The English theatre, in common with every other form of the world’s drama, had a religious, or even more exactly a liturgical, origin. At the Norman Conquest as the English monasteries began to be filled with cultured French scholars there is evidence that Latin dialogues, the legends of saints and martyrs, something after the fashion of Hrotsvitha’s comedies, which we do not imagine to have been a unique phenomenon, found their way here also, and from recitation to the representation of these was an easy and indeed inevitable step. For it is almost impossible to declaim without appropriate action. From the very heart of the liturgy itself arose the Mystery Play.

The method of performing these early English guild plays has been frequently and exactly described, and I would only draw attention to one feature of the movable scaffold which passed from station to station, that is the dark cavern at the side of the last of the three sedes, Hell-mouth. No pains were spared to make this as horrible and realistic as might be. Demons with hideous heads issued from it, whilst ever and anon lurid flames burst forth and dismal cries were heard. Thus the Digby S. Mary Magdalen play has the stage-direction: “a stage, and Helle ondyrneth that stage.” At Coventry the Cappers had a “hell-mouth” for the Harrowing of Hell, and the Weavers another for Doomsday. This was provided with fire, a windlass, and a barrel for the earthquake. In the stage-directions to Jordan’s Cornish Creation of the World Lucifer descends to hell “apareled fowle wᵗʰ fyre about hem” and the place is filled with “every degre of devylls of lether and spirytis on cordis.” Among the “establies” required for the Rouen play of 1474 was “Enfer fait en maniere d’une grande gueulle se cloant et ouvrant quant besoing en est.” The last stage-direction of the Sponsus, a liturgical play from Limoges,—assigned by M. M. W. Cloetta and G. Paris to the earlier half of the twelfth century—which deals with the Wise and Foolish Virgins runs as follows: “Modo accipiant eas [fatuas uirgines] dæmones et præcipitentur in infernum.”

The Devil himself is one of the most prominent characters in the Mystery, the villain of the piece. So the York cycle commences with The Creation and the Fall of Lucifer. Whilst the Angels are singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” before the throne of God, Satan appears exulting in his pride to be cast down speedily into hell whence he howls his complaint beginning “Owte, owte! harrowe!” There is a curious incident in the episode of the Dream of Pilate’s wife. Whilst she sleeps Satan whispers in her ear the vision which moves her to try to stay the condemnation of Jesus whereby mankind is to be redeemed. The last play of the York cycle is the Day of Judgement.

In like manner the Towneley cycle opens with The Creation, and presently we have the stage-direction hic deus recedit à suo solio & lucifer sedebit in eodem solio. The scene soon shifts to hell when we hear the demons reproaching Lucifer for his pride. After the creation of Adam and Eve follows Lucifer’s lament. In the long episode of Doomsday a number of demons appear and are kept inordinately busy.

The Devil was represented as black, with goat’s horns, ass’s ears, cloven hoofs, and an immense phallus. He is, in fact, the Satyr of the old Dionysiac processions, a nature-spirit, the essence of joyous freedom and unrestrained delight, shameless if you will, for the old Greek knew not shame. He is the figure who danced light-heartedly across the Aristophanaic stage, stark nude in broad midday,⁠[1] animally physical, exuberant, ecstatic, crying aloud the primitive refrain, Φαλῆς, ἑταῖρε Βακχίου, ξύγκωμε, νυκτεροπλάνητε, μοιχε, παιδεραστά, (Phales, boon mate of Bacchus, joyous comrade in the dance, wanton wanderer o’ nights, fornicating Phales), in a word he was Paganism incarnate, and Paganism was the Christian’s deadliest foe; so they took him, the Bacchic reveller, they smutted him from horn to hoof, and he remained the Christian’s deadliest foe, the Devil.⁠[2]

It was long before the phallic demon was banished the stage, for strange as it may seem, positive evidence exists that he was known there as late as Shakespeare’s day. In 1620 was published in London by Edward Wright A Courtly Masque: The Deuice called, The World tost at Tennis. “As it hath beene diuers times Presented to the Contentment of many Noble and Worthy Spectators: By the Prince his Seruants.” It was “Inuented and set downe by Tho: Middleton, Gent, and William Rowley, Gent.” The title-page presents a rough engraving of the various characters in this masque, doubtless from a sketch made at the actual performance. Outside the main group stands a hideous black figure “The Diuele,” who made his appearance towards the end to take part in the last dance, furnished with horns, hoofs, talons, tail, and a monstrous phallus. It may be remarked that these horns are prominent on the goat-like head (a clear satyr) of the Devil in Doctor Faustus as depicted on the title-page of the Marlovian quarto. A phallus, to which reference is made in the text, was also worn by the character dressed up as the monkey (Bavian) in the May-dance scene in Shakespeare & Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsman, Act III, 5, 1613. It is worth remembering that troops of phallic demons formed a standing characteristic of the old German carnival comedy. Moreover, several of the grotesque types of the Commedia dell’ arte in the second decade of the seventeenth century were traditionally equipped in like manner.⁠[3] That the Devil was so represented in the English theatre is important. It gives us the popular idea of the Prince of Evil, and incidentally throws a side-light upon much of the grotesque and obscene evidence in the contemporary witch-trials.

In Skelton’s lost Nigramansir one of the stage directions is stated to have been “Enter Balsebub with a beard,” no doubt the black vizard with an immense goatish beard familiar to the old religious drama. Presumably the chief use of the Necromancer, who gives his name to this play, was indeed but to speak the Prologue which summons the Devil who buffets and kicks him for his pains. However, we only know the play from Warton, who describes it as having been shown him by William Collins, the poet, at Chichester, about 1759. He says: “It is the Nigramansir, a morall Enterlude and a pithie, written by Maister Skelton laureate, and plaid before the King and other estatys at Woodstoke on Palme Sunday. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in a thin quarto, in the year 1504. It must have been presented before Henry VII, at the royal manor or palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire, now destroyed. The characters are a Necromancer or conjurer, the devil, a notary public, Simony, and Philargyria or Avarice. It is partly a satire on some abuses in the Church.... The story, or plot, is the trial of Simony and Avarice.” Beyond what Warton tells us nothing further is known of the play. Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica, 106, declared: “it is utterly incredible that the Nigramansir ... ever existed.” It has been shown, too, that Warton as a literary historian is not infrequently suspect, and E. G. Duff, Hand Lists of English Printers, can trace no extant copy of this “morall Enterlude.”

In the English moralities the Devil plays an important part, and, as in their French originals or analogues, he is consistently hampering and opposing the moral purpose or lesson which the action of these compositions is designed to enforce. In the later English plays also which evolved with added regularity from these interludes the Devil is always a popular character. He is generally attended by the Vice, who although in some sort a serving-man or jester in the fiend’s employ, devotes his time to twitting, teazing, tormenting, and thwarting his master for the edification, not unmixed with fun, of the audience. In The Castell of Perseverance Lucifer appears shouting in good old fashion “Out herowe I rore,” just as he was wont to announce himself in the Mysteries, and he is wearing his “devil’s array” over the habit of a “prowde galaunt.” Wever’s Lusty Juventus has unmistakable traces of the slime of the evil days of Edward VI, in whose reign it was written, and when the Devil calls Hipocrisy to his aid we are prepared for a flood of empty but bitter abuse which embodies the sour Puritan hatred against the Catholic Church, and towards the end, under the misnomer God’s Merciful Promises, we are not surprised to meet a tiresome old gentleman who cantingly expounds the doctrine of Justification by Faith.

In the interlude to which Collier has assigned the name Mankind Mischief summons to her aid the fiend Titivillus, who had appeared in the Judicium of the Towneley Mysteries. Once the Devil’s registrar and tollsman, he is best known as “Master Lollard.” According to a silly old superstition Titivillus was an imp whose business it was to pick up the words any priest might drop and omit whilst saying Mass.

When we pass to the beginnings of the regular drama we find an extremely interesting play that introduces, if not magic, at least fortune-telling, John Lyly’s “Pleasant Conceited Comedie” Mother Bombie, acted by the children of Paul’s and first printed in 1594. Although the plot is of the utmost complexity and artificiality it does not seem to be derived, as are most of Lyly’s stories, from any classical or pseudo-classical source, whilst the cunning old woman of Rochester, who supplies the title, has in fact little to say or do, except that her intervention helps to bring about the unravelling of a perfect maze and criss-cross of incidents. When Selena addresses the beldame with “They say, you are a witch,” Mother Bombie quickly retorts “They lie, I am a cunning woman,” a passage not without significance.

Upon a very different level from Lyly’s play stands Marlowe’s magnificent drama The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. The legend of a man who sells his soul to the Devil for infinite knowledge and absolute power seems to have crystallized about the sixth century, when the story of Theophilus was supposed to have been related in Greek by his pupil Eutychianus. Of course, every warlock had bartered his soul to Satan, and throughout the whole of the Middle Ages judicial records, the courts of the Inquisition, to say nothing of popular knowledge, could have told of a thousand such. But this particular legend seems to have captured the imagination of both Western and Eastern Christendom; it is met with in a variety of forms; it was introduced into the collections of Jacopo à Voragine; it found its way into the minstrel repertory through Rutebeuf, a French trouvère of the thirteenth century; it reappeared in early English narrative and in Low-German drama. Icelandic variants of the story have been traced. It was made the subject of a poem by William Forrest, priest and poet, in 1572; and it also formed the material for two seventeenth-century Jesuit “comedies.”

That the original Faust was a real personage,⁠[4] a wandering conjurer and medical quack, who was well known in the south-west of the German Empire, as well as in Thuringia, Saxony, and the adjoining countries somewhere between the years 1510-1540, does not now admit of any serious doubt. Philip Begardi, a physician of Worms, author of an Index Sanitatis (1539), mentions this charlatan, many of whose dupes he personally knew. He says that Faust was at one time frequently seen, although of later years nothing had been heard of him. It has indeed been suggested the whole legend originated in the strange history of Pope S. Clement I and his father Faustus, or Faustinianus, as related in the Recognitions, which were immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages. But Melanchthon knew a Johannes Faustus born at Knütlingen, in Wurtemberg, not far from his own home, who studied magic at Cracow, and afterwards “roamed about and talked of secret things.” There was a doctor Faustus in the early part of the sixteenth century, a friend of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, a scholar who won an infamous reputation for the practice of necromancy. In 1513 Conrad Mutt, the Humanist, came across a vagabond magician at Erfurt named Georgius Faustus Hermitheus of Heidelberg. Trithemius in 1506, met a Faustus junior whose boast it was that if all the works of Plato and Aristotle were burned he could restore them from memory. It seems probable that it was to the Dr. Faustus, the companion of Paracelsus and Cornelius⁠[5] Agrippa, that the legend became finally and definitely attached. The first literary version of the story was the Volksbuch, which was published by Johann Spies in 1587, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, who tells us that he obtained the manuscript “from a good friend at Spier,” and it soon afterwards appeared in England as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus, a chap-book to which Marlowe mainly adhered for the incidents in his play. The tragedy was carried across to Germany by the English actors who visited that country in the last years of the sixteenth and the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and thus, while it was itself derived from a German source, it greatly influenced, if it did not actually give rise to, the treatment of the same theme by the German popular drama and puppet-play. These were seldom printed, and usually for the most part extemporized, keeping all the while more or less closely to the theme. Scheible in his Kloster (1847), Volume V, gives the excellent Ulm piece, and there are marionette versions edited by W. Hamm (1850; English translation by T. C. H. Hedderwick, 1887), O. Schade (1856), K. Engel (1874), Bielschowsky (1882), and Kralik and Winter (1885).

Lessing projected two presentations of the story, and Klinger worked the subject into a romance, Fausts Leben, Thaten, und Höllenfahrt (1791; translated into English by George Barrow in 1826). A bombast tragedy was published by Klingemann in 1815, whilst Lenau issued his epico-dramatic Faust in 1836. Heine’s ballet Der Doctor Faust, ein Tanzpoem appeared in 1851. The libretto for Spohr’s opera (1814) was written by Bernard.

Goethe’s masterpiece, planned as early as 1774, was given to the world in 1808, but the second part was delayed until 1831.

General evidence points to 1588 as the date of the first production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, for it seems certain that the ballad of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus the great Conjurer, entered in the Stationers’ Register, February, 1589, did not precede but was suggested by the drama. The first extant quarto is 1604, but already it had been subjected to more than one revision. Upon the stage Doctor Faustus long remained popular, and in England, at least, however fragmentary Marlowe’s tragedy may be it has never been supplemented by any other literary handling of its theme. Old Prynne in his Histriomastix (1633) retails an absurd story to the effect that the Devil in propria persona “appeared on the stage at the Belsavage Playhouse in Queen Elizabeth’s days” whilst the tragedy was being performed, “the truth of which I have heard from many now alive who well remember it.” It was revived after the Restoration, and on Monday, 26 May, 1662, Pepys and his wife witnessed the production at the Red Bull, “but so wretchedly and poorly done that we were sick of it.” It was being performed at the Theatre Royal in the autumn of 1675, but no details are recorded. In 1685-6 at Dorset Garden appeared William Mountfort’s The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Made into a Farce, with the Humours of Harlequin and Scaramouch, a queer mixture of Marlowe’s scenes with the Italian commedia dell’ arte. Harlequin was acted by nimble Thomas Jevon, the first English harlequin, and Scaramouch by Antony Leigh, the most whimsical of comedians. At the end of the third act after Faustus has been carried away by Lucifer and Mephistopheles, his body is discovered torn in pieces. Then “Faustus Limbs come together. A Dance and Song.” This farce was continually revived with great applause, and during the whole of the eighteenth century Faust was the central figure of pantomime after pantomime. Nearly forty dramatic versions of the Faust legend might be enumerated. Many are wildly romantic and were especially beloved of the minor theatres: such are Faustus by G. Soane and D. Terry, produced at Drury Lane 16 May, 1825, with “O” Smith as Mephistopheles; H. P. Grattan’s Faust, or The Demon of the Drachenfels performed at Sadlers Wells, 5 September, 1842, with Henry Marston, Mephistopheles, T. Lyon, Faust, “the Magician of Wittenberg,” Caroline Rankley, Marguerite; T. W. Robertson’s Faust and Marguerite, played at the Princess’s Theatre in April, 1854: some are operatic; the ever-popular Faust of Gounod, with libretto by Barbier and Carré, first seen at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, in 1859; and Hector Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust, which, adapted to the English stage by T. H. Friend, was performed at the Court, Liverpool, 3 February, 1894; many more are burlesques, descendants of the eighteenth-century farces, amongst which may be remembered F. C. Burnard’s Faust and Marguerite, S. James, 9 July, 1864; C. H. Hazlewood’s Faust: or Marguerite’s Mangle, Britannia Theatre, 25 March, 1867; Byron’s Little Doctor Faust (1877); Faust in Three Flashes (1884); Faust in Forty Minutes (1885); and the most famous of all the travesties Faust Up to Date, produced at the Gaiety, 30 October, 1888, with E. J. Lonnen as Mephistopheles and Florence St. John as Marguerite. In France the Faust—après Goethe—of Theaulou and Gondelier first seen at the Nouveautés, 27 October, 1827, had a great success, and in the following year no less than three pens, Antony Béraud, Charles Nodier, and Merle, combined to produce a Faust in three acts, the music of which is by Louis Alexandre Piccini, the grandson of Gluck’s famous rival. In 1858 Adolphe Dennery gave the Parisian stage Faust, a “drame fantastique” in five acts and sixteen tableaux, a drama of the Grattan school, effective enough in a lurid Sadlers Wells way, which is, at any rate, a vein greater dramatists have exploited with profit and applause.

Of more recent English dramas which have the Faust legend as their theme the most striking is undoubtedly the adaptation by W. G. Wills from the first part of Goethe’s tragedy, which was produced at the Lyceum 19 December, 1885, with H. H. Conway as Faust; George Alexander, Valentine; Mrs. Stirling, Martha; Miss Ellen Terry, Margaret; and Henry Irving, Mephistopheles. Not merely in view of the masterpieces of Marlowe and Goethe, but even by the side of theatrical versions of the legend from far lesser men the play itself was naught, a superb pantomime, a thing helped out by a witches’ kitchen, by a bacchanalia of demons, by chromo-lithographic effects, by the mechanist and the brushes of Telbin and Hawes Craven, but it was informed throughout and raised to heights of greatness, nay, even to awe and terror, by the genius of Irving as the red-plumed Mephistopheles, that sardonic, weary, restless figure, horribly unreal yet mockingly alert and alive, who dominated the whole.

To attempt a comparison between Marlowe and Goethe were not a little absurd, and it is superfluous to expatiate upon the supreme merits of either masterpiece. In Goethe’s mighty and complex work the story is in truth refined away beneath a wealth of immortal philosophy. Marlowe adheres quite simply to the chap-book incidents, and yet in all profane literature I scarcely know words of more shuddering dread and complete agony than Faust’s last great speech:

The scene becomes intolerable. It is almost too painful to be read, too overcharged with hopeless darkness and despair.

As it is in some sense at least akin to the Faust story it may not be impertinent briefly to mention here an early Dutch secular drama, which has been called “one of the gems of Dutch mediæval literature,” A Marvellous History of Mary of Nimmegen, who for more than seven years lived and had ado with the Devil,⁠[6] printed by William Vorsterman of Antwerp about 1520. It is only necessary to call attention to a few features of the legend. Mary, the niece of the old priest Sir Gysbucht, one night meets the Devil in the shape of Moonen with the single eye. He undertakes to teach her all the secrets of necromancy if she will but refrain from crossing herself and change her name to Lena of Gretchen. But Mary, who has had a devotion to our Lady, insists upon retaining at least the M in her new nomenclature, and so becomes Emmekin. “Thus Emma and Moonen lived at Antwerp at the sign of the Golden Tree in the market, where daily of his contrivings were many murders and slayings together with every sort of wickedness.” Emma then resolves to visit her uncle, and insists upon Moonen accompanying her to Nimmegen. It is a high holiday and she sees by chance the mystery of Maskeroon on a pageant-waggon in a public square. Our Lady is pleading before the throne of God for mankind, and Emma is filled with strange remorse to hear such blessed words. Moonen carries her off, but she falls and is found in a swoon by the old priest, her uncle. No priest of Nimmegen dared shrive her, not even the Bishop of Cologne, and so she journeyed to Rome, where the Holy Father heard her confession and bade her wear in penitence three strong bands of iron fastened upon neck and arms. Thus she returned to Maestricht to the cloister of the Converted Sinners, and there her sorrow was so prevailing and her humility so unfeigned that an Angel in token of Divine forgiveness removed the irons as she slept.

Magic and fairy-land loom large in the plays of Robert Greene, whose place in English literature rests at least as much upon his prose-tracts as on his dramas. It seems to me fairly obvious that The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which almost certainly dates from 1589, although the first quarto is 1594, was composed owing to the success of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Greene was not the man to lose an opportunity of exploiting fashion, and with his solid British bent I have no doubt he considered an old English tale of an Oxford magician would be just as effective as imported legends from Frankfort and Wittenberg. To say that the later play is on an entirely different level is not to deny it interest and considerable charm. But in spite of Bacon’s avowal

his sorceries are in lighter vein than those of Faustus; moreover neither his arts nor the magic of Friar Bungay form the essential theme of the play, which also sketches the love of Edward, Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward I) for Margaret, “the fair Maid of Fressingfield.” It is true Bacon conjures up spirits enough, and we are shown his study at Brasenose with the episode of the Brazen Head. It may be noted that Miles, Bacon’s servant, is exactly the Vice of the Moralities, and at the end he rides off farcically enough on the Devil’s back, whilst Bacon announces his intention of spending the remainder of his years in becoming penitence for his necromancy and magic.

In Greene’s Orlando Furioso, 4to, 1594, which is based on Ariosto, canto XXIII, we meet Melissa, an enchantress: and in Alphonsus, King of Arragon, 4to, 1599, which is directly imitative of Tamburlaine, a sibyl with the classical name Medea, conjures up Calehas “in a white surplice and cardinal’s mitre,” and here we also have a Brazen Head through which Mahomet speaks. A far more interesting play is A Looking Glasse for London and England, 4to, 1594, an elaborated Mystery upon the history of the prophet Jonah and the repentance of Nineveh. Among the characters are a Good Angel, an Evil Angel, and “one clad in Devil’s attire,” who is soundly drubbed by Adam the buffoon. In 1598 was published, “As it hath bene sundrie times publikely plaide,” The Scottish Historic of Iames the fourth, slaine at Flodden. Entermixed with a pleasant Comedie, presented by Oboram, King of Fayeries. But the fairies only appear in a species of prose prologue, and in brief interludes between the acts.

George Peele’s charming piece of folk-lore The Old Wives’ Tale introduces among its quaint commixture of episodes the warlock Sacripant, son of a famous witch Meroe,⁠[8] who has stolen away and keeps under a spell the princess Delia. His power depends upon a light placed in a magic glass which can only be broken under certain conditions. Eventually Sacripant is overcome by the aid of a friendly ghost, Jack, the glass broken, the light extinguished, and the lady restored to her lover and friends.

Other magicians who appear in various dramas of the days of Elizabeth and her immediate successors are Brian Sansfoy in the primitive Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 4to, 1599; the Magician in The Wars of Cyrus; Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay, and Jaques Vandermast in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Merlin and Proximus in the pseudo-Shakespearean The Birth of Merlin, where the Devil also figures; Ormandini and Argalio in The Seven Champions of Christendom, where we likewise have Calib, a witch, her incubus Tarpax, and Suckabus their clownish son; Comus in Milton’s masque; Mago the conjurer with his three familiars Eo, Meo, and Areo in Cokain’s Trappolin Creduto Principe, Trappolin suppos’d a Prince, 4to, 1656, excellent light fare, which Nahum Tate turned into A Duke and No Duke and produced at Drury Lane in November, 1684, and which in one form or another, sometimes “a comic melodramatic burletta,” sometimes a ballad opera, sometimes a farce, was popular until the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Seeing that actors are “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time,” it is not surprising to find that Witchcraft has a very important part in the theatre of Shakespeare. Setting aside such a purely fairy fantasy as A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, such figures as the “threadbare juggler” Pinch in The Comedy of Errors, such scenes as the hobgoblin mask beneath Herne’s haunted oak, such references as that to Mother Prat, the old woman of Brainford, who worked “by charms, by spells, by the figure,” or the vile abuse by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, of “Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch, Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,” we have one historical drama King Henry VI, Part II, in which an incantation scene plays no small part; we have one romantic comedy The Tempest, one tragedy Macbeth, the very motives and development of which are due to magic and supernatural charms. It must perhaps be remarked that King Henry VI, Part I, is defiled by the obscene caricature of S. Joan of Arc, surely the most foul and abominable irreverence that shames English literature. It is too loathsome for words, and I would only point out the enumeration in one scene where various familiars are introduced of the most revolting details of contemporary witch-trials, but to think of such horrors in connexion with S. Joan revolts and sickens the imagination.

In King Henry VI (Part II) the Duchess of Gloucester employs John Hume and John Southwell, two priests; Bolingbroke, a conjurer; and Margery Jourdemain, a witch, to raise a spirit who shall reveal the several destinies of the King, and the Dukes of Suffolk and Somerset. The scene is written with extraordinary power and has not a little of awe and terror. Just as the demon is dismissed ’mid thunder and lightning the Duke of York with his guards rush in and arrest the sorcerers. Later the two priests and Bolingbroke are condemned to the gallows, the witch in Smithfield is “burn’d to ashes,” whilst the Duchess of Gloucester after three days’ public penance is banished for life to the Isle of Man.

The incidents as employed by Shakespeare are fairly correct. It is certain that the Duchess of Gloucester, an ambitious and licentious woman, called to her counsels Margery Jourdemain, commonly known as the Witch of Eye, Roger Bolingbroke an astrologer, Thomas Southwell, Canon of S. Stephen’s, a priest named Sir John Hume or Hun, and a certain William Wodham. These persons frequently met in secret, and it was discovered that they had fashioned according to the usual mode a wax image of the King which they melted before a slow fire. Bolingbroke confessed, and Hume also turned informer; and in 1441 Bolingbroke was placed on a high scaffold before Paul’s Cross together with a chair curiously carved and painted, found at his lodging, which was supposed to be an instrument of necromancy, and in the presence of Cardinal Beaufort of Winchester, Henry Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, and an imposing array of bishops, he was compelled to make abjuration of his wicked arts. The Duchess of Gloucester, being refused sanctuary at Westminster, was arrested and confined in Leeds Castle, near Maidstone. She was brought to trial with her accomplices in October, when sentence was passed upon her as has been related above. Margery Jourdemain perished at the stake as a witch and relapsed heretic; Thomas Southwell died in prison; and Bolingbroke was hanged at Tyburn, 18 November.

In The Tempest Prospero is a philosopher rather than a wizard, and Ariel is a fairy not a familiar. The magic of Prospero is of the intellect, and throughout, Shakespeare is careful to insist upon a certain detachment from human passions and ambitions. His love for Miranda, indeed, is exquisitely portrayed, and once—at the base ingratitude of Caliban—his anger flashes forth, but none the less, albeit superintending the fortunes of those over whom he watches tenderly, and utterly abhorring the thought of revenge, he seems to stand apart like Providence divinely guiding the events to the desired issue of reconciliation and forgiveness. Even so, the situation was delicate to place before an Elizabethan audience, and how nobly and with what art does Shakespeare touch upon Prospero’s “rough magic”! In Sycorax we recognize the typical witch, wholly evil, vile, malignant, terrible for mischief, the consort and mistress of devils.

There are few scenes which have so caught the world’s fancy as the wild overture to Macbeth. In storm and wilderness we are suddenly brought face to face with three mysterious phantasms that ride on the wind and mingle with the mist in thunder, lightning, and in rain. They are not agents of evil, they are evil; nameless, spectral, wholly horrible. And then, after the briefest of intervals, they reappear to relate such exploits as killing swine and begging chestnuts from a sailor’s wife, to brag of having secured such talismans as the thumb of a drowned pilot, businesses proper to Mother Demdike or Anne Bishop of Wincanton, Somerset. Can this change have been intentional? I think not, and its very violence and quickness are jarring to a degree. The meeting with Hecate, who is angry, and scolds them “beldames as you are, Saucy and overbold” does not mend matters, and in spite of the horror when the apparitions are evoked, the ingredients of the cauldron, however noisome and hideous, are too material for “A deed without a name.” There is a weakness here, and it says much for the genius of the tragedy that this weakness is not obtrusively felt. Nevertheless it was upon this that the actors seized when for theatrical effect the incantation scenes had to be “written up” by the interpolation of fresh matter. Davenant also in his frankly operatic version of Macbeth, produced at Dorset Garden in February, 1672-3 elaborated the witch scenes to an incredible extent, although by ample conveyance from Middleton’s The Witch together with songs and dances he was merely following theatrical tradition.⁠[9]

There seems no reasonable doubt that The Witch is a later play than Macbeth, but it is only fair to say that the date of The Witch is unknown—it was first printed in 1778 from a manuscript now in the Bodleian—and the date of Macbeth (earlier than 1610, probably 1606) is not demonstrably certain. The Witch is a good but not a distinguished play. Owing to the incantation scenes and its connexion with Macbeth it has acquired an accidental interest, and an enduring reputation. The witches themselves, Hecate and her crew, stand midway between the mystic Norns of the first scene in Macbeth, and the miserable hag of Dekker in The Witch of Edmonton; they are just a little below the Witches in Macbeth as they appear after the opening lines. There is a ghastly fantasy in their revels which is not lessened by the material grossness of Firestone the clown, Hecate’s son. They raise “jars, jealousies, strifes, and heart-burning disagreements, like a thick scurf o’er life,” and although their figures are often grotesque their power for evil is not to be despised. Much of their jargon, their charms and gaucheries complete, are taken word for word from Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, London, 1584.

The village witch, as she appeared to her contemporaries, a filthy old doting crone, hunch-backed, ignorant, malevolent, hateful to God and man, is shown with photographic detail in The Witch of Edmonton; A known True Story by Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, produced at the Cockpit in Drury Lane during the autumn or winter of 1621. It seems to have been very popular at the time, and not only was it applauded in the public theatre, but it was presented before King James at Court. It did not, however, find its way into print until as late as 1658.

The trial and execution (19 April, 1621) of Elizabeth Sawyer attracted a considerable amount of attention. Remarkable numbers of ballads and doggerel songs were made upon the event, detailing her enchantments, how she had blighted standing corn, how a ferret and an owl constantly attended her, and of many demons and familiars who companied with her in the prison. Not only were these ditties trolled out the day of the execution but many were published as broadsides, and sold widely. Accordingly the Newgate Ordinary hastened to pen The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction, and Condemnation, and Death, Together with the Relation of the Divels Accesse to Her, and Their Conference Together, “Written by Henry Goodcole, Minister of the Word of God, and her Continual Visiter in the Gaole of Newgate,” Published by Authority, 4to, 1621. This tractate is in the form of a dialogue, question and answer, between Goodcole and the prisoner, who makes ample confession of her crimes.

In some ways The Witch of Edmonton is the most interesting and valuable of the witch dramas, because here we have the hag stripped of the least vestige of glamour and romance presented to us in the starkest realism. We see her dwelling apart in a wretched hovel, “shunned and hated like a sickness,” miserably poor, buckl’d and bent together, dragging her palsied limbs wearily through the fields, as she clutches her dirty rags round her withered frame. And if she but dare to gather a few dried sticks in a corner she is driven from the spot with hard words and blows. What wonder her mouth is full of cursing and revenge?

Then appears the Black Dog and seals a contract with her blood. She blights the corn and sends a murrain on the cattle of her persecutors; here a horse has the glanders, there a sow casts her farrow; the maid churns butter nine hours and it will not come; above all a farmer’s wife, whom she hates, goes mad and dies in frantic agony; mischief and evil run riot through the town. But presently her familiar deserts her, she falls into the hands of human justice, and after due trial is dragged to Tyburn shrieking and crying out in hideous despair. It is a sordid and a terrible, but one cannot doubt, a true picture.

It is obvious that in this drama⁠[10] Frank Thorney, a most subtle and minute study of weakness and degeneracy, is wholly Ford’s. Frank Thorney may be closely paralleled with Giovanni in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Winnifride, too, has all the sentimental charm of Ford’s heroines, Annabella and Penthea.

Carter is unmistakably the creation of Dekker. Simon Eyre and Orlando Friscobaldo are the same hearty, bluff, hospitable, essentially honest old fellows. To Dekker also I would assign Mother Sawyer herself.

Rowley’s hand is especially discernible in the scenes where Cuddy Banks and the clowns make their appearance.

It may be mentioned that Elizabeth Sawyer figures in Caulfield’s Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons, 1794; and she is also referred to in Robinson’s History and Antiquities of the Parish of Edmonton with a woodcut “from a rare print in the collection of W. Beckford, esq.”

A second drama which was also actually founded upon a contemporary trial is Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, “A Well Received Comedy” produced at the Globe in 1634.⁠[11] In the previous year, 1633, a number of trials for Witchcraft had drawn the attention of all England to Pendle Forest. A boy, by name Edmund Robinson, eleven years of age, who dwelt here with his father, a poor wood-cutter, told a long and detailed story which led to numerous arrests throughout the district. Upon All Saints’ Day when gathering “bulloes” in a field he saw two greyhounds, one black, the other brown, each wearing a collar of gold. They fawned upon him, and immediately a hare rose quite near at hand. But the dogs refused to course, whereupon he beat them with a little switch, and the black greyhound started up in the shape of an old woman whom he recognized as Mother Dickenson, a notorious witch, and the other as a little boy whom he did not know. The beldame offered him money, either to buy his silence or as the price of his soul, but he refused. Whereupon taking something like a Bridle “that gingled” from her pocket she threw it over the little boy’s head and he became a white horse. Seizing young Robinson in her arms they mounted and were conveyed with the utmost speed to a large house where had assembled some sixty other persons. A bright fire was burning on the hearth with roast meat before it. He was invited to partake of “Flesh and Bread upon a Trencher and Drink in a Glass,” which he tasted, but at once rejected. He was next led into an adjoining barn where seven old women were pulling at seven halters that hung from the roof. As they tugged large pieces of meat, butter in lumps, loaves of bread, black puddings, milk, and all manner of rustic dainties fell down into large basins which were placed under the ropes. When the seven hags were tired their places were taken by seven others. But as they were engaged at their extraordinary task their faces seemed so fiendish and their glances were so evil that Robinson took to his heels. He was instantly pursued, and he saw that the foremost of his enemies was a certain Mother Lloynd. But luckily for himself two horsemen, travellers, came up, whereupon the witches vanished. A little later when he was sent in the evening to fetch home two kine, a boy met him in the dusk and fought him, bruising him badly. Looking down he saw that his opponent had a cloven foot, whereupon he ran away, only to meet Mother Lloynd with a lantern in her hand. She drove him back and he was again mauled by the cloven-footed boy.⁠[12]

Such was the story told to the justices and corroborated by Robinson’s father. A reign of terror ensued. Mother Dickenson and Mother Lloynd were at once thrown into jail, and in the next few days more than eighteen persons were arrested. The informer and his father netted a good sum by going round from church to church to point out in the congregations persons whom he recognized as having been in the house and barn to which he was led. A little quiet blackmail of the wealthier county families, threats to disclose the presence of various individuals at the witches’ feast, brought in several hundreds of pounds.

The trial took place at Lancaster Assizes and seventeen of the accused were incontinently found guilty. But the judge, completely dissatisfied with so fantastic a story, obtained a reprieve. Four of the prisoners were sent up to London, where they were examined by the Court physicians. King Charles himself also questioned one of these poor wretches and, discerning that the whole history was a fraud, forthwith pardoned all who had been involved. Meantime Dr. John Bridgeman, the Bishop of Chester, had also been holding a special inquiry into the case. Young Robinson was lodged separately, being allowed to hold no communication with his relatives, and when closely interrogated he gave way and confessed that the scare from beginning to end had been manœuvred by his father, who carefully coached him in his lies. In spite of this fiasco the talk did not die down immediately, and there were many who continued to maintain that Mother Dickenson was indeed a witch, however false the evidence on this occasion might be. It must be remembered, moreover, that twenty-two years before, in the very same district, a coven of thirteen witches, of whom the chief was Elizabeth Demdike, had been brought to justice, “at the Assizes and Generall Gaole-Delivery, holden at Lancaster, before Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Eltham.” Old Demdike herself—she was blind and over eighty years of age—died in prison, but ten of the accused were executed, and the trial, which lasted two days, occasioned a tremendous stir.

It seems not at all improbable that Heywood had written a topical play in 1612 dealing with this first sensational prosecution, and that when practically the same events repeated themselves in the same place less than a quarter of a century after he and the ever-ready Brome fashioned anew the old scenes. In the character of the honourable country-gentleman Master Generous, whose wife is discovered to be guilty of Witchcraft, there is something truly noble, and his tender forgiveness of her crime when she repents is touched with the loving pathos that informs A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, whilst his agony at her subsequent relapse is very real, although Heywood has wisely refrained from any attempt to show a broken heart save by a few quite simple but poignant words. The play as a whole is a faithful picture of country life, homely enough, yet not without a certain winsome beauty. The comic episodes are sufficiently broad in their humour; we have a household turned topsy-turvy by enchantment, a wedding-breakfast bewitched: the kitchen invaded by snakes, bats, frogs, beetles, and hornets, whilst to cap all the unfortunate bridegroom is rendered impotent. In Act II we have the incident of a Boy with a switch (young Edmund Robinson) and the two greyhounds. Gammer Dickison carries him off against his will “to a brave feast,” where we see the witches pulling ropes for food:

In Act V the Boy tells Doughty the story of his encounter with the Devil: “He came to thee like a boy, thou sayest, about thine owne bisnesse?” they ask him, and the whole scene meticulously follows the detailed evidence given before the judge at Lancaster. Of the witches, Goody Dickison, Mal Spencer, Mother Hargrave, Granny Johnson, Meg, Mawd, are actual individuals who were accused by Robinson; Mrs. Generous alone is the poet’s fiction. When Robin, the blunt serving-man, refuses to saddle the grey gelding she shakes a bridle over his head and using him as a horse makes him carry her to the satanical assembly. There is a mill, which is haunted by spirits in the shape of cats, and here a soldier undertakes to watch. For two nights he is undisturbed, but on the third “Enter Mrs. Generous, Mal, all the Witches and their Spirits (at severall dores).” “The Spirits come about him with a dreadfull noise,” but he beats them thence with his sword, lopping off a tabby’s paw in the hurly-burly. In the morning a hand is found, white and shapely, with jewels on the fingers. These Generous recognizes as being his wife’s rings, and Mrs. Generous, who is in bed ill, is found to have one hand cut off at the wrist. This seals her fate. All the witches are dragged in and in spite of their charms and bug-words are identified by several witnesses including the boy who “saw them all in the barne together, and many more, at their feast and witchery.”

The play was evidently produced just after the Lancaster Assizes, whilst four of the accused were in the Fleet prison, London, for further examination, and the King’s pardon had not as yet been pronounced. This is evident from the Epilogue, which commences: