Macbeth is in some ways a source for The Witch, but the relationship between the two plays is very complex. Until recently critics have constructed the relationship in ways which worked to the disadvantage of Middleton’s play. Because The Witch was believed to have failed in the theatre, the fact that it shares two songs and some dialogue with Macbeth was interpreted as proving that Macbeth was damaged by the ‘inferior’ material that Middleton added to it when he revised it in 1609 or 1610. The traditional view was that Shakespeare could not have authorised such interpolations. It is true that the songs fit more closely with the characters and situations of The Witch than with those of Macbeth, but it is simplistic just to disparage Middleton’s interpolations, as so many editors of Macbeth have done. Recently the opposite critical approach to these passages has appeared. For example, Anne Lancashire, after arguing that the artistic merit of The Witch has been undervalued, suggests (p. 174) that after the play was suppressed, Macbeth was revived partly to keep The Witch’s political satire in circulation. Inga-Stina Ewbank follows Lancashire’s lead, noting how the first Jacobean audience could see The Witch ‘in the same playhouse and with the same cast’ as ‘they had seen the tragedy of Macbeth’.9

The two songs that appear in both the Folio text of Macbeth and The Witch are ‘Come away, Hecate!’ (Macbeth III.v; The Witch III.iii) and ‘Black spirits’ (Macbeth IV.i, The Witch V.ii). In neither case does the Folio text of Macbeth provide the full text of the songs, and until the two recent Oxford editions most editors of Shakespeare followed suit.10 Consequently these songs are rarely performed as part of Macbeth.

Brooke’s edition of Macbeth is remarkable for taking the songs from The Witch seriously, and he proposes the following hypoth esis: Middleton wrote ‘Come away, Hecate!’ when he was revising Macbeth in 1609–10, and in 1615, when he was writing The Witch, he reused the song. (Brooke (p. 58) cites R. V. Holds-worth’s work on other instances of Middleton’s reuse of songs from plays he had written earlier.) This theory also fits what we know about the music composed for The Witch (see p. xii) by Robert Johnson (‘Come away, Hecate!’) and John Wilson (‘In a maiden-time professed’). The use of two different composers suggests that they collaborated or worked at different periods. Brooke favours the latter theory, suggesting that when Middleton came to write ‘his entertainingly bawdy burlesque of witchcraft’ in The Witch, he already had a ‘cast and themes to develop’ from his work on Macbeth (p. 66).