Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2010 Bewitching The tS age: Elizabethan And Jacobean Witch-Lore And Witch-Hunt Kyoung H. Lee Wayne State University Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lee, Kyoung H., "Bewitching The tS age: Elizabethan And Jacobean Witch-Lore And Witch-Hunt" (2010). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 99. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. BEWITCHING THE STAGE: ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN WITCH-LORE AND WITCH-HUNT by KYOUNG LEE DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2010 MAJOR: ENGLISH _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY KYOUNG LEE 2010 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION Hither!, Gare greets me at journey’s end; Wingbeats of Madeline evanescence send. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation, I got to feel the feel of “The Colossus” that once loomed over Sylvia Plath: “I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pierced, glued, and properly jointed.” One guide in my journey kept telling me it is doable if I can eat an elephant a bite at a time. I am truly indebted to Arthur Marotti who showed me how to engage the elephant. “Perseverance” was his word of encouragement, and he was and is a living example of the virtue. I am grateful to Simone Chess for her spirit and energy, which helped me keep churning my rough lump for clarity and texture. Ken Jackson, with his sharp eye, and Michael Giordano, weaving English literary matters into continental thoughts and affairs, each showed me different argument maps. Last May, my sage friends, Barrett Watten and Carla Harryman, opened their home on Cathedral Drive, which greeted me in verdure’s fragrance: thank you for the opportunity to be “together and away” from my daughter and husband. Gerald MacLean, who is now teaching at the University of Exeter, taught me a touching lesson of how the unappreciated labor of a teacher may come into blossom in due time. Here at the University of Texas, Pan-American, I was and am in good company: Thank you, Pamela Anderson-Mejías, Virginia Broz, William Broz, Colin Charlton, Jonikka Charlton, Debbie Cole, Jamee Cole, Theron Francis, Kathy Sparrow, and Scott Sparrow, for who you are and for what you showed me. I am looking forward to setting a table full of dishes laced with potions of love and gratitude: Health for the UTPA community, we might intone. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ii Acknowledgments----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------iii Introduction-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Chapter 1 “Titus Andronicus and Catering for Bloody Banquets: the Witch in the Kitchen”---13 The Troubling Mothers in Shakespeare and the Troubles of the Mother--------------------13 Troubling Titus and the Troubling Remains of the Maternal------------------------------------25 Maternal Gore and the Grotesque in Tamora’s Revelry and Banquet------------------------33 The Abominable Appropriation: Male Witchery in Titus’s Housewifery--------------------- 54 Chapter 2 “Is There a Witch in This Text?: The Troubling Provenance of the Witch of Brainford in The Merry Wives of Windsor”--------------------------------------------------------------------------------63 Is There a Witch in This Text? --------------------------------------------------------------------------63 What’s in a Name?: Staff versus Broom--------------------------------------------------------------68 Hornucopia: the False Phallus --------------------------------------------------------------------------72 Hair of the Dog or Glamour of the Hag---------------------------------------------------------------84 Mistresses’ Tale and its Gallant Genuflection ----------------------------------------------------- 97 Chapter 3 “Imagining the Witch at the Table: The Abominable Belly of Middleton’s Women”-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------112 The Contents of the Table: Recipes for Housewifery--------------------------------------------116 The History of the Cauldron, the Grotesque, and the Witch-----------------------------------121 Indigence of Illicit Bellies: Her Appetite, His Purse-----------------------------------------------129 The Witch: the Virtuous Ascetic and the Domestic Saboteur----------------------------------147 Chapter 4 “The Covenant Staged: Jugglers, Conjurers, and Skeptics on the Early Modern Stage” iv Prologue: the Appeasing Magic of the Rowdy Theater-----------------------------------------169 Necromantic Stage: How to Sport the Art with Doctor Faustus------------------------------178 The Stage Strikes Back, or the Blame Game in The Witch of Edmonton--------------------207 Epilogue: Stage Skepticism ----------------------------------------------------------------------------235 Conclusion -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------238 Notes------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------240 References-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------267 Abstract---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------284 Autobiographical Statement-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------286 v 1 Introduction The early modern witch on the pre-Restoration stage poses a utilitarian question: What purpose did the detestable and dreadful witch serve for the stage and its audience? While historians tell us most of the executed witches were too old, poor, and lame to claim either attention or agency, the early modern stage interjected the liminal presence of the witch onto the stage alongside the nobles and citizens as if she were capable of trespassing the boundaries of geography, class, and economic standing. Clearly, the early modern stage witch claimed more seditious and frightening authority than her real-life counterpart—the old village woman whose nagging presence evoked her want and the community’s guilt. This project hypothesizes that the stage witch’s grotesque femininity and her masculine presumption of agency were the effective signifiers of the feminine interior, what men fantasized about the reproductive secrets of womanhood and their control over the feminine activities. My investigation of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama indicates that the fictional witch is postulated as the negative example of female fertility and feminine nurture and, furthermore, she assumes an antagonistic agency to household prosperity by interfering in the natural process of fertility in humans as well as in crops and livestock. I suggest that the early modern stage appropriated the historical witch, the anti-mother, and cast her as the anti- housewife whose negative example was to discipline femininity and domesticate housewives. The socio-cultural expediencies of the early moderns dictated that the elusive properties as the feminine and the maternal needed to be exposed, and I believe the stage witch was scribed as a bogey lurking in the hidden interior of the feminine and the maternal. In understanding the cultural fantasies about women and the feminine, the three decades of the 2 late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods provide a wealth of dramatic narratives about witches and witchcraft fantasies. With little discomfort the stage appropriated the cultural tropes of misogyny and anti-Catholicism, associating them with the witch. The late Elizabethan stage witnessed and engineered the shared suspicion and awe toward women of power since the exceptional political embodiment of the virgin mother in Elizabeth was the maternal matrix that nurtured and at the same time confined. On the other hand, James established royal patronage in a paternalistic manner, renaming the Chamberlain’s Men as the King’s Men and the Jacobean stage responded and reflected the King’s paternalistic political philosophy in its portrayal of domestic gender expectations. As the Stuart dynasty established itself, the stage portrayed insubordinate women as the mistresses of misrule and the object of mockery. This process also coincided with James’s slow movement toward skepticism of the witches’ agency. As the former demonologist’s enthusiasm gradually dissipated, the Jacobean stage witches were removed from the stage of absurd prominence. By the time the theater was closed in 1642, witch-hunting narratives in stage plays were virtually expunged from the English stage, and after the theater reopened upon the return of James’s grandson, they had disappeared altogether. The historical parabola from the last decade of the