Witch and its Primary Sources

According to his account, Sawyer was a malicious old woman responsible for the death of infants, cattle, and her neighbor. The rest of the pamphlet recounts Goodcole’s questioning of Elizabeth before her execution at Newgate prison. Because of the way he wrote it, we can easily read this as a script. 

The Witch of Edmonton:

Images from the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 2014.

The same year “The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer” was published, Dekker, Ford, and Rowley wrote their play. The accusation and condemnation of Elizabeth is one of the two main plots. The other follows Frank Thorney as he commits bigamy (marital cheating) and murder. The plot is as follows:

Frank Thorney is secretly married to a pregnant servant woman Winnifred and risks being disinherited. While he thinks the baby is his, the father is actually his master Sir Arthur. To save his father’s estate from being sold, Frank marries Susan Carter bigamously. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Sawyer (“Mother Sawyer”), a cursing, outcast old woman is abused by her neighbors. She laments her position and wishes for revenge. The devil comes to her as a black dog and she agrees to give him her soul for his services. Frank and Susan encounter the dog, who gives Frank murderous thoughts. Frank stabs Susan, wounds himself, and ties himself to a tree with unseen help from the dog. Mother Sawyer is accused of causing widespread cattle death and sexual deviance. Anne Radcliffe, a neighbor with whom Elizabeth has been feuding, is driven mad and kills herself. Mother Sawyer is arrested. She is hanged with Frank Thorney. Sir Arthur is ordered to pay a sum to Winnifred. Cuddy also appears in this play. Rather than being Sir Arthur’s son, Cuddy is a neighbor and clownish morris-dancer. He abuses Sawyer and is tricked by the dog.

In The Witch of Edmonton, the playwrights present Elizabeth fairly close to the Goodcole pamphlet. She is still an elderly disabled woman isolated from and abused by her community. She still curses and associates with the Devil. Significantly, she is not responsible for Anne Radcliffe’s death for which she is killed, as Elizabeth testifies in the pamphlet. In these ways, she is true to life. However, the playwrights treat her with much more sympathy than Goodcole does. While he calls her “a very ignorant woman,” the playwrights grant her more personality and autonomy. Mother Sawyer’s first lines of the play are:

“And why on me? Why should the envious world

Throw all their scandalous malice upon me?

‘Cause I am poor, deformed and ignorant,

And like a bow buckled and bent together

By some more strong in mischiefs than myself,

Must I for that be made a common sink

For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues

To fall and run into?”[1]

The same word is used, but it comes from her own mouth to make a point supporting her ultimate question: Do I deserve the verbal and physical abuse because of the way that I am? Dekker, Ford, and Rowley are interested in Elizabeth as a woman profoundly aware of her own vulnerability. They depict her abuse to bring forth its senselessness. They condemn her abusers. In placing her death alongside that of Frank Thorney, an actual murderer, they point out the injustice of her station. For these Jacobean men, Elizabeth was a misunderstood woman who was a victim of her status and her community.

[1] John Ford, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton (1620), 2.1.1-8.

Witch:

So, what did Jen Silverman, writing in 2022, keep from Dekker, Ford, Rowley, and Goodcole? What did she adapt? A similarity that is initially striking is Elizabeth’s opening line, which mirrors the original play:

“I’m like a disease that only I seem to have caught.

I’m like a plague of locusts that’s just one locust…

I can’t say I don’t have a grudge, because

I do, clearly, I do have a grudge.

But does that detract from my argument, or is it just added texture?”[1]

In this line, like the one from the previous work, Elizabeth acknowledges her position in society and expresses bitterness at the injustice of it. Here, Silverman is even more interested than Dekker, Ford, and Rowley in Elizabeth’s autonomy and personhood. More than lamenting her place, Silverman’s Elizabeth deeper questions her options. 

These two Elizabeth monologues also reveal that Silverman’s language differs greatly from the original Jacobean English and brings the play and its characters closer to a contemporary audience. To hear Elizabeth speak as if she is a twentieth-century woman makes it easier to draw connections between her troubles and ours. 

         The playwright takes some elements from Frank and Winnifred’s relationship in the 1621 play, such as Frank’s bigamy and Winnifred’s pregnancy. Like the Frank of Witch, the Jacobean Frank is trying to escape the lower class.  Unlike him, however, the Frank of the source material is the killer and not the killed.

Henry Goodcole wrote “The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer” to disprove the rumor-filled ballads circulating the community about her trial and thus claims to offer an objective account of her case. In theatrical expression, however, issues of conflict, rumor, hearsay, and reputation are far juicier. In The Witch of Edmonton, “gossip… transforms Sawyer into a witch and Winnifride into a fallen woman”[2]. Not only is Elizabeth Sawyer painted as a witch according to rumor, but Winnifred suffers too. Her rumored marriage with Frank and the ambiguous origin of her pregnancy makes her ripe for scandal: “Winnifride’s isolation from her community at the hands of rumor and misfortune hints that, should her situation not change (or even worsen), she might soon speak the same words Sawyer does.”[3] In this way, the Jacobean play represents women as especially vulnerable to slander.

Silverman does not focus on Elizabeth’s trial or formal accusations like Goodcole does. Instead, like in The Witch of Edmonton, rumors are the primary reputation-making (or breaking) device. In nearly every scene of Witch the characters reference a rumor heard from an outside source. These rumors shape the conceptions and decisions of these characters. The spread is not seen, but the results are. Silverman forefronts the consequences of rumor:

• “ELIZABETH. Wherever I go, people are like:

Oh there’s the witch of Edmonton.”[4]

• “CUDDY. Everyone says she makes the crops wither.

                             Everyone says she makes the cows dry up.

                             Everyone says she dances with the devil in the pale moonlight.”[5]

• “SCRATCH. Winnifred is secretly married to Young Frank Thorney. So. Winnifred might be drawn to you. That’s certainly possible. But she can’t be your girlfriend… or your wife… which is a problem, considering the rumors. But maybe you don’t care about the rumors…

Frank as the

‘Adoptive Heir’... you know

but:

Rumor! Rumor.

Probably untrue.”[6]

• “SCRATCH. The way it sounded—from you and others, mostly from others—it sounded like you come from a poor family and they don’t have anything to give you…”[7]

• “ELIZABETH. It made me very unwelcome at the castle, and later in the village, understandably.

Deflowered, etc. Tarnished.

How easily we jump from tarnished to untouchable.”[8]

Apart from this re-focusing away from court proceedings and Elizabeth’s execution, the other main change Silverman makes is to center queerness. Her expansion of Cuddy’s character into a closeted queer heir is a prime example of this. Frank and Cuddy’s high-tension love/hate relationship brings gay romance to the story, complicating their struggle over masculinity and heritage. 

“(A moment between them. FRANK understands what CUDDY meant. He feels the wight of longing directed at him. He’s not sure what to do with this.)

(CUDDY reaches out and touches FRANK’s face. Tender, dangerous. CUDDY’s thumb over FRANK’s lower lip. A beat. And then:)

FRANK. I can’t.

CUDDY. I know.

FRANK. Your dad, and

everything

pretty much everything

super messy.

CUDDY. I know that.”[9]

Silverman’s other queering element is the personification of the Devil as genderqueer Scratch instead of the Dog. She details elements of Scratch’s past to bring complexity to the Devil’s image. The inclusion of queerness brings a new color to the sociopolitical landscape of the play; not only do these characters navigate their class and gender identities, but their queer identity too. Finally, the expansion of Sir Arthur’s character into a grieving husband rounds out the ensemble so that each character is a distinct individual, not a mere representation.

Silverman left a lot of material from her primary sources on the cutting room floor in order to make room for more intricate human characters with complex interpersonal dynamics that speak to modern sympathies. She uses this four-hundred-year-old true(ish) story to bring attention to questions of injustice and hope, much like her fore-writers did. Only Silverman, writing just a year ago, embeds contemporary concerns about capitalism, truth, queerness, and hope into her play.

[1] Jen Silverman, Witch (2022), 1.

[2] Todd Butler. “Swearing Justice in Henry Goodcole and The Witch of Edmonton,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 50, no. 1 (2010): 127–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40658423.

[3] Butler, 135.

[4] Silverman, 1.

[5] Silverman, 5.

[6] Silverman, 6.

[7] Silverman, 12.

[8] Silverman, 47.

[9] Silverman, 76.