I believe The Witch to have been written in 1615–16. The manuscript states that the play was ‘long since acted, by his majesty’s servants at the Black friars’. This ‘long since’ has to be placed by the date of the manuscript, which is likely to be between 1619 – the date of the first recorded dramatic transcript by Ralph Crane, the scribe who produced the manuscript – and 1627, the date of Middleton’s death. (Although the manuscript is not signed by Middleton, the epistle suggests that he was personally involved with it.) The play is likely to date from after 1609–10, as before that date ‘his majesty’s servants’, that is the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatre company, did not use the Blackfriars theatre. Middleton seems to have started writing regularly for the King’s Men around 1614–15.

Some have argued that The Witch was influenced or inspired by Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (presented on 2 February 1609). More recently commentators have dated the play between 1613 and 1616, believing it to be related to a contemporary scandal involving the Howard family, the Earl of Essex, Robert Carr, a Scottish favourite of James I and later Earl of Somerset, and Sir Thomas Overbury. The evidence for this is summarised in the section below on topical satire (pp. xv-xix). I believe that The Witch was written late in the Overbury affair as deliberate, particularised and dangerous satire which was suppressed by the government before it could have the sort of success Middleton was to have later with another political satire, A Game at Chess.

In his Oxford edition of Macbeth Nicholas Brooke discusses the dating implications of the music written for the songs in The Witch.3 One song, ‘Come away, Hecate!’, which also appears in Macbeth, appears with music in a collection in which most of the music is known to be by Robert Johnson, who worked for the King’s Men from 1609 to around 1615. The other song in The Witch that has its original music, ‘In a maiden-time professed’, is by John Wilson, who was born in 1595 and worked for the King’s Men from around 1615 onwards. The fact that he composed the music for this song suggests a date for The Witch around 1613–15 because he would have been too young to be working for the King’s Men much earlier (the earliest music known to be by him dates from 1614). The intersection between these two careers suggests a date for The Witch that also fits in logically with the tragicomedies Middleton was writing around 1615–16, such as A Fair Quarrel.

Middleton’s play A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613) also offers several analogues with The Witch: the comic construing joke of Il.ii. (cf. CM I.i.65–77); the emphasis on drink in Francisca’s lying-in (cf. CM’s treatment of Mistress Allwit’s delivery); the casual abandonment of Francisca’s unwanted baby (cf. CM II.ii); and the duke unexpectedly rising from the dead (cf. the rising up from the dead of Moll and Touchwood junior).