14 July, 1597 - The Witch of Islington

Here's what the Admiral's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: 14 | tt at the wiche of Jslyngton | 01 | 07

In modern English: 14^th [July, 1597] ... total at The Witch of Islington ... £1 and 7 shillings [i.e. 27 shillings]

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a play that has not appeared in the Diary before! Henslowe does not identify The Witch of Islington as new, so it is probably an older play from the archives. Unfortunately, it is lost, and the title is more intriguing than it is informative. Henslowe's 1598 inventory of costumes includes "one hood for the witch", which may relate to this play.  

London seen from Islington in 1665,
by Wenceslas Hollar

Modern Islington is an urban environment and most would regard it as a part of central London. But in the sixteenth century, Islington was a rural village on a hill, with springs and pools that fed London with water (now remembered in place names such as Sadler's Wells). 

There are no known stories about witches in Islington. However, in his 1581 De magorum demonomania ("On the Demon-Mania of Mages"), the French demonologist Jean Bodin reported a story about mysterious objects found in an Islington dunghill. They turned out to be effigies of the Queen and two members of the Privy Council; the discovery spawned rumours of a magical plot against the government. In a marginal annotation to his Masque of Queens (1609), the playwright Ben Jonson quotes Bodin's anecdote and says he remembers people discussing these rumours when he was a child (that, is in the 1570s). Perhaps the play was a fantastical riff on these stories. But perhaps not, since Jonson makes no mention of a play on the topic.  

In his catalogue of British drama, Martin Wiggins observes that Islington was known as a place for lovers to resort to, and he speculates that the play was about lovers being helped or hindered by the witch, perhaps in the same manner as the eponymous suburban fortune-teller of The Wise Woman of Hoxton (1613-38). I would add another play of the same kind, The Merry Devil of Edmonton (c. 1603), about a helpful magician in a another north London village.  Perhaps The Witch of Islington was an early example of this subgenre. And perhaps, more broadly, it was similar to a A Midsummer Night's Dream (by now part of the repertory of Shakespeare's company across the river), in which lovers from the city encounter magical figures in the countryside.  

Whatever the nature of this play, its box office today is merely average, suggesting no enormous interest in its revival.

FURTHER READING

The Witch of Islington information

• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 978.
• Simon Davies and Roslyn L. Knutson, "Witch of Islington, The", Lost Plays Database (2019), accessed July 2021. 

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

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