Book contents
5 - Touching on the Margins: Elizabeth Sawyer’s Body in Performance and Print
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter considers the differing treatments of the alleged witch Elizabeth Sawyer in the collaborative play The Witch of Edmonton, and Henry Goodcole's The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, Witch (both 1621), focusing on acts of touch. The former, exemplifying common contemporary attitudes, treats the witch's touch as a demonic influence over her victims; the latter employs acts of touch between Elizabeth and others to model reciprocal forms of contact that contrast markedly with hierarchical uses of touch in the community from which she is excluded. Where the pamphlet constructs communal bonds by scapegoating Elizabeth, the play models alternative forms of association between elderly, poverty-stricken women like Sawyer, and other figures on the margins of the community.
Keywords: witchcraft; touch; community; reciprocity; embodiment
This chapter examines depictions of Elizabeth Sawyer, an elderly English woman accused and convicted of witchcraft in 1621, with a focus on questions of embodiment, and specifically the accused witch's contacts with others. Little is known of Elizabeth herself, a resident of the town of Edmonton, some ten miles of north of London, until she was accused and convicted of witchcraft, including the murders of several of her neighbours by demonic means, brought to London for her trial, and executed on 19 April 1621. In the wake of Elizabeth's trial, London's producers of popular literature rushed to capitalize on the sensational case. Elizabeth Sawyer inspired ballads (now lost); a pamphlet by Henry Goodcole, who had interrogated her in his capacity as Visitor to Newgate prison, where she was kept between her trial and her execution, titled The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch; and The Witch of Edmonton, a collaborative effort of the playwrights Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, and perhaps others. The two portrayals of Elizabeth speak to a widespread interest in the body of the witch, a source of her power and, in the play's more sympathetic representation, of her vulnerability. Reading play and pamphlet in conjunction can tell us a good deal about how women like Elizabeth Sawyer—elderly, poor, and living on the edges of her community—might be imagined in early modern England.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe , pp. 93 - 112Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019