| English writers and thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries use the signs and symbols of witchcraft to investigate the nature of legitimacy and authority. Reginald Scot (The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584), George Gifford (A Dialogue of Witches and Witchcraft, 1593), and William Perkins (A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 1613) attempt to control the specter of popular supernatural power by controlling it theoretically. These theoreticians define popular supernatural power in terms of authorized religious power, inadvertently highlighting a tension in demonological theory between educated and popular approaches to legitimacy and power: a tension also found in dramatic works of the period. John Marston's Tragedy of Sophonisba, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches, and Thomas Middleton's The Witch dramatize the representational power of popular witchcraft, and an elite culture's attempts to control and diffuse that power. Shakespeare's history plays use the figure of the feminine witch to challenge masculine providential conceptions of history. Throughout 1 Henry VI, 1 Henry IV, and Richard III, Shakespeare dramatizes the efficacy of witchcraft's language and definitions, both to challenge authorized structures of power, and to act as illegitimizing tools of power wielded by legitimate authority itself. Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth investigate the nature of the feminine and its connection to supernatural, illegitimate power. The symbols of witchcraft in these plays highlight moments in which a feminized power challenges accepted masculine power. Shakespeare's cynical and ultimately skeptical treatment of historical witchcraft, and his dramatization of witchcraft in the service of power, represent his own critique of the authorizing strategies of Renaissance England itself. Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford engage in a similar project as they present The Witch of Edmonton as a critique of the social conditions creating, and necessitating witchcraft. It is, finally, the socially constructed nature of witchcraft, and analogously, the socially constructed nature of power of all kinds, that is at the center of these dramatic texts. |
