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Double Double, Toil and Trouble: King James, Witchcraft and

Witches in Jacobean Drama
When involving himself in the North Berwick witch trials, King James I called witchcraft a
most abominable sin1 that the only suitable punishment for was death. Although magic had,
in one way or another, been included in laws even during the time of Queen Elizabeth, King
James I insisted that all witchcraft was evil and therefore should be punished ferociously.
This led to a witch-hunting period where women were habitually accused and tortured in
order to name themselves and others, as witches, after which they were executed.
Contemporary culture spiralled around witches, especially after the North Berwick trials and
King James Is ascension to the English throne, and prolific playwrights such as Ben Jonson
and William Shakespeare jumped to include witches in their works.
King James I was a sickly child from birth, to the point where he found it quite
difficult to get around without the aid of others, and this was a chip on his shoulder that he
carried well into his reign. His bouts of illness as a child led him to become a coward who
preferred to rule through malice and deceit than through strong-hearted control and order.
Furthermore, when the North Berwick witch trials uncovered a plot for his demise, King
James I quickly affixed his various ails and illnesses to Satans jealousy and fear of him, and
saw witches as the ultimate servant of the devil. The very first line in his book,
Daemonologie, in fact identifies a witch as these detestable slaves of the Devill 2. In the rule
of Elizabeth, witchcraft was only seen as evil if it caused others harm. King James Is renewal
of the witchcraft laws made all types of magic good, bad, herbal, spiritual and all othersevil. This was a decidedly biased view echoed in then-contemporary plays, but not all
playwrights treated the topic of witchcraft with the serious manner that King James I had in
pursuing them.
The North Berwick witch trials were a sensationalized affair in Scottish history. On
her way to wed the King, Queen Anne of Denmarks ship ran into difficulties and King James
I left Scotland in order to go and help her. Their return trip to Scotland was beset with storms
1 The Demonology of King James I, ed. by Donald Tyson (USA: Llewellyn Publications Ltd, 2011),
p. 304.
2 King James I, The Preface to the Reader, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), Watch.pair.com, Web
[accessed 20 December 2013].

from the start and the ship almost capsized. The Danish admiral of the fleet blamed the storm
on a noblewoman he had insulted, and several Scottish nobles were implicated in the affair,
including the 5th Earl of Bothwell, a rival of King James I. King James I grew convinced that
the Devil himself wanted him dead due to a strict religious upbringing and the numerous
confessions extracted under torture from hundreds of suspects and he insisted on presiding
over the Berwick Witch trials himself. King James I was then so affected by the trials that he
had seen, and by the stories he had heard of people meeting the Devil in Churches and of
their familiars and spells and the whole gamut of witchcraft, that he began to think of himself
as an expert on the subject and became quite ardent about the topic at large. When he then
moved to England in order to take the English throne, he took his obsession with witchcraft
with him and involved British society in the craze as well. Although witches were a part of
British society, they had never truly been given the attention that King James Is ascension to
the throne and his book about witchcraft brought them in the earliest days of his reign,
leading not only to scholarly works written about witchcraft, but also plays involving
witchcraft and magic surging in popularity, especially in the Kings presence.
William Shakespeare wrote the most well-known witches of Stuart theatre; the Weird
Sisters of Macbeth, who give a prophecy to the titular character that Macbeth will become
king. Through his wifes ambition, Macbeth becomes first a murderer, then a barbarian, his
life spiralling down after he murders the king in a bid to take his place. The Weird Sisters are
grotesque, violent and pervasively evil; their dread saturates the entirety of the play,
oppressing the action and the setting in a mist of the unnatural and the occult. The first scene
itself has the Weird Sisters discussing the murder via storm of the man of a woman who
refused to share her food; this is probably referencing the very trial that led to James
publishing Daemonologie and revising the laws against witchcraft: the North Berwick trials,
where the witches were accused of sending a storm to sink the ship of King James I and his
new bride, Queen Anne, on their voyage from Denmark.
The original tale by Holinshed does not strictly allegorize the weird sisters as witches,
however Shakespeare makes a list of notable changes with regards to the witches in his story.
Rather than being ambiguously supernatural, Shakespeare opens the scene with the witches in
such a way that they are instantly aligned with evil.
First Witch: When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?
Second Witch: When the hurly-burlys done,

When the battles lost and won.3

Therefore, the atmosphere is both metaphorically darkened and also playing into
contemporary beliefs that witches brought bad weather. As if to strengthen their identification
as witches, they depart calling to their familiars, Graymalkin, Paddock and Anon; it is worth
pointing out that the familiar is a trait predominantly attributed to English witches. In King
James Is Daemonologie, he defines familiars as familiar spirits, and goes on to explain that
this is the Devil taking shape in the form of a cat, a dog, or some other beast. By manifesting
in the given shape, the Devil makes a contract with magicians where he is subservient to their
demands, such as causing illnesses, causing storms and otherwise doing their bidding. The
word graymalkin comes from grimalkin, first used in a publication by William Baldwin
called Beware the Cat. Additionally, Scottish legend has the figure of Cait Sith, a black cat
with a white spot that roamed the Scottish highlands it was most often said to be the devil
or a fairy cat, which could steal the lingering soul of the dead before they passed into Heaven,
and so Scots avoided the Highlands and came up with the Late Wake to protect the soul and
keep Cait Sith away. Although this was performed for an English audience, the inclusion of a
cat familiar could be an allusion to Cait Sith as well as drawing on Daemonologies idea of
witch familiars.
In contrast, the introduction to The Devil is an Ass starts out with the Devil laughing
at his minion, Pug, for wanting to go to earth. Whereas the Witches in Macbeth have
performed serious sins over the course of the play, not to mention setting off the vicious cycle
of events itself (though this is argued by many scholars), Pugs list of sins, as given to us by
the devil, is a tame example of what can barely be called witchcraft. The Devil mentions,
among other things, that Pug is responsible for to keep the Churn, so that the Butter may
come not and to sowre the Citizens Cream 'gainst Sunday 4, which will get a woman
accused of witchcraft by a Middlesex Jury, to the satisfaction / Of their offended Friends, the
Londoners Wives5. He also mentions laming cows - one of the main reasons for women
being accused as witches was causing harm to livestock - and of spoiling the yeast so that
3 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Red Gibson, 2nd ed (UK: Cambridge University Press,
2005), I. 1. 1-4.
4 Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass (UK, 1616) I. 1., The Holloway Pages, Web [23 December 2013]
5 The Devil is an Ass, I. 1.

they could not make ale, which was yet another reason women were accused of witchcraft
was for ruining crops. This particular reference to Middlesex also references the three women
hanged in Middlesex for being witches, the only time in recorded Middlesex history that any
three women were executed for this cause, which may have been the entire reason for Jonson
wanting to write a play about witchcraft. However, the satirical element of Pug and Satan is a
direct contrast to Shakespeares dark witches. In The Devil is an Ass, even the title is a
blasphemous attitude towards a problem that haunted King James to the point where
witchcraft was considered an act of treason and worthy of death. Although, in later years, his
ardour for witchcraft died down, the women executed on accusations made by other women
therefore, the reference to Londoners wives were nonetheless never pardoned, even
posthumously.
Witches were always synonymised as belonging to or serving the Devil, which may
be more due to King James personal mannerisms than any strict proof or belief held by
society at large at the time. The publication of King James Is rewritten verses of the Bible
made specific ties between the Devil and Witchcraft. King James I was a scrupulously
religious man and very fond of the Scriptures, to the point where he amended Bible with two
additions: in Exodus, Chapter 22, he added the statement thou shalt not suffer a witch to
live6 and, in Levictus, chapter 20, he added A man also or a woman that hath a familiar
spirit, or that is a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death; they shall
stone them with stones7. King James I also promoted this version of the Bible strongly,
which led to a general acceptance that the duty of Christians was to judge and execute these
followers of Satan, Witches. This could also be a reason for why witches are mainly dark in
plays, and also for the proliferation of Biblical and Satanic themes that Jacobean drama and
comedy had in abundance. Macbeth, for example, has an obvious theme of the battle between
good and evil within it; if the Witches are to be servants of Satan, one can draw clear links
between the story of the Fall of Man Adam, Eve, the consumption of the Forbidden Fruit
and Macbeth Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, the murder of King Duncan which elevates
temporarily but ultimately leads to the fall of the house of Macbeth.
In a later scene, the Witches are seen brewing a spell. Into their cauldron go grotesque
ingredients, such as the tongue of a dog and the finger of a child that died in childbirth.
6 The Holy Bible, King James Version, Exodus 22. 18.
7 The Holy Bible, King James Version, Levictus 20. 27.

Reading Macbeth and The Devil is an Ass side by side, both take elements from
Daemonologie and contemporary thought about witches and witchcraft, with a huge reference
to The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot, however while Macbeth is a serious
exploration of the nature of witches, The Devil is an Ass is an out-and-out satire of the entire
thing and thus played as comedy, not a tragedy or a drama. Even in The Masque of Queens,
Jonsons witches are never explicitly stated to be witches although, like Shakespeare, they
bring in elements of witchcraft. The Masque of Queens opens up with eleven witches some
with / Rats on their Head; some on their Shoulders 8 again, the prevalence of animals as a
symbol of witchcraft as it was detailed in Daemonologie.
Both Jonson and Shakespeare have interesting ways of showing how their witches
travel. In Macbeth, the First Witch says but in a sieve Ill thither sail 9, a direct reference to
the North Berwick trials, where one of the witches was accused of sailing in a sieve in order
to raise storms. In The Masque of Queens, Jonson has his witches state that they will home
in th egg shell sail10, which is far more in line with contemporary thought about witches at
the time. Reginald Scots Discoverie identifies as much when he talks about all the various
ways that witches can get around, from eggshells to sea shells.
The witches dance in both Macbeth and The Masque of Queens, which was not a
feature that English witches were known for; however, an account of the North Berwick trials
was published in England under the title Newes from Scotland where the Scottish witches
accused accounted being led to a dance. Scottish witches in general were considered to be far
more sociable than English witches, and the idea of the witches dancing is further explained
in Daemonologie, where King James writes that dancing is a common ceremony.
It is interesting to point out that Reginald Scots Discoverie was not, like Newes from
Scotland and Daemonologie, a book devoted solely to witches. Most of it was debunking
popular misconceptions about the rumours that he believed surrounded witchcraft and, while
he believed in witches, he also thought that a great deal of the rumours surrounding them
were false. King James I disagreed with this view, and had all remaining books of Discoverie
burned when he ascended the throne. Thus, the plays that were written after King James
ascension to the throne rarely, if at all, had references to Discoverie. In The Masque of
8 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens (UK, 1609), The Holloway Pages, Web [23 December 2013].
9 Macbeth, I. 3. 7.
10 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens.

Queens, Ben Jonson references Scot when having his witches sail in egg-shells, but the most
prevalent usage of Scots work in a literary drama is in Middleton.
Jonson himself found the topic of witches and of the witch trials and the juries who
presided over them to be a topic filled with silly facts, prejudices and overhype. While other
people, including the king and the upper classes, took witchcraft with scholarly intent, Ben
Jonson derided and mocked them for it. In his play The Devil is an Ass, even the very title is a
mockery of the most well-known fact about witches: their link to the devil. The Devil, in this
case, sends his minion, Pug, above to Earth to, it is largely implied, get him to stop bothering
him. The entire exchange between Satan and Pug is heavily satirized, where Hell is painted as
a sort of bureaucracy or court, with different sections that do different forms of things. Its
greatly implied that, rather than the witches calling the devil, the devil himself sends his
minions along to cause havoc that the accused are then blamed for which is, having been
written in a time where witchcraft was more or less the subject on everyones mind, quite a
bold stance to take. Even his contemporary, Shakespeare, refused to take that approach in
Macbeth. In the play, Macbeth is at the mercy of the forces that control him. The Weird
Sisters are only a symbolic representation of the larger battle of good and evil that is waging
on behind the scenes, using the characters as pawns. In Jonson, however, evil is largely
benign. As evidenced in the list of sins that the Devil recites as having been caused by Pug
souring of cream, tampering with butter and striking cows lame featuring chiefly amongst
them the nature of witchcraft in Jonson is less evil and more along the lines of petty
annoyances. Witches seem to be only capable of creating those little annoyances, whereas in
Macbeth, and even, to a smaller extent, in The Masque of Queens, witches are plainly
identified with evil. In both, the case of dismembering corpses and killed infants are
mentioned, and Macbeths cauldron scene remains one of the most grotesque examples of onstage devilry that had been written in its history. The scene in question has all three witches
throwing ingredients into a bubbling cauldron and chanting, creating this spell that will cause
harm. They call on their witch-mother Hecate in a later scene, who arrives with her familiar
in tow.
Contrastively, Ben Jonsons devils in The Devil is an Ass are rather weak. In a scene
at the start, the Devil allows Pug to go to Earth with one condition in place: he is not going to
help him. Pug has to take the body of a recently-hanged man and that is all he can give him.
For clothing and money, he will have to imploy your credit with the hang-man 11 and he will
11 Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass.

have to serve the first man that he comes across. Although this is mentioned in
Daemonologie as being the main background of witchcraft, the book Daemonologie sees it as
far more independently than is shown in Jonsons plays. Even in Macbeth, the Witches seem
to perform evil more or less on their own terms, although there is a brief moment where
Hecate pushes them and sends them to commit more evil in her name.
Again, satirizing the seriousness with which witchcraft was debated upon in his time,
Ben Jonson introduces the character Fitz-Dottrell, a man that seems to be written partly as a
parody of the fop, and partly as a catch-all figure to mock witchcraft. Fitz-Dottrell is, in fact,
introduced to the audience by walking along and lamenting that he could not summon the
devil, for he wishes to see the devil. Fitz-Dottrells unhappiness at avoiding the devil is
completely misaligned with contemporary thinking at the time surely, when the punishment
was hanging, the last thing a reasonable person would want to be accused of was witchcraft
and consorting with the devil. Furthermore, Fitz-Dottrell is, as opposed to many of the
victims accuse of witchcraft, both a man and a quite well-off man at that. While it would be
unreasonable to assume that Jonson wrote a man specifically for the further satirical element,
it does put other plays with female witches into perspective. In them, female witches are
constantly compared to animals; they are a step above vermin in the great chain of being,
which is also true in Ben Jonsons The Masque of Queens; however, in this, both the idea
behind witchcraft (i.e., initially it is merely the experience of seeing the devil) and the typical
figure of the accused witch is subverted. Fitz-Dottrell also seems to, in a confusing exchange
to himself, side with the Devil; he believes that one has not appeared because other Conjurors
have bound him against his will, and so the devil has grown tired of it. The play continues in
this vein, both playing into the expectations of contemporary audiences while retaining a
prominent feeling of the comedy. Pug, as a devil, is a devil that seems to mock the entire
enterprise at large, and Fitz-Dottrell, far from being an agent of evil, only seems to be
concerned with matters such as parties and enjoying himself.
This is starkly contrasted with the idea of the witches in the other Jonsonian play, The
Masque of Queens. Witches, in that play, are completely and utterly mad. They talk about
killing babies and wave about large knives, and the gist behind them is more in line with
thinking contemporary to King James, although the case has been made that it is also a
subversion of Jamesian thinking. The introduction and the usage of the dancing witches does
seem to be plucked straight from the pages of Daemonologie, though it could also be inspired
by other witchcraft plays of the era.

Ultimately, the main reason behind the witchcraft craze of the 1600s can be easily
attributed to the ascension of King James to the English throne. Although witches had existed
in England before, King James turned the idea of witchcraft into a political and societal
concern, and though the high numbers of people executed is greatly exaggerated, it was a
time of persecution, particularly for women unlucky enough to have been reported. This rise
for witchcraft can also be linked prominently to King James Is intensely religious
personality. Even looking through plays such as Macbeth, the theme of good versus evil is
Biblical. The idea behind witchcraft and witchhunting at large can generally be seen as
Christians given the freedom to work in the Lords name, pursuing and delivering people
from the evil of the Devil. Thus, this explains the rise of witches during the reign of King
James. He was not only a scholar of the Bible, but also an ardent follower, and published a
new version of it underneath his name. By all accounts, this version of the Bible was quite
unpopular in James native Scotland, and priests had to force their congregation to listen to it
often with dire consequences.
In later years, King James I lessened his strict belief in witchcraft. He was quite
embarrassed about the persecution of witches at the end of his reign, and refused to even
speak about it in certain circles. Nonetheless, the damage of the early part of his reign was
not erased. Today, King James I has gone down in history books as being a ruler of strict
principle and political machinations, and not one who was well-liked.

List of Works Cited

Gibson, Rex (ed). 2005. Macbeth (UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 3-9
Jonson, Ben. 1609. The Masque of Queens (UK: Oxford). N. pag. The Holloway Pages. Web.
25 Dec 2013
--- 1611. The Devil is an Ass (UK: Oxford), N. pag. The Holloway Pages. Web. 25
Dec 2013
King James I, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), N. Pag. Watch.pair.com. Web. 20 December
2013
--- 1611. The King James Bible (UK: Oxford), N. pag. The King James Bible
Online. Web. 25 Dec 2013
Tyson, Donald. 2011. The Demonology of King James (USA: Llewellyn Ltd), p. 301.