If The Witch was written and suppressed around 1615, the revival of interest in the scandal about Frances and Carr when they were released from the Tower in 1622 may have inspired the dedicatee Thomas Holmes’s interest in the play. Equally the success of the satire of A Game at Chess (1624) may have stirred his interest in an earlier politically sensitive play written by the same author. Andrew Gurr points out that plays which survive in manuscript form are often controversial ones;4 the fact that The Witch was written on the same batch of paper as one of the manuscripts of A Game at Chess suggests an association with this extremely controversial play.5

SOURCES

The main source for much of the witchcraft material in The Witch is Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), a humane and intelligent book that treats witchcraft sceptically: it argues that many of the women executed as witches were in fact senile, confused or brow-beaten. Scot’s book was burnt in the Scotland of James VI as an outlawed and heretical treatise, and the king wrote Demonology (1597, reprinted in 1603 as soon as James became King of England) in part to refute Scot.6 Middleton often uses Scot verbatim, as will be seen from footnotes to the witch scenes, especially I.ii. Although no audience would recognise Scot as Middleton’s source, the fact that when Middleton wanted detail on witch practices he went to a sceptical source is suggestive of his general strategy in this play, which I believe to be satiric.

The Witch also uses Thomas Bedingfield’s 1595 version of Machiavelli’s Florentine History as a source for the story of the duchess’s revenge for being forced to drink from a cup made of the skull of her father. G. B. Cinthio’s 4th novella of the fourth day in Hecatommithi (1574) has been identified along with Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy as a source for Isabella’s story and the plot of the woman tricked into a never-to-be-consummated marriage when she is presented with faked evidence that her true love is dead.7 Jonson’s Masque of Queens has been suggested as a source of witch material and also possibly of costumes (hypothetically used in the masque and then passed on to the actors to be used in the first performance of The Witch); however, much of the common ground between the Masque of Queens and The Witch seems unremarkable given their shared interest in presenting witches on-stage. Virgil’s Eclogues 8 is clearly a source for the love charm in II.ii, and the text Middleton used has been identified through the mistake he copied from it.8 Contemporary scandal (the Overbury affair) also constitutes a source.