The Witch of Edmonton

Description

It is a historical phenomenon that while thousands of women were being burnt as witches in early modern Europe, the English - although there were a few celebrated trials and executions, one of which the play dramatises - were not widely infected by the witch-craze. The stage seems to have provided an outlet for anxieties about witchcraft, as well as an opportunity for public analysis. The Witch of Edmonton (1621) manifests this fundamentally reasonable attitude, with Dekker insisting on justice for the poor and oppressed, Ford providing psychological character studies, and Rowley the clowning. The village community of Edmonton feels threatened by two misfits, Old Mother Sawyer, who has turned to the devil to aid her against her unfeeling neighbours, and Frank, who refuses to marry the woman of his father's choice and ends up murdering her. This edition shows how the play generates sympathy for both and how contemporaries would have responded to its presentation of village life and witchcraft.

John Ford (1586-1639) was an English playwright whose works have often been cited as examples of the 'decadence' of Caroline Drama. In the 19th century he was admired by Charles Lamb but attacked by William Hazlitt and others, who accused him of lacking a sense of morality. However, many 20th-century critics have praised his insight into character and his skill in writing dialogue His best known play is the bloody tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1627). Other works inlcude Love's Sacrifice (1627), the tragicomedy The Lover's Melancholy (1628), and Perkin Warbeck (1634), described by T. S. Eliot as "one of the very best historical plays in the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama". Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist, born in 1572. Possibly of Dutch origin, very little is known of Dekker's early life and education. His career in the theatre began in the mid-1590s but it is unclear how or why Dekker came to write for the stage. By that time he was odd-jobbing for various London theatre companies, including both the Admiral's Men and its rivals the Lord Chamberlain's Men; he probably joined the large team of playwrights, including Shakespeare, who penned the controversial drama Sir Thomas More around this time. Dekker struggled to make ends meet, however, and in 1598 he was imprisoned for debt. 1599 was, by contrast, an annus mirabilis for Dekker. The theatrical entrepreneur and impresario of the Admiral's Men, Philip Henslowe, lists payments to Dekker that year for contributions to no fewer than eleven plays; two of these, Old Fortunatus and The Shoemaker's Holiday, were selected to be performed at Court during the Queen's Christmas festivals. Dekker received royal favour again after the death of Elizabeth and the accession of King James I in 1603 when he was contracted with Ben Jonson to write the ceremonial entertainments for James's coronation procession through London. He was sorely in need of such commissions; the playhouses were closed for much of this year because of a plague outbreak that killed as many as a quarter of London's population. During the outbreak, he retooled himself as a writer of satires - a genre in which he had acquired some dramatic experience in 1602, when he penned Satiromastix, a play that took aim at Ben Jonson (who had lampooned him the previous year in Poetaster). Dekker's prose satires about the plague year reveal a new skill for gritty reportage and sympathetic attention to the enormous sufferings of the afflicted. He repeatedly returned to this genre when he was prevented, whether by theatre closures or by imprisonment, from writing for the stage. Like The Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker's plays in the years of James's reign tend to dramatize the stories of citizens. And they again display a sympathetic fascination with socially marginal characters, often women - a prostitute (The Honest Whore, co-written with Thomas Middleton, 1604), a transvestite (The Roaring Girl, 1611, also co-written with Middleton), and a witch (The Witch of Edmonton, 1621, co-written with John Ford and William Rowley). But Dekker's financial woes continued through these years, and he was once more imprisoned for debt between 1612 and 1619, a harrowing experience that he later claimed turned his hair white. Upon his release, he continued to write plays, citizen pageants, and prose pamphlets, but he never enjoyed the success of his earlier years. He died, leaving his widow no estate except his writings, in 1632. William Rowley was born around 1585. His first recorded acting is in 1607, the same year his first two plays - Fortune by Land and Sea with Thomas Heywood and The Travels of the Three English Brothers with John Day and George Wilkins - were produced. From 1609 to 1621 he was a member of the Duke of York's Men (later Prince Charles's Men), usually taking the part of the clown. He began collaborating with Thomas Middleton on several important plays in 1617, writing the subplot of A Fair Quarrel; two years later he played the clown in Middleton's The Inner Temple Masque. That same year - 1619 - he wrote his only extant play without collaboration, All's Lost by Lust, a tragic melodrama which establishes the same tone as The Witch of Edmonton, a play he cowrote with Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. In 1622 he again returned to comedy, but this time tinged with madness when writing the subplot of The Changeling, once more in collaboration with Middleton. In 1623 he joined the King's Men, offending the Spanish ambassador while playing the part of the fat bishop in Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624) and probably collaborating once more with Middleton on The Spanish Gipsy. In 1625 he worked with John Webster on the comedy A Cure for a Cuckold with the well known clown Compass and wrote his own city comedy A Woman Never Vexed. Rowley died in February 1626; only 16 plays have survived of more than 50 on which he worked during his lifetime.