“I Knew Not How to Call Her Now”: The Bigamist’s Second Wife in The Witch Of Edmonton and All’s Lost By Lust

In The Witch of Edmonton, a 1621 domestic tragedy by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, Susan Carter discovers to her surprise that she is a whore. This news is a shock for the virtuous yeoman’s daughter, who has only just married Frank Thorney, the outwardly pleasant son of a poor gentleman from her village. Shortly after their wedding night, Frank has informed Susan that he must leave her for a time (2.2.144–48), and the puzzled young wife has followed him across the fields, whereupon he has drawn a knife to kill her.¹ It is when Susan asks why that she receives the devastating answer, “Because you are a whore”; Frank explains, “[You are] no wife of mine. The word admits no second. / I was before wedded to another, have her still” (3.3.26, 31–32). In this cataclysmic moment, Susan learns that her husband is a bigamist and that she is now in the position of being unmarried and yet not a virgin. She is a paradox; even though she refers to “the stain / Of my unwitting sin” (50–51; emphasis mine), and even though Frank takes full responsibility for it (“I do not lay the sin unto your charge, / ’Tis all mine own” [33–34]), both behave as though Susan has technically committed what she calls the “sin of my most hatred…Adultery” (43). No polite word exists for her state, a problem already introduced in the previous scene, in which Frank, confessing to his original wife, Winifred, that he is a bigamist, accidentally refers to Susan as his wife too, before hastily correcting himself to say “the woman; I knew / Not how to call her now” (3.2.34–35). Behind Frank’s loss for words lurks the proverbial phrase “neither maid, wife nor widow,” which lists the three acceptable social roles for women and implies that anyone who doesn’t fit them is a whore.² Susan is thus relieved when Frank murders her, for, as she says, her death prevents her from living as an adulteress any longer (3.3.41–43); believing that heaven will accept her “soul’s purity,” she dies welcoming death and forgiving Frank (57–64). The playwrights evoke great sympathy for Susan and the cruel social logic that produces her “stain,” but by presenting death as her only solution, they dodge difficult questions about how such a woman should have been treated by society had she remained alive.³

Susan’s crisis of status is the reverse of what happens to Frank’s first wife. Before the events of the play begin, Winifred is an unmarried, pregnant serving-woman who has slept with both her fellow servant Frank and with their master, Sir Arthur Clarington, and could thus have been tarred with the same label as Susan.⁴ But Winifred’s subsequent marriage to Frank gives both herself and her baby a legitimate identity: as Frank bluntly puts it, “thy childe shall know / Who to call Dad now” (1.1.4–5), and, as Winifred tells Sir Arthur, “I will change my life, / From a loose whore, to a repentant wife” (191–92). When Frank commits bigamy soon afterward (marrying the rich Susan only to secure his inheritance), Winifred’s status is unaffected; she is able to identify herself as “his first onely wife, his lawful wife” (4.2.175). And at the end of the play, the focus is on the renewal of Frank and Winifred’s marriage in the wake of Frank’s crimes: repentant upon the gallows, Frank accepts that he must die for his sins, and when his penitence moves Susan’s family sufficiently for them to forgive him, Winifred too accepts his remorse and wishes they could ascend to heaven together. Since they cannot, she promises to “be the monument / Of [his] lov’d memory” and “preserve it / With a Religious care” (5.3.100–102). Susan is mentioned only fleetingly in this final scene, so that even...