The Late Lancashire Witches is a Caroline-era stage play and written by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, published in 1634.
It was a popular success; it ran for three consecutive days in August 1634, at a time when plays were normally changed daily in a repertory system.
[2] Modern scholarship argues that the dramatists' extensive use of court documents shows that Heywood and Brome wrote a new play in 1633–34 to capitalise on a current public affair, producing a work that is much closer to an equal collaboration.
[3][4] The 1634 quarto was printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller Benjamin Fisher, with a Prologue addressed by Heywood to the Earl of Dorset.
The Late Lancashire Witches belongs to a subgenre of English Renaissance drama that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft.
[5] (In fact, Edmund Robinson, the ten-year-old boy who was the prosecutors' chief witness, later admitted subornation of perjury; King Charles I pardoned all seventeen people convicted.)
The Lord Chamberlain of that time, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, may have prompted the creation of the play for political reasons.
These convicted witches were in the Fleet Prison, awaiting a decision from the Privy Council as to whether the executions (they and others had been found guilty in court in Lancaster) should go ahead.
Arthur flatters Generous, the men attend to various legal documents together, at last the three gentleman and Whetstone leave to go hare coursing again.
Act 2 iv shows the gentlemen coursing again, with their hunting disrupted this time by a quarrel largely triggered by Bantam (the name connotes a small fighting cock).
Robin, sent to Lancaster to buy wine by Generous in the second scene, is seen with his lover, Mall Spencer, whose magical powers are demonstrated.
The bridal cake turns to bran, and all the cooked meat in the elaborate feast is supernaturally switched for inedible or satirical things (dollops of cow shit, ram’s horns, etc.
The wedding guests nearly panic, but rally to stay in the house, and cold meat is found to make some kind of collation.
Mistress Generous enters, and demands a horse: Robin refuses, but with a magical bridle she transforms him into a mount to carry her to the meeting of the sisterhood.
Mall gives to Lawrence an enchanted ‘point’, a lace to retain the flap of his codpiece – it will render him impotent, but not knowing this, he fastens it in place.
But it is remembered that bagpipes resist magic (an effect used in the preposterous Ken Russell horror film, ‘The Lair of the White Worm’).
Robin peers in, and comments on what he sees (it is of interest that he reports on just a female company assembled, and makes no testimony to the devil being present).
Generous, the sceptic, is confuted, and now witchcraft lore fills his mind as truth: he can now imagine that he has often slept with a succubus, left by his side while she has been out with her fellow witches.
Discovering her husband to be impotent, Parnell has been so noisily irate that her scandalised neighbours are caricaturing them as ‘Don Skimmington’ and his shrewish wife (imagine pasteboard figures on horseback, accompanied by villagers beating on pans, etc.).
Parnell enters, her sexual dissatisfaction loud and, to the mind of the gentlemen, immodest (she had prior experience of how virile Lawrence once was, but now she says she wants a divorce).
Whetstone enters, and he wants to use his aunt’s powers to retaliate on the gentlemen for abusing him, Mistress Generous hastily gives him a paper with instructions.
The Seely household are all restored to their wits and proper sense of social position, Parnell very excitedly describes how she and her husband worked out how to deliver him from Mall Spencer’s incapacitating sexual charm (Brome works in a lot of bawdy, the point burning in the fire is really a description of their successful sexual congress at last).
Old Seely can now recollect how he had encountered and rebuked a ‘wayward’ (weird) woman for bearing with a ‘most unseemly disobedience’ in her own son, and the retaliatory curse she passed on him for these sharp remarks: that he would soon experience the same.
The accused women find that they cannot conjure up their familiars, and Doughty expounds that even a village constable (i.e., the lowest officer of the Christian state) has power over witchcraft in his staff (imagine a truncheon with the royal coat of arms).
Having got what he wants from this confession, Doughty ceases to ‘dandle’ (treat with apparent kindness) this witch, and the male characters end the play with Robin leading the jeering: he expects Mall and Mistress Generous to be mounted next on a ‘horse’ with a ‘bridle’, the gallows and the halter which will hang them.
Thomas Potts asserted that Jennet Preston in the 1612 Pendle Hill witchcraft was “unfit to live, having once so great mercie extended to her”, and Heywood seems to be picking up this detail.
[7] Shadwell's play was also popular through much of the 18th century; as late as 1782, Charles Dibdin had a success with his pantomime The Lancashire Witches, or The Distresses of Harlequin.
[8] When Gabriel Egan produced another modern edition in 2002, he employed the title The Witches of Lancashire,[9] in the judgement that this reflected the play as performed in 1634.