ABSTRACT
From its first production, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches offered alternatives to the standard readings and shows of a witch play. Contemporary witch plays typically erred on the side of judgment against witches in their conclusions, removing a disturbance in order to allow a troubled community to come together. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621) ends with Elizabeth Sawyer’s hanging, for example, while plays such as Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (c. 1625) portray their supernatural denizens as completely alien and literally outside the human community. By contrast, The Late Lancashire Witches presents a community of witches largely incorporated into society whose magics are more frequently confusing than harmful. According to early audience member Nathanial Tomkyns, the play offered spectators no “poeticall Genius, or art, or language, or judgement to state or tenet of witches … or application to vertue but [is] full of ribaldrie and of things improbable and impossible.”1 In this essay I will argue that a similar ambiguity surrounds Heywood and Brome’s constant interrogations of the experience of seeing these “things improbable and impossible.” Nearly every spectacular moment of witchcraft in the play elicits competing responses and interpretations by the characters on stage. As a result, The Late Lancashire Witches draws our attention from looking at witches to thinking about witches. In particular, the play encourages its spectators to think about the manner in which it sees witches. This multifaceted play may draw upon a contemporary witch trial for its plot, but it also produces a skeptical portrayal of the hypervisual processes of identifying, trying, and condemning witches.
