Staging Devils and Witches: Had Shakespeare Read Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft?

Abstract

Pierre Kapitaniak follows up on Laroque’s study by turning to witchcraft and demonology. Doing so, he examines the tenuous line distinguishing superstition from science, and analyses the staging of devils and witches in Shakespeare’s drama. Despite legends about King James I ordering it to be burnt, Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, was an ongoing success from the moment it was published, more often meeting with approval than with condemnation. Among those who approved of Scot’s ideas and who plundered them eagerly, were several generations of London playwrights. In The Discoverie of Witchcraft they found the buds of inspiration for all their supernatural figures that became so successful on Elizabethan and Jacobean stages, and one can only wonder whether the slow evolution from the usual supernatural paraphernalia (ghosts, demons, witches and wizards) towards more and more unbelievable figures, is not due to Scot’s widespread influence. Kapitaniak thus tries to reassess whether undisputable traces of Scot’s treatise can be found and ascertained in Shakespeare’s plays, and if his findings yield no easy conclusion, they offer fascinating hypotheses.