Witch plays were popular in the early seventeenth century, a period of appalling witch-hunts in Europe.19 Some of these plays claim to approach social history and adopt a pseudodocumentary approach; The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches, for example, report on recent, notorious trials. Middleton’s play is not, however, about the women who were executed for being ‘real’ witches in the witch-hunts. Instead, it shows larger than life, often rumbustious, quite comical singing witches who are never in any danger of being brought to trial. The title indicates that witchcraft is a significant focus in the play, but modern feminist readers in search of oppressed sisters need to look elsewhere.20

The reality of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts was that they were likely to victimise women who were old, poor and unmarried (especially widowed) and who grumbled or cursed in response to hardship. Hecate and her cohorts, however, do not fit these categories. Hecate, although mortal and clearly not a goddess, really does fly, run a coven, have familiars, cast spells, cook dead babies and all the things witches were supposed to do,21 but there is an absurd element to her: for example her use of standard charlatan tricks in I.ii or her almost jolly attitude towards evil doing. This can be contrasted with the witch-character Mother Sawyer in The Witch of Edmonton. Mother Sawyer is at first presented sympathetically and credibly: the play begins by offering a convincing picture of how a disempowered old woman desires to become a witch in order to retaliate against her enemies. The fact that the play then shows the old woman successfully becoming a malicious and powerful witch – one able to cause death – confirms the stereotype that old woman equals witch, a stereotype that could affect the lives of real old women, living in every village, vulnerable to attack.22 By contrast Middleton presents a fantastic, and I believe tongue-in-cheek, caricature of witches.

The witch scenes in the play are also challenging because they present the witches as less obnoxious than the human characters. The comparison is clearly invited by the parallelism of the two opening scenes (see pp. xxvii–xxviii). Sometimes the witch scenes seem irrelevant to the main action except for the fact that the witches provide almost a local shop, casually used by the court whenever a poison or potion is required. However, Middleton’s witches also provide a compelling focus for a subject that Middleton often explored in his plays: his society’s neurosis about female chastity.