Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton. Ed. Shelby Richard-son

This Broadview Anthology of British Literature edition of The Witch of Edmonton (1621)-a collaboration between Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, and others (as the quarto title page's "&c" suggests)-presents an affordable single-volume edition of a fascinating domestic tragicomedy derived from contemporary accounts of the trial of accused witch Elizabeth Sawyer.The play has three tightly interwoven plots: Frank Thorney, an impecunious gentleman, secretly marries Winifred, the pregnant servant of Sir Arthur Clarington, not knowing that Sir Arthur is her unborn child's father, but must also bigamously marry Susan Carter to save his family with her dowry.The abused, poverty stricken, and doomed Elizabeth Sawyer sells her soul to the devil in the form of a talking dog, who later convinces Frank to murder Susan while he attempts to abscond with the cross-dressed Winifred.Meanwhile, the attempts of the clownish Morris dancer Cuddy Banks to enlist Sawyer's witchcraft in his pathetic amorous pursuits are foiled to comic effect.Shelby Richardson's edition provides a fine and generally helpful modernization and, as her introduction suggests, the play deserves the attention of scholars and theatre practitioners for a variety of reasons.As an example of the late, post-imprisonment work of Thomas Dekker, almost certainly the lead author, it offers a diverse snapshot of Jacobean audience interests, featuring the kind of middle-class morality showcased in the likes of The Shoemaker's Holiday (and appropriate for the Red Bull audiences for whom Dekker was accustomed to write) together with a focus on witchcraft aimed to appeal to its actual performance at the court of a king with a keen interest in demonology, and for the more upscale audiences of the Cockpit.The play places sophisticated, and ultimately unanswered, social critique in the mouths of marginalized women-the eponymous witch and her insane victim Ann Ratcliffewith resonances that recall both the trial of Vittoria in The White Devil and the ravings of Lear.That the true villain of the piece is Sir Arthur, a privileged male whose punishment is a negligible fine, while Elizabeth Sawyer suffers arrest and execution, is surely meant by the playwrights to stand as a cruel and illustrative irony.And the character of Tomalin, the colour-shifting, talking, sometimes

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