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The Witch
HECATE Titty and Tiffin, Suckin and Pidgen, Liard and Robin, White spirits, black spirits, grey spirits, red spirits, Devil-toad, devil-ram, devil-cat, and devil-dam!
Thomas Middleton's 1615 political satire is a send-up of the affair between Thomas Overbury, Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset; Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex; and Frances Howard, and also makes fun of King James's fear of witches and the obsession with female virginity by hypocritical male nobles who regularly hire prostitutes. The play was suppressed for over a decade, but interest in it renewed when Howard and Carr were released from imprisonment from the Tower of London in 1622.
The play's scribal manuscript survives, and it was first published by Isaac Reed in 1778.
This edition features an introduction, notes, and historical background by Elizabeth Schafer, a biographical sketch of Middleton by William C. Carroll, and Ian Spink's piano/vocal arrangements of the original settings two of the play's songs, "In a Maiden Time Profess'd" composed by John Wilson, and "Come Away, Hecate!" composed by Robert Johnson.
Thomas Middleton's 1615 political satire is a send-up of the affair between Thomas Overbury, Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset; Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex; and Frances Howard, and also makes fun of King James's fear of witches and the obsession with female virginity by hypocritical male nobles who regularly hire prostitutes. The play was suppressed for over a decade, but interest in it renewed when Howard and Carr were released from imprisonment from the Tower of London in 1622.
The play's scribal manuscript survives, and it was first published by Isaac Reed in 1778.
This edition features an introduction, notes, and historical background by Elizabeth Schafer, a biographical sketch of Middleton by William C. Carroll, and Ian Spink's piano/vocal arrangements of the original settings two of the play's songs, "In a Maiden Time Profess'd" composed by John Wilson, and "Come Away, Hecate!" composed by Robert Johnson.
127 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1616
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224 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Middleton
681 books55 followersThomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) 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 comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
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April 1, 2025Middleton writes such brilliantly convoluted and disjointed bizarre plays. They sometimes don't really work for me and sometimes really do.
Whereas Shakespeare (sorry to compare, but he's of course the touchstone for early modern drama) ties his many plots together, Middleton pieces together plots that are seemingly incongruent. But somehow, sometimes, it works. This one really interestingly turns some trends on its head, and I think is the play that is most accurately titled a tragicomedy that I've read. Maybe because the genres occur in that order, whereas they often start with comedy and end with tragedy.
I definitely would love to see a production of this, it was a blast, with the proper amount of emotional stakes that a tragedy delivers and the absurdity and deus ex machinas that a comedy delivers.
Whereas Shakespeare (sorry to compare, but he's of course the touchstone for early modern drama) ties his many plots together, Middleton pieces together plots that are seemingly incongruent. But somehow, sometimes, it works. This one really interestingly turns some trends on its head, and I think is the play that is most accurately titled a tragicomedy that I've read. Maybe because the genres occur in that order, whereas they often start with comedy and end with tragedy.
I definitely would love to see a production of this, it was a blast, with the proper amount of emotional stakes that a tragedy delivers and the absurdity and deus ex machinas that a comedy delivers.
July 11, 2013
I found this play to be fairly enjoyable, though it does have some flaws. The various plotlines are fairly good and interesting, and are lacking only in that they never really cohere into a single plot very well. Yes, the characters are linked together by various relationships and most of the plots involve the witches, but those aren't really strong enough connections for me. The characters are relatively good for the time, and I especially like the witches. The play can be somewhat difficult to follow, and thus I'd be interested in seeing it staged, as perhaps that helps somewhat. Overall, I definitely enjoyed reading this.
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August 21, 2022Middleton is such a cynic. He really thinks the worst of everyone. It's kind of awful. This play is, however, enlivened by the occasional presence of a coven of witches and their leader Hecate (who is randomly visited onstage by a French-speaking feline familiar because why not?). Otherwise The Witch is a series of nefarious plots without much characterization. Everyone in it is a poor imitation of a character from Tourneur or Shakespeare or Webster or Middleton's own corpus. And of course, Middleton's usual moralizing obsessions with marriage and sexual purity suffuse this text in a way that is painfully irritating.
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June 27, 2022One of the weirder early modern plays. I liked some parts of it, especially the exuberant and fun witch scenes but I couldn't read it without a summary on hand (which I didn't need with most other Early Modern plays I read recently). I feel like this would have worked best on stage, as with most plays. It's pretty ambitious but falls flat, especially for a modern audience thought I wouldn't say that it's unsalvageable per se.
February 6, 2022
He was getting four stars until that ending 🙄 Hecate is very fun though.
August 11, 2024
I think this would be a joy to watch, but it’s not a great piece of writing. A lot of the characters are undifferentiated, no memorable lines of verse, & some scenes that are clearly included only for the spectacle (such as a scene where nothing much happens aside from witches flying).
February 25, 2024
The story started out well. Lots of sabotage, infidelity, a pregnancy out of wedlock, and the consultation with witches about dark matters. All the makings of a very intriguing story and all done is a Shakespearean dialog style. Well done and compelling. Then the end comes. The big reveal of who was trying to kill, sabotage , and woo whoever....and the Duke whose wife was going to kill him, but didn’t die....just forgives her for trying? Anticlimactic. Everything leading up to that point was exciting and interesting...and then the end just didn’t seem to justify all the prior drama or give sufficient closure. For a full in-depth review visit: https://youtu.be/IydjQ8w2mGM?si=ilWk9...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 28, 2015
Overcomplicated play, in which the number of overlapping conspiracies makes following the action almost impossible, especially when you throw in the key plot elements that are withheld until late in the play. Probably somewhat easier to follow in performance, but even there, I suspect that it would be mstly baffling, given that, according to the introduction, making sense of its topical satire depends on a fair bit of specific historical knowledge. It's called The Witch because a couple of characters rely on a witch's curse to advance their plots, and there are a handful of witch scenes, but the witch is not in fact the central character or even a key one. Bizarre.
October 31, 2023
I already have a selection of plays by Thomas Middleton that I am working through. It contains five of the plays considered his best works, and The Witch is not one of them.
This is probably correct. While The Witch is certainly a fun play, it is also a bit of a mess. It contains too many storylines, thrown together in a convoluted and illogical manner, and the final resolution….fails to resolve anything.
There are in fact four main storylines here. Antonio has deceived Isabella into marrying him by convincing her that her lover Sebastian is dead. In fact Sebastian has returned, and now wishes to avenge himself on Antonio with a drug that leaves him impotent (though mysteriously Antonio can still perform with his mistress). Sebastian also disguises himself as a servant so he can seduce Isabella and undermine Sebastian further.
Isabella has a sister, Francisca who has foolishly got herself pregnant. She must find a ruse to leave the area long enough to have a baby but also distract attention away from her pregnancy by inciting Antonia against her sister.
Then there is a Duchess who is married to the man who murdered her father. She might not have minded this so much if he did not tactlessly drink out of her father’s skull. So she plots her husband’s murder with a man who is attracted to her servant (who shares the same name as the Duchess for no reason whatsoever).
He thinks he is sleeping with the servant, but he is blindfolded, and sleeping with the Duchess, or maybe it is not the Duchess either. In any case this is cause for blackmail.
The fourth plot strand is perhaps not really a storyline so much as a device to move the other three plots along. Or perhaps the other three plots only exist so that these scenes can be added. They centre on the witch Hecate and her followers.
Middleton clearly wants as many witch scenes as possible, so he is always finding excuses to bring them in. Want a potion to render a man impotent? Ask the witches. Or to persuade a woman to fall in love with you? What about some poison? The witches have it all.
Some elements of Middleton’s neglected play found their way into Macbeth, but Shakespeare shows himself to be the better dramatist. Middleton is only concerned with salacious details – Hecate having sex with her own son, the witches taking incubus form so they can sleep with handsome men, a dead child’s body stuffed with herbs, or the murder of a red-haired girl.
While Shakespeare certainly uses his witches for entertainment value, he tones down the more hideous elements. He is not aiming for Middleton’s sensationalism; he is writing art. Middleton just wants the witches in his play.
There is of course a serious side to these scenes. While Middleton is having fun with the idea, he is also perpetuating images of witches performing evil rites that many of his contemporaries seriously believed. Such stories helped to spread the misogyny and superstitious bigotry that would bring about the deaths of many women.
Notably Middleton is ambiguous in the title of the play. The witch might be Hecate, but maybe a few of the other scheming women in the story might earn the title. Indeed while the witches are irredeemably foul, they are only expressing the same evil instincts that the other characters possess in hidden form.
Certainly the witches never have to worry about being lonely. No matter how murderous or malicious their practices, none of this concerns the respectable characters in the play, four of whom visit the witches to ask for a favour. Who cares if the person from whom you seek help is in league with Satan, and is using materials obtained from the body of a dead child?
After all the characters are themselves constantly intriguing against one another. Many of them are quite willing to kill anyone who gets in their way, and it is only a stroke of luck that the play finally ends with very few murderers and very few murders.
Instead the play extraordinarily works it way round to offer a happy ending to almost all the characters, many of whom we would normally expect to be forced to accept the moral consequences of their actions. Is Middleton mocking the traditional tragedy?
Whatever the case, The Witch does not really work as either tragedy or tragicomedy. Nonetheless it is an amusing and intriguing little work that is well worth a look.
This is probably correct. While The Witch is certainly a fun play, it is also a bit of a mess. It contains too many storylines, thrown together in a convoluted and illogical manner, and the final resolution….fails to resolve anything.
There are in fact four main storylines here. Antonio has deceived Isabella into marrying him by convincing her that her lover Sebastian is dead. In fact Sebastian has returned, and now wishes to avenge himself on Antonio with a drug that leaves him impotent (though mysteriously Antonio can still perform with his mistress). Sebastian also disguises himself as a servant so he can seduce Isabella and undermine Sebastian further.
Isabella has a sister, Francisca who has foolishly got herself pregnant. She must find a ruse to leave the area long enough to have a baby but also distract attention away from her pregnancy by inciting Antonia against her sister.
Then there is a Duchess who is married to the man who murdered her father. She might not have minded this so much if he did not tactlessly drink out of her father’s skull. So she plots her husband’s murder with a man who is attracted to her servant (who shares the same name as the Duchess for no reason whatsoever).
He thinks he is sleeping with the servant, but he is blindfolded, and sleeping with the Duchess, or maybe it is not the Duchess either. In any case this is cause for blackmail.
The fourth plot strand is perhaps not really a storyline so much as a device to move the other three plots along. Or perhaps the other three plots only exist so that these scenes can be added. They centre on the witch Hecate and her followers.
Middleton clearly wants as many witch scenes as possible, so he is always finding excuses to bring them in. Want a potion to render a man impotent? Ask the witches. Or to persuade a woman to fall in love with you? What about some poison? The witches have it all.
Some elements of Middleton’s neglected play found their way into Macbeth, but Shakespeare shows himself to be the better dramatist. Middleton is only concerned with salacious details – Hecate having sex with her own son, the witches taking incubus form so they can sleep with handsome men, a dead child’s body stuffed with herbs, or the murder of a red-haired girl.
While Shakespeare certainly uses his witches for entertainment value, he tones down the more hideous elements. He is not aiming for Middleton’s sensationalism; he is writing art. Middleton just wants the witches in his play.
There is of course a serious side to these scenes. While Middleton is having fun with the idea, he is also perpetuating images of witches performing evil rites that many of his contemporaries seriously believed. Such stories helped to spread the misogyny and superstitious bigotry that would bring about the deaths of many women.
Notably Middleton is ambiguous in the title of the play. The witch might be Hecate, but maybe a few of the other scheming women in the story might earn the title. Indeed while the witches are irredeemably foul, they are only expressing the same evil instincts that the other characters possess in hidden form.
Certainly the witches never have to worry about being lonely. No matter how murderous or malicious their practices, none of this concerns the respectable characters in the play, four of whom visit the witches to ask for a favour. Who cares if the person from whom you seek help is in league with Satan, and is using materials obtained from the body of a dead child?
After all the characters are themselves constantly intriguing against one another. Many of them are quite willing to kill anyone who gets in their way, and it is only a stroke of luck that the play finally ends with very few murderers and very few murders.
Instead the play extraordinarily works it way round to offer a happy ending to almost all the characters, many of whom we would normally expect to be forced to accept the moral consequences of their actions. Is Middleton mocking the traditional tragedy?
Whatever the case, The Witch does not really work as either tragedy or tragicomedy. Nonetheless it is an amusing and intriguing little work that is well worth a look.
March 21, 2024
In prep to see this rarely staged play performed by the Meadowlarks, the 3rd-year MFA class of Mary Baldwin's Shakespeare in Performance program, I sped through Middleton's text. It was a confusing journey, what might have been called in its day a gallimaufrey or hodgepodge, what its author seems to have conceived of as a tragicomedy.
Today we might call it a mashup of several popular Jacobean dramatic genres, filled with topical references and capitalizing on prurient interests in witchcraft and sexuality. The two most obvious points of entry are its evident relationships to one of the era's most notorious scandals and to its most famous playwright.
The character Francisca seems intended to call to mind Frances Howard, who was married for years to the Earl of Essex but upon examination was found to be a virgin, who was rumored to have consorted with a witch and magicians to render him impotent or dead and to charm the Earl of
Somerset to love her. Her trial was postponed because of pregnancy, but eventually she pleaded guilty to poisoning one of Somerset's advisers who opposed the marriage. All of these elements - witches, love charm, impotency curse, pregnancy, poisoning - find their way into Middleton's play.
Two songs that are featured in this play also appear in Macbeth, and the presiding witch in each play is named Hecate. So for over a century speculation has swirled about the source and order of composition of these features. Current opinion favors the view that after Shakespeare's death the Kings Men commissioned Middleton not only to continue producing new plays for them but to augment the witch material in Shakespeare's earlier play.
Apart from all those matters of scholarly interest, there is much of interest in Middleton's play itself. Here he seems to craft bawdy city comedy that surpasses Dekker and anticipates Restoration wit comedy, spliced with dark Jacobean tragedy to rival Webster, before swerving with a sudden spate of unveilings and resurrections that out-Fletcher the extremes of Jacobean tragicomedy. Apart from the sudden surprises that dead characters are revealed to be alive, the dramaturgy itself is spectacular, with Malkin the witch's cat descending and the witch Hecate ascending in flight. Some kind of mechanism for such acrobatics was evidently used in this Blackfriars play, as in a similar scene near the end of Shakespeare's Cymbeline when the god Jupiter descends upon an eagle.
While only gesturing toward the witches in flight, the Meadowlarks leaned fully into the ridiculous plot twists at the end, triggering raucous laughter from the absurdities of the plot's lurch to undeserved happy endings for all. It is hard to imagine a serious rendering of the last act - as if the point is to admire the playwright's adroitness in delivering the requisite ending at the last possible second.
Today we might call it a mashup of several popular Jacobean dramatic genres, filled with topical references and capitalizing on prurient interests in witchcraft and sexuality. The two most obvious points of entry are its evident relationships to one of the era's most notorious scandals and to its most famous playwright.
The character Francisca seems intended to call to mind Frances Howard, who was married for years to the Earl of Essex but upon examination was found to be a virgin, who was rumored to have consorted with a witch and magicians to render him impotent or dead and to charm the Earl of
Somerset to love her. Her trial was postponed because of pregnancy, but eventually she pleaded guilty to poisoning one of Somerset's advisers who opposed the marriage. All of these elements - witches, love charm, impotency curse, pregnancy, poisoning - find their way into Middleton's play.
Two songs that are featured in this play also appear in Macbeth, and the presiding witch in each play is named Hecate. So for over a century speculation has swirled about the source and order of composition of these features. Current opinion favors the view that after Shakespeare's death the Kings Men commissioned Middleton not only to continue producing new plays for them but to augment the witch material in Shakespeare's earlier play.
Apart from all those matters of scholarly interest, there is much of interest in Middleton's play itself. Here he seems to craft bawdy city comedy that surpasses Dekker and anticipates Restoration wit comedy, spliced with dark Jacobean tragedy to rival Webster, before swerving with a sudden spate of unveilings and resurrections that out-Fletcher the extremes of Jacobean tragicomedy. Apart from the sudden surprises that dead characters are revealed to be alive, the dramaturgy itself is spectacular, with Malkin the witch's cat descending and the witch Hecate ascending in flight. Some kind of mechanism for such acrobatics was evidently used in this Blackfriars play, as in a similar scene near the end of Shakespeare's Cymbeline when the god Jupiter descends upon an eagle.
While only gesturing toward the witches in flight, the Meadowlarks leaned fully into the ridiculous plot twists at the end, triggering raucous laughter from the absurdities of the plot's lurch to undeserved happy endings for all. It is hard to imagine a serious rendering of the last act - as if the point is to admire the playwright's adroitness in delivering the requisite ending at the last possible second.
July 31, 2024
Hmmm, to describe Middleton's The Witch as batshit crazy is to be slightly unfair to batshit. I have just finished it in one sitting and my oh my.
What have I just read?
This is one of those plays where the attitudes of people in Jacobean England are so different from my own, it's like what?
Okay: take one: a woman attempts murder on her husband by seducing a man to murder her. The plot is discovered, but she reveals it wasn't her, but she prostituted her maid instead. Husband leaps up, "I wasn't dead: that shows you really love me after all": happily ever after.
Take two: husband who's been having a seven-year affair believes his wife is cheating on him, because he's been told by his sister, so he stabs his faithful servant and his wife. But no, it was only fleshwounds and it was his mistress he almost killed, so everything's all right.
Take three: teenager is up the duff on first go with her boyfriend, so fakes a letter from her mother to escape to the country, where she has the baby, gets some old woman to take it, and heads home, a bit pale, but otherwise "baby? what baby?". She rides home on a horse.
And I haven't even got to the incestuous, cannibalistic witches yet, who frankly don't have much part in the story, but Middleton re-used them anyway when he came to refresh Macbeth.
I mean, merciful heavens.
Oh yeah, and everything done at a fever pitch of emotions, it's like a Latin American 80s telenovella. But on coke.
What have I just read?
This is one of those plays where the attitudes of people in Jacobean England are so different from my own, it's like what?
Okay: take one: a woman attempts murder on her husband by seducing a man to murder her. The plot is discovered, but she reveals it wasn't her, but she prostituted her maid instead. Husband leaps up, "I wasn't dead: that shows you really love me after all": happily ever after.
Take two: husband who's been having a seven-year affair believes his wife is cheating on him, because he's been told by his sister, so he stabs his faithful servant and his wife. But no, it was only fleshwounds and it was his mistress he almost killed, so everything's all right.
Take three: teenager is up the duff on first go with her boyfriend, so fakes a letter from her mother to escape to the country, where she has the baby, gets some old woman to take it, and heads home, a bit pale, but otherwise "baby? what baby?". She rides home on a horse.
And I haven't even got to the incestuous, cannibalistic witches yet, who frankly don't have much part in the story, but Middleton re-used them anyway when he came to refresh Macbeth.
I mean, merciful heavens.
Oh yeah, and everything done at a fever pitch of emotions, it's like a Latin American 80s telenovella. But on coke.
February 22, 2020
Incredibly difficult to read, even for an old text.
Middleton plays with a lot of threads within this text, and more often than not they simply get tangled. There are also a lot of details skimmed over due to how familiar they would be to contemporary audiences - which of course makes sense at the time, but since the plots and traditions referred to are no longer prevalent, it leaves several leaps for the reader to make.
Its presence as a satire piece is interesting historical context, and the story of Frances Howard is definitely a story worth telling. There are simply too many other ones weaved in to make sense of it - which may well have been Middleton's intention, in order to sneak past political censors.
Middleton plays with a lot of threads within this text, and more often than not they simply get tangled. There are also a lot of details skimmed over due to how familiar they would be to contemporary audiences - which of course makes sense at the time, but since the plots and traditions referred to are no longer prevalent, it leaves several leaps for the reader to make.
Its presence as a satire piece is interesting historical context, and the story of Frances Howard is definitely a story worth telling. There are simply too many other ones weaved in to make sense of it - which may well have been Middleton's intention, in order to sneak past political censors.
April 30, 2023
In comparison to William Shakespeare, who was living in his period, his screenplay is very flat and a little messy. His work is not as deep as Shakespeare, but still interesting and somehow seems modern. Some characters are left to their own, and we don't know if anything happened to them or not -such as wizard and her son.
September 21, 2024
Way to have a play with so many plot lines and characters and have almost nothing happen. Loved the witch scenes and truly loved how they did so much nothing the whole time. Was it a little entertaining sometimes? Sure. But that ending just ruined the fun. Still want to be generous but also, why did Hecate do nothing? Why did no one actually die? And why was Firestone even there?
October 16, 2020
Not in the same league as The Witch of Edmonton, but good fun.
Re-read as part of the "Extra Mile" Shakespeare Institute online readathon in the increasingly bleak semi-lockdown autumn of 2020.
Re-read as part of the "Extra Mile" Shakespeare Institute online readathon in the increasingly bleak semi-lockdown autumn of 2020.
March 22, 2024
Every time I read an Early Modern play I am surprised again by just how strange they are. Despite being called The Witch, magic itself features at the relative sidelines of this play, overshadowed by adultery, murder, treachery, and most notably of all unbounded confusion.
October 14, 2020
Either i didn’t get the point or this was just plain tedious
February 28, 2021
3.5/5 stars.
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November 12, 2022Very interesting play. Lots of parallels with Macbeth . It was a little hard to read, but it was funny and intriguing, nonetheless.
May 5, 2023
This might just take the cake for the most WILD early modern play I’ve ever read… and I’ve read The Bloody Banquet.
October 21, 2024
Now... now. What was this? It was fine to talk about in class, but the ending was so lame!
December 2, 2024
read for class. a funny play. early modern soap opera.
November 13, 2021
-Emily Schmidt & Gregory Kerkman
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