The Witch of Edmonton (1621) is a tale of romance, murder, revenge, and witchcraft. Centred around the Devil in the form of a black dog named Tom, the play comprises three sub-plots which see the titular witch awarded surprisingly few lines, though when the subject of witchcraft arises, the dramatists reveal a lot about contemporary witchcraft belief.
Written by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton is a tragi-comedy of the ‘known true story’ of Elizabeth Sawyer. It was first performed in 1621 (the year of Sawyer’s trial, conviction, and execution) at the Cockpit Theatre by Prince Charles’ Men and was also performed at court. The play was subsequently performed by Queen Henrietta’s Men in 1636 and published in print in 1658.
In short, the play has three plotlines:
- Elizabeth Sawyer, an elderly woman, who—after having been falsely accused of witchcraft—is confronted by the Devil in the form of a black dog (which she calls Tom) and subsequently becomes a witch. She bewitches a woman named Anne Ratcliffe, who subsequently dies, and is eventually executed.
- A romantic plotline wherein two men (Somerton and Warbeck) are attempting to woo the daughters of Old Carter (Kate and Susan). Susan is in love not with Warbeck but rather Frank Thorney, though Frank is in love with (and has secretly married) Winnifred, the maid of Sir Arthur Clarington, who is pregnant with a child (which Frank believes to be his but is really Sir Arthur’s).
- The play’s comic relief, Cuddy Banks. Banks is a foolish, though generally innocent, character who is in love with Kate (who Somerton also loves) and in attempting to court her has various interactions with the witch and the Devil. He is also a Morris dancer.
The thread linking these plots is the Devil himself and it is this fact which reveals one of the play’s most significant details: Although the play’s title exploits the contemporary intrigue in witches, the crime of witchcraft is consistently contextualised within a much broader moral landscape.
This detail is obvious not only from the lines of the play but also its characters. Although Frank and Sawyer are both executed for their crimes, the force which compelled them to do so (the dog) simply disappears into the background and presumably continues to cause evil. More explicitly there is a line in Act 4, Scene 1 which is largely insignificant to the plot of the play, but epitomises the dramatists’ view of witchcraft:
Elizabeth Sawyer: Fly at him [Sir Arthur Clarington], my Tommy, and pluck out’s throat.
Dog: No, there’s a dog already biting’s — his conscience. (4.2.291-93)
The implication of this line is that there is no reason for Sir Arthur to be bewitched because he is already suffering the ramifications of a guilty conscience (which is the result of his affair with Winnifred and his foreknowledge of Frank’s bigamy). Rather than positioning witchcraft as an evil unlike any other, the dramatists undercut the uniqueness of witchcraft by noting that other non-magical afflictions can fulfil a functionally identical purpose.
It’s possible to contend that the Devil is also recognising his inability to harm Sir Arthur because he is being virtuous by recognising his guilt and repenting, although this would rely on an assumption of the character’s intentions which is not fully justified by the text alone. In any case, the play takes an uncontroversial view of the Devil’s agency by only allowing it to afflict those who are in some way deserving of it. When a spirit attempts to harm Cuddy Banks in Act 3, Scene 2, it states that ‘We can meet his folly,/But from his virtues must be runaways.’
A similar position is taken with regards to who the Devil is able to seduce into witchcraft. The first line given to the Devil, and the one which is included in the woodcut on the title page of the play’s 1658 publication, is ‘Ho! Have I found thee cursing? Now thou art mine own.’ A moral responsibility is ascribed to Sawyer, who has given the Devil leverage over herself by sinning. In this regard, the moral agency of the play’s characters is of paramount importance. Unlike some contemporary theologians, who maintain a model of witchcraft dictated by predestination, the dramatists subscribe to a view which is very similar to Henry Goodcole’s (the author of the pamphlet on Sawyer which is the play’s primary source of information). Goodcole argued that sinning was ‘a playne way to bring you to the Divell; nay that it brings the Divell to you.’ The difference between the play’s dramatists and Goodcole, according to David Nicol, is that ‘despite placing the primary responsibility for evil onto the individual, [the dramatists] simultaneously emphasize the extreme pressure that the characters are under to make the wrong decision.’ It is this social pressure which drives the sympathy for Elizabeth Sawyer which is so prominent throughout the play and is present even in her very first lines:
Elizabeth Sawyer: And why on me? Why should the envious world
Throw all their scandalous malice upon me?
‘Cause I am poor, deformed and ignorant,
And like a bow buckled and bent together
By some more strong in mischiefs than myself,
Must I for that be made a common sink
For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues
To fall and run into? (2.1.1-8)
This sympathy is supported by the view the dramatists clearly take on the relative power of witches and devils. Although the popular 17th-century view was that witches were able to perform magic and had authority over their familiars as a result of the pact they had made, it was popular among Protestant clergymen to argue that witches never had any genuine magical ability or authority over the Devil. Rather, the Devil would deceive them into believing this but only carry out evil acts because they themselves desired to. Moreover, in making people believe they were witches, and subsequently creating a communal paranoia surrounding witchcraft which led to mob violence and false accusations, the Devil could increase the amount of sinning going on in the world.
According to George Gifford’s Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593), which was another key source of information for the play, ‘[T]he witch is the vassall of the devill, and not he her servant; he is Lord and commaundeth, and she is his drudge and obeyeth.’ In this light, the dog’s refusal to bewitch Sir Arthur in Act 4, Scene 2 may stem not from a recognition of any virtuous behaviour but in fact from the complete opposite. Because Sir Arthur is guilty of immoral actions which he is actively concealing, there is no need to bewitch him because the Devil’s wishes (that Sir Arthur sin and damn himself) are already being fulfilled. And because Sawyer has no actual authority over the Devil, or the ability to practise magic herself, he can simply refuse her command.
When Sawyer is moments away from being arrested and feeling helpless and betrayed by the Devil, he appears not to support her but reject her. She threatens to appeal to other devils but the dog retorts that ‘Thou art so ripe to fall into hell that no more of my kennel will so much as bark at him that hangs thee’ (5.1.62-64). In addition to the implication that anyone who harmed Sawyer would be doing a virtuous act and thus not be vulnerable to the Devil for it, the Devil is asserting that there is no reason for any devil to want to save her because their desire is for people to sin and be damned and in aiding her they would be contradicting that intention. Not only does the Dog recognise the powerlessness of witches by stating that ‘They [witches] follow us [devils]’ In Act 5, Scene 1 but only a few lines later, Cuddy Banks learns of the betrayal:
Dog: While I served my old Dame Sawyer, ’twas. I’m gone from her now.
Young Banks: Gone? Away with the witch then, too! She’ll
never thrive if thou leavest her. She knows no more how
to kill a cow, or a horse, or a sow without thee, than she
does to kill a goose. (5.1.103-8)
Once the Devil has chosen to abandon the witch, a choice which he makes freely and uncompelled, the witch loses any ‘power’ she ever laid claim to. Thus, the dramatists subscribe to a demonological view of witchcraft in which not only is the devil the source of the witch’s power (a common view) but this ‘power’ is not really the witch’s at all, rather it is a force which they have been deluded into believing they possess when in reality they have been deceived by the Devil, who will inevitably betray them.
This selfish behaviour by the Devil—who is never truly acting under the witch’s command or with the intention of helping her—explains why after Cuddy Banks nearly drowns due to demonic machinations in Act 3, Scene 1, not only does the Dog not try to harm him any further, but he is actually willing to aid Cuddy Banks in courting Kate. If the Devil’s desire or compulsion was to obey its witch, this decision would be confusing and contradictory but because his only objective is to proliferate sinning and damn others, the Devil takes no issue with ‘helping’ Cuddy Banks by causing harm to others (namely by causing the downfall of Somerton).
Interestingly, it is Cuddy Banks—the ‘clown’ of the play and its primary source of comic relief—who ends up essentially interrogating the Devil.
Young Banks: It seems you devils have poor thin souls, that
you can bestow yourselves in such small bodies. But pray
you, Tom, one question at parting—I think I shall never
see you more—where do you borrow those bodies that
are none of your own? The garment-shape you may hire
at broker’s.
Dog: Why wouldst thou know that, fool? It avails thee not.
Young Banks: Only for my mind’s sake, Tom, and to tell
some of my friends.
Dog: I’ll thus much tell thee. Thou never art so distant
From an evil spirit but that thy oaths,
Curses, and blasphemies pull him to thine elbow.
Thou never tellst a lie but that a devil
Is within hearing it; thy evil purposes
Are ever haunted. But when they come to act—
As thy tongue slandering, bearing false witness,
Thy hand stabbing, stealing, cosening, cheating—
He’s then within thee. Thou playst, he bets upon thy part.
Although thou lose, yet he will gain by thee. (5.1.128-146)
The scene is naturally comedic, insofar as it constitutes a conversation between the play’s clown and the very embodiment of evil wherein the clown insults the Devil. In fact, the Dog isn’t even really answering Banks’ question (although he later does). Banks is enquiring into how the Devil is able to take the shape of people (as he did when trying to trick Banks earlier in the play), since only God is supposed to be able to create people. The Dog interprets the question more metaphorically, as one about how people give their own bodies to the Devil through sinning, or perhaps chooses to outline first why the Devil would choose to appear to someone and then explains how this is achieved.
Through its answer, however, the Devil reaffirms what the dramatists had already implied throughout the play: The Devil is attracted to people who, through their personal agency, engage in small acts of sinning and he then manipulates them. The crux of the dramatists’ view regarding the relative power of devils and the people they deceive (including witches) is that ‘he bets upon thy part.’ The devil never has any genuine care for the person he makes contact with, nor is he ever subservient to them, but he simply tries to make them damn themselves and as many others as he can.
The idea that the devil not only can but will inevitably betray the witch, or any other person he claims to ‘help’, was an important one in 17th-century demonology. In part this is a genuine reflection of theological belief, because it reflects the malevolence of Satan, but it was also an important deterrent of which the authorities were acutely aware. In witch-trials whose proceedings were published, there was always an emphasis on the betrayal of the witch by the devil—and also commonly a reference to this betrayal as having been one which was guaranteed and bound to happen from the moment any pact was made. Even if writers, such as Dekker, Ford, and Rowley, made it clear that witches never had any real power over the devil (rather he had it over them), there was still the risk that some people could see a deal with the devil as one which could benefit them and so the inclusion of this inevitable treachery on the Devil’s part constituted a sort of catch-all clause. There’s no indication that the dramatists of The Witch of Edmonton desired to push this notion explicitly (not least because they deliberately downplay the role of witchcraft in causing harm, placing more significance on the agency of other individuals), but as their primary source was Goodcole’s pamphlet, which had been ‘published by authority’, it is unsurprising that some of this sentiment comes across.
The most shocking detail of The Witch of Edmonton might not be the devil-dogs, witchcraft, or supernatural horrors it contains but rather the sheer lack of them. Although there is no doubt the Devil exists and has a hand in the evil which occurs, precisely how much of this is simply an extension of the desires of the characters who only needed a little prompting to action is deliberately left unclear. Despite this, the dramatists have a very consistent demonological stance throughout. Witchcraft is only part of a much larger evil puzzle, the ‘witch’ is made so through her own personal agency (though compelled in part by external social pressures), and the Devil is an omnipresent actor who commands witches—not the other way around— and whose plots seem chaotic at times but are in fact part of a coherent resolution: to proliferate sin.
[This is the second post in a series which will focus on the 1621 case of Elizabeth Sawyer, commonly known as ‘The Witch of Edmonton’.]
[1. The Witch of Edmonton, Ballad-Mongers, and Early Modern Fake News]
[2. Witchcraft, Demonism, and Agency in ‘The Witch of Edmonton’ (1621)]
