In early modern England cunning men and women (often older people on the fringes of society) became easy targets for gossip within rural communities. I will examine some figures of the cunning woman in this period and show how they appear in different senses: the cunning woman as a healer, nurturer, fortune-teller and domestic manager. Mother Sawyer, in The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford (1621), complains of the community of Edmonton that she has been convicted because she is ‘poor, deform’d, and ignorant’ (II.i.3).1 Sawyer has been abused because she is old and ugly and does not have any means by which to make her living. She is physically portrayed as a contemporary English witch. However Sawyer is not a witch from the beginning of the play, and not presented as one until her community accuse her of witchcraft. After she realizes that there is nothing left to lose, she makes a pact with the devil and thus her identity changes from an old woman into a real witch. In John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (1594), Bombie is a ‘white witch’ or ‘cunning woman’ whose mysterious power is used to help people, not to harm. In Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), the Wise Woman pretends to be a cunning woman and skilled in fortune-telling, palmistry and curing diseases. The three protagonists in the mentioned plays are drawn from English witch-lore, and they live in the suburbs and resort to witchcraft in order to make their living. Mother Sawyer, a traditional English witch, is portrayed as hag-like whereas Mother Bombie and the Wise Woman are English local cunning women. The witches do not fly and stage directions do not call for flight in the witch scenes; their feet remain firmly on the ground in all scenes. Cunning women are not the same as witches: they do not have a familiar, they tell fortunes and cure diseases, are benevolent, they do not hold covens on the Sabbath, do not make pacts with the devil in return for rewards and they do not act maleficium. The chronological approach taken here is used in order to determine the dramatic development of the witches and cunning women in two theatrical modes—the tragic (The Witch of Edmonton) and the comic (Mother Bombie, and The Wise Woman of Hogsdon).
| Published in | International Journal of Literature and Arts (Volume 2, Issue 5) |
| DOI | 10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11 |
| Page(s) | 130-141 |
| Creative Commons |
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Copyright |
Copyright © The Author(s), 2014. Published by Science Publishing Group |
Stage Directions and Genre, The Witch of Edmonton, Mother Bombie, and The Wise Woman of Hogsdon
| [1] | Ashley, Leonard R.N., review of ‘The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition. Renaissance Drama Series’, ed. by Etta Soiref Onat and Stephen Orgel, Bibliotheque d’humanisme et Renaissance, 2 (1982), 476-479 |
| [2] | Atkinson, David, ‘Moral Knowledge and the Double Action in The Witch of Edmonton’, Studies in English Literature, 25 (1985), 419-437 |
| [3] | Briggs, Katherine Mary, Pale Hecate’s Team: an examination of the beliefs on Witchcraft and Magic among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and his Immediate Successors (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1962) |
| [4] | Corbin, Peter and Douglas Sedge, Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays: The Tragedy of Sophonisba, The Witch, and The Witch of Edmonton (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1986) |
| [5] | Cromwell, Otelia, Thomas Heywood: A Study in the Elizabethan Drama of Everyday Life ([Hamden, Conn.]: Archon Books, 1969 [c1928]) |
| [6] | Dekker, Thomas, Ford, John, and Rowley, William, The Witch of Edmonton (London, 1658) |
| [7] | The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. by Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1958), iii |
| [8] | The Witch of Edmonton: A Critical Edition, ed. by Etta Soiref Onat (New York: Garland, 1980) |
| [9] | Ford, John, The Dramatic Works of John Ford: in two volumes, with notes critical and explanatory, ed. by William Gifford, 2 vols (London, 1827), ii |
| [10] | The Dramatic Works of John Ford: with an introduction and explanatory notes, ed. by Henry Weber, 2 vols (London, 1811) |
| [11] | Gibbons, Daniel R., ‘Thomas Heywood in the House of the Wise Woman’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 49 (2009), 391-416 |
| [12] | Helgerson, Richard, review of ‘The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England’, ed. by Jean E. Howard, Comparative Literature, 48 (1996), 383-385 |
| [13] | Herrington, H. W., ‘Witchcraft and Magic in the Elizabethan Drama’, Journal of American Folklore, 32 (1919), 447-485 |
| [14] | Heywood, Thomas, The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (London, 1638) |
| [15] | The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 6 vols (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964) |
| [16] | A Critical Edition of Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, ed. by Michael H. Leonard (New York and London: Garland, 1980) |
| [17] | The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Thomas Heywood, ed. by A. Wilson Verity; with an Introduction, ed. by J. Addington Symonds (London: Vizetelly, 1888) |
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| [19] | King James VI, Daemonologie (Edinburgh: 1597) |
| [20] | Daemonologie in Forme of Dialogve, Diuided into Three Books (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603) |
| [21] | Leinwand, Theodore B., review of ‘The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England’, ed. by Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47 (1996), 204-206 |
| [22] | Lyly, John, Mother Bombie (London, 1594) |
| [23] | The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. by R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902) |
| [24] | Mother Bombie, ed. by Leah Scragg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) |
| [25] | Purkiss, Diane, The Witch in History: Early Modern and twentieth-Century Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) |
| [26] | Sawyer, Ronald C., ‘Strangely Handled in All Her Lyms’: Witchcraft and Healing in Jacobean England’, Journal of Social History, 22 (1989), 461-485 |
| [27] | Scot, Reginald, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1654) |
| [28] | Sharpe, James, ‘The Debate on Witchcraft’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 653-661 |
| [29] | Thomas, Keith, Religion and The Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1971) |
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‘Beldam’, Oxford English Dictionary, |
APA Style
Shokhan Rasool Ahmed. (2014). Witches which Never Flew: Native Witchcraft and the Cunning Woman on the Stage. International Journal of Literature and Arts, 2(5), 130-141. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11
ACS Style
Shokhan Rasool Ahmed. Witches which Never Flew: Native Witchcraft and the Cunning Woman on the Stage. Int. J. Lit. Arts 2014, 2(5), 130-141. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11
AMA Style
Shokhan Rasool Ahmed. Witches which Never Flew: Native Witchcraft and the Cunning Woman on the Stage. Int J Lit Arts. 2014;2(5):130-141. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11
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Download@article{10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11,
author = {Shokhan Rasool Ahmed},
title = {Witches which Never Flew: Native Witchcraft and the Cunning Woman on the Stage},
journal = {International Journal of Literature and Arts},
volume = {2},
number = {5},
pages = {130-141},
doi = {10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11},
url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11},
eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijla.20140205.11},
abstract = {In early modern England cunning men and women (often older people on the fringes of society) became easy targets for gossip within rural communities. I will examine some figures of the cunning woman in this period and show how they appear in different senses: the cunning woman as a healer, nurturer, fortune-teller and domestic manager. Mother Sawyer, in The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford (1621), complains of the community of Edmonton that she has been convicted because she is ‘poor, deform’d, and ignorant’ (II.i.3).1 Sawyer has been abused because she is old and ugly and does not have any means by which to make her living. She is physically portrayed as a contemporary English witch. However Sawyer is not a witch from the beginning of the play, and not presented as one until her community accuse her of witchcraft. After she realizes that there is nothing left to lose, she makes a pact with the devil and thus her identity changes from an old woman into a real witch. In John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (1594), Bombie is a ‘white witch’ or ‘cunning woman’ whose mysterious power is used to help people, not to harm. In Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), the Wise Woman pretends to be a cunning woman and skilled in fortune-telling, palmistry and curing diseases. The three protagonists in the mentioned plays are drawn from English witch-lore, and they live in the suburbs and resort to witchcraft in order to make their living. Mother Sawyer, a traditional English witch, is portrayed as hag-like whereas Mother Bombie and the Wise Woman are English local cunning women. The witches do not fly and stage directions do not call for flight in the witch scenes; their feet remain firmly on the ground in all scenes. Cunning women are not the same as witches: they do not have a familiar, they tell fortunes and cure diseases, are benevolent, they do not hold covens on the Sabbath, do not make pacts with the devil in return for rewards and they do not act maleficium. The chronological approach taken here is used in order to determine the dramatic development of the witches and cunning women in two theatrical modes—the tragic (The Witch of Edmonton) and the comic (Mother Bombie, and The Wise Woman of Hogsdon).},
year = {2014}
}
TY - JOUR T1 - Witches which Never Flew: Native Witchcraft and the Cunning Woman on the Stage AU - Shokhan Rasool Ahmed Y1 - 2014/09/10 PY - 2014 N1 - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11 DO - 10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11 T2 - International Journal of Literature and Arts JF - International Journal of Literature and Arts JO - International Journal of Literature and Arts SP - 130 EP - 141 PB - Science Publishing Group SN - 2331-057X UR - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20140205.11 AB - In early modern England cunning men and women (often older people on the fringes of society) became easy targets for gossip within rural communities. I will examine some figures of the cunning woman in this period and show how they appear in different senses: the cunning woman as a healer, nurturer, fortune-teller and domestic manager. Mother Sawyer, in The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford (1621), complains of the community of Edmonton that she has been convicted because she is ‘poor, deform’d, and ignorant’ (II.i.3).1 Sawyer has been abused because she is old and ugly and does not have any means by which to make her living. She is physically portrayed as a contemporary English witch. However Sawyer is not a witch from the beginning of the play, and not presented as one until her community accuse her of witchcraft. After she realizes that there is nothing left to lose, she makes a pact with the devil and thus her identity changes from an old woman into a real witch. In John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (1594), Bombie is a ‘white witch’ or ‘cunning woman’ whose mysterious power is used to help people, not to harm. In Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), the Wise Woman pretends to be a cunning woman and skilled in fortune-telling, palmistry and curing diseases. The three protagonists in the mentioned plays are drawn from English witch-lore, and they live in the suburbs and resort to witchcraft in order to make their living. Mother Sawyer, a traditional English witch, is portrayed as hag-like whereas Mother Bombie and the Wise Woman are English local cunning women. The witches do not fly and stage directions do not call for flight in the witch scenes; their feet remain firmly on the ground in all scenes. Cunning women are not the same as witches: they do not have a familiar, they tell fortunes and cure diseases, are benevolent, they do not hold covens on the Sabbath, do not make pacts with the devil in return for rewards and they do not act maleficium. The chronological approach taken here is used in order to determine the dramatic development of the witches and cunning women in two theatrical modes—the tragic (The Witch of Edmonton) and the comic (Mother Bombie, and The Wise Woman of Hogsdon). VL - 2 IS - 5 ER -
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