The topical satire in The Witch is important from a critical point of view. If the play is seen primarily as a topical satire, as a seventeenth-century equivalent of Spitting Image, some of the supposed ‘problems’ of the play seem less urgent. Nothing dates more quickly than topical satire, which depends very much on the audience identifying targets and concentrating on how these targets are represented. Topical satire also needs no compelling narrative line (as is shown by A Game at Chess), so the fact that in The Witch the plot line sometimes hardly makes sense is of little significance. Consider Sebastian’s machinations in IV.ii, which are deeply confusing. The best sense that can be made of them is that Sebastian has plotted that Florida will meet Isabella at Fernando’s house and that Florida will lay claim to Antonio in some way (this is based on Isabella’s comments at IV.ii.74–5, 81–2, although this theory partly depends on an emendation to IV.ii.27). Isabella also expects to find Antonio at Fernando’s house, but clearly Sebastian cannot arrange for this to happen. Florida thinks she is taking part in a plot to disgrace Isabella in Antonio’s eyes, because Isabella will be caught out of her own house at night in the company of ‘Celio’ and so disgraced. Florida also believes she is going to have a night with Antonio. Sebastian presumably hopes that Isabella, enraged by the evidence that her husband is unfaithful, will be slightly easier to seduce or rape. Sebastian is going to rape Isabella, on the grounds that this is his lawful right because of their precontract, but then he has a change of heart. What Sebastian laughably calls his ‘plain’ plot then gets enmeshed with Francisca’s plot to discredit Isabella, and the confusion is compounded. No-one can follow this narrative in the theatre, but if the emphasis of the play is on ridiculing recognisable targets of personal satire, the need for Middleton’s audience to follow the plot, as opposed to laughing at the characters’ confusion, would have been less urgent. Plots do not always make clear sense in Middleton (for example the end of the Antonio plot in The Changeling), but Sebastian’s convoluted plotting really suggests that clarity of narrative is not the dramatist’s priority here.