Hecate and her witches have little time for chastity, and they roam around at night picking out delicious young men. If nothing promising turns up Hecate will make do with her son, Firestone, or even the cat, Malkin, rather than go without sex. However, while the witches’ cheerful promiscuity is certainly condemned by the play, abiding by society’s norms for female sexuality and the cult of female chastity is shown as almost equally repulsive. Three plot lines are dominated by the question of female chastity: Francisca turns to murder by proxy in order to hide her loss of virginity; the duchess is willing to be executed as a murderer but fights to clear her name of the sin of unchastity, which to her is worse than murder; and the technicality of who is to break Isabella’s hymen absorbs the energies of Antonio, Sebastian and his friend, Fernando. Sebastian in particular goes to absurd lengths, obtaining a spell from Hecate in order to secure his ‘rights’ in relation to Isabella’s hymen and to prevent Antonio from usurping that ‘right’. What initially appears to be extremism in Francisca’s behaviour later appears to be commonsensical when we see her brother’s reaction to her confession that she has lost her virginity: Antonio goes berserk and deems death the only appropriate reward for the man and woman who have thus disgraced his family name. Antonio’s behaviour (which, given his relationship with Florida, is crassly hypocritical) makes Francisca’s deceptions seem sensible rather than callous.

Maintaining a reputation for impeccable chastity is an urgent problem for most of the women characters in The Witch, just as it is for real women in any patriarchal society. Middleton offers almost a survey of the possible roles available to women – wife, bride, unmarried mother, prostitute, witch – and all except Florida and Hecate are fighting to keep their reputations intact. The range of roles under discussion is emphasised by Isabella’s song in II.i, which assesses the comparative merits of the states of maid, wife and widow. Because of the pressure to maintain their reputations (deserved or not), when women want to strike at one another they know exactly where other women’s point of maximum vulnerability is. Both Francisca and Florida try to discredit Isabella’s claim to chastity, since without it Isabella’s status in her society will be destroyed. The hypocrisy of the men in relation to female chastity is also baldly demonstrated in the play. Not only is Antonio’s hypocrisy almost laughably blatant, but also Almachildes (Ill.i) complains that the woman he thought to deflower did not have an intact hymen and so had deceived him. Sebastian claims a heavenly union with Isabella but comes close to raping her, asserting self-righteously that it is his right so to do.