Plot
In the main plot of the Heywood/Brome play, an upright and hospitable gentleman named Generous discovers that his wife has a secret nocturnal life, as the leader of a coven of witches; his miller wounds her with his sword while she is in the shape of a cat. When one of her servants refuses to get her horse, Mistress Generous bridles him instead and rides him to her coven. The conventional male-dominated relationship between husband and wife is subverted as Mistress Generous seeks greater freedom – until she is arrested and brought to trial. In the Seely family depicted in the subplot, the upset of social norms is even more extreme: the father is cowed by his son, the mother by her daughter, and the children by the servants. The family's butler and maid, Lawrence and Parnell (the only characters in the play who speak in Lancashire dialect), marry, determined to lord it over their employers; but Lawrence is rendered impotent on his wedding night by a bewitched codpiece, and once again the woman inverts the usual social order. It is with the discovery and prosecution of the witches that society's norms are restored.
Read more about this topic: The Late Lancashire Witches
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—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)