of four women from Lancashire recently incarcerated in London on charges of witchcraft. Because the testimony that condemned them had since been recanted, it was unclear at the time of performance whether the accused would be pardoned or punished. The affair divided both popular opinion and the Privy Council between believers in the supernatural and skeptics—including the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The case was a religious and political hot potato that passed through several courts. Eventually, without any final determination made as to their guilt or innocence, the women were sent back to Lancashire, where they died in jail.
The King’s Men capitalized on the topicality of The Late Lancashire Witches;30 however, rather than offering a judgment as to whether the women were guilty, the play parodies the question.31 Opposing views as to the reality of witchcraft are continually expressed back to back, and several characters reverse their opinions to comic effect. The braggart Whetstone’s tales of witchcraft are dismissed as his usual lies. When the magic he boastingly describes is shown onstage, it is funny both because his improbable fibs turn out to be true and because, through their association with Whetstone, the supernatural tricks seem phony. One of the running jokes of the play is that witchcraft is shown primarily as the cause of everyday, embarrassing “Crosses”:32 impotency, bastardy, bad luck hunting, getting beaten in a fistfight. As the witch Meg herself points out, regarding the inversions of social hierarchies through sorcery that put unruly women above their husbands, and make children and servants overly bold with their parents and masters:
But that’s no wonder, through the wide
World ’tis common. (C4v)
The effect of coding magic as a convenient excuse is that the tricks happening almost continuously in front of the audience seem as much a shaggy-dog story as actual enchantments. Witchcraft is often a dirty joke: Mrs. Generous is turned into a “jade” with a bewitched bridle and “ridden hard” (G4r). When the women are apprehended and patriarchal order restored, all their respectable interrogator wants to know are the dirty details: “And then [the devil] lay with thee, did he not sometimes? … —and how? and how a little? was he a good Bedfellow?” (L3r). Keeping the question of the witches’ guilt or innocence open is crucial to the “game” of the play. The running gag of The Late Lancashire Witches is the simultaneity of these mutually exclusive possibilities. The play’s comedy depends on sustaining a religious question; it does not encourage spectators to take a stance in the debate. That would ruin the joke.
Because of its explicit topicality, eyewitness Tomkyns “expected … [a] judgment” in the play regarding the question of the women’s guilt, or a moral “application,” but he finds neither. Tomkyns’s correspondent, Sir Robert Phelips, would likely have been keen to hear any theatrical commentary on the issue decoded, since his father had been Speaker of the House of Commons when it passed the witchcraft law with which the women were charged. The newsletter begins with an attempt to make politic observations on the play as a social event in London, but it primarily records its physical comedy. Magic tricks flout Tomkyns’s best efforts to be edified. Similarly, Simon Forman’s detailed, eyewitness accounts of William Shakespeare’s plays garnish a dominant interest in striking stage moments with sprigs of application.33 Since Tomkyns’s description of live performance is less frequently discussed than Forman’s, and because the number and vivid physicality of the special effects demonstrate my point, I quote the passage in full:
Here hath bin lately a newe comedie at the globe called The Witches of Lancasheir, acted by reason of the great concourse y[e] people 3 dayes togither: the 3[d] day I went with a friend to see it, and found a greater apparance of fine folke gent[men] and gent[weomen] then I thought had bin in town in the vacation: The subject was of the slights and passages done or supposed to be done by these witches sent from thence hither and other witches and their familiars; Of ther nightly meetings in severall places: their banqueting with all sorts of meat and drinke conveyed unto them by their familiars upon pulling of a cord: and walking of pailes of milke by themselves and (as they say of children) a highlone: the transforming of men and weomen into the shapes of severall creatures and especially of horses by putting an inchaunted bridle into ther mouths: their posting to and from places farre distant in an incredible short time: the cutting off a witch-gentwoman’s hand in the forme of a catt, by a soldier turned miller, known to her husband by a ring thereon, (the onely tragicall part of the storie:) the representing of wrong and putative fathers in the shape of meane persons to gent[men] by way of derision: the tying of a knott at a marriage (after the French manner) to cassate masculine abilitie, and y[e] conveying away of y[e] good cheere and bringing in a mock feast of bones and stones in steed thereof and y[e] filling of pies with living birds and yong catts &c: And though there be not in it (to my understanding) any poeticall Genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state o[r] tenet of witches (w[ch] I expected,) or application to vertue but full of ribaldrie and of things improbable and impossible; yet in respect of the newnesse of y[e] subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the ende of odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter, and is mixed with divers songs and dances, it passeth for a merrie and ex[c]ellent new play. per acta est fabula. Vale.34
Tomkyns’s description captures the kind of fantasy and physicality that Gosson rejects as a gratuitous distraction to theater’s more serious, didactic purpose, even down to the recognition-by-token device in the severed hand of Mrs. Generous. However, the fact that The Late Lancashire Witches proposes no “tenet of witches” does not mean that its entertainment value makes it irrelevant to public discourse on the topic: the “newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here)” is still a large part of the appeal of the play, even though it “consisteth [of] … fopperies.”
While larger confessional conflicts over traditional festivity and the enforcement of conformity hover at the edges of the comedy,35 the play maintains no clear position in these broader debates. One of the stage tricks in The Late Lancashire Witches is the supernatural flight of the servant Robin to the Miter tavern in London for wine for his master, who, “since hee was last at London and tasted the Divinitie of the Miter, scarce any liquour in Lancashire will go downe with him, sure, sure he will never be a Puritane, he holds so well with the Miter” (E2r). The joke is about boozing, but the religious associations of the pub’s name are developed enough to glance at Laud. This reference is not a coded message so much as a wink. The magical jaunt to the Miter runs irreverent, frenetic rings around a complicated set of real-world religious conflicts. The Late Lancashire Witches’ absurdist nose-thumbing at serious controversies is itself an important form of religious and political expression. The play’s “improbable and impossible” stage tricks allow its mixed-faith audiences to take pleasure in suspending the question of whether the magic was “done or supposed to be done.” The play’s comedy is too imbricated in the debate surrounding the so-called witches to be considered escapist. However, it allows audiences divided on these debates to share an alternative attitude toward the question, to approach a fraught, religious issue with greater imaginative and affective license. Rather than a release from religious politics, the play offers a giddy, double vision, in which sorcery is real and not real, the witches are socially disruptive and harmless, and confessional differences are recalibrated to pub preferences.
Tomkyns’s first-person account is a compelling piece of evidence, unusual in the specificity with which it connects cultural context, stage effects, and audience response. It shows that even plays whose commercial and artistic success depended on their explicit engagement with topical religious material did not always transmit identifiable stances on these matters to their audiences. Important as this document is, we do not need Tomkyns’s direct testimony that the play contains no “judgment … of witches” to know that this is not a didactic play making a sustained, serious case against either sorcery or superstition but is instead a comedy in which the central conceit is the inability to separate magic from hoax. That evidence is in the script. Undeniably, Tomkyns’s extensive description of props and effects not included in the stage directions points up the limitations
