SOURCE: Atkinson, David. “Moral Knowledge and the Double Action in The Witch of Edmonton.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 25, No. 2 (Spring, 1985): 419-37.

In the following essay, Atkinson asserts that the theme of moral knowledge serves to unite the seemingly disconnected Mother Sawyer and Frank Thorney plots in The Witch of Edmonton.

A familiar view of The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Ford, and Rowley is that the play was written hastily in order to cash in on the topicality of the witchcraft material and that little effort was made to integrate this with the Frank Thorney plot.¹ A study which praises the main plot as “probably the most sophisticated treatment of domestic tragedy in the whole of the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama” simultaneously dismisses the sub-plot as sketchy and largely unrelated.² Edward Sackville West, in his seminal essay on the play, gives a more detailed reason for doubting the unity...