| Popis: |
Over a hundred years have elapsed since Clarence Andrews first wrote that Richard Brome’s “reworking [in The Late Lancashire Witches] has made a worse play out of a very poor one”. Since then, critics have redressed this disparaging appraisal of Thomas Heywood and Brome’s 1634 collaborative comedy and in doing so have also reinstated the legal, historical and theatrical wealth that the play affords readers. Like others before me, I will briefly contextualise the news item that was behind the writing of the play. I will then examine how the playwrights use storytelling within their fiction, along with metatheatre and stage “sport” to render the events of their story possible at a time when witchcraft and witches were thought to exist by some early moderns, but also rejected by others: these divergent beliefs are indeed mirrored throughout the play. The final part of the paper will focus on the letter that was written by Nathaniel Tomkyns when he saw the play performed at the Globe. This critical spectator, who voices his own judgment about what he saw, broaches questions linked to the poetics of the comedy. He shows the limits of verisimilitude and those of “improbable and impossible” events. He did not buy into Heywood and Brome’s story describing it as “a merry and excellent new play” whose aim was “to provoke laughter” rather than offering him “judgment to state or tenet of witches” or “application to virtue”. |
