Collection Connections: 'A Haunting on the Hill'

In A Haunting on the Hill, struggling playwright Holly describes The Witch of Edmonton with the following dismissive flourish “a misogynistic patchwork of Jacobean melodrama, unfunny rustics, thwarted romance, and a bigamist who murders one of his wives to collect a larger dowry from the other” (Hand, 20). Holly’s simplistic analysis aligns with the character’s goal of writing an empowered, feminist version of The Witch of Edmonton. However, it fails to consider the social-political context in which the play was produced and in which the events of the play occur. What early modern audiences feared most about witchcraft and what the play so probingly explores, is the way in which witchcraft with its deals with the Devil, demonic familiars, and its socially marginalized practitioners upset domestic relationships and the social fabric of small communities.  

The Witch of Edmonton intertwines three plotlines all occurring simultaneously in the village of Edmonton located just outside the bounds of greater London. However, this was not the first early modern play to be set in the town of Edmonton. A play produced almost twenty years earlier in 1603, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, treated upon the supernatural – a magician likened to the Devil – in the same village.  

The Merry Devil of Edmonton was performed at the Globe in 1603 and later published in 1608. The play was attributed to Shakespeare in the 1653 Stationer’s Register. However, this attribution has long since been discredited, and Thomas Dekker – one of the collaborators on The Witch of Edmonton – is now believed to be the author of The Merry Devil of Edmonton. 

Although many in the book club may have come to The Witch of Edmonton, a fictionalized play, through a fictional novel, A Haunting on the Hill, the playwrights themselves based the plot on the very real Elizabeth Sawyer. During her lifetime, the real Sawyer was taken to court multiple times for theft prior to her trial for witchcraft. This perhaps created a tense, even resentful, relationship between the aging Sawyer and her neighbors, laying the foundation for the later allegations of witchcraft against her. Although convictions of witchcraft and subsequent executions for it were quite uncommon in England in the 1610s and 1620s, on April 19th, 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer was executed for her conviction of witchcraft. 

A likely source for the playwrights about Sawyer’s trial and execution would have been Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet about the trial. Although he worked primarily as a clergyman, including as the spiritual advisor to prisoners in Ludgate and Newgate prisons, he is best known today for the seven pamphlets he wrote about criminal trials. Goodcole contributed to an active industry of printing cheap prose pamphlets for the masses aimed at satisfying their thirst for insider knowledge of popular trials. These pamphlets satisfied the similar hunger that ‘true-crime’ podcasts do for today’s modern audience.  

Most of the early modern murder pamphlets were published anonymously so Goodcole’s choice to publish under his name – perhaps to lend a sense of authority to his writing and help to distinguish his works in a saturated market – was an uncommon choice. While the Folger doesn’t have Goodcole’s pamphlet for Sawyer’s trial, the collection has two of the other pamphlets he wrote detailing the executions of women in the 1630s. It is notable that both of the pamphlets shown here concern women convicted of murder and that the title asserts that the women’s confessions – supposedly their own words – are included. The gruesome woodcut illustrations were a common feature of early modern murder pamphlets. 

In addition to ‘true crime’ materials the playwrights could access, they created within a context of plays about witches and witchcraft which were themselves part of a larger trend of staging the supernatural at the start of the 17th century. Such plays included the previously mentioned The Merry Devil of Edmonton, John Lyly’s Mother Bombie, Shakespeare’s Macbeth first performed by actors in the King’s Men theatrical troupe in 1605 and 1606, and John Marston’s The vvonder of vvomen or The tragedie of Sophonisba. When The Witch of Edmonton was revised in 1634, London audiences could also see Thomas Heywood’s new play, The Late Lancashire Witches. 

Alleged witches did exist in early modern England, but they were perhaps most alive in the stage productions, popular ballads, and murder pamphlets the London masses consumed with a seemingly insatiable appetite. Whether in the early modern play The Witch of Edmonton or the contemporary novel A Haunting on the Hill, both texts ask the reader to consider ‘how does suspicion within a community, be it an early modern village or a small group of theater makers, lead to tragic consequences?’