“Made a Witch”: Grotesque Femininity and Forced Deviance in The Witch of Edmonton

This paper argues that The Witch of Edmonton (1621), written by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, stages witchcraft as a socially constructed accusation rather than an innate female device, as it was typically represented on the early modern stage. Elizabeth Sawyer, the play’s beldam-turned-antagonist, opposes the conventional standards of gender and femininity long before she enters into a diabolical pact. The play repeatedly emphasizes her age, poverty, isolation, and sharp speech; traits that mark her as a failure within the normative expectation that women should remain quiet, obedient, and within the domestic sphere. While the play does present the supernatural as an external, corrupting force, through Sawyer’s rightly named familiar, Dog, the play also invites audiences to consider whether witchcraft emerges as the culmination of communal scapegoating. Sawyer’s voice and body become sites upon which Edmonton projects its anxieties about disorderly, even grotesque, femininity, the supernatural, and the limits of patriarchal authority. As Sawyer herself observes, “Some call me witch,/ And being ignorant of myself, they go/ About to teach me how to be one,” explicitly identifying the village as the catalyst for her transformation. Her eventual pact with Dog does not initiate her deviance; it formalizes a status that Edmonton imposed upon her. Reading the play alongside witchcraft pamphlets, parish records, and conduct literature, this paper situates Sawyer within the material conditions of early modern poverty, gender prescriptions, and village surveillance. This paper contends that the supernatural in The Witch of Edmonton exposes the social mechanisms that manufacture feminine monstrosity. Witchcraft here is not an origin point of deviance, but the product of a society invested in defining and punishing women who fail to conform.