Possibly the start of a series of essays that remain significant to my fiction writing. I have a few of these, that I felt passionately about — or thought passionately in; and that creep into my story themes — or try. First up, Reginald Scot and The Discoverie of Witchcraft, written for a Witch-Hunting unit in History.

I saw Scot in relation to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage — both comedy and tragedy, and playwrights’ presentation of human evil. Nods to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Iago, and my fave, The Changeling.

Next up: my What is Tragedy? essay, if I dare after I re-read it.

Sarcasm, compassion and the stage: Reginald Scot on witchcraft

 

MEPHISTOPHELES Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
– Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act 1, Scene 3, line 76

And if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart.
– Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Partition 1, Section 4, Member 1

This essay looks at Reginald Scot’s strategy and tactics as a writer in the Discoverie of Witchcraft. His strategy is to expose ‘cousenage’, from the physical tricks of legerdemain to the belief structures of demonologists. If he can unmask the one, can he not un-construct the other? Merely bracketing the jugglers and the intellectuals in his screed against cozenage works like the strategy of a play where comic subplot is associated with tragic main plot. One tactic Scot shares with Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights is witty speech – the provocation of laughter, by which he exposes absurdity, both in the concept of witchcraft and in the trial of witches. The playwrights are justly accused of failure to seriously engage with the contemporary topic of the witch-hunt; but they did seriously engage with the question of evil. Scot’s main enemy is the sense of Satan’s presence in the world, and his answer can be seen in the light of stage plays that treat of evil and its human agents.

Scot’s witty speech is involved with his attacks on the absurd: when his sarcasm effects a smile, then the illogic he points to is killed with humour along with contempt. Sarcasm is not low wit for Scot, not beneath him; neither is the pun; the anti-Catholic joke is a given.1 His sallies seek to clinch an argument by amusement or thrust a point home on his rapier wit: witty speech is his most ready weapon. He lampoons demonologists even as he draws out their arguments to absurd conclusions, extrapolates from what they say to use their own logic against them. He is often funny to read. This has not been enough noticed; perhaps the humour is thought an adjunct to his argument, a delivery system, rather than being an integral part of the missile itself.2

Where else in the sources can humour be found? Stuart Clark in his grand analysis of demonologists’ language does not identify humorous weapons in their arsenal; his section on ‘wit-craft’ is about clever speech, not about wit as upon the stage; the only humours in the learned writings of his study are the medical understanding of the day; laughter, it seems, was not a tool of his intellectual demonologists.3 Certainly ‘M. Mal.’ and Jean Bodin, ‘their principall doctors’ for Scot, do not construct their case by wit. Possibly wit is more suited to deconstruction, to the sceptic. Marion Gibson takes English pamphlets as her study, and finds that even the grave ones can feature humour; furthermore, there is a category of ‘triviall’ pamphlets which treat witchcraft frivolously, at a time when people are being hanged and the public is supposed to be in the grip of fear of witches. Gibson asks us not to neglect this ‘trivial’ evidence of another attitude Elizabethans and Jacobeans had towards witches.4

Comedy in the circumstances may challenge our understanding, but the same can be said for comic subplots in the Elizabethan play. In these the comic and the earnest cohabit, often uneasily to us. Like Clark’s festivals of misrule, the stage comedy and the comic subplot in a serious play can incline either to conserve or to subvert the order of the establishment (whatever that is in the context of the play).5 On stage, comedy can be tipped towards the conservative or the subversive by a performance, and of course by its audience. Festivals of misrule were live performances, too.

Performances of Doctor Faustus used tricks from Scot’s repertoire for its stage effects of magic. This play’s stage Lucifer, its machinery of devils, its close imitation of conjuration in the theatre, can be played for fear even to a post-Christian audience.6 But the stagedness may be fatal to earnest fear. If the devil on stage is a thing of masks, of smoke and mirrors, perhaps the off-stage devil is questioned, deflated, seen (if only for a moment of confusion) as spectacle. Scot equates jugglery with conjuration to mock the latter. In the case of Doctor Faustus, comedy infiltrates the main plot: audiences are invited to laugh with Faustus and Mephistopheles as they bamboozle the corrupt pope in Rome and the silly emperor of Germany. Anti-Catholicism opens a crack; it is a wedge exploited by Doctor Faustus and by the Discoverie of Witchcraft. A devil play that laughs with Mephistopheles through half of the action pulls in different directions; the opportunity to thumb one’s nose at Europe allows in what Stuart Clark calls ‘the relativity of the devil.’7 Clark identifies an opportunity in the new plurality of confessional faiths – when the church is not one edifice. Of course, it is not sufficient to be anti-Catholic to achieve a distance from the witchcraft construct. As Scot observes himself, one piece of that construct can be questioned, disproved, yet other pieces remain intact and the construct knits together again in people’s brains.8 Christopher Marlowe has been reputed an atheist; Reginald Scot has been reputed a member of the Family of Love.9 Whether or not either speculation has truth, both are taken for radicals in their work. Marlowe’s Faustus has also been interpreted as a conservative and truly Christian play, but it is a send-up, it is not a sermon.10

Scot employs the send-up, in that he particularises the opposition’s beliefs (his ‘inventory of devils’) and extrapolates from those beliefs with the ‘what if?’ question, until they are exposed as absurd. One of his counter-arguments is to point out that if witches’ impossibilities were possible, these decrepit old women would much more resemble the great stage Satanist, the learned doctor, Faustus. Like him, they would advise princes, muster imaginary armies out of the air, and obtain for themselves fabulous wealth. Furthermore, the kingdoms of Europe would be in chaos – with thousands of Doctor Faustuses at large. Does this resemble reality? he asks. The misrule that must ensue were witches real is like the slapstick scenes of Doctor Faustus, in every prince’s court.11

In addition, Scot brackets illogic with injustice. When he critiques the conduct of witch trials, he brings out the absurdities. Magistrates too are cozened, by procedure he unpicks as illogical – including torture which he attacks as absurd too, so that miscarriages of justice must be the result.12 Witchcraft cannot be seen as irrational belief; the trouble is it was rational by the thought structures of the day.13 Stuart Clark explains it was locked in by the structures of language, by which a contrary had to exist (if God, then Satan) and where logical extension was sufficient to convince people, above evidence, in the face of evidence.14 Scot is aware of the obstinacy of belief, upon which simple disproofs do not work.15 He addresses his book to the magistracy of England among other intelligent men: he knows witchcraft makes sense to persons of reason.16 His attacks on its logic, from his ‘let us assume it true’ extrapolations, to his argumentation as to why torture does not detect the guilty, are an attempt to dismantle pieces of the thought-world that makes witchcraft in his time a rational proposition. To point out the preposterous, to ridicule, or better, to construct a ridiculous case by the opposition’s own logic; to make men laugh at a facet of the false beliefs: this is his way forward, into a ‘time to come’ when witch beliefs ‘will be as much derided and contemned, and as plainlie perceived’ as the goblins once believed in.17

To banish God’s great contrary the devil, with his hosts of demons as against the host of angels, from the world, from activity on earth, might require both feats of logic to unpick how people think, and an address to their human recognition of the accused human agents of the devil. Scot comes back again and again to the trope of ‘potable babies’ – infants’ flesh rendered down into a soup that may be drunk.18 The idea of potable babies stands for Scot as the great unlikelihood. When one looks at an old woman in court and imagines she has made a hundred babies potable – then that is such a failure of human recognition as staggers Scot’s mind. He simply attempts to point out its obvious impossibility on another level, a level of sane thought as to what people do and what is too wicked for people to be doing, by the thousands, in our own neighbourhoods.

On human recognition, he has an ally in the playwrights. There are trivialisations of witchcraft that modern persons find difficult to excuse: Diane Purkiss says Shakespeare scholars go into interpretive contortions to make of his three Weird Sisters in Macbeth a significant commentary on the subject. In her investigation of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama she finds no more serious, or more sympathetic, stage witch extant. Our greatest playwright has failed us.19 However, let us not forget, the witch is personified evil. Attention is directed to Satan, while the witch is the one with malice towards other humans, neighbours, who chooses to perform these foul acts – the acts Scot disbelieves as inhuman, not humanly possible, on the scale imagined. Scot expends his pen on what is not an intellectual demonologist’s argument, but is about the acceptance of a dangerous fantasy as to deeds our neighbours do in their homes. This fantasy of evil, detached from real observation, to which intellectuals are at least as subject as other folk, he sees perpetuated by scare tactics, both demonologists’ literature and old wives’ tales fed to us early (if Scot is elitist in his scorn for ‘what our low-class nurses told us’, as Purkiss charges, he has equal contempt for the knowledge structures of the learned).20 This is the crux of the matter. The witch was personified evil in that on trial for her life was a person, accused of huge malignancy, an exaggerated wickedness.

When playwrights present an individual figure of evil actions and ask why, this too can be acknowledged a response to witchcraft. Iago is Shakespeare’s treatment of the perplexity of evil in human guise. To stage an Iago, and puzzle the audience as to why he ruins lives, must be seen as topical. Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights did engage deeply with questions of evil. From Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1580s) to Middleton’s The Changeling (1622) – also in Spain, although Italy was popular – tragedies were set in Catholic lands where the playwrights could not only stage sensational action, with the anti-Catholic tropes of poisoning and illicit sex, but discuss evil’s place in the world and its existential position. In The Changeling, De Flores is a figure for the devil: a fallen gentleman, of ugly visage, Beatrice’s servant who, when engaged by her to perform a wicked piece of work, becomes her master, and for his end of the bargain demands sexual intercourse with her. This is the very devil’s pact of witches, although Purkiss only attends to Middleton’s direct portrayal in his comedy The Witch.

It is witches in the real world who suffer this being personified – being caught up in the contraries Stuart Clark analyses, whereby Satan was inflated to be (almost) God’s equal and opposite, and oppositional faiths were locked into a language of antagonism, into extremist positions.21 There was no room in such a totalising of evil, a totalising of the opposition, to be an ill-favoured, nasty old woman and not be of the devil’s party – a witch. De Flores is typecast into his devil figuration by his face. As a matter of fact it is Beatrice who tempts De Flores, to whom he succumbs: she assumes that a foul face is made for criminal work, and it is his exclusion from the opportunity to woo her in any other fashion – because of his ugliness – that leads him to agree. From there, evil actions are contagious, the contamination has set in. If a Kentish wife can be mad and yet not of the devil, if a crotchety old woman can curse her neighbour and yet not go home to practice dark arts upon him, then there is that ‘gradation’ that Clark sees as lost to the language and its conceptual structures.22 One thing leads to another, in the rhetoric of the day. Purkiss thinks Scot insults the crotchety old women,23 but this is not to the point; it is important that he does champion those hard to champion, those most easily categorised in the extreme of evil. If a petty affront, then a major crime: this is the thinking he wants to undo. It would not achieve his purpose to exempt the victims of witch trials from eccentricity, difficult tempers, distempers of the mind or ugly faces.

These are the people in danger. The Changeling has sympathy for the devil in that De Flores begins as an unfortunate whose preoccupation with Beatrice is not less to be called love than the emotions of her suitors. Macbeth has no sympathy for its witches, but the playwrights make it their business to humanise the agents of evil (it is in Lady Macbeth, or Macbeth himself, we might better look for comment). This of course is to work against the demonising of people. The demonologists, quite simply, demonise people, Scot finds, by their intellectual structures and their use/misuse of evidence. A person cannot be half bad in the contraries structure of Clark, whether Calvinist or Catholic; and herein lies the danger to the vulnerable of society, who are already seen as half bad or a quarter bad or a difficulty to the community. The thrust of a plot like The Changeling’s speaks to the inevitability of a mildly disassociated person like De Flores falling further – and this because of people’s expectations of him. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth undergo this progress into evil. Must a poor Essex woman, turned away at a door, inevitably be led by her rancour into the stereotypes that await her as a witch? Scot attempts to say no.

If Shakespeare does not grasp the nettle of the witch trials, directly, then neither do other admired writers, Robert Burton (1577-1640) with his Anatomy of Melancholy and Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) in his essays. For Burton, a witch may cause or be caused by melancholy, but he has nothing to say about melancholics misunderstood and on trial for their lives; Montaigne once meets accused witches and vaunts his strict impartiality of mind; he does not go on to write an essay on the witch-hunt.24 Both authors deal largely with what is Scot’s main defence: the psychological explanation, ‘the force of imagination’, and the sick imagination of melancholy.25 Scot rests on the medical doctor Weyer for his understanding, but he finds in melancholy madness a sufficient explanation even for cases he has witnessed. Burton writes feeling pages upon self-harm as the main ‘prognostic’ for the melancholy condition; Montaigne writes an anecdotal essay on people’s strange readiness to die.26 For Scot, such gleaned information (he and Burton in particular share authorities) demolished any difficulty posed by those cases where witches voluntarily cast themselves into the arms of the law – judicial suicide.27 As to that sad phenomenon, self-cozened witches, a book like Burton’s – a catalogue of mental illness – easily explains these, and Scot is convinced.28 His ideal story is that of the Kentish husband who so compassionately opposes his wife’s belief that she is a witch and has done harm.29 If only every woman self-abused to self-accuse were possessed of such a husband, Scot seems to say. Without him, she would have been hanged; just as, if Job’s story happened now, ‘a few old women would hang for it’ – this line or its similar is one of Scot’s themes, inserted as a chorus to his song.30 It has his traits as a writer: angry under an off-hand phrase, with scorn and compassion at work together.

Sarcasm and the argument by absurdity can be seen as a sceptic’s weapons, if Scott’s demonological opposition are conceded to have little humour. Judicial procedure against witches is also absurd in Scot’s hands: he scoffs at the illogic in the construct of witchcraft and in its proofs in court. Scot champions the victims of witch trials in their sickness, ugliness, or their common human malice; and this restores what Stuart Clark calls ‘gradation’ – the avoidance of absolutes. Sympathy for the (human) devil is almost unavoidable in a well-written tragedy like Othello, Macbeth or The Changeling, where evil action is seen in gradual steps and does not explain the whole of the personality. Scot’s most sentimental stories tend to this end, as does his pity for the unfortunate.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed., Holbrook Jackson. New York: New York Review Books, 2001.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus and Other Plays. Eds., David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Middleton, Thomas and Rowley, William. The Changeling, in Three Jacobean Tragedies. Ed., Gamini Salgado. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Trans., John Florio. 1603. Renascence Editions: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions, accessed 30 March 2016.

Russell, Ian (director). Doctor Faustus (video recording). London: Globe Theatre On Screen, Opus Arte, 2012.

Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. New York: Dover, 1972.

 
Secondary works

Almond, Philip C. England’s First Demonologist: Reginald Scot and the ‘Discoverie of Witchcraft’. London and New York: I B Taurus, 2011.

Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Davies, S.F., ‘The reception of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, magic and radical religion’ Journal of the History of Ideas 74 (No. 3, 2013), pp. 381-401.

Gibson, Marion. Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-century Representations. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Wootton, David, ‘Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love’, in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, pp. 119-138. Ed., Stuart Clark. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001.

Footnotes
1 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (New York: Dover, 1972). Examples of sarcasm in III xv, IV ii; of puns in III iv; of anti-Catholic jokes in III ii, IV iii. Passim.
2 His humour is not discussed in Philip C. Almond, England’s First Demonologist: Reginald Scot and the ‘Discoverie of Witchcraft’ (London and New York: I B Taurus, 2011), or in the other works consulted for this essay.
3 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
4 Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); for ‘trivial’ pamphlets, see pp. 113-49.
5 For festivals of misrule, see Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 11-30.
6 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-text, 1604; for a performance which seeks to recreate Elizabethan stage machinery and effects, see Ian Russell (director), Doctor Faustus, video recording (London: Globe Theatre On Screen, 2012).
7 Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 134-48.
8 Scot, Discoverie, I vi.
9 Arguments for and against Scot’s Family of Love connection found in David Wootton, ‘Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love’, in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and
Meaning in Early Modern Culture, ed., Stuart Clark (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 119-138; S.F.
Davies, ‘The reception of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, magic and radical
religion’, Journal of the History of Ideas 74 (No. 3, 2013), pp. 396-401.
10 For the debates on Marlowe’s atheism and the play’s Christianity, see Lisa Hopkins, Christopher
Marlowe: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 65-84.
11 Scot, Discoverie, III viii and xiv, parallels Doctor Faustus, Acts 3 and 4.
12 Scot frequently touches on torture; for example, II xii.
13 Clark is certainly not on his own but he states this strongly, Thinking with Demons, pp. 3-10.
14 Ibid., pp. 43-93.
15 Scot, Discoverie, I vi, again.
16 For the persons Scot dedicated the Discoverie to, and whose perusal he hoped for, see Almond,
England’s First Demonologist, pp. 1-20.
17 Scot, Discoverie, VII ii.
18 Ibid.; first mentioned II ix.
19 Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-century Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 179-230.
20 For Purkiss on Scot’s elitism, see Witch in History, p. 64.
21 Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. 43-68.
22 Ibid., p. 61.
23 For Scot as misogynist, see Purkiss, Witch in History, p. 217.
24 Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy; witches cause melancholy, Pt. 1, Sec. 2, Mem. 1, Subs. 3; witches are caused by melancholy, Subs. 6. Michel de Montaigne meets witches in his essay ‘Of Cripples’.
25 ‘Of the Force of Imagination’ is the title of an essay by Montaigne.
26 Burton, Anatomy, Pt. 1, Sec. 4, Mem. 1; Montaigne, ‘That the taste of Goods or Evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them’.
27 Scot, Discoverie, III vii.
28 Burton, Anatomy, Pt. 1, Sec. 3; Scot, Discoverie, III vii-xi.
29 Ibid., III x.
30 Ibid., V viii.