The Late Lancashire Witches

The Late Lancashire Witches is a Caroline-era stage play and written by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, published in 1634. The play is a topical melodrama on the subject of the witchcraft controversy that arose in Lancashire in 1633. Performance The play was performed by the King's Men at the Globe Theatre. It was a popular success; it ran for three consecutive days in August 1634, at a time when plays were normally changed daily in a repertory system. Date and collaboration It was once thought that Brome revised an old play by Heywood to make it pertinent to the situation in the early 1630s, generating a work that is roughly 90 per cent Heywood and 10 per cent Brome. Modern scholarship argues that the dramatists' extensive use of court documents shows that Heywood and Brome wrote a new play in 1633–34 to capitalise on a current public affair, producing a work that is much closer to an equal collaboration. The 1634 quarto was printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller Benjamin Fisher, with a Prologue addressed by Heywood to the Earl of Dorset. Genre The Late Lancashire Witches belongs to a subgenre of English Renaissance drama that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft. The most famous of these plays is Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1603–6), though Middleton's The Witch (c. 1609–16) and The Witch of Edmonton (1621) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, are other notable examples.