SOURCE: Comensoli, Viviana. “Witchcraft and Domestic Tragedy in The Witch of Edmonton.” In The Politics of Gender in Early Europe, edited by Jean R. Brink. Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz, pp. 43-59. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989.

In the following essay, Comensoli argues that The Witch of Edmonton, attributed to Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, was inspired by the execution of an English woman the same year the play was written and that the dramatists wanted to show that social ills, not demonology, were behind her trial and conviction.

The Witch of Edmonton (1621) dramatizes the historical execution of Elizabeth Sawyer for witchcraft on April 19, 1621. The play's immediate source is The Wonderfull Discouerie of Elizabeth Savvyer a witch, a pamphlet written by Henry Goodcole, chaplain of Newgate prison, and entered in the Stationers' Register on April 27 of the same year. The pamphlet records Goodcole's “interviews...