Workshops: Stories

Workshop 1: Broomsticks and Distaffs

Conveners:

• Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Comparative Humanities, SUNY, Old Westbury
• Betty S. Travitsky, English, Graduate Center/CUNY

The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which sent thousands of women to torture and to death, touched more lightly on England than on some other parts of Europe. They left their greatest mark there in the seventeenth century, following the accession of the perhaps credulous James VI and I to the English throne and, during the disorders at mid-century, at the prompting of Matthew Hopkins, the witchhunter-general.

Three seventeenth-century English plays--Dekker, Ford, and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton (c. 1622), Brome and Heywood's Late Lancashire Witches (1634), and Middleton's(?)/Rowley's(?): The Witch (first printed in 1778)--feature the "so-called" witch prominently. Two are directly related to actual instances of so-called witchcraft for which we have other historical records.

In this workshop, a historian and a literary scholar looked at these plays from their different disciplinary perspectives to raise questions and tease understanding of the early modern witch hunts in England.

Speaking for no longer than five to ten minutes each, the two participants considered the three plays, i.e., narratives about female witches, from their different disciplinary perspectives, framing/posing questions for discussion.

• What light do these plays/stories shed on the gendering of the witch?
• What is the connection between these stories about female witches and historical events?
• What do the plays reveal about this society's popular religious beliefs?
• About its uses of magic?
• To what extent are the witches portrayed as victims or as agents of their stories?
• On the basis of these plays, what conclusions do you reach about the role of women in early modern England?
• In what ways might this connecting of women with evil affect our view of women today?
• What does the genre of these plays suggest about the authors' perceptions of the witch?
• How does the theme of order and disorder intertwine with domesticity? Is patriarchal order an important motif in these plays?
• What part does witchcraft play in subverting patriarchal order?
• What do the resolutions of these plays suggest about these perceptions? Are the witches stock characters?
• Is their function in the plays tragic or comic?
• Why do the playwrights treat a historically tragic figure as an object of fun?