Thomas Middleton was an English dramatist during the reign of King James I. He was born in London on April 18th, 1580, and started his writing career at the age of 17. Most of his early plays were written in collaboration with other playwrights. Between 1613 and 1618 he mostly wrote “tragi-comedies.” And after 1621 he wrote tragedies - including one of his most famous works, The Changling. Middleton died, only 47, in 1627. Middleton's plays are marked by their cynicism about the human race. True heroes are rare almost every character is selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed. When Middleton does portray good people, the characters have small roles and are presented as flawless.
Middleton's primary source for material on witches was the Discovery of Witchcraft , written by Reginald Scot (1584),from which the playwright drew invocations, demons' names, and potion ingredients. The other source he used is the situation of a historical Duke and Duchess of Ravenna, related in the Florentine Histories, by Niccolò Machiavelli.
The first few lines of Hecate, the Lead Witch, alone entering the scene ,in Act 1, scene 2, derive from Scot’s accounts of the St. Osyth Witches: Heccat: Titty and Tiffin! Suckin and Pidgen! Liard and Robin! White Spirits, Black Spirits, Gray Spirits, Red Spirits! Devil-toad, Devil-ram! Devil-cat, and Devil-Dam! With a great Invocation of Witch-Spirits- Heccat the Witch-Queen (leader of her Witch-Coven) sweeps onto the stage.
The St. Osyth Witches of Essex represent one of the first well-known English Witch-Cases; The St. Osyth Case is most known for being the first English case to utilize the accusations of children against adults. The child in this case is the eight year-old son of the primary accused Witch Ursula Kemp, clearly prompted and guided in his testimony.
Hecate’s Entrance speech is derived from Ursula Kemp’s eight year-old son’s descriptions of his mother’s familiars- Titty, Tiffin, Suckin and Pidgen were their names (according to the boy). I’m not clear that these weren’t originally household pets, twisted into demonic familiars. Mixed up with their invocation is a call to Liard (presumably some sort of lion-familiar) and Robin (well recognizable in English folk-culture as the Goodfellow). Also mixed up is apparently some sort of folk-charm involving Devil-toads and Devil-rams, Devil-cats and Devil-Dams- as well as four, multi-colored Spirits: White, Black, Gray and Red.
Heccat calls out to her fellow-Witches: Hoppo; Stadlin; Hellwain; and Puckle. Hellwain and Puckle are both recognizable through folklore- the Hellwain is a ghostly Wagon of the Dead popular in English tale, and Puckle is a diminutive form of Puck (interchangeable with Robin the Goodfellow). The names Stadlin and Hoppo derive from Scot.
Then, at a certain point in the same scene, Heccat kneels and recites an odd kind of Witches’ Invocation, calling upon a wide variety of English folkloric characters. Again this derives from Scot. Scot made a comprehensive list of various goblins and spooks of the sixteenth century (Scot complains about the degree to which his fellow Englishpeople put faith and belief into what seems to Scot’s mind foolish and self-evident superstition). Scot’s list includes such familiar figures as “Elves, Hags, Satyrs, Pans,and Fawns,” as well as the more esoteric.
The manuscript bears Middleton's dedication to Thomas Holmes, Esq. There, Middleton refers to the play as "ignorantly ill-fated." This was long taken to mean that the play failed with the audience, but modern critics allow the possibility that the play was pulled from performance for censorship or legal reasons.
In fact, The King's Men played “The Witch” in 1613 and in 1609 the Jacobean court had witnessed the Essex divorce scandal. In the play, Sebastian returning after three years of war service only to find out that his wife, Isabella, is married to another man, as the Earl of Essex returned from abroad in 1609 and found his wife, Frances Howard, entertaining herself with another man. This parallelism is based on even more clear evidence: in order to get a divorce, Essex was accused of impotence and Antonio, Isabella's husband, bewitched by Hecate on request, will be incapable for sex with Isabella.
The Witch is known chiefly because parts of the play were incorporated into Shakespeare's Macbeth. The added text involves Hecate and the Three Witches, and is found in Macbeth, Act III, scene v, and Act IV, scene i, and includes two songs, "Come away, come away" and "Black spirits." Middleton's text gives the full lyrics of the songs, which are represented in Macbeth by their first lines.
Middleton's chief witch is a 120-year-old practitioner called Hecate. she specialises in love and sex magic, giving one character a charm to cause impotence. She leads a coven of four other witches, Stadlin, Hoppo, Hellwain, and Puckle. The witches in only three scenes:
Act I, scene ii introduces the coven and contains abundant witchcraft elements — fried rats and pickled spiders, the flesh of an "unbaptized brat," a cauldron boiling over a blue flame, the Witches occupying themselves with the boiling of baby fat into the ointment necessary for them to attain Witches’ Flight.
III,iii features the song "Come away" that was added to Macbeth, and deals with the witches' flight through the air
V,ii contains the song "Black spirits," also inserted into Macbeth.
Middleton's witches are lustful, murderous and perverse in the traditional demonological way, but they are also 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.
Complicated in structure, Middleton follows various plotlines as they interweave throughout the story. Sebastian, who is engaged to and in love with Isabella, was reported dead. Isabella married Antonio the day Sebastian returned to Urbino. Sebastian vows to do anything to reclaim Isabella as his own. Meanwhile, Antonio has a courtesan named Florida who is jealous of Isabella. Francisca, Antonio’s sister, is pregnant out of wedlock with Aberzanes’ child. A man named Almachildes is in love with Amoretta who is the waiting woman to the Duchess. The Duchess is angry with her husband and is plotting to kill him. The witches, Hecate and her coven, do little more than aid in the complicated plans put in motion by the other characters. Sebastian, Almachildes, and The Duchess all go to the witches for various charms. However, other than those interactions, the witches play a small role in the play.
What is baffling to critics is the use of the witches in Middleton’s play. Though Hecate and her band of magical women are the title characters of the play, they only appear in three different scenes and are absent from the ending of the play. Hecate functions, not as a prominent influence over the happenings in the play, but rather as a deus ex machina. All who resort to Hecate in the play do so with their minds made up. Hecate does not influence their choices and her spells illustrate the prior surrender of moral control. The humans come to her to find a way out of their terrible problems. Aside from being linked to magic and other traditional markers of the witch, Hecate does not find herself frequently in the play. Instead, the other females in the play are portrayed as human witches.
The first character that comes to mind when discussing the females of The Witch is the Duchess. She plans to kill her husband to take revenge for him killing her father. This is a retelling of a famous Medieval story that follows the Duke of Ravenna and his delightful control of his wife by forcing her to pledge herself to him over the skull of her father. Middleton works within figure of the Duchess to create a vengeful and vindictive character, modeled after the witches themselves. The Duchess pushes the bounds of being a submissive wife. Instead, she takes it fully upon herself to deceive her husband, and hopes to murder him. The Duchess tricks her husband by acting the kind and obedient wife. She then takes a lover by sleeping with Almachildes and convinces him to kill her husband. Purely from the surface of her plot line it is clear that she could be considered witch-like in all but magic.
It can be also argued that the Duchess uses her lies as a certain kind of magic. Lying and deceit are strongly associated with witches as they are sinful behaviors and not ideal in the perfect woman. The Duchess weaves lie after lie into a convoluted web that she uses to get what she desires. She lies to almost everyone she encounters, Amoretta, Almachildes, and the Lord Governor. These lies are all told to manufacture one occurrence, to kill the Duke. Much like the witches use their magic spells, the Duchess uses the power of her lies to create her desired outcome.
There is even more evidence against the Duchess. When the Duchess interacts with Hecate in Act Five, she is addressed by Hecate as “daughter” and responds with “mother.” It is unclear in the play whether this is supposed to be read as literally a mother-daughter relationship or if it is simply supposed to show kindred spirits. Though this relationship is unclear, this interaction works well to highlight the Duchess’s relationship with witchcraft and witchlike behavior in the play.
While the Duchess is never seen using magic herself, she is the only human woman to interact with Hecate face-to-face. Hecate literally passes her magical tokens from her hands and into the Duchess’s hands. While not inherently magical herself, the Duchess is a vehicle for magic in that she tells Hecate specifically what she wants to happen and makes sure Hecate performs those tasks.
The Duchess is not the only woman directly linked to witchlike qualities in Middleton’s play. Francisca, the sister of Antonio who has fallen pregnant out of wedlock, displays the evil qualities of sexuality as is common in witches. She is set up as complementary to her sister-in-law, Isabella, who shines as a woman who is impossibly good. This illustrates Middleton’s love for exploring the virtues, and lack thereof, in women Francisca represents the depraved juvenile.
Her inability to maintain her chastity is congruent with the characteristics as it shows she is promiscuous. This is in direct comparison to Hecate who is shown so promiscuous and insatiable that she lies with her son, Firestone, as well as enjoying the fantasy of Almachildes when he comes to take a charm from her. In fact, Francisca’s engagement of premarital sex further distances her from the idealized female characteristics and moves her closer to the depictions of the witch in the play.
To draw some conclusions, while the witches in Middleton’s first exploration into tragicomedy are hardly involved in the actual happenings of the play, the female characters in the play stand in as witch figures themselves. Their connection with Hecate is only a small part of their witchlike qualities. Instead, the characters of the Duchess and Francisca are condemned as witches for their deceitful behavior and lustful sexuality. It is in this way that Middleton uses it to tell a story that explores the virtues of women while capitalizing on society’s obsession with witches. His exaggerations create human witches that drive the tale, showing that when a woman rejects society’s values she becomes a witch herself.