The text is at least one remove from playhouse practice, as is clear from its failure to indicate several necessary entrances and exits. The manuscript title-page tells us the play was ‘acted, by his Majesty’s Servants at the Blackfriars’, and Lancashire (pp. 162–3) is right to caution us against reading the phrase ‘ill fated’ as meaning ‘failed in the playhouse’, because it could equally be interpreted as ‘censored off stage’, or ‘suppressed’. Thomas Holmes’s interest in the play certainly makes more sense if it was suppressed because of scandal rather than being a box office failure. However, we know nothing about the premiere performance (s) of The Witch apart from the fact that it/they took place at Blackfriars.

Blackfriars was an indoor playhouse with a smaller stage than the outdoor playhouses and with more capacity for impressive scenic and some lighting effects.27 It is likely that the witch scenes would have been staged with considerable spectacle. Because of the more reliable acoustics in the indoor playhouses, music was often a feature of performances, and this again would be important in the witch scenes. The other main staging requirement of the play is a two-level playing area for IV.iii.

Jonson’s Masque of Queens gives some idea of how spectacular a performance of The Witch could have been. Jonson’s masque was performed at court with no expense spared (Frances, then Countess of Essex, participated in it); and while the commercial theatre company, the King’s Men, would not have been so extravagant, the description of the court masque costume and dancing is still suggestive of what could be achieved. Jonson describes his witches thus: ‘some, with rats on their heads; some, on their shoulders; others with ointment-pots at their girdles; all with spindles, timbrels, rattles or other venefical instruments, making a confused noise, with strange gestures’. When the Dame enters she is ‘naked armed, bare footed, her frock tucked, her hair knotted, and folded with vipers; in her hand a torch made of a dead man’s arm, lighted; girded with a snake’ (p. 286). Jonson describes the witches’ dance as follows: ‘full of preposterous change, and gesticulation, … all things contrary to the custom of men, dancing, back to back, hip to hip, their hands joined, and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange fantastic motions of their heads, and bodies’ (p. 301).

In the twentieth century The Witch has not been acted professionally, but there have been enterprising student productions. In 1986, Robert Jones directed the play for Warwick University Dramatic Society.28 In 1988 (July 7–9, 12–16) Ormond College dramatic society at the University of Melbourne presented the play in the Union theatre. This production, directed by Mark Williams, billed the play as ‘a hilarious four-plot tragi-comedy, with witches’.29 There has also been a production of the play at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada.