The Late Lancashire Witches - Date and Collaboration

Date and Collaboration

It was once thought that Brome revised an old play by Heywood to make it pertinent to the situation in the early 1630s, generating a work that is roughly 90 per cent Heywood and 10 per cent Brome. Modern scholarship argues that the dramatists' extensive use of court documents shows that Heywood and Brome wrote a new play in 1633–34 to capitalize on a current public affair, producing a work that is much closer to an equal collaboration. The 1634 quarto was printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller Benjamin Fisher, with a Prologue addressed by Heywood to the Earl of Dorset.