The Witch - Witches

Witches

Middleton's primary source for material on witches was the Discovery of Witchcraft of Reginald Scot (1584), from which the playwright drew invocations, demons' names, and potion ingredients. Middleton, however, ignores Scot's skeptical attitude toward much witchcraft lore, and merely mines his book for exploitable elements. He also borrowed the situation of a historical Duke and Duchess of Ravenna, related in the Florentine History of Niccolò Machiavelli and in the fiction of Matteo Bandello.

Witchcraft was a topical subject in the era Middleton wrote, and was the subject of other works like The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches. Middleton's chief witch is a 120-year-old practitioner called Hecate. Her magic adheres to the Classical standard of Seneca's Medea; she specializes in love and sex magic, giving one character a charm to cause impotence. (In forming this aspect of the play's plot, Middleton may have been influenced by the contemporaneous real-life divorce scandal of Lady Frances Howard and the Earl of Essex, which involved charges of magic-induced impotence.)

Middleton's Hecate has a son (and incestuous lover) called Firestone, who serves as the play's clown. She leads a coven of four other witches, Stadlin, Hoppo, Hellwayn, and Prickle. The occult material in The Witch occurs in only three scenes:

• Act I, scene ii introduces the coven and contains abundant witchcraft exotica, to establish the macabre mood — fried rats and pickled spiders, the flesh of an "unbaptized brat," a cauldron boiling over a blue flame, "Urchins, elves, hags, satyrs, Pans, fawns...Tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, imps...", "the blood of a flittermouse," and much much more. At one point, a cat enters playing a fiddle (a role probably filled by a musician in feline costume).

• III,iii features the song "Come away" that was added to Macbeth, and deals the witches' flight through the air: at one point "A Spirit descends in the shape of a Cat," and Hecate is shown "Ascending with the Spirit."

• V,ii contains the song "Black spirits," also inserted into Macbeth.

Middleton's witches "are lecherous, murderous and perverse in the traditional demonological way, but they are also funny, vulnerable and uncomfortably necessary to the maintenance of state power and social position by those who resort to them." Middleton's choice to set the play in Italy may reflect an element of satire against witchcraft beliefs and practices in Roman Catholic societies of his era.