) and The Witch of Edmonton
(1621) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford
, and William Rowley
, are other notable examples.
The 1633–34 prosecution was a sequel to a larger trial
of 1612 (the major affair of its kind in English history) that saw ten people from the Pendle Hill
area of Lancashire hanged at Lancaster Moor. The second episode was still unresolved when the two playwrights wrote their play; the dramatists were working so close to events that they had no firm conclusion — the play's Epilogue assumes the guilt of the four women who were the prime suspects but admits that "the ripeness yet of time / Has not reveal'd" the final outcome. (In fact, Edmund Robinson, the ten-year-old boy who was the prosecutors' chief witness, later admitted subornation of perjury; King Charles I
pardoned all seventeen people convicted.) The Lord Chamberlain
of that time, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke
, may have prompted the creation of the play for political reasons.
later borrowed from the Heywood/Brome work for his own The Lancashire Witches (1681). Shadwell's play was also popular through much of the 18th century; as late as 1782, Charles Dibdin
had a success with his pantomime
The Lancashire Witches, or The Distresses of Harlequin. Both the Heywood/Brome and Shadwell versions were reprinted together in a 1853 volume titled The Poetry of Witchcraft.
Thomas Heywood
Thomas Heywood was a prominent English playwright, actor, and author whose peak period of activity falls between late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre.-Early years:...
and Richard Brome
Richard Brome
Richard Brome was an English dramatist of the Caroline era.-Life:Virtually nothing is known about Brome's private life. Repeated allusions in contemporary works, like Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, indicate that Brome started out as a servant of Jonson, in some capacity...
, published in 1634
1634 in literature
The year 1634 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*January 1 - The King's Men perform Cymbeline at the court of King Charles I of England.*January 22 - The King's Men perform Davenant's The Wits at the Blackfriars Theatre....
. The play is a topical melodrama on the subject of the witchcraft
Witchcraft
Witchcraft, in historical, anthropological, religious, and mythological contexts, is the alleged use of supernatural or magical powers. A witch is a practitioner of witchcraft...
controversy that arose in Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
in 1633.
Performance
The play was performed by the King's MenKing's Men (playing company)
The King's Men was the company of actors to which William Shakespeare belonged through most of his career. Formerly known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it became The King's Men in 1603 when King James ascended the throne and became the company's patron.The...
at the Globe Theatre
Globe Theatre
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613...
. It was a popular success; it ran for three days straight in August 1634, at a time when plays were normally changed daily in a repertory system.
Date and collaboration
It was once thought that Brome revised an old play by Heywood to make it pertinent to the situation in the early 1630s, generating a work that is roughly 90% Heywood and 10% Brome. Modern scholarship argues that the dramatists' extensive use of court documents shows that Heywood and Brome wrote a new play in 1633–34 to capitalize on a current public affair, producing a work that is much closer to an equal collaboration. The 1634 quartoBook size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
was printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller Benjamin Fisher, with a Prologue addressed by Heywood to the Earl of Dorset
Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset
Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset KG was the son of Robert Sackville, 2nd Earl of Dorset and the brother and heir of Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset.-Life:...
.
Genre
The Late Lancashire Witches belongs to a sub-genre of English Renaissance dramaEnglish Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, refers to the theatre of England, largely based in London, which occurred between the Reformation and the closure of the theatres in 1642...
that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft. The most famous of these plays is Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
Macbeth
Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
(c. 1603–6), though Middleton's
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in...
The Witch
The Witch
The Witch is a Jacobean play, a tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton. The play was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. It is thought to have been written sometime between 1609 and 1616; it was not printed in its own era, and existed only in manuscript until it was published by...
(c. 1609–16) and The Witch of Edmonton
The Witch of Edmonton
The Witch of Edmonton is an English Jacobean play, written by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford in 1621.The play—"probably the most sophisticated treatment of domestic tragedy in the whole of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama"—is based on supposedly real-life events that took place...
(1621) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford
John Ford (dramatist)
John Ford was an English Jacobean and Caroline playwright and poet born in Ilsington in Devon in 1586.-Life and work:...
, and William Rowley
William Rowley
William Rowley was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. His date of birth is estimated to have been c. 1585; he was buried on 11 February 1626...
, are other notable examples.
The 1633–34 prosecution was a sequel to a larger trial
Pendle witch trials
The trials of the Pendle witches in 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history, and some of the best recorded of the 17th century. The twelve accused lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and were charged with the murders of ten people by the use of witchcraft...
of 1612 (the major affair of its kind in English history) that saw ten people from the Pendle Hill
Pendle Hill
Pendle Hill is located in the north-east of Lancashire, England, near the towns of Burnley, Nelson, Colne, Clitheroe and Padiham, an area known as Pendleside. Its summit is above mean sea level. It gives its name to the Borough of Pendle. It is an isolated hill, separated from the Pennines to the...
area of Lancashire hanged at Lancaster Moor. The second episode was still unresolved when the two playwrights wrote their play; the dramatists were working so close to events that they had no firm conclusion — the play's Epilogue assumes the guilt of the four women who were the prime suspects but admits that "the ripeness yet of time / Has not reveal'd" the final outcome. (In fact, Edmund Robinson, the ten-year-old boy who was the prosecutors' chief witness, later admitted subornation of perjury; King Charles I
Charles I of England
Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
pardoned all seventeen people convicted.) The Lord Chamberlain
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
of that time, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke
Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke
Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke and 1st Earl of Montgomery KG was an English courtier and politician active during the reigns of James I and Charles I...
, may have prompted the creation of the play for political reasons.
Plot
In the main plot of the Heywood/Brome play, an upright and hospitable gentleman named Generous discovers that his wife has a secret nocturnal life, as the leader of a coven of witches; his miller wounds her with his sword while she is in the shape of a cat. When one of her servants refuses to get her horse, Mistress Generous bridles him instead and rides him to her coven. The conventional male-dominated relationship between husband and wife is subverted as Mistress Generous seeks greater freedom — until she is arrested and brought to trial. In the Seely family depicted in the subplot, the upset of social norms is even more extreme: the father is cowed by his son, the mother by her daughter, and the children by the servants. The family's butler and maid, Lawrence and Parnell (the only characters in the play who speak in Lancashire dialect), marry, determined to lord it over their employers; but Lawrence is rendered impotent on his wedding night by a bewitched codpiece, and once again the woman inverts the usual social order. It is with the discovery and prosecution of the witches that society's norms are restored.Adaptation
Thomas ShadwellThomas Shadwell
Thomas Shadwell was an English poet and playwright who was appointed poet laureate in 1689.-Life:Shadwell was born at Stanton Hall, Norfolk, and educated at Bury St Edmunds School, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1656. He left the university without a degree, and...
later borrowed from the Heywood/Brome work for his own The Lancashire Witches (1681). Shadwell's play was also popular through much of the 18th century; as late as 1782, Charles Dibdin
Charles Dibdin
Charles Dibdin was a British musician, dramatist, novelist, actor and songwriter. The son of a parish clerk, he was born in Southampton on or before 4 March 1745, and was the youngest of a family of 18....
had a success with his pantomime
Pantomime
Pantomime — not to be confused with a mime artist, a theatrical performer of mime—is a musical-comedy theatrical production traditionally found in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, India, Ireland, Gibraltar and Malta, and is mostly performed during the...
The Lancashire Witches, or The Distresses of Harlequin. Both the Heywood/Brome and Shadwell versions were reprinted together in a 1853 volume titled The Poetry of Witchcraft.
Modern editions
Laird Barber produced a modern edition of the play in 1979, under its traditional title. When Gabriel Egan produced another modern edition in 2002, he employed the title The Witches of Lancashire, in the judgement that this reflected the play as performed in 1634. (The second title derives from an August 16, 1634 letter written by Nathaniel Tomkyns, a member of the audience. The run-on title in the 1634 quarto, positioned along the tops of the pages, is also The Witches of Lancashire.)External links
- Richard Brome Online http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/ contains a scholarly edition of this play, including textual and critical introductions.