The Witch (play)

The Witch is a Jacobean play, a tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton. The play was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. It is thought to have been written between 1613 and 1616; it was not printed in its own era, and existed only in manuscript until it was published by Isaac Reed in 1778.

The still-extant manuscript (since 1821, MS. Malone 12 in the collection of the Bodleian Library), a small quarto-sized bundle of 48 leaves, is in the hand of Ralph Crane, the professional scribe who worked for the King's Men in this era, and who prepared several texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, as well as two of the surviving manuscripts of Middleton's A Game at Chess, plus other King's Men's works. Since Middleton wrote for the King's Men in this period, the Crane connection is unsurprising. 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. A 21st century adaptation is available.

Two songs, "Come away, come away" and "Black spirits", occur in both The Witch and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Middleton's play gives the full lyrics, whereas Macbeth only mentions the song titles in stage cues. Many scholars agree that the songs were interpolated into Macbeth during the printing of the First Folio.

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 sceptical 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.

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