8 Pierre Le Loyer’s work, translated as A Treatise of Specters by Z. Jones (1605) has ‘nodo’ for ‘modo’, a mistake Middleton reproduces in II.ii. 14. This is discussed in Gareth Roberts, ‘A Re-examination of the Sources of the Magical Material in Middleton’s The Witch’, NQ 221 (1976), 216–19.

9 Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘The Middle of Middleton’, in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter, ed. Murray Biggs et al. (1991), p. 157. The subject of Middleton’s possible contributions to both Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure, aired first as part of the Victorian vogue for authorship controversy, has recently been revived.

10 See Brooke and The Oxford Complete Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells et al. (1988).

11 See Beatrice White, Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (1965). For ease of reference the woman who was at various times Frances Howard/Essex/Somerset will simply be designated ‘Frances’ in this introduction.

12 The marriage was not popular. See A. A. Bromham and Zara Bruzzi, ‘The Changeling’ and the Years of Crisis, 1619–24 (1990), p. 22. They comment that the masque was produced ‘for the banquet which James insisted the City should provide’.

13 See Bromham and Bruzzi; J. L. Simmons, ‘Diabolical Realism in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling’, Renaissance Drama 11 (1980), 135–70, especially pp. 153—5.

14 Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (1980), pp. 108, 111

15 See Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (1982). Gair points to contemporary allusions in The Phoenix by Middleton (p. 152).

16 ‘The Witch: Stage Flop or Political Mistake?’, p. 163

17 A. A. Bromham, ‘The Date of The Witch and the Essex Divorce Case’, NQ 225 (1980), 149–52

18 Condemnations of heavy drinking appear at: I.i.32, 35, 40–1, 43–5, 87, 89, 96, 106, 108; I.ii.84; II.ii.2. Surfeits of eating and drinking are commented upon at I.i.34, 137 and II.i.77, and Francisca’s (fictional) prospective bridegroom is plausibly reported at III.ii.71 as having died of a surfeit. For heavy drinking at James’s court see Sir John Harington’s account of the festivities in July 1606 for a visit by Christian IV of Denmark in Nugae Antiquae (1804, reprinted 1966), pp. 348–53.

19 Standard works on the witch hunts include Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (1970) and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). See also Christina Larner, The Enemies of God (1983) and Witchcraft and Religion (1984) and Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1976). A feminist and deliberately iconoclastic critique of Thomas and Macfarlane is offered by Marianne Hester in Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination (1992).

20 E.g. the socialist feminist account of the witch-hunts in Caryl Churchill’s play Vinegar Tom and the more radical feminist account in Sarah Daniels’s play Byrthrite. See also Kathleen McLuskie’s comments in her Renaissance Dramatists (1989), p. 60.