“Go Touch His Life”: Contagious Malice and the Power of Touch in The Witch of Edmonton

Abstract

In this chapter, Johnston considers the links between contagion and the devil in Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621). This chapter outlines how the play exhibits a complex model of infection in which pollution and disease are linked inextricably with moral corruption, with the devil serving as the pathogenic transmitter of both. The spread of evil follows a clear pattern of contagion, of infection, treatment, and eradication, in which all transgressions are triggered by touch. Focusing on the demonic agency given to infection, Johnston argues that the devil enables a synthesis of etiologies. The play follows a Frascatorian exogenous model of pathology but it does so within the bounds of an endogenous understanding rooted in the idea of galenic humours.

In The Witch of Edmonton, evil is quite literally infectious. When the devil creeps into the small, rural community in the form of a stray dog, he sets off a chain reaction of disastrous events culminating in the deaths of four people. With a subtle rub, the devil dog induces both physical and moral disease that is in turn transmitted to the next person his victim touches. In the play, witchcraft, revenge, pollution, vermin, disease, and moral degeneracy are all connected to, and disseminated by, the devil. As a walking, talking, corporeal pathogen, the devil’s material presence in Edmonton threatens every aspect of the community’s social order. The sequence of events follows a pattern of infection, treatment, and eradication, enacting a contamination that is dependent wholly on the physical contact from witch to devil, from devil to person, and from person to person. Whether out of hatred or affection, from seemingly harmless daily interactions to violent beatings, from chaste encounters to illicit sexual relationships, every transgression in The Witch of Edmonton is triggered by touch .

The Witch of Edmonton is worthy of our attention not only because of its intricate portrayal of early modern witch persecution but also because it exhibits a complex model of contagion in which pollution and disease are linked inextricably with moral corruption, with the devil serving as the pathogenic transmitter of both. In giving agency to contagion, Dekker, Ford, and Rowley demonstrate how contemporary audiences made sense of infection. As the play exemplifies, occult explanations played a significant part in understanding contagion in the early modern world. Contamination in The Witch of Edmonton encompasses different etiological concepts and assimilates them, including theories of vermin, miasmic infection, and humoral imbalances. The spread of both evil and disease in the play follows a Frascatorian exogenous model of pathology with specific importance given to the role of touch in transmitting the witch’s corrupting influence. However, it does so within the bounds of an endogenous understanding rooted in the idea of Galenic humors.

What is especially striking about The Witch of Edmonton is not the conflation of different theories of contagion, but the prominent role given to the devil as the medium through which different etiologies can work in the act of contagion. The devil in fact proves to be an unlikely compromise between different systems. He is an airborne and invisible species, darting from eye to eye or eye to body, rendering a change in one’s emotional or physical state. He is associated with miasmic foul odors polluting the town. He is also very visible to the audience, reveling in his physicality and contaminating his victims through contact. The exact form the devil takes—as a stray dog—also connects the spread of disease to animals, and in particular, to vermin. The devil’s entrance into the community triggers an infection of disease and depravity, but the devil is also instrumental in spreading the infection himself. The success of the contagion is dependent not only on the devil’s initial appearance but also on his continued material presence in disseminating vice. Dog’s influence must be quite literally rubbed into his victims. His touch both releases dormant evil within the body and infects it with that of others. His victims, in turn, contaminate each other through the same method, and every plot development hinges on such acts of contagion. More broadly, the devil’s function as a pathogen, as a sometimes invisible yet all too material disseminator of both vice and disease, demonstrates how the early moderns could understand different etiologies that operated alongside each other. In The Witch of Edmonton, the devil helps make sense of how such seemingly opposing ideas could coexist in a play world without apparent contradiction.

Origin

The pattern of contagion in Edmonton begins not with the devil but with the witch, a woman hell-bent on wreaking havoc on her abusive neighbors. While the devil functions as the disseminator of disease and vice, the source itself is human, in the deformed and decrepit body of an angry old woman whose rage and vitriol have manifested materially in her physical being. Such a view serves not only to dehumanize the witch but to humanize the source of infection plaguing the community. The witch as a walking, talking miasma makes the source of contamination even more dangerous by giving it agency. This infection wants to infect and has every reason to. While the play is certainly sympathetic to the plight of the witch as it explores extensively the circumstances in which an old woman dependent on the goodwill of her neighbors might turn to witchcraft, it nevertheless presents her as unequivocally guilty of malicious intent. Mother Sawyer is culpable for, if not exactly capable of, the murders. From her first appearance, she makes it clear that if she had the means to kill her tormentors she would do so in a heartbeat: “would some power, good or bad, / Instruct me which way I might be revenged” (2.1.114–115). She subsequently embraces her identity as a witch and is unabashedly delighted to enact revenge on her accusers. Sawyer’s revenge is focused on enabling the devil to touch all he can with his corrupting influence, while Edmonton’s story is centered on restoring social order through eliminating the infection by isolating and killing the witch, and thus preventing the devil from transmitting her noxious influence to the rest of the village.

From her first entrance, Mother Sawyer’s body is presented as the source of all things foul. The corrupting influence of the witch is tangible, concentrated in her body and especially in her blood. In Sawyer’s first scene, she articulates powerfully and with striking eloquence, how the village, not herself, has made her a witch. Using the language of dirt and pollution, she identifies her accusers as the source of her own corruption: “Must I for that be made a common sink / For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues / To fall and run into?” and “that my bad tongue, by their bad usage made so, / Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn, / Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse” (2.1. 6–7, 12–13).¹ In using the word “sink,” she likens herself to a refuse pile from which miasma, the commonly believed source of infection, generates. Sawyer embodies Edmonton’s failings and corruption, exemplifying perfectly Mary Douglas’s model of dirt and impurity as anything that the town considered out of place in a conflation of sin and pollution.² The witch is the embodiment of the town’s refuse pile, a noxious source of infection primed to contaminate all with whom she comes into contact.

This association of witchcraft and disease was by no means unusual at the time. Both early modern demonologists and physicians associated witches with the spread of illness, focusing in particular on how witches infected the air around them. French demonologist Jean Bodin writes that they “attract the poison from the earth, and the infection from the air,” implying that witches were a concentration of the filth around them.³ This miasmic connection to witchcraft is best exemplified in Macbeth, in which the weird sisters “Hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.13).⁴ They are subsequently associated with “infected” air and foul air arising from the earth: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them” (1.3.77–78). In Edmonton, Mother Sawyer is similarly connected to the dirt and rotten refuse produced by the town, and she is blamed for the consequent infection. In her analysis of rats and contagion in the early modern world, Lucinda Cole identifies a correlation between climate changes, plague, and witch persecution, suggesting that “witches, rats, and plague became associated in the early modern imagination as part of a developing theory of contagion.”⁵ All three were associated with “fetid or otherwise corrupt air.”⁶ The witch, as the “filth and rubbish of men’s tongues” is treated as nothing more than a vengeful stink.

Particular significance is given to her polluted blood as the source of unrest. Sawyer’s desire for revenge is concentrated in her veins, and her pact with Dog allows him to suck the blood out of her on a regular basis. In Henry Goodcole’s interview with the real Elizabeth Sawyer, she explains that the blood is “to nourish him.”⁷ The bloodsucking enables him to transmit her decayed corruption into whomever or whatever he brushes up against, and he makes the most of it, wandering through the play and touching everything he possibly can. The source of infection is limited and, once exhausted, the devil relinquishes the witch to her community. Sawyer’s frequent blood loss affects her temperament, which the playwrights connect to Galenic principles. Draining Sawyer’s blood inevitably affects her humoral balance. The more blood the devil takes, the more choleric the witch becomes, until, as she laments, she has nothing left to give him: “I am dried up / With cursing and with madness, and have yet / No blood moisten these sweet lips of thing” (4.1.167–169). Dog abandons her shortly afterward. In Goodcole’s pamphlet, he comments that Sawyer’s complexion was “pale and ghost-like without any blood at all.”⁸ Drained of her infectious blood, a concentration of both disease and vice, she is no longer useful to her canine pollutant.

Sawyer’s blood-sucking bargain with the devil impacts Edmonton’s means of survival immediately. Just as they were associated with miasma and disease, witches were also commonly charged with damaging crops out of revenge. Sawyer curses her assailants with “Diseases, plagues, the curse of an old woman follow and fall upon you!” and “Rots and foul maladies eat up thee and thine” (4.1.26–27, 77–78). The devil soon brings these curses into fruition. The cattle and crops are “killed,” “mildewed,” and “spoiled,” the corn and fruit destroyed as part of Sawyer’s revenge. Old Banks links her to the sudden sickness of his horse, who “this morning runs piteously from the glanders” (4.1.1–2). At first glance, these acts appear nothing out of the ordinary, the typical activities of minor devils such as those exhibited by Pug in The Devil Is an Ass and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet in Edmonton, such upsets are hardly petty and are, in fact, life-threatening in an agricultural community dependent on the success of their crops. This dependence is magnified in the play, and the threat to them serious. The witch is a serious threat, not only to the moral well-being of the village but also to their survival.

Unsurprisingly, the devil functions as a disseminator of vice as well as infection. The rots and mildews affecting the food supply are linked inextricably with diseased human behavior. In fact, the distinction between literal disease and moral decay is hard to distinguish at times. In Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England, Margaret Healy writes that “Spiritual and moral infection are caught from evil spirits and ‘wicked fiends’ in the same manner that pestilence is inhaled with ‘corrupt’ air and from infected people.”⁹ This conflation is exemplified perfectly in The Witch of Edmonton, where the demonic connection to contagion is indistinguishable from the devil’s traditional role of disseminating vice. In the opening of the fourth act, the irate villagers list Sawyer’s alleged crimes, mingling the agricultural disasters with the sinful indulgences of their womenfolk: “Our cattle fall, our wives fall, our daughters fall, and / maid-servants fall; and we ourselves shall not be able to stand / if this beast be suffered to graze amongst us” (4.1.15–18). Both are sourced from the witch and disseminated by the devil, both are spread through the act of touch , and both are regarded as equally threatening to the stability of the community. Dog himself connects disease to loose morals when he discusses with Cuddy Banks the different forms he takes in order to keep up with his busy agenda of spreading corruption and vice: “The carcass of some disease-slain strumpet / We varnish fresh, and wear at her first beauty” (5.1.150–1). Here, he associates disease explicitly with licentious behavior, covering up the presence of the disease in the body in order to spread it further. Such actions are paralleled in the Frank Thorney plot, in which hidden motives and dubious intentions are transmitted sexually. When contemplating his unscrupulous behavior, Frank likens his mind to a rotting marsh, a “fen in which this Hydra / of discontent grows rank,” his heart sucked by “poisonous leeches” (2.2.113–114, 116). His rotten thoughts, prompted into action by Dog, have harmful results.

Contamination

The witch thus functions as the source of vice and infection, but she is dependent on the devil for its transmission. Contamination, both physical and moral, requires touch. In this respect, the play’s model of contagion is exopathic, with the devil acting as the carrier of the pathogens, infecting all those with whom he comes into contact. Such infection is reliant on a tangible connection between contaminant and contaminated, and in most cases, the devil functions as an intermediary between revenger and victim. The two murders committed in the play are the result of a complex chain of physical contact from human to devil, from devil to human, and from human to human, and both are linear progressions of immorality and deceit that, with a little help from the devil, culminate in death. In the first, the witch Elizabeth Sawyer feeds her blood to her devil, who then touches Anne Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is driven mad and kills herself. The murder of Susan Carter, though occurring through a more complicated sequence of events, nevertheless parallels the witch plot closely in terms of transmission via touch. Sir Arthur Clarington impregnates Winnifred, who sleeps with Frank Thorney and tells him the baby is his. Frank marries her in secret and is then forced by his father to marry Susan Carter, whom he then murders. Just as he is about to murder Susan, Dog appears, rubbing his leg to prompt the deed.

The connection between touch and the spread of maleficium is explicit in the language itself. The seemingly innocuous words used to describe physical contact between human and human, or animal/devil and human all, in fact, prove malignant. An exopathic etiology is evident simply in the etymology of the word contagion which, as Donald Beecher points out, comes from tangere, that is, “touch.”¹⁰ The word “plague” carries similar tactile associations, Healy explains, “derived from the Latin word ‘plaga’ which actually means ‘a blow, a stroke, a wound.’”¹¹ In Edmonton, both Sawyer and Dog use the word “touch” as a synonym for kill.¹² Sawyer’s first command to Dog, “Go touch his life,” is to enact revenge on Old Banks to which Dog replies that he has “no power to touch” (II.i.160, 173). Sawyer later commands Dog to “touch” Anne Ratcliffe. Her command means, unequivocally, to kill. The word is also used in Doctor Faustus, when Mephistopheles tells Faustus he is incapable of harming the old man who pleads with Faustus to return to God: “I cannot touch his soul” (V.i.189).¹³ Dog himself acknowledges the power of his hellish touch, announcing that “one touch from me soon sets the body forward” (3.3.2–3). His role in the death of Susan is confirmed by the stage direction “Dog rubs him” (3.3.s.d). In fact, the abundance of stage directions for Dog indicates the physicality of the character, and the significant role that movement and physical presence have in his magic. The stage directions specify a particular type of contact each time: “Dog rubs him” (3.3.14.s.d); “he fawns and leaps upon her” (2.1.251.s.d.); “sucks” (2.1.153.s.d.) and “paw[s] softly at Frank” (4.2.108.s.d.). He is also called on to “pinch,” “touch,” “rub,” “tickle,” and “nip.” “Nip” is for the “sucking child” (4.1.175), while “tickle” signifies an overtly sexual action, and “pinch” and “touch” both denote killing, or an action leading to death. All of Dog’s contaminations, not just the deaths, are instigated by physical contact between infector and infected.

Viewing the witch is also treated as a form of infectious touch. The very sight of Sawyer is considered harmful, a fear that exemplifies a contemporary understanding of vision as an act of physical contact between viewer and viewed. Vision in the play is rooted in an extramissive explanation of visual cognition in which the eyes receive beams of images or species emitted from that which they observed. Stuart Clark lays out the model in Vanities of the Eye: “objects in the visual field were said to produce species…which radiated out from these objects into the surrounding medium, usually the air, transmitting images of the qualities physically (that is, by alteration) through the medium of the eye.”¹⁴ This model of visual cognition, Carla Mazzio explains, “speaks to a material process of visualization at the most basic physiological level.”¹⁵ This carries with it the implication that to look on Sawyer is to make a tangible connection because it suggests a physical interaction between two people, even from a distance. The tangible connection of sight is explained in a more benevolent context elsewhere in the play when Cuddy Banks, the local simpleton, describes how he came to fall in love at first sight with Kate Carter: “I saw a little devil fly out of her eye like a burbolt, which sticks at this hour up to the feathers in my heart” (2.1.231–233). Cuddy’s explanation demonstrates how a person’s eyes rendered them especially vulnerable to influence. As Clark points out, “if the senses were windows on the soul they were also doors, allowing entrance to temptation, vice, and evil spirits.”¹⁶ A look from the witch is equivalent to an infectious touch, and Sawyer’s body is certainly characterized as infectious. In The Witch of Edmonton, the Renaissance fears of the decaying body of an old woman are magnified by her association with the devil. There is particular emphasis on the decrepitude of her body as rotten and dried up, a “ruined cottage ready to fall with age” (2.1.118). She describes herself as “poor, deformed, and ignorant, / And like a bow buckled and bent together” (2.1.3–4), a detail that comes directly from Goodcole, who notes that “Her body was crooked and deformed, even bending together.”¹⁷ Mother Sawyer’s ugliness signifies her internal corruption and the sight of her—and a look from her—can disturb. Her unsightly appearance causes the Morris dancers to “Exeunt in strange postures,” implying that her harmful gaze impairs their mobility (2.1.105.s.d.). One look at, or one look from, the witch can harm. The corrupting glare, and less than desirable appearance, was again something commonly associated with witchcraft. In The Devil Conjured (1596), Thomas Lodge demonstrates how the devil’s possession of a witch adopts the language of contagion: “the witches soule infected with malice, corrupteth the aire by her sight / and by yt means infecteth yong infants,” while in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), Heinrich Kramer writes that some witches could kill through “a touch and a glance, or simply a glance.”¹⁸ In this extramissive model, the diseased species from Sawyer’s eye contaminate the air and are transmitted to the beholder, entering the body and infecting it.

Once the corrupted species or the rubbing influence of the devil has made their way into their victim’s body, they work to alter its internal state. Like witches, the devil was typically connected to the infliction of disease in early modern medical texts as well as in demonologies.¹⁹ Healy demonstrates that, even though Hippocrates and other ancient physicians typically ruled out the possibility of occult explanations in medical diagnosis, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the devil featured prominently in medical enquiry.²⁰ But how does this work, exactly? In Compendium Maleficarum (1608), Francesco Maria Guazzo explains that “For the purpose of causing bodily infirmities he distils a spirituous substance from the blood itself, purifies it of all base matter, and uses it as the aptest, most efficacious and swiftest weapon against human life.”²¹ Since orthodox demonology mandated that the devil’s powers were restricted to manipulating natural processes, their ability to strike illness in people was, as Clark puts it, “nothing more than a complicated piece of physics,” based on a Galenic understanding of humoral harmony.²² Both demonologists and physicians alike wrote that the devil was able to induce any kind of illness in his human victims by altering their humoral imbalance: “In principle, diseases caused by devils were inflicted to demonic ends, yet were not different in kind from those brought on through the adustion of black bile.”²³ No ailment was off limits. In the Malleus Maleficarum, for example, harmful magic could “inflict any kind of physical infirmity, even leprosy or epilepsy.”²⁴ In his natural state, the devil was incorporeal, inhabiting an “airy” intangible body that lacked “flesh, blood, spirit, and bone.”²⁵ As an airy spirit, he was capable of appearing visible or invisible. In this respect, the devil mimics the invisible, airborne species moving between people and affecting them accordingly. Dog is both invisible and visible, working on humoral imbalances but also infecting through external infection, and thus synthesizing exogenous and endogenous etiologies

In terms of contagion, it is not the devil’s incorporeal qualities but his very material form that is essential to the spread of corruption in The Witch of Edmonton. While the animal form does not automatically link him with the spread of disease in an early modern understanding, his status as a devil in corporeal form does. As discussed above, rather than appearing in his natural, if oxymoronic, “incorporeal body,” in order to implement wicked effects in Edmonton, the devil takes corporeal form by possessing the body of a real animal. He does not bewitch from afar but is instead solidly present to perform the contamination in its entirety. Toward the end of the play, in a conversation with Cuddy Banks, Dog lists the forms he typically takes to interact with people. While devils can appear in “Any shape to blind such silly eyes as thine,” devils typically favor a particular kind of animal: “chiefly those coarse creatures, dog or cat, hare, ferret, frog, toad” (5.1.124–125). Dog’s list is congruent with the forms taken by witches’ familiars in other contemporary texts, such as Macbeth and The Late Lancashire Witches. James Serpell’s research on animal familiars reveals that a dog familiar in witchcraft cases was a common occurrence.²⁶ As Cuddy informs the demon, this is not a particularly impressive range of forms: “It seems you devils have poor thin souls, that / You can bestow yourselves in such small bodies.” (5.1.128–129). Dog himself tells Cuddy that devils habitually possess the bodies of “Any poor vermin” (5.1.127). The devil’s influence is dependent on material contact, no matter how small or lowly the animal.

The word “vermin” connects Dog to another aspect of contagion not quite understood at the time: the role of animals in the spread of disease. Dog’s own animalness is pertinent to a particular type. While he is teased about inhabiting such lowly forms, it might be a deliberate choice, considering that such animals were those not usually employed by humans. In “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England,” Mary Fissell suggests that “vermin” were defined both by their consumption of human food and grain and their lack of appeal to the human palate: “not only were vermin uncouth eaters who devoured their meat without ceremony. Vermin were also animals who were never transformed into meat.”²⁷ There is no satisfactory explanation for why vermin were not consumed but, as Fissell suggests, the origins may be biblical. According to Leviticus: “These shall also be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.”²⁸ In Daemonologie (1597), King James I asserts that

the qualitie of these formes and effectes, is lesse or greater, according to the skil and art of the Magician. For as to the formes, to some of the baser sorte of them he oblishes him self to appeare at their calling upon them, either in likenes of a dog, a Catte, an Ape, or such-like other beast.²⁹

Here, James suggests that the devils are concerned with separating themselves from humans, commonly assuming forms that ensure they will not be eaten. Possessing the body of an animal not likely to be eaten seems a highly practical choice for Dog, securing desirable proximity to humans without the threat of being eaten or employed. He is motivated not by human resources but by human souls and, like vermin, human prosperity is dependent on his eradication. While vermin were not yet connected explicitly to the spread of disease, they were nevertheless associated with dirt and contamination, as noted in Leviticus.³⁰ While the early moderns did not understand the exact process by which animals transmitted disease, they certainly seemed to understand how the devil, in the form of vermin, could transmit both literal disease and moral disease, from body to body, from human to animal, from animal to animal, and from animal to crops.

The repeated identification of the devil and the villagers as dogs shows how far the evil has spread. In rubbing Sawyer’s ill will into her assailants, Dog has imbued them with his own devilish qualities. In fact, everybody is compared to a dog at some stage in the play. Sawyer refers to Old Banks as “this black cur / That barks and bites, and sucks the very blood / Of me and of my credit,” while Sawyer herself is “a base hell-hound” (2.1.123–125, 4.1.103). She calls her accusers “None but base curs so bark at me” and claims “I am torn in pieces by a pack of curs,” echoing Dog’s earlier threat to “tear thy body in a thousand pieces” if she does not comply with his demands (4.1. 86–87, 164, 2.1.143–144). The village eventually destroys her in place of the devil. Rather than being dragged off stage when her pact expires, as in the A-text Faustus or torn to shreds by the devil as in the B-text Faustus, Mother Sawyer is instead killed by her neighbors. In a play that takes a lot from Marlowe’s , even paraphrasing it in several scenes, Sawyer’s neighbors take over the Mephistophelean role of collecting on the witch’s hellish debts. Mother Sawyer, the infector of the village body, must be cut out for the rest to return to physical and moral health.

Vulnerability

The contamination of evil influence in Edmonton, however, is more complicated than the simple spread of moral infection from one person to another. Also present in The Witch of Edmonton is the idea of dormant sympathies that render someone susceptible to infection, a concept described in contemporary accounts of contamination. In his Treatise of the Plague , Lodge elucidates how some people are more susceptible to infection than others:

Contagion, is an evil qualitie in a body, communicated unto an other by touch, engendring one and the same disposition in him to whom it communicated…very properly is he reputed infectious, that hath in himselfe an evil, malignant, venemous, or vitious dispostition, which may be imparted and bestowed on an other by touch.³¹

Exopathic demonic infection, like contagious sympathy , “presupposes a latent likeness between the disease and the victim.”³² The same is true of the contamination in Edmonton. Dog refuses Sawyer’s request to kill Old Banks on the grounds that he is “loving to the world / And charitable to the poor” and thus lives “without compass of our reach” (2.1.166–167, 170). The devil, it seems, must locate an appropriate receiver. In this respect, the play recalls Calvinist convictions of predetermined capacity for evil. In The Witch of Edmonton, the model works especially well for the spread of moral corruption. Dekker, the probable author of the witch plot, was himself a militant Protestant, and he makes the connection between sin and pollution in his plague pamphlets.³³ If we regard Sawyer’s determination to wreak havoc on her neighbors’ lives as revenge, we can understand that those who have wronged her in the past are ripe for demonic contamination because they have committed moral transgressions by denying charity, harming her possessions, and physically abusing her. In Edmonton, the affinity with the devil depends on the precondition of bad language and bad intention. Bad language plays a significant role in the play, which suggests that words themselves are infectious. Sawyer’s identity as a witch originates in her “bad tongue,” created by the “bad usage” of the village, and it is cursing that summons Dog to her in the first place. Why Dog can set forth in motion the actions that lead to Ratcliffe’s death but not Old Banks is puzzling, but it may be that Old Banks is better spoken than Anne. Dog explains to Sawyer that he cannot kill Banks directly unless he finds him “as I late found thee, /Cursing and swearing” (2.1.58). Anne, in contrast, is described as a “foul-tonged whore,” and thus a perfect candidate for demonic corruption (4.1.182).

Anne’s death, while prompted by Dog’s touch at Sawyer’s behest, is indirect. Dog does not kill her outright. Instead his touch drives her mad so that she became “nothing but the miserable trunk of a wretched woman” with “nothing in her mouth being heard but ‘the devil, the witch, the witch, the devil’” (4.1.221–225). According to her husband, following her encounter with Sawyer, she “beat out her own brains and died” (4.1.225–226). Dog is thus able to trigger in Anne the impetus that will lead to her own death. Susan Carter, rather disturbingly, believes herself deserving of her death when Frank tells her that, as he is already married, she is “my whore. / No wife of mine,” and then, acknowledging the presence of the presumably invisible Dog, declares she has “dogged [her] own death” (3.3.30–31, 39). Frank himself effectively invites the devil in. When swearing to Winnifred that he will remain true to her in spite of his father’s wishes, Frank declares that if his affections stray from Winnifred then “let heaven / Inflict upon me some fearful ruin” (1.1.66–67). Acting on the desires of both Frank and Sawyer, Dog infects with intention, bringing out the malicious impulses that already lurk within his victims. When he chances on Sawyer herself, she has already voiced her desire to become a witch if only she had the means. Dog merely enables her. His toxic touch disrupts the balance of the recipients’ internal state, prompting them to act.

Immunity

The idea that some characters are more susceptible to wicked influence than others is demonstrated not only by those who are infected by Dog but also by those who seem to resist it. In the play’s decidedly quirky third plot, Old Banks’s foolish son Cuddy strikes up an affectionate—and very tactile—friendship with Dog yet remains curiously impervious to his demonic charms. His child-like purity and innocence render him immune to Dog’s contamination. When Cuddy approaches Sawyer for help in wooing Kate Carter, the witch delights in the prospect of taking revenge on Old Banks: “Now the set’s half won. / The father’s wrong I’ll wreck upon the son,” even though Cuddy is the only character to express kindness to her in the play (2.1.288–289). Sawyer instructs Cuddy to pursue a likeness of Kate Carter, claiming that he need only “embrace her in thy arms and she is thine own” (2.1.283). Cuddy will win her affections only if he makes physical contact with her, in keeping with the pattern of contagion in the play. Of course, Sawyer issues these instructions to Cuddy with the intention that it will cause his death, and he almost drowns, but Cuddy resists infection, telling the devil “I entertained you ever as a dog, not as a devil” (5.1.117). Dog agrees that he used the fool “doggedly, not devilishly” and only “for sport to laugh at” (5.1.118–119). Cuddy’s lack of evil intention makes him of little use to Dog. The fool instead hopes that he will be able to influence Dog for the better, lecturing him on mending his wicked ways and advising him to “rub thy shoulder against a lawyer’s gown as thou passest by” (5.1.212). No matter how close Dog is able to get, he has no power to touch the young fool’s life because Cuddy exhibits no innate capacity for evil and consequently remains immune to both disease and moral corruption.

Antidote

The villagers’ various attempts to stop the contamination of the community are also centered on touch in The Witch of Edmonton, implying that the antidote is affected through recontamination. The mad Anne Ratcliffe evokes an old folk remedy when she asks Sawyer if she can “scratch thy face” (4.1.198). Although it carried no weight in courts, witch scratching is a commonly cited practice that was employed both for relieving a witch’s victim of symptoms and identifying somebody as the guilty party. Striking her, specifically scratching her face, was also based on the idea of contagion through touch. In the many descriptions of witch scratching, there is a noted emphasis on drawing the witch’s blood. Orna Alyagon Darr explains that “the belief was that by scratching the suspect with the nails and drawing her blood, the bewitched victim could enjoy temporary relief of symptoms. Therefore, the victim’s relief after scratching a suspect confirmed the suspect’s guilt.”³⁴ Scratching the witch in fact serves a variety of purposes. It was believed to reverse the symptoms of her victims, make the devil uncomfortable, drain the witch of her corrupt blood faster, and expedite her hellish fate, as Shakespeare suggests in 1 Henry VI: “Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee: / Blood will I draw on thee – thou art a witch – / And straightaway give thy soul to him thou serv’st” (1.5.5–7).³⁵ In some sources, the practice offers instant relief, implying that the physical contact transfers the pain back to the witch. The drawing of blood prevents it from being sucked by the devil or helps to drain her of her malice and accelerate her death. Barbara Rosen also suggests the blood could draw the familiar back to the witch.³⁶ Ultimately, the villagers stop the infection by destroying the witch through hanging. Like witch scratching, violence is met with violence to prevent further violence. If scratching the witch curtails her ability to inflict physical harm on her neighbors, the only way to stop the witch killing again is to kill her first.

In drawing on a complex model of contagion dependent on both the innate tendencies of the victims and the material presence of an external infector, The Witch of Edmonton accounts for an infection of agricultural blight and licentiousness by giving agency to the contamination. It is tempting to view the play as a medical drama of small-scale germ warfare in which Sawyer contaminates the community, resulting in widespread social unrest and several deaths. The plague is finally stopped with the identification and destruction of patient zero, the witch, and the departure of the infector, the devil. An etiology that encompasses magic makes the play seem, paradoxically, quite modern. In the last two decades, historians of science have focused increasingly on how occult belief enabled, rather than hindered, the development of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and The Witch of Edmonton illustrates perfectly how supernatural convictions fit into rational explanations of natural disasters. Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s play demonstrates especially well how contemporary medical knowledge was fused with popular belief in order to make sense of otherwise inexplicable events in the early modern world.

In Edmonton, the presence of the devil enables an exopathic understanding of infection. Dog in fact serves as an intermediary between traditional conventions and more recent scientific developments in understanding contagion. The witch’s demonic familiar functions as the carrier of all things harmful, transferring infection and evil influence from body to body, from human to animal, and from the animate to the inanimate. The Witch of Edmonton thus demonstrates unequivocally that the spread of both vice and disease occurs not merely through presence or proximity but through the physical act of contamination. Dog serves as a sort of prototype for the role of vermin and pathogens in an exopathic etiology. The blight on the town can only be explained if there is ill-intention at the root of the contamination. Any misfortune must have a malicious cause, and the stray dog spreading disease through touch conveniently lends agency to contagion. There are no random acts in The Witch of Edmonton. Those who succumb to moral or physical infection deserve it. Acting on the wronged woman’s desire for vengeance, the devil dog always infects with purpose .

Notes

• 1. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, Revels Student Editions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). All subsequent references are to this edition.

• 2. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

• 3. Jean Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, ed. Jonathan L. Pearl, trans. Randy A. Scott (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 146.

• 4. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

• 5. Lucinda Cole, “Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 66.

• 6. Ibid.

• 7. Henry Goodcole, “The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death,” in Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton, 144.

• 8. Ibid., 137.

• 9. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics (Houndmills; New York: Palgrave, 2001), 36.

• 10. Donald Beecher, “Windows on Contagion,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 32.

• 11. Margaret Healy, “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 23.

• 12. David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 456. Crystal and Crystal outline that “touch” does not exclusively refer to “kill,” but can mean: “threaten, danger, imperil,” “wound, hurt, injure,” or “stain, taint, infect.”

• 13. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

• 14. Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15.

• 15. Carla Mazzio, “Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance,” in Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 171.

• 16. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 24.

• 17. Goodcole, 137.

• 18. Thomas Lodge, The Devil Conjured (London, 1596) 15; Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 171.

• 19. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 188.

• 20. Healy, 35.

• 21. Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, ed. Montague Summers (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 106.

• 22. Clark, 187.

• 23. Donald Beecher, “Witches, the Possessed, and the Diseases of the Imagination,” in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Diseases in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011), 112.

• 24. Kramer et al., 163.

• 25. Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson, trans. James Freake (Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 1993), 40 and Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, eds. Benjamin G. Kohl and George Mora, trans. John Shea (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1991), 85.

• 26. The others were (in order of frequency of appearance in witch trials from highest to lowest): cats, dogs, toads, mouse, mole, domesticated fowl, wild birds, rat, cow/bull, ferret, bees/wasps/hornets, fly, rabbit, and snail. James A. Serpell, “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530–1712,” in The Human/Animal Boundary: Historical Perspectives, eds. Angela Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 167.

• 27. Mary Fissell, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999), 63. Fissell explains that: “Vermin were defined legally in Elizabethan and Henrician statures which authorized parishes to provide payments for the killing of vermin injurious to grain…while the Henrician statute focused closely on birds that ate grain or spoiled fruit trees, the Elizabethan one also included foxes, stoats, weasels, hedgehogs, and a host of other ‘four-footed beasts’ who damaged or ate human food,” 86.

• 28. Leviticus 11:29–30, qtd in Fissell, 87.

• 29. James VI and I, “Demonology,” in King James VI and I: Selected Writings, eds. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 163.

• 30. While rats were not explicitly connected to plague, it seems that dogs were. Frank Percy Wilson notes in The Plague in Shakespeare’s London that several measures were taken between 1543 and 1625 to eradicate the presence of dogs , both domestic and stray, from London, and to prevent the careless disposal of carcasses, especially during times of plague. The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 36–39.

• 31. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), sig. B2v.

• 32. Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25.

• 33. Healy, 121.

• 34. Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 173.

• 35. William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

• 36. Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1969), 18. Rosen also suggests that “Beating a lunatic made the patient’s body uncomfortable for the possessing devil, so that he would leave; Perhaps her indwelling evil power deserted the scratched witch for the same reason,” 18.