The Witches of Lancashire

by Thomas Heywood, Richard Brome

Part of the Nick Hern Books  Globe Quartos  series, co-published with Shakespeare's Globe, marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's play  The Witches of Lancashire  is a sensational dramatisation of the seventeenth-century witch trials, first performed at the original Globe in 1634. When everything goes wrong at a wedding, everyone starts to believe that a local coven is to blame. The play mocks the naïveté of those who cannot see what is under their noses, i.e. organised witchcraft and its double, Roman Catholicism.

Genres: Plays, Classics

100 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1979

About the author

Thomas Heywood (early 1570s – 16 August 1641) was an English playwright, actor, and author. His main contributions were to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre. He is best known for his masterpiece A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic tragedy, which was first performed in 1603 at the Rose Theatre by the Worcester's Men company.
He was a prolific writer, claiming to have had "an entire hand or at least a maine finger in two hundred and twenty plays", although only a fraction of his work has survived.

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the most insane of the 17th century English witch plays. It is certainly the most atypical. Written by Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood, this has the domestic focus and folk style of those writers (as compared to other witch plays by, for example Middleton, Dekker, and Marston). The witches in this play (unlike the others) are secret witches, hiding their craft while pretending to be good wives, grandmothers, and servants. The Late Lancashire Witches is also a comedy, and there is lots of wonderful nonsense throughout. This is rather an extraordinary text.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you're reading through the Early Modern English witchcraft plays, maybe skip over this one.

[Rebecca Fell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel this could have been a lot shorter, but it was a pretty good time nonetheless. It gave me plenty of material on the supernatural influence over food, feasting and emotions for an Early Modern Literature essay I'm planning/writing. I also really enjoyed the way animals were depicted.

[Hannah Sames · Rating 4 out of 5]

kinda wild it has to be said x

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I am uncertain how good a PLAY this is, this is alternately fascinating, funny, silly, worrying, smutty, shocking and inconclusive. I have a suspicion that was how Heywood and Brome intended it.

The young gentlemen characters spend a lot of their time mocking master Whetstone for being (a) a bit dim, and (b) having unmarried parents. They also need to borrow money because they have overspent their inheritances. Early Bullingdon types.

There is a scene where the characters believe a kid who has quite clearly made up a load of complete rubbish (possibly a dream), that echoes a lot of his early testimony, reminiscent of the Satanic Panic of about thirty years ago. There is also a scene where a soldier, with clear PTSD, attacks imaginary witches in a barn.

Nonetheless, a group of witches do (what appears to be) harmless women's-groupy stuff, for which they are all blamed for the upturning of Seely's household (because socialism can only be the result of witchcraft) and Laurence's impotence (because there is no other explanation for erectile dysfunction than witchcraft). At the end, the epilogue asks for mercy.

Heywood had his fingers in (apparently) over 200 plays, but this is the only collaborative play Brome wrote. This was a big hit at the time, with three shows in a row at The Globe, the last night full of gentry and appreciative. It's called The Late Lancashire Witches because their case was still ongoing, and very recent.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in a hurry by Heywood and Brome to cash in on topical material. NOT the Pendle witches, but from the same area, after a boy claimed to his parents that he was late home because he had been kidnapped by witches. The King ultimately ordered the release of all the accused.

The writers didn't really care about the facts, and had a great deal of fun exploiting the special effects the King's Men could provide at the Globe. At one point an eye-witness reported live birds flew out of one pie and live kittens jumped from another! The plot, such as it is, is forgettable, but the play is a very entertaining read, despite some inevitable misogyny.

Read as part of the REP readathon online of the King's Men repertoire in the blistering one-week heatwave of 2021.

[Daisy May Twizell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful insight into the contemporary response to witches.

Heywood juggles all his different plots and characters with clarity. He crafts them individually and into each-other, without ever muddling them. It also presents an interesting moral view on the ongoing trial of the Lancashire witches; Heywood and the other dramatists had access to the accused while they were paraded through London, and it reflects in the presentation of the witches in the text. Heywood also utilities a direct interview with one of them in the confessional scene, adding a layer of authenticity to a scenario that modern audiences would struggle to empathize with.

[Amy O’Regan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It rewards a reader with a bit of a background interest in English witch hunting or the period in general, and it does have humorous moments, but I wouldn’t recommend to someone who wasn’t interested in early modern drama/literature.

[Maddy Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

hilarious

[bubble butt book lover · Rating 2 out of 5]

horribly rushed and horribly hilarious at the same time

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Witches of Lancashire' was written at the time of the witch trials in Lancashire in 1633-1634 and, although the real women accused of witchcraft were actually in custody at the time of writing, the play is a comedy not a tragedy. It presents the witches as mischievous and unruly rather than evil - they play pranks but nobody is severely hurt. The play derives most of its humour from social chaos, whether it is servants inverting their roles with their masters, or wives rebelling against their husbands.