The Witch Figure: The Witch of Edmonton

Abstract

IntroductionIn 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer was hanged for the of Agnes Ratcleife, following a well-publicised court case held at the Old Bailey. Immediately after Sawyer's execution Henry Goodcole, the chaplain of Newgate prison, published a pamphlet recounting in detail the trial and confession of Elizabeth Sawyer. Goodcole refers in the introduction to a number of ballads that describe Sawyer's supernatural orchestration of Agnes Ratcleife's suicide. While Goodcole refutes these claims as groundless rumours, the playwrights William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford include these accusations in their staging of The Witch of Edmonton. Using The Witch of Edmonton as a case study, I will argue that self-murder is a dramatic tool that definitively stigmatises the staged-witch.In studying the relationship between the play and its contextual material, this article is shaped by a number of studies on early modern pamphlets. Sandra Clarke in The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580-1640, for example, has examined moralistic pamphlets at length, while Alexandra Walsham has explored prodigies and providential pamphlets in her book Providence in Early Modern England.1 Tessa Watt has also conducted research into Protestant literature in Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640. In expounding the relationship between providential readings within pamphlet material and the public stage, Peter Lake's The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England has proved especially valuable to this research.2 While suicide pamphlets differ significantly from pamphlets, Peter Lake's work provides a template for the study of early modern suicide material.3 Highlighting important aspects of the relationship between pamphlet and play, Lake argues that: 'The more convoluted accounts of the workings of divine providence reach their apogee in some of the plays where a providential reading of the events portrayed sometimes far transcends the confirmation of the soundbite moral message murder will out so prevalent in the pamphlets. On the contrary, in many of the plays a providential reading of the text becomes, in effect, a legitimating underpinning for the plotting of the play or the telling of the tale.'4 In my study of the Elizabeth Sawyer narratives, this facet of the relationship between source materials and the play proves significant. However, in contrast to Peter Lake's observation, my primary thesis challenges the notion that the dramatisations transcend the moral didacticism of the source pamphlet. Indeed, it is the contention of this article that The Witch of Edmonton wholly inverts Lake's theorisation of the morally soundbiting pamphlet. Instead, I suggest that in the case of Dekker, Ford and Rowley's play The Witch of Edmonton, the nuanced and morally ambiguous narrative of Goodcole's confession pamphlet is reduced to a simplistic morality tale that draws on contemporary fears and superstitions.As originally outlined by St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologicae , the sin of self-murder is threefold. Firstly, suicide is denounced as an act against nature, secondly as a crime against the state, and thirdly as a sin against God.5 From the seventh century onwards, the law against self-murder was rooted in Christianity. But while medieval and early modern ecclesiastical writers cite biblical examples, such as the hanging of Judas, in arguments against suicide, the prohibition of suicide has little scriptural basis; in denunciations of self-murder, the majority of theologians do little more than cite the sixth commandment, 'Thou shault not kill'.6 Nevertheless, in the late Middle Ages, Christian condemnation of suicide was heralded by Augustine in Of the Cities of God:This we say, this we affirme, this wee vniuersally approoue, that no man ought to procure his owne death for feare of temporall miseries; because in doing this hee falleth into eternall: Neither may hee doe it to avoide the sinnes of others, for in this hee maketh himselfe guilty of a deadly guilt, whome others wickednesse could not make guilty: nor for his owne sinnes past, for which hee had more neede to wish for life, that hee might repent himselfe of them: nor for any desire of a better life to bee hoped for after death: Because such as are guiltie of the losse of their owne life, neuer enioye any better life after their death. …