Genre
The Late Lancashire Witches belongs to a sub-genre of English Renaissance drama that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft. The most famous of these plays is Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1603–6), though Middleton's The Witch (c. 1609–16) and The Witch of Edmonton (1621) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, are other notable examples.
The 1633–34 prosecution was a sequel to a larger trial of 1612 (the major affair of its kind in English history) that saw ten people from the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire hanged at Lancaster Moor. The second episode was still unresolved when the two playwrights wrote their play; the dramatists were working so close to events that they had no firm conclusion – the play's Epilogue assumes the guilt of the four women who were the prime suspects but admits that "the ripeness yet of time / Has not reveal'd" the final outcome. (In fact, Edmund Robinson, the ten-year-old boy who was the prosecutors' chief witness, later admitted subornation of perjury; King Charles I pardoned all seventeen people convicted.) The Lord Chamberlain of that time, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, may have prompted the creation of the play for political reasons.
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