Even when it is accepted that The Witch satirises the Howard/Essex/Carr scandal, critics still argue over what stage in the proceedings had been reached when the play was written. Anne Lancashire proposes that it alludes to the divorce scandal, with its rumours of witchcraft and love potions, but suggests that as the Overbury murder story began to break, the play became too dangerous to stage; by 1615–16 in the real-life scandal ‘murder and poison overshadowed impotence in marriage’ (p. 166). Because the first reference to Frances as a poisoner occurred as early as 1610, Lancashire can argue for a very early date for the play. This she needs to do because she reads the end of the play as masque-like and reformative, and this ending would have appeared an outrageous ‘whitewash’ (p. 172) by the time the details of the Overbury murder were emerging. I feel that Bromham and Bruzzi are closer to the tone of the play when they describe The Witch not as ‘reformative’ but as ‘exud[ing] a sense of disgust that is barely held in control by the dramatist’ (p. 25). They are also convincing in drawing parallels between the progress of three of the female characters in The Witch and various aspects of Frances’s career (p. 26). Elsewhere Bromham argues for a date before the full details of Overbury’s murder emerged in 1615, but the play could be seen to be responding to events late in the scandal. In particular the forced happy ending of The Witch could be understood as reflecting on the happy ending engineered for the aristocratic criminal Frances, who retired to live in some splendour in the Tower while her accomplices were executed.17

I also believe that the court of James is being satirised generally, well beyond the particularities of Frances’s schemes. For example, the king’s interest in witchcraft was well known but, instead of pandering to royal tastes, Middleton presents witches as such comic bogies that he seems to be parodying the royal interest. Another favourite royal pastime satirised in several episodes of the play is drinking to excess. Too much alcohol is to blame for the duchess’s story which begins with a drunk’s insult to his wife; in I.i. Almachildes decides when under the influence of alcohol to visit the witches; many characters suffer from a ‘surfeit’ or excess, usually of drink and food; and in the manuscript there is also a revealing slip in the opening scene, where there is a reference to a drunken ‘king’, not a drunken duke, as it should be. This mistake follows a source, Bedingfield’s version of Machiavelli’s Florentine History, but it is also suggestive of the notoriously heavy drinking at James I’s court.18 The inclusion of a character with a Scottish accent (II.i. 171) in a play set in Ravenna also glances at James and his Scottish favourites, in particular Carr, who spoke broad Scots.

THE PLAY