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The Witch is also the name of a side project of the band Cold.

The Witch is a Jacobean play by Thomas Middleton. It is thought to have been written sometime between 1609 and 1616; it was not printed in its own era, and existed in manuscript till it was published by Isaac Reed in 1778. The playwright's epistle prefacing the play states that it was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre—and also that the play was poorly received, "ignorantly ill-fated."

(The ninety-page manuscript—Bodleian Library MS. Malone 12—is from the hand of Ralph Crane, the professional scribe who worked for the King's Men in this era, and who prepared several play texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays as well as two of the extant manuscripts of Middleton's A Game at Chess and other King's Men's plays. Since Middleton wrote for the King's Men in this period, the Crane connection is unsurprising. The manuscript is dedicated to Thomas Holmes, Esq.)

The Witch is known chiefly because parts of the play were incorporated into Shakespeare's Macbeth after the original play's completion, perhaps around 1618. The added text involves Hecate and the Weird Sisters in Act III, scene v, and Act IV, scene i, lines 39-43 and 125-32, and includes two songs.^[1]

Middleton's primary source for belief and folklore regarding witches was the Discovery of Witchcraft of Reginald Scot (1584).^[2] Middleton, however, ignores Scot's skeptical attitude toward much witchcraft lore, and merely exploits his book for dramatically useful elements.

Though witchcraft was a topical subject in the era Middleton wrote, and was the subject of other works like The Witch of Edmonton, Middleton's play is set not in England but in Ravenna; his chief witch is the 120-year-old Hecate. Her magic adheres to the Classical standard of Seneca's Medea; she specializes in love magic, and in the play's second scene supplies a soldier named Sebastian with a potion to inhibit the sexual performance of a rival. Other sexual intrigues follow, in a lurid comic and satiric melodrama.

1. ^ Evans, pp. 1340-1.
2. ^ Logan and Smith, p. 66.

• Evans, G. Blakemore, textual editor. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, Houghton and Mifflin, 1974.
• Greg, W. W. "Some Notes on Crane's manuscript of The Witch." The Library, 4th series, XXII (1942).
• Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

• The Text of Middleton's The Witch

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