The Staging of Witchcraft and a “Spectacle of Strangeness”: Witchcraft at Court and the Globe

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© 2014 Shokhan Rasool Ahmed. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 10/08/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9280-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-9281-9 (e)

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Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Chapter One: Music and a Spectacle of Strangeness

1.1 Jonson’s 1616 Folio and Authorship

1.2 Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens

1.3 Jonson’s Spectacle of Strangeness and Witchcraft

1.4 The Costume of Witches and Masquers

1.5 Stage Directions of the Hags and Masquers

1.6 John Marston’s The Wonder of Women, Tragedy of Sophonisba

1.7 An Introduction to the Play with its Performance and Authorship

1.8 Witchcraft and Music in Sophonisba

1.9 Stage Directions in The Tragedy of Sophonisba

Chapter Two: Dragons on the Jacobean Stage

2.1 Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

2.2 Stage Directions in Doctor Faustus

2.3 Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

2.4 Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter

2.5 William Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin

Chapter Three: Witches Which Never Flew: Native Witchcraft and the Cunning Woman on the Stage

3.1 The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford (1621)

3.2 Mother Bombie by John Lyly (1594)

3.3 The Wise Woman of Hogsdon by Thomas Heywood (1604)

3.4 Genre and Stage Directions of these three Plays

Conclusion

Bibliography

Reference Works

Abstract

This study is principally concerned with the staging of drama at the Blackfriars theatre, especially from the time that the King’s Men leased it in 1609. However, not all the plays in this book were staged at the Blackfriars from the beginning, some of them were staged there after being revised and refashioned. The book examines Jacobean plays (e.g., The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, The Wonder of Women or Sophonisba, The Devil’s Charter, The Masque of Queens, The Witch of Edmonton, and The Birth of Merlin), in comparison to Elizabethan (e.g., Dr Faustus, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Mother Bombie), which were performed in different locations.

The nature and status of stage directions in these plays will also be investigated, paying particular attention to the status of stage directions in printed texts, and whether these were originally written by the playwrights themselves or were revised or supplied by editors, scriveners or members of the theatre companies.

In each chapter, several questions will be investigated. Why is it particularly important to look at the visual depiction of hags and masquers in theatre? What is the difference when a supernatural character ‘enters’ the stage via flying or platform traps and does it make any difference to the audience when supernatural characters use one form of entrance rather than another? The study will also evaluate how the technology of the Blackfriars playhouse facilitated the appearance of spirits, devils, witches, magicians, deities and dragons on stage. The third chapter deals with native witches and ‘cunning women’ on stage and also considers why elderly women in early modern England were more prone to accusations of witchcraft than the young, and why a number of harmless women were tortured, including midwives and healers.

Introduction

This study demonstrates that plays about witchcraft and witches were popular in early modern England and, moreover, people were interested in flying witches and their dances. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries plays featuring village witches were popular; in such plays the dramatists claimed to draw a social history of their community. Some of plays concerned with witch trials while others were about witch-hunting.

Some playwrights presented the superstitious beliefs about witchcraft and witches through technology rather than just through the expression of words. For example, Thomas Middleton, in The Witch, and Ben Jonson, in The Masque of Queens, show supernatural effects through technology to amuse the audience and engage their minds. In contrast, Shakespeare expressed the supernatural element in Macbeth through words rather than technology. In addition, the stage machinery has been utilized to produce the popular superstitious effect on stage to the audience which is something unusual by English standards, aerial journey of witches being rather more familiar in the continental tradition at this period.

The argument presented here mainly concerns the staging of witchcraft in Jacobean drama during the period of 1603-25, when interest in witchcraft was particularly intense. The main questions that will be considered in this book are the following: why is it particularly important to look at the visual depiction of witches in theatre? Does the visual spectacle of witchcraft scenes intersect with the genre of the plays? To what extent do changing theatrical tastes affect the way that witches are shown on stage?

Chapter One turns from Blackfriars witchcraft to witchcraft at Court. It examines Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens (1609) in comparison to John Marston’s The Wonder of Women, Tragedy of Sophonisba (1604-6). The Masque of Queens was performed at Court but Sophonisba at Blackfriars. It could be argued that theatrical tastes at court may have had an influence on playhouse practice. However, a distinctive feature of both works is their exploration of the nature of witchcraft through music and dance, the authors being concerned with the representations of witches’ festivities. In The Masque of Queens, music plays a major part as the hags make their entrances and exits from the stage and to hell. In Tragedy of Sophonisba, I examine the way the entrances and music of this play were performed by youths alongside the dramatic techniques of the play, such as the stage action and the entrances and exits followed by music. In sum, I explore how the writers dramatize the visual spectacle of their witches on stage, how these plays represent witchcraft and how their witches fit in with their work.

Chapter Two examines plays both Elizabethan (Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1594), Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1588-92)) and Jacobean (Barnabe Barne’s The Devil’s Charter (1607) and The Birth of Merlin by William Rowley (1622)). This part of the book considers these plays in the light of my witchcraft study for their staging of supernatural entities such as male witches, magicians, and dragons. What binds all these sorcerer plays together is that they all feature dragon(s) controlled by a magician. This chapter investigates the stage directions of the dragons in making their exits and entrances, what role they have in the plays, and how they affect the character of the drama. It also discusses the character of the sorcerers with regard to the kind of rituals and magic they make.

Chapter Three examines The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford (1621), Mother Bombie by John Lyly (1594) and The Wise Woman of Hogsdon by Thomas Heywood (1604), in order to shed light on another type of witch, namely the cunning woman on stage. Unlike the earlier plays considered in this book, these plays are based on English, rather than Continental, witch-lore. The three protagonists live in the suburbs and resort to witchcraft in order to make their living. I examine the differences between Mother Sawyer, Mother Bombie and the Wise Woman: how they appear on stage as hag-like or local cunning women, whether they fly or not, and what their differences are from witches.

Chapter One

Music and a Spectacle of Strangeness

This paper examines Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens (1609), and The Wonder of Women, Tragedy of Sophonisba (1604-6) by John Marston, considering the topic of the nature and status of stage directions related to the hags in Jonson’s play, and how they make their entrances and exits from the stage and to hell. In Tragedy of Sophonisba, I examine the way the entries and the music of this play were performed by youths alongside the dramatic techniques of the play, and address the question of whether Marston’s hags flew or not while they scatter on stage to the accompaniment of the music. In sum, I explore how Jonson and Marston present the visual spectacle of their witches on stage, how Jonson’s masque and Marston’s play represent witchcraft and how their witches fit in this masque and play.

What binds Jonson’s masque and Marston’s play together is the use of music and dance through which the hags appear on stage. Both Jonson (in all the nine Charms - list of spells) and Marston (Act III. i & IV. i) explore the nature of witchcraft through music and dance: Jonson’s hags disperse on stage and the manner of their dance is full of a ‘spectacle of strangeness’ while Marston’s characters are led away to seduction with a musical accompaniment. In each play I will concentrate on the matter of authorship and the status of stage directions in the printed text, and whether the stage directions (only those involving the supernatural characters) in this masque and play were originally written by the author himself or were revised or supplied by editors.

1.1 Jonson’s 1616 Folio and Authorship

In order to consider the ways in which the stage directions in The Masque of Queens direct the movements of Jonson’s hags, one must first examine the status of the printed text through which these stage directions are transmitted. The Works of Benjamine Jonson, printed by William Standby in 1616 in London, includes a collection of plays and poems and has a unique place in the history of printing, in its presentation of dramatic texts in a single volume with its own aesthetic design.¹ Jonson was aged 43 when the 1616 Folio was printed and it was a turning point in his life; he was the first English writer for the stage who published his own collected works in folio.² Jonson was responsible for two general classes of revision in the Folio: he made changes in punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and italicization, as well as a number of added stage directions and many changes of word of phrase.³ However, it appears that Jonson did not supervise the printing of the section of the Folio which contains the masques and entertainments. Herford and Simpson argue that ‘The [Folio] text of the entertainment and masques is often carelessly printed, and the Latin and Greek quotations in the notes are especially bad. Jonson cannot have read the proofs’.⁴ The exception is the Masque of Queens which, as Donovan notes, was printed from the holograph in the British Library.⁵

Building on the work of Andrew Gurr, Richard Cave compares the 1616 Folio of Jonson’s Works with the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s. He notes that while ‘Shakespeare’s plays were printed from copy that in various ways was designed primarily for actors’ use’, Jonson’s were ‘the product of careful editing, even rewriting and expansion, and designed for a readership’.⁶ Shakespeare was not responsible for revision and stage directions in the First Folio but Jonson was for his own Folio. This distinction is important here as it suggests that all the stage directions are written by Jonson himself. The stage directions are relatively few in Shakespeare’s Folio. However, Jonson’s are even fewer in number. One can find a very small number of bracketed stage directions which are printed in italics and set between the lines of the text and the surrounding dialogue.

Besides the 1616 folio, The Masque of Queens exists in an autograph manuscript (British Library Royal