The Late Lancashire Witches: The Girls Next Door

In The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome depict witches and their work as intelligible, even mundane parts of a society replete with community rituals and ceremonies. In the county of Lancashire depicted in the play, one may find gallants hunting (1.1, 2.4), gentlemen dining and drinking together (1.1, 2.2, 4.5), an elaborate wedding featuring a feast and dancing (3.1, 3.3), and a skimmington ride to mock the conjugal mishaps of the couple married earlier (4.3). The presence of so many community rituals establishes the play's setting in Lancashire, a region that was notorious for its traditionalism due to its significant recusant community and proclivity for older festive practices, such as Morris dances and maypoles. By showing this community already employing a number of traditional practices, several of which are deployed to manage local problems, the playwrights argue that this community—which includes witches—functions perfectly well. Through the depiction of so many festive gatherings in their witch play, Heywood and Brome interrogate the hegemony and exclusion that so often defines witchcraft plays. Instead, The Late Lancashire Witches reveals how the chaos of witchcraft may be incorporated into social coherence.