The first scene presents the audience with an enormous amount of information very quickly and covers a wide variety of theatrical genres. All the main plot lines are introduced, family relationships established and recent histories recounted; we pass from romantic tragedy with Sebastian, through citizen comedy intrigue with Florida, to romantic comedy verging on broad comedy with Almachildes and Amoretta. Finally we have the shock of the duke’s use of his father-in-law’s skull, compounded by the suddenness with which he produces it. That some sort of sensational reaction is produced on-stage is suggested by the duke’s comment ‘Fie, how you fright the women!’ (I.i. 111). This is a very uneasy, perverse moment, wavering between farce and horror. But however this final part of the first scene is played, the second scene parallels and undercuts it: another banquet is presented, and the witches’ ingredients are as bizarre as the duke’s use of the skull. The duke’s action is thus closely allied to the fantastic and ridiculous world of Hecate and Firestone, something which could be easily reinforced by blocking – placing the leader of the coven, Hecate, where the leader of the court, the duke, has just been standing to reinforce their shared taste in gruesome stage properties.

The second scene also moves gradually closer to farce: Firestone’s presence encourages us to look for the comic even in Sebastian’s melodramatic posturing, but when Almachildes is introduced with farcical tumbling and a rather sadly unambitious request for an aphrodisiac charm, the tone is clearly comic. The swings in mood from the beginning of the act to the end are thus enormous. Similarly extreme changes in mood also appear elsewhere; for example, the farce of Almachildes’ narrative in its early stages is transformed as he becomes entangled in a serious murder plot, which is then undercut by the ludicrous ending. Playing on these surprising swings in mood, on the black comedy and the satire of the immoral casualness towards murder that prevails in the court scenes would be to play to The Witch’s strengths.

THE TEXT

The manuscript of The Witch is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS Malone 12). The scribe who produced the manuscript, Ralph Crane, has been thoroughly studied, particularly in relation to his contribution to the production of the Shakespeare First Folio.31 Crane was a professional scrivener, and it seems reasonable to trust his work to a large extent. However, he had many idiosyncracies: he loved colons and semi-colons; his question marks and exclamation marks are often indistinguishable; he used brackets enthusiastically, especially around titles and vocatives; he liked stringing adjectives and nouns together with hyphens. To follow his heavy and idiosyncratic punctuation (especially when we know Middleton’s punctuation was light) would be confusing for most modern readers, and so this text of The Witch has been punctuated lightly, with the aim of making sense even when the text itself does not.