Here hath bin lately a newe comedie at the globe called The Witches of Lancasheir, acted by reason of the great concourse y[e] people 3 dayes togither: the 3[d] day I went with a friend to see it, and found a greater apparance of fine folke gent[men] and gent[weomen] then I thought had bin in town in the vacation: The subject was of the slights and passages done or supposed to be done by these witches sent from thence hither and other witches and their familiars; Of ther nightly meetings in severall places: their banqueting with all sorts of meat and drinke conveyed unto them by their familiars upon pulling of a cord: and walking of pailes of milke by themselves and (as they say of children) a highlone: the transforming of men and weomen into the shapes of severall creatures and especially of horses by putting an inchaunted bridle into ther mouths: their posting to and from places farre distant in an incredible short time: the cutting off a witch-gentwoman’s hand in the forme of a catt, by a soldier turned miller, known to her husband by a ring thereon, (the onely tragicall part of the storie:) the representing of wrong and putative fathers in the shape of meane persons to gent[men] by way of derision: the tying of a knott at a marriage (after the French manner) to cassate masculine abilitie, and y[e] conveying away of y[e] good cheere and bringing in a mock feast of bones and stones in steed thereof and y[e] filling of pies with living birds and yong catts &c: And though there be not in it (to my understanding) any poeticall Genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state o[r] tenet of witches (w[ch] I expected,) or application to vertue but full of ribaldrie and of things improbable and impossible; yet in respect of the newnesse of y[e] subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the ende of odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter, and is mixed with divers songs and dances, it passeth for a merrie and ex[c]ellent new play. per acta est fabula. Vale.34
Tomkyns’s description captures the kind of fantasy and physicality that Gosson rejects as a gratuitous distraction to theater’s more serious, didactic purpose, even down to the recognition-by-token device in the severed hand of Mrs. Generous. However, the fact that The Late Lancashire Witches proposes no “tenet of witches” does not mean that its entertainment value makes it irrelevant to public discourse on the topic: the “newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here)” is still a large part of the appeal of the play, even though it “consisteth [of] … fopperies.”
While larger confessional conflicts over traditional festivity and the enforcement of conformity hover at the edges of the comedy,35 the play maintains no clear position in these broader debates. One of the stage tricks in The Late Lancashire Witches is the supernatural flight of the servant Robin to the Miter tavern in London for wine for his master, who, “since hee was last at London and tasted the Divinitie of the Miter, scarce any liquour in Lancashire will go downe with him, sure, sure he will never be a Puritane, he holds so well with the Miter” (E2r). The joke is about boozing, but the religious associations of the pub’s name are developed enough to glance at Laud. This reference is not a coded message so much as a wink. The magical jaunt to the Miter runs irreverent, frenetic rings around a complicated set of real-world religious conflicts. The Late Lancashire Witches’ absurdist nose-thumbing at serious controversies is itself an important form of religious and political expression. The play’s “improbable and impossible” stage tricks allow its mixed-faith audiences to take pleasure in suspending the question of whether the magic was “done or supposed to be done.” The play’s comedy is too imbricated in the debate surrounding the so-called witches to be considered escapist. However, it allows audiences divided on these debates to share an alternative attitude toward the question, to approach a fraught, religious issue with greater imaginative and affective license. Rather than a release from religious politics, the play offers a giddy, double vision, in which sorcery is real and not real, the witches are socially disruptive and harmless, and confessional differences are recalibrated to pub preferences.
Tomkyns’s first-person account is a compelling piece of evidence, unusual in the specificity with which it connects cultural context, stage effects, and audience response. It shows that even plays whose commercial and artistic success depended on their explicit engagement with topical religious material did not always transmit identifiable stances on these matters to their audiences. Important as this document is, we do not need Tomkyns’s direct testimony that the play contains no “judgment … of witches” to know that this is not a didactic play making a sustained, serious case against either sorcery or superstition but is instead a comedy in which the central conceit is the inability to separate magic from hoax. That evidence is in the script. Undeniably, Tomkyns’s extensive description of props and effects not included in the stage directions points up the limitations of play texts as records of performance. Nevertheless, the premise of the script and its punch lines structure and mobilize the physical comedy. The Late Lancashire Witches orchestrates not a resolution but a ridiculous encounter with a religious impasse. We erase a crucial form of public engagement with confessional life if we look to plays only for the kind of “position taking” elicited by works of controversy and ignore the subtler, stranger, but equally strong processes of collective thought and feeling orchestrated by early modern commercial drama.
The Orchestration of Active Reception
Plays were considered to be working when they gathered playgoers’ imaginations. The idea that plays move their audiences as a group from one mood or mode of thought to another is implicit in early modern theater’s frequently noted connection to oratory: the art of swaying a multitude.36 Skillful players were praised for their ability to focus an audience’s attention. “Sit in a full Theater,” writes Thomas Overbury, “and you will think you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the [Excellent] Actor is the Center.”37 As Matthew Steggle demonstrates in detail, the mark of a successful comedy was loud, theater-wide laughter, and a good tragedy was one that made the crowd weep.38 In other words, the basic, declared goal of early modern stagecraft was to guide collective audience experience.
Implicit in plays are processes of shared perception and feeling. While external evidence of playgoer behavior can seem more empirically sound than the internal evidence of plays, it is also more limited. Unattached to a specific dramatic moment, Overbury’s description of the magnetic actor only tells us that a good performer can engage a crowd. Plays offer more detailed maps of thought and feeling. Playwrights used generic cues hoping to elicit particular reactions, and, as Lopez points out, “for a device to become conventional it must be functional.”39 Scripts, and the staging practices they index, structure audience response. Even though they exclude the very things that constitute theater—live bodies, contingency, and physical staging—play scripts remain the richest and most extensive records of early modern English playhouse experiences. Nor has this archive been mined to exhaustion, especially as current scholarship attends to only a fraction of the extant corpus of early modern drama. Scripts are admittedly, as Richard Preiss objects, only a partial record of one half of a conversation, and as such omit the voices of live audiences.40 Yet these incomplete transcripts are full of speaking silences.
To value scripts in this way is not to privilege text over performance, or to reify fantasies of authorial control over the distributed agency of the playhouse. A script is not a prison house but a spine that enables movement. Play scripts are synecdochical for live performance, a suggestive piece that conjures something larger than itself. In synecdoche, the part does not “stand in for” the whole in a mimeographic fashion, like an architect’s blueprint blown up in scale on a projector. “Think when we talk of horses, that you see them,” is not a prescriptive instruction but an open invitation. The “imaginary forces” of audiences that piece out vasty fields of France within the wooden O are always bigger and wilder than the scripts that set them to work.41 Preiss imagines an oppositional relationship between scripted drama and audience interactivity: “not ‘partnership’ but competition.”42 But scripts are not