Wow. What an excellent play! Good call Professor Lemon. I was going to prescribe this for a class of undergraduates but chose “A Lady Killed with Kindness” instead. Needless to say the class did not enjoy it as much as (I thought) they would have this play.
So… I have a few ideas:
Is this a Tragi-Comedy? Seems to be a “Problem Play” by definition. Like the ambivalence that guides Measure for Measure’s end—the scene where the Duke reaches out for Isabella, who neither accepts nor refuses the marriage proposal—The Witch of Edmonton ends on similarly problematic lines. Taken from the Introduction in the New Mermaids Edition, (Thanks Stephan, I love the editions published by this press!) Thomas Dekker’s work traditionally exhibited “an interest in common people…and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed” (Kinney ix). Moreover, “Dekker’s chief interest was in the functioning of society, the need for community and appeals for social concern and change” (xi). In addition, “The situation faced by the real-life Elizabeth Sawyer would have attracted his deepest sympathies, but so would frank Thorney’s arranged marriage and the causes and consequences of his unintended bigamy” (xi). If we look at the husbandless women in this play—those bearing children, and those who have aged on the fringes of society—one cannot but connect their ambivalent treatment as characters with the probability that the authors were attempting to illuminate larger, more problematic functions of their contemporary society and the social disregard of women/witches.
Furthermore, I am fascinated with Mother Sawyer in this play. At times, she is as dynamic a “villain” as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” or Dr. Faustus. I love in Act 4.1. 111, when she pleads to Sir Arthur, the play’s real villain:
“A Witch? Who is not? Hold not that universal name in scorn then. What are your painted things in princes’ courts? Upon whose eyelids lust sits blowing fires To burn men’s souls in sensual hot desires.”
Or, when on trial, Old Carter asks her: “Did you not bewitch Frank to kill his wife? He could never have done’t without the Devil” (5.3.26-7). To which the mighty hag responds:
“Who doubts it? But is every devil mine? Would I had one now whom I might command To tear you all to pieces” (28-30).
These are my favorites, but Sawyer in The Witch... shines, and I think her bravado functions to show the precarious illusion of free-will amidst stronger forces—be they divine, metaphysical, social, or born from the uncontrollable passions of the self. Kinney sees enlightenment and disenchantment as the same thing in this play, but I would like to riff off this idea and say, with disenchantment comes delusion, frenzy, nostalgia, and defeat (xxxiii). When Frank says, “All life is but a wandering to find home.” in Act 4.2.31, he invokes the nostalgic lament of the Romantics-to-come, and his dissatisfaction with his world, his attempt to “find home” and revert to a pre-civil or pre-oedipal state, exhibits a dissatisfaction with institutional and familial arrangements. Nobody really “wins” in this play, except maybe Dog, who severs the apple’s core when he exclaims,
“Ha, ha, ha, ha! Let not the world witches or devils condemn, They follow us and then we follow them.” (5.1.82-4)
I will subside here, and bring more to class. Looking forward to the presentation!
Hands reach back to relics of Nippled moons, extinct and cold, Frozen in designs of love.” –Sylvia Plath “Danse macabre”
“If we look at the husbandless women in this play…one cannot but connect their ambivalent treatment as characters with the probability that the authors were attempting to illuminate larger, more problematic functions of their contemporary society and the social disregard of women/witches.”
I agree. I’d also like to inflect that claim by asserting one of those “larger” societal issues to be the notion of anxiety about limits. That is, the play is permeated by ambivalence, which often surfaces at critical moments to the narrative development as well as to character development. Moreover, those anxieties seem to arise most frequently from tension erupting from the muddled limits between the real and the imagined, the natural and the spiritual, and the benign and the menacing. This is evident even in the origins of the play—an abstract, aesthetic act—as a response to the real-life execution of Elizabeth Sawyer and the circulation of Goodcole’s paranoia-inducing pamphlet. Complicating the confusion between aesthetics and life is the claim on the play’s cover that it is “A known true Story” (p.143). That sequence of confusion (Derrida’s notion of “economimesis”) alone seems to initiate a tense relationship arising from problems of representation, meaning a tension between the real and conceptual. And, in particular, this tension manifests itself through the trope of the seemingly pervasive Jacobean fear of sinister witches circulating amidst and capriciously corroding English communities. Or, as Elizabeth says, those targeted as witches are continuously being scapegoated for natural destruction within communities, such as for “forspeak[ing] their cattle….bewitch[ing] their corn, / Themselves, their servants and their babes at nurse” (II.i.12-3).
In such moments, we certainly see the supposed witches embodying Scot’s descriptors of witches, as the intro to the Manchester text illustrates. And certainly contemporary readers of Scot might assign those signifiers to suspicious women who are “poor, deformed and ignorant” (II.i.3). But, beneath that process is a deeper anxiety about the unidentifiability of the unknown, the Devil, and one’s own propensity for sin. There is a profound frear of the inexplicable at play, driving the relatively unintelligent and intelligent alike to behave brutishly out of anxiety (and consequently violent frustration) with the inexplicable natural phenomenon of their community.
For example, the rural “countryman”, Old Banks, beats Elizabeth for collecting sticks. In the play’s Jacobean context, Old Banks’ violence could be seen (and his reaction justified) as doubly provoked by paranoid misinformation about “spirits” (as in the believer’s use of the term by Frank Thorney in “Some swift spirit / Has blown this news abroad” I.ii.163-4). These people genuinely feared witches, and, according to Scot, and presuming Elizabeth to be a witch, one could read her sticks as an ingredient of her magic and/or a material for preparing/cooking those ingredients (or even as a means of flying, or identifying witches, as when her thatch is burned.)
So when Old Banks spies the presumed witch collecting her materials for bewitching Edmonton, he is afraid with (specious) credible reason. Compounding this is Elizabeth’s verbal response to the attack, which sounds like a bewitching curse (though lacking Latin!): “There [the sticks] be. Would they stuck ‘cross thy/ throat, thy bowels, thy maw, thy midriff” (II.i.24-5)
Furthermore, Elizabeth’s opening sentence is “And why on me?” Not only is this a gripping narrative hook for introducing the play’s female protagonist and theme (i.e. one wonders who she is, why she is targeted, and what consequences/complications will ensue), but this opening question, which is answered within the text only through false information and logic leading to violence, perpetuates the allegorical meaning of the play as a representation of the anxiety of being mistakenly condemned by society for one’s darker aspects (like the witches being blamed for one’s ‘nocturnal emissions’ in The Witch, or like witchcraft/devilry being blamed for temptation in Doctor Faustus).
I also think this correlates to your citation, Cody, of Kinney as “see[ing] enlightenment and disenchantment as the same thing in this play”. They are the same because the tension differentiating them produces an emotional and moral border that muddies itself in its own articulation. And, again, this seems to be a problem linked to anxieties of representation.
Ok. I wrote way more than I wanted to, and I’m yet to get to my other examples of this through nuanced but important differences. But I’ll save those for tomorrow.
I like the play for its Monty Python and the Holy Grail-ness. Or maybe from now on I'll say that I like Monty Python and the Holy Grail for its Witch of Edmonton-ness: All: Out, witch! Beat her, kill her! and-- Angry Mob: She's a witch! Burn her! Burn her!
Anyway, I don't want to steal too much of Trisha's thunder, but the way that names and naming are used in this play really resonate with what she had to say about "The Discoverie of Witchcraft" a few weeks back: "the label "witch," once applied to a woman, is virtually impossible to remove." We see this in the play when Elizabeth Sawyer says, "'Tis all one / To be a witch as to be counted one" (2.1, 118-119).
There are a lot of puns, as there are a lot in the play: Dog is the inverse of God. Thorney pretty accurately describes the position Frank puts himself in. Does this blatant and comical awareness of language draw attention to the "anxiety of representation" that Seth talks about?
I'm interested in the tension between the known and unknown in this play. As Seth points out, there is a great fear of the unknown, the inexplicable. However, Atkinson argues that there's danger in knowing-- it's only when Frank and Elizabeth know that there is good and evil do they commit evil acts. This complicates the moral of the play. On one hand the authors seem to indicate that ignorance is a bad thing-- Old Banks' prejudicial ignorance and Elizabeth Sawyer's moral ignorance are what drive her to witchcraft. But if we are to believe Atkinson, then there is danger in knowing too much. Frank and Elizabeth gain awareness and turn to evil (there's another pun here. Frank literally "knows" too much. He takes two wives. Winnifride "knows" too much and becomes pregnant). So is this play like The Witch, where maybe we aren't supposed to take away much of a moral? If so, how do we reconcile its social awareness, and it's relation to a "true known Story?"
Bryan, I like how you point out the tension in the play between the evils caused by ignorance and the evils caused by (too much) knowledge. I've been thinking a lot during this "Witchcraft" unit about why 16th and 17th century men and women directed so much fear and hatred towards supposed witches, and I often come back to the fact that "witches" were women who knew (or desired to know) too much. Of course, this desire for knowledge was also Dr. Faustus' problem, but there's something especially threatening about an uppity woman's desire for knowledge that harkens back to Eve and her role in mankind's fall. Women who command a surplus of knowledge are dangerous -- especially to men (think the witches in Macbeth). Just as we spoke last week about how the supposed ability of witches to fly was threatening mainly due to the multi-facetedly transgressive power such an ability would allow witches to have, the idea that poor/old/disfigured/waspish women ("witches") could have excessive knowledge of natural and unnatural elements and acts seems equally transgressive to the natural and social order of things, and thus equally threatening.
On a totally different note, I love the social themes of the play that get brought up on the very first page: Frank Thorney, describing how he does not want his child with Winnifred to be born poor, says "The heir that shall be born may not have cause/ To curse his hour of birth, which made him feel/ The misery of BEGGARY and WANT,/ TWO DEVILS that are occasions to enforce/ A shameful end" (lines 16-20, caps mine). While David Atkinson identifies Frank's motives as being "primarily psychological in origin, while the dramatization of Mother Sawyer concentrates a good upon social pressures," he is right that there is a "fair amount of overlap in these respects" as is proved not least of all by that Thorney quote (Atkinson 420). Though the play does represent witchcraft and devilry as real (i.e. I don't think Dog is supposed to be a figment of Mother Sawyer's and Cuddy's imaginations), these opening lines also clearly situate real social concerns as "devils that...enforce a shameful end" -- as shameful an end, I would argue the play is saying, as being condemned for witchcraft. The play's situating of social and political concerns as equal to religious ones is thus set up neatly from the beginning and played out in the variety of ways the blog posts have already mentioned.
I have to echo Cody here - this is a great play. I'm looking forward to talking about this with all of you tomorrow!
Rowley, Dekker, and Ford seem to be carrying on Scot’s project of de-mystifying and humanizing witches. For one thing, they give voice and subjectivity to Elizabeth Sawyer. Where earlier fictional witches are just objects of the audience’s fear and bemusement, Sawyer is able to give an intelligent, plausible account of her origins and motivations. She fumes, “Still vexed! Still tortured! That curmudgeon / Banks / Is ground of all my scandal. I am shunned / And hated like a sickness, made a scorn / To all degrees and sexes” (162). Unlike the witches in Macbeth, Mother Sawyer doesn’t emerge from nowhere, chanting gnomic phrases in spooky meter. According to her own account, she has been shaped, influenced, and ultimately made by society’s marginalization of her. The authors’ larger implication—that there is a “ground” for our identity and consciousness—seems to presage all those later post-Romantic thinkers we like to quote in our seminar papers.
To me, the authors get even more provocative when they hint at a possible reason why such elderly women as Elizabeth Sawyer are vilified and slandered by the likes of Old Banks in the first place. Deftly parrying the accusations against her, Mother Sawyer points out that younger women—“painted things in princes’ courts”—have a “worse” effect on the social order than she herself is accused of having (187-88). These younger women, she goes on to say, are capable of “blowing fires / To burn men’s souls in sensual hot desires” (187). And yet these same women, she points out, are held in high social esteem where she herself is subject to social torment. I wonder if Mother Sawyer/the authors are intimating something here. Could the ascription of witchcraft to elderly women be a kind of displaced fear of sexuality in general, and of female sexuality in particular? I notice how quick Old Banks is to call Mother Sawyer a “hot whore” (186). And I’m keeping in mind that the New World Puritans, who were particularly anxious about sexuality, were notorious for their zeal in burning witches. How far can I/we take this connection between fear of witches and fear of sex?
I’ve also been particularly interested in how sexuality functions vis-à-vis witchcraft. This is particularly pertinent, I think, in this play. The sexuality of the women functions prominently within both the social but also the economic structures in place, and it is as essential and desired as it is suspect and potentially uncontrollable. Once more, there seems to be evidenced in the play a deeply rooted trepidation of the ways in which the body leaves itself open to invasion, possession, or even a kind of perceived parasitism by impure or irrational forces, both real and imagined. Furthermore, it seems that in the literature of this period, consciousness and external forces (be they blessed or malevolent) combine to form a fulcrum of sorts upon which the possibility of salvation, or else the certainty of damnation, hang in the balance. While free will and rationality seem potential saviors (e.g. as Sir Arthur remarks cunningly to Frank Thorney, “You should have thought on this before, and then/Your reason would have overswayed the passion/ Of your unruly lust”), this is sadly not the case with poor old Elizabeth Sawyer, as her intellect leads her awry precisely as a direct consequence of her attempts to subject the irrational beliefs of others to reason. Elizabeth's tragic plight recalls Agamben’s outline of the history of melancholy, in which the disease is described as the product of the “noon-day demon,” or as an affliction to which scholars were believed to be especially susceptible when either fatigue or a sense of their limitations overtook them. This strange tension between the inherent capabilities of mankind and its necessary limitations, both spiritual and material, and the wild hope for soteriological clarity in spite, or because, of it all, was nicely expressed by Winnifrede when she draws her line in the sand with Sir Arthur, saying “I was your devil; O, be you my saint!” I guess it might be possible to organize the play under some neat rubric of topics for our discussion tomorrow, but as we’ve already discovered countless times this far into the class, the themes of agency and determinism, alienation and community, the material and the immaterial, are so mutually and interminably bound up in one another that the original “neat” polarity soon starts to revolve. Your posts have been really helpful in refining the presentation -- thanks, and I look forward to the discussion!
Like Cody, I found the ending of the play somewhat problematic. Professor Lemon’s mathematical approach to Renaissance drama is a neat way of thinking about gaps/discontinuities. If I apply the math to this play, I find that nearly everyone gets his or her comeuppance. The witch is exposed, executed, likewise the bigamist-murderer. But the division isn’t so neat. In my mind, the thing that is the remainder, that lingers unresolved is the Dog (5.1). In the last encounter between Young Banks and the Dog, I got the impression that the dramatists wanted to contain the evil represented by the dog, but that their attempt to end on an upbeat, moral note is complicated and destabilized by the moral insufficiency of the moralizer—Young Banks. Not to say that Young Banks is morally deficient, rather, as the play’s fool, he isn’t “quite there” in terms of his capacity for moral reasoning (this is a version of Atkinson’s point regarding Frank’s character). What does it mean, then, to pit the most foolish and mentally limited character of the play against the demonic dog? There is something of a mock-epic, at least, a denouement about this scene. The fool vs. the devil, the fool emerging the seeming winner. What kind of message are the dramatists conveying by staging this scene? When Young Banks tells the dog, “I defy thee. Out and avaunt!” (5.1.180), would the audience feel satisfied that evil has been contained, or at least, that it has been beaten back into the shadowy periphery? What does the Dog signify, besides pure, unadulterated evil? Might we once again make a socio-historical argument, and say that the Dog represents not simply manifest evil, but the community’s fear of the unknown? In its ability to affect people’s actions by simply brushing against them, the Dog acts almost like the carrier of disease. The Dog tells Young Banks that sometimes it can take the shape of a “louse or flea,” indeed, “any poor vermin” (5.1.119-120), which creates a frightening image of evil as that which is contagious, replicating, and infectious.
For me, this is the most complicated scene in Act 5. I’d really love to hear what people thought about this scene. What an unnerving, exciting play—a perfect prelude to Hallowe’en).
Building on what Cody started with the Kinney (“see[ing] enlightenment and disenchantment as the same thing") and what Bryan et al. said about knowing versus unknowing, I'll respond to Penny's question, which asks what kind of message are the dramatists conveying by staging the final scene between The Dog and Young Banks?
To me it seems to be a triumph of simple-mindedness, with Young Banks serving as a sort of Chauncey Gardiner (Being There) or Forest Gump. Young Cuddy Banks has been hurt the least by the Dog -- he got used "doggedly, not Devilishly," because he used the dog as a dog and not a devil. His actions were innocent, boy-like (chasing after a girl), rather than sinister (Sawyer using The Dog to seek her revenge) or accompanied by the Dog's presence on stage (as when we see the death of Susan and the guilt of Frank, suggesting the Devil/Dog had a part in these actions).
There seems to be something about intent in all this. Young Banks sees A, so he gets A. The Others see B, a less innocent image, and as a result are faced with that. Sawyer addresses this issue in the line Cody first referenced: "What are your painted things in princes' courts, upon whose eyelids lust sits, blowing fires to burn men's souls in sensual hot desires." Are these lusts only capable of reaching men's souls if men observe them? Just as Old Banks can only call Sawyer a witch if he first sees her as a witch?
It may be a reach to go back to Utter Depravity and the inherent corruption of man (especially at midnight), but everyone in this play but Cuddy is casting out something on someone else, either an expectation (Winnifride on Frank) which leads to pain and torment (a Hell-like state) or a judgment (Sir Arthur on Frank and Winni, Old Banks on Sawyer, etcetera) which leads to similar troubles. Cuddy is only embarassed when he embraces the spirit evoked by the Dog. He emerge wet, whereas the others become dead and or distraught. You get what you search for? Is that what this play is advancing, that question. If so, it'd correspond to some of our earlier conversations about The Forbidden Fruit and the idea that certain Knowledge should be kept from the masses and not pursued.
Ok, I'm chiming in late here, but hopefully can still contribute something to this discussion.
The Witch of Edmonton has proven to be quite the delight to read. As mentioned already, there's an almost Monty Pythonesque humor that runs through certain scenes which had me laughing aloud as various deceits are revealed.
There's something of shifting of label which is occurring in the play. While we are presented with the quintessential witch in the form of Elizabeth Sawyer, we are never led to view her as less than human. In fact, as Cody and others note, Sawyer's bravado is something we come to admire. In some respect, we could argue that Dekker makes use of Sawyer to facilitate a critique of his contemporary society. What exactly is a witch he seems to ask? If a witch is known by the fruits of his/her labors: deception, illness, out of control sexuality, murder, and unnatural behavior -- who really is at the heart of the moral and societal decay?
While Elizabeth Sawyer initially calls out the women in society who use sexuality to "bewitch" and "control" others, she does not fail to point the finger at men. In particular, lawyers who lure clients into costly entanglements. Sir Arthur protests that these "men-witches" are not so bad since they do not traffic directly with the devil -- but it is clear that he argues from weak ground as a man who has already practiced deception and has had a hand in almost every deception and ill deed which occurs in the play (albeit indirectly).
For me at least, it seems like the men come across as the true deceivers - more witch-like in their practice of deception, adultery, bigamy, murder, betrayal, and illusion. Frank Thorney's true intentions are hard to pin down -- in one instant he professes love to Winnifride, in another he is negotiating support payment from Sir Arthur, in another he bowing to his father's will (is this knowing deceit in service of Winnifride, or a revelation that he is deceiving her as well). In each step, the plot reveals that Frank as a man with many versions of self, and shows how he deploys his identities in strategic fashion. He's a trickster and a shifter. Who is the real Frank Thorney? Is the last version any more real than the first?
This multiplicity of selves -- a hyper hypocrisy of sorts -- turns up in many of the men in the play. Sir Arthur is not truly the virtuous knight, but actually a lecherous man conducting an affair with Winnifride. Old Banks is simultaneously a man who can beat Elizabeth Sawyer out of paranoia, and yet be so charitable and good in his community that the Black Dog is prevented from striking him. Their ill actions, like Frank's, are not the product of bewitching - nor even end result of traffic with the devil, but purely and completely the product of their own will and choices.
Other than Sawyer, it is Frank who receives the most cues which signify him as witch. He commits murder, betrays acquaintances (Warbeck and Somerton), sees a spirit (murdered wife Susan), and swears false oaths.
The Witch of Edmonton presents a problem ending - one in which some characters seem to get away with lighter punishments than they should. The obvious witches: Sawyer the conventionally defined witch and Frank the functional equivalent witch both receive expected punishment, but other characters escape -- no penalty for Sir Arthur for instance.
As a final point, it seems to me that we are arriving at a functional definition for a witch as a individual who possesses and uses (or is believed to possess and use) power in excess of their position in society. It is the circumventing of an understood natural order which becomes frightening. Whether that power derives from the unknown, the devilish, or the forbidden, that individual's exercise of power beyond what has been proscribed for their station (whether by gender or class) is thereby viewed as witchcraft -- for it creates and enables what "should" not be.
10 comments:
Dear Class,
Wow. What an excellent play! Good call Professor Lemon. I was going to prescribe this for a class of undergraduates but chose “A Lady Killed with Kindness” instead. Needless to say the class did not enjoy it as much as (I thought) they would have this play.
So… I have a few ideas:
Is this a Tragi-Comedy? Seems to be a “Problem Play” by definition. Like the ambivalence that guides Measure for Measure’s end—the scene where the Duke reaches out for Isabella, who neither accepts nor refuses the marriage proposal—The Witch of Edmonton ends on similarly problematic lines. Taken from the Introduction in the New Mermaids Edition, (Thanks Stephan, I love the editions published by this press!) Thomas Dekker’s work traditionally exhibited “an interest in common people…and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed” (Kinney ix). Moreover, “Dekker’s chief interest was in the functioning of society, the need for community and appeals for social concern and change” (xi). In addition, “The situation faced by the real-life Elizabeth Sawyer would have attracted his deepest sympathies, but so would frank Thorney’s arranged marriage and the causes and consequences of his unintended bigamy” (xi). If we look at the husbandless women in this play—those bearing children, and those who have aged on the fringes of society—one cannot but connect their ambivalent treatment as characters with the probability that the authors were attempting to illuminate larger, more problematic functions of their contemporary society and the social disregard of women/witches.
Furthermore, I am fascinated with Mother Sawyer in this play. At times, she is as dynamic a “villain” as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” or Dr. Faustus. I love in Act 4.1. 111, when she pleads to Sir Arthur, the play’s real villain:
“A Witch? Who is not?
Hold not that universal name in scorn then.
What are your painted things in princes’ courts?
Upon whose eyelids lust sits blowing fires
To burn men’s souls in sensual hot desires.”
Or, when on trial, Old Carter asks her: “Did you not bewitch Frank to kill his wife? He could never have done’t without the Devil” (5.3.26-7). To which the mighty hag responds:
“Who doubts it? But is every devil mine?
Would I had one now whom I might command
To tear you all to pieces” (28-30).
These are my favorites, but Sawyer in The Witch... shines, and I think her bravado functions to show the precarious illusion of free-will amidst stronger forces—be they divine, metaphysical, social, or born from the uncontrollable passions of the self. Kinney sees enlightenment and disenchantment as the same thing in this play, but I would like to riff off this idea and say, with disenchantment comes delusion, frenzy, nostalgia, and defeat (xxxiii). When Frank says, “All life is but a wandering to find home.” in Act 4.2.31, he invokes the nostalgic lament of the Romantics-to-come, and his dissatisfaction with his world, his attempt to “find home” and revert to a pre-civil or pre-oedipal state, exhibits a dissatisfaction with institutional and familial arrangements. Nobody really “wins” in this play, except maybe Dog, who severs the apple’s core when he exclaims,
“Ha, ha, ha, ha!
Let not the world witches or devils condemn,
They follow us and then we follow them.” (5.1.82-4)
I will subside here, and bring more to class. Looking forward to the presentation!
Hands reach back to relics of
Nippled moons, extinct and cold,
Frozen in designs of love.” –Sylvia Plath “Danse macabre”
-Cody
Hi All,
I like the following idea from your post, Cody:
“If we look at the husbandless women in this play…one cannot but connect their ambivalent treatment as characters with the probability that the authors were attempting to illuminate larger, more problematic functions of their contemporary society and the social disregard of women/witches.”
I agree. I’d also like to inflect that claim by asserting one of those “larger” societal issues to be the notion of anxiety about limits. That is, the play is permeated by ambivalence, which often surfaces at critical moments to the narrative development as well as to character development. Moreover, those anxieties seem to arise most frequently from tension erupting from the muddled limits between the real and the imagined, the natural and the spiritual, and the benign and the menacing. This is evident even in the origins of the play—an abstract, aesthetic act—as a response to the real-life execution of Elizabeth Sawyer and the circulation of Goodcole’s paranoia-inducing pamphlet. Complicating the confusion between aesthetics and life is the claim on the play’s cover that it is “A known true Story” (p.143). That sequence of confusion (Derrida’s notion of “economimesis”) alone seems to initiate a tense relationship arising from problems of representation, meaning a tension between the real and conceptual. And, in particular, this tension manifests itself through the trope of the seemingly pervasive Jacobean fear of sinister witches circulating amidst and capriciously corroding English communities. Or, as Elizabeth says, those targeted as witches are continuously being scapegoated for natural destruction within communities, such as for “forspeak[ing] their cattle….bewitch[ing] their corn, / Themselves, their servants and their babes at nurse” (II.i.12-3).
In such moments, we certainly see the supposed witches embodying Scot’s descriptors of witches, as the intro to the Manchester text illustrates. And certainly contemporary readers of Scot might assign those signifiers to suspicious women who are “poor, deformed and ignorant” (II.i.3). But, beneath that process is a deeper anxiety about the unidentifiability of the unknown, the Devil, and one’s own propensity for sin. There is a profound frear of the inexplicable at play, driving the relatively unintelligent and intelligent alike to behave brutishly out of anxiety (and consequently violent frustration) with the inexplicable natural phenomenon of their community.
For example, the rural “countryman”, Old Banks, beats Elizabeth for collecting sticks. In the play’s Jacobean context, Old Banks’ violence could be seen (and his reaction justified) as doubly provoked by paranoid misinformation about “spirits” (as in the believer’s use of the term by Frank Thorney in “Some swift spirit / Has blown this news abroad” I.ii.163-4). These people genuinely feared witches, and, according to Scot, and presuming Elizabeth to be a witch, one could read her sticks as an ingredient of her magic and/or a material for preparing/cooking those ingredients (or even as a means of flying, or identifying witches, as when her thatch is burned.)
So when Old Banks spies the presumed witch collecting her materials for bewitching Edmonton, he is afraid with (specious) credible reason. Compounding this is Elizabeth’s verbal response to the attack, which sounds like a bewitching curse (though lacking Latin!): “There [the sticks] be. Would they stuck ‘cross thy/ throat, thy bowels, thy maw, thy midriff” (II.i.24-5)
Furthermore, Elizabeth’s opening sentence is “And why on me?” Not only is this a gripping narrative hook for introducing the play’s female protagonist and theme (i.e. one wonders who she is, why she is targeted, and what consequences/complications will ensue), but this opening question, which is answered within the text only through false information and logic leading to violence, perpetuates the allegorical meaning of the play as a representation of the anxiety of being mistakenly condemned by society for one’s darker aspects (like the witches being blamed for one’s ‘nocturnal emissions’ in The Witch, or like witchcraft/devilry being blamed for temptation in Doctor Faustus).
I also think this correlates to your citation, Cody, of Kinney as “see[ing] enlightenment and disenchantment as the same thing in this play”. They are the same because the tension differentiating them produces an emotional and moral border that muddies itself in its own articulation. And, again, this seems to be a problem linked to anxieties of representation.
Ok. I wrote way more than I wanted to, and I’m yet to get to my other examples of this through nuanced but important differences. But I’ll save those for tomorrow.
Thanks for reading.
I like the play for its Monty Python and the Holy Grail-ness. Or maybe from now on I'll say that I like Monty Python and the Holy Grail for its Witch of Edmonton-ness:
All: Out, witch! Beat her, kill her!
and--
Angry Mob: She's a witch! Burn her! Burn her!
Anyway, I don't want to steal too much of Trisha's thunder, but the way that names and naming are used in this play really resonate with what she had to say about "The Discoverie of Witchcraft" a few weeks back: "the label "witch," once applied to a woman, is virtually impossible to remove." We see this in the play when Elizabeth Sawyer says, "'Tis all one / To be a witch as to be counted one" (2.1, 118-119).
There are a lot of puns, as there are a lot in the play: Dog is the inverse of God. Thorney pretty accurately describes the position Frank puts himself in. Does this blatant and comical awareness of language draw attention to the "anxiety of representation" that Seth talks about?
I'm interested in the tension between the known and unknown in this play. As Seth points out, there is a great fear of the unknown, the inexplicable. However, Atkinson argues that there's danger in knowing-- it's only when Frank and Elizabeth know that there is good and evil do they commit evil acts. This complicates the moral of the play. On one hand the authors seem to indicate that ignorance is a bad thing-- Old Banks' prejudicial ignorance and Elizabeth Sawyer's moral ignorance are what drive her to witchcraft. But if we are to believe Atkinson, then there is danger in knowing too much. Frank and Elizabeth gain awareness and turn to evil (there's another pun here. Frank literally "knows" too much. He takes two wives. Winnifride "knows" too much and becomes pregnant). So is this play like The Witch, where maybe we aren't supposed to take away much of a moral? If so, how do we reconcile its social awareness, and it's relation to a "true known Story?"
Bryan, I like how you point out the tension in the play between the evils caused by ignorance and the evils caused by (too much) knowledge. I've been thinking a lot during this "Witchcraft" unit about why 16th and 17th century men and women directed so much fear and hatred towards supposed witches, and I often come back to the fact that "witches" were women who knew (or desired to know) too much. Of course, this desire for knowledge was also Dr. Faustus' problem, but there's something especially threatening about an uppity woman's desire for knowledge that harkens back to Eve and her role in mankind's fall. Women who command a surplus of knowledge are dangerous -- especially to men (think the witches in Macbeth). Just as we spoke last week about how the supposed ability of witches to fly was threatening mainly due to the multi-facetedly transgressive power such an ability would allow witches to have, the idea that poor/old/disfigured/waspish women ("witches") could have excessive knowledge of natural and unnatural elements and acts seems equally transgressive to the natural and social order of things, and thus equally threatening.
On a totally different note, I love the social themes of the play that get brought up on the very first page: Frank Thorney, describing how he does not want his child with Winnifred to be born poor, says "The heir that shall be born may not have cause/ To curse his hour of birth, which made him feel/ The misery of BEGGARY and WANT,/ TWO DEVILS that are occasions to enforce/ A shameful end" (lines 16-20, caps mine). While David Atkinson identifies Frank's motives as being "primarily psychological in origin, while the dramatization of Mother Sawyer concentrates a good upon social pressures," he is right that there is a "fair amount of overlap in these respects" as is proved not least of all by that Thorney quote (Atkinson 420). Though the play does represent witchcraft and devilry as real (i.e. I don't think Dog is supposed to be a figment of Mother Sawyer's and Cuddy's imaginations), these opening lines also clearly situate real social concerns as "devils that...enforce a shameful end" -- as shameful an end, I would argue the play is saying, as being condemned for witchcraft. The play's situating of social and political concerns as equal to religious ones is thus set up neatly from the beginning and played out in the variety of ways the blog posts have already mentioned.
I have to echo Cody here - this is a great play. I'm looking forward to talking about this with all of you tomorrow!
--Trisha
Rowley, Dekker, and Ford seem to be carrying on Scot’s project of de-mystifying and humanizing witches. For one thing, they give voice and subjectivity to Elizabeth Sawyer. Where earlier fictional witches are just objects of the audience’s fear and bemusement, Sawyer is able to give an intelligent, plausible account of her origins and motivations. She fumes, “Still vexed! Still tortured! That curmudgeon / Banks / Is ground of all my scandal. I am shunned / And hated like a sickness, made a scorn / To all degrees and sexes” (162). Unlike the witches in Macbeth, Mother Sawyer doesn’t emerge from nowhere, chanting gnomic phrases in spooky meter. According to her own account, she has been shaped, influenced, and ultimately made by society’s marginalization of her. The authors’ larger implication—that there is a “ground” for our identity and consciousness—seems to presage all those later post-Romantic thinkers we like to quote in our seminar papers.
To me, the authors get even more provocative when they hint at a possible reason why such elderly women as Elizabeth Sawyer are vilified and slandered by the likes of Old Banks in the first place. Deftly parrying the accusations against her, Mother Sawyer points out that younger women—“painted things in princes’ courts”—have a “worse” effect on the social order than she herself is accused of having (187-88). These younger women, she goes on to say, are capable of “blowing fires / To burn men’s souls in sensual hot desires” (187). And yet these same women, she points out, are held in high social esteem where she herself is subject to social torment. I wonder if Mother Sawyer/the authors are intimating something here. Could the ascription of witchcraft to elderly women be a kind of displaced fear of sexuality in general, and of female sexuality in particular? I notice how quick Old Banks is to call Mother Sawyer a “hot whore” (186). And I’m keeping in mind that the New World Puritans, who were particularly anxious about sexuality, were notorious for their zeal in burning witches. How far can I/we take this connection between fear of witches and fear of sex?
I’ve also been particularly interested in how sexuality functions vis-à-vis witchcraft. This is particularly pertinent, I think, in this play. The sexuality of the women functions prominently within both the social but also the economic structures in place, and it is as essential and desired as it is suspect and potentially uncontrollable. Once more, there seems to be evidenced in the play a deeply rooted trepidation of the ways in which the body leaves itself open to invasion, possession, or even a kind of perceived parasitism by impure or irrational forces, both real and imagined. Furthermore, it seems that in the literature of this period, consciousness and external forces (be they blessed or malevolent) combine to form a fulcrum of sorts upon which the possibility of salvation, or else the certainty of damnation, hang in the balance. While free will and rationality seem potential saviors (e.g. as Sir Arthur remarks cunningly to Frank Thorney, “You should have thought on this before, and then/Your reason would have overswayed the passion/ Of your unruly lust”), this is sadly not the case with poor old Elizabeth Sawyer, as her intellect leads her awry precisely as a direct consequence of her attempts to subject the irrational beliefs of others to reason. Elizabeth's tragic plight recalls Agamben’s outline of the history of melancholy, in which the disease is described as the product of the “noon-day demon,” or as an affliction to which scholars were believed to be especially susceptible when either fatigue or a sense of their limitations overtook them. This strange tension between the inherent capabilities of mankind and its necessary limitations, both spiritual and material, and the wild hope for soteriological clarity in spite, or because, of it all, was nicely expressed by Winnifrede when she draws her line in the sand with Sir Arthur, saying “I was your devil; O, be you my saint!”
I guess it might be possible to organize the play under some neat rubric of topics for our discussion tomorrow, but as we’ve already discovered countless times this far into the class, the themes of agency and determinism, alienation and community, the material and the immaterial, are so mutually and interminably bound up in one another that the original “neat” polarity soon starts to revolve. Your posts have been really helpful in refining the presentation -- thanks, and I look forward to the discussion!
Like Cody, I found the ending of the play somewhat problematic. Professor Lemon’s mathematical approach to Renaissance drama is a neat way of thinking about gaps/discontinuities. If I apply the math to this play, I find that nearly everyone gets his or her comeuppance. The witch is exposed, executed, likewise the bigamist-murderer. But the division isn’t so neat. In my mind, the thing that is the remainder, that lingers unresolved is the Dog (5.1). In the last encounter between Young Banks and the Dog, I got the impression that the dramatists wanted to contain the evil represented by the dog, but that their attempt to end on an upbeat, moral note is complicated and destabilized by the moral insufficiency of the moralizer—Young Banks. Not to say that Young Banks is morally deficient, rather, as the play’s fool, he isn’t “quite there” in terms of his capacity for moral reasoning (this is a version of Atkinson’s point regarding Frank’s character). What does it mean, then, to pit the most foolish and mentally limited character of the play against the demonic dog? There is something of a mock-epic, at least, a denouement about this scene. The fool vs. the devil, the fool emerging the seeming winner. What kind of message are the dramatists conveying by staging this scene? When Young Banks tells the dog, “I defy thee. Out and avaunt!” (5.1.180), would the audience feel satisfied that evil has been contained, or at least, that it has been beaten back into the shadowy periphery? What does the Dog signify, besides pure, unadulterated evil? Might we once again make a socio-historical argument, and say that the Dog represents not simply manifest evil, but the community’s fear of the unknown? In its ability to affect people’s actions by simply brushing against them, the Dog acts almost like the carrier of disease. The Dog tells Young Banks that sometimes it can take the shape of a “louse or flea,” indeed, “any poor vermin” (5.1.119-120), which creates a frightening image of evil as that which is contagious, replicating, and infectious.
For me, this is the most complicated scene in Act 5. I’d really love to hear what people thought about this scene. What an unnerving, exciting play—a perfect prelude to Hallowe’en).
Building on what Cody started with the Kinney (“see[ing] enlightenment and disenchantment as the same thing") and what Bryan et al. said about knowing versus unknowing, I'll respond to Penny's question, which asks what kind of message are the dramatists conveying by staging the final scene between The Dog and Young Banks?
To me it seems to be a triumph of simple-mindedness, with Young Banks serving as a sort of Chauncey Gardiner (Being There) or Forest Gump. Young Cuddy Banks has been hurt the least by the Dog -- he got used "doggedly, not Devilishly," because he used the dog as a dog and not a devil. His actions were innocent, boy-like (chasing after a girl), rather than sinister (Sawyer using The Dog to seek her revenge) or accompanied by the Dog's presence on stage (as when we see the death of Susan and the guilt of Frank, suggesting the Devil/Dog had a part in these actions).
There seems to be something about intent in all this. Young Banks sees A, so he gets A. The Others see B, a less innocent image, and as a result are faced with that. Sawyer addresses this issue in the line Cody first referenced: "What are your painted things in princes' courts, upon whose eyelids lust sits, blowing fires to burn men's souls in sensual hot desires." Are these lusts only capable of reaching men's souls if men observe them? Just as Old Banks can only call Sawyer a witch if he first sees her as a witch?
It may be a reach to go back to Utter Depravity and the inherent corruption of man (especially at midnight), but everyone in this play but Cuddy is casting out something on someone else, either an expectation (Winnifride on Frank) which leads to pain and torment (a Hell-like state) or a judgment (Sir Arthur on Frank and Winni, Old Banks on Sawyer, etcetera) which leads to similar troubles. Cuddy is only embarassed when he embraces the spirit evoked by the Dog. He emerge wet, whereas the others become dead and or distraught. You get what you search for? Is that what this play is advancing, that question. If so, it'd correspond to some of our earlier conversations about The Forbidden Fruit and the idea that certain Knowledge should be kept from the masses and not pursued.
Ok, I'm chiming in late here, but hopefully can still contribute something to this discussion.
The Witch of Edmonton has proven to be quite the delight to read. As mentioned already, there's an almost Monty Pythonesque humor that runs through certain scenes which had me laughing aloud as various deceits are revealed.
There's something of shifting of label which is occurring in the play. While we are presented with the quintessential witch in the form of Elizabeth Sawyer, we are never led to view her as less than human. In fact, as Cody and others note, Sawyer's bravado is something we come to admire. In some respect, we could argue that Dekker makes use of Sawyer to facilitate a critique of his contemporary society. What exactly is a witch he seems to ask? If a witch is known by the fruits of his/her labors: deception, illness, out of control sexuality, murder, and unnatural behavior -- who really is at the heart of the moral and societal decay?
While Elizabeth Sawyer initially calls out the women in society who use sexuality to "bewitch" and "control" others, she does not fail to point the finger at men. In particular, lawyers who lure clients into costly entanglements. Sir Arthur protests that these "men-witches" are not so bad since they do not traffic directly with the devil -- but it is clear that he argues from weak ground as a man who has already practiced deception and has had a hand in almost every deception and ill deed which occurs in the play (albeit indirectly).
For me at least, it seems like the men come across as the true deceivers - more witch-like in their practice of deception, adultery, bigamy, murder, betrayal, and illusion. Frank Thorney's true intentions are hard to pin down -- in one instant he professes love to Winnifride, in another he is negotiating support payment from Sir Arthur, in another he bowing to his father's will (is this knowing deceit in service of Winnifride, or a revelation that he is deceiving her as well). In each step, the plot reveals that Frank as a man with many versions of self, and shows how he deploys his identities in strategic fashion. He's a trickster and a shifter. Who is the real Frank Thorney? Is the last version any more real than the first?
This multiplicity of selves -- a hyper hypocrisy of sorts -- turns up in many of the men in the play. Sir Arthur is not truly the virtuous knight, but actually a lecherous man conducting an affair with Winnifride. Old Banks is simultaneously a man who can beat Elizabeth Sawyer out of paranoia, and yet be so charitable and good in his community that the Black Dog is prevented from striking him. Their ill actions, like Frank's, are not the product of bewitching - nor even end result of traffic with the devil, but purely and completely the product of their own will and choices.
Other than Sawyer, it is Frank who receives the most cues which signify him as witch. He commits murder, betrays acquaintances (Warbeck and Somerton), sees a spirit (murdered wife Susan), and swears false oaths.
The Witch of Edmonton presents a problem ending - one in which some characters seem to get away with lighter punishments than they should. The obvious witches: Sawyer the conventionally defined witch and Frank the functional equivalent witch both receive expected punishment, but other characters escape -- no penalty for Sir Arthur for instance.
As a final point, it seems to me that we are arriving at a functional definition for a witch as a individual who possesses and uses (or is believed to possess and use) power in excess of their position in society. It is the circumventing of an understood natural order which becomes frightening. Whether that power derives from the unknown, the devilish, or the forbidden, that individual's exercise of power beyond what has been proscribed for their station (whether by gender or class) is thereby viewed as witchcraft -- for it creates and enables what "should" not be.
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