O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note

Music, Community, and Middleton's Anti-Masque in The Witch

“…15 Only Amanda Eubanks Winkler's musicological reading of the play acknowledges in any real detail its debt to Jonson's masque and the role its music plays in producing 'a disturbingly symbiotic relationship between witch and noble'. 16 The effect of this general dismissal has been to turn Middleton's witches into quaint curiosities, and to divest them of any lasting significance in terms of our understanding of both the play itself and of English representations of witchcraft more generally.…”

“…As Jonson notes in the preamble to the published version of the masque he made available shortly after its performance, his 'celebration of honorable and true fame bred out of virtue' ( 6) would be juxtaposed with 'a foil, or false masque' that depicted 'twelve women in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc.' (12)(13)(14)(15)(16). 34 Such binaries were crucial to the political function of the Jonsonian masque/antimasque dynamic, which emerged at 'a moment in which the English court, representing (in its own estimation) the English nation, struggled to identify itself not only with the qualities and values it possessed but by those it opposed as well'.…”

“…The effect is that the music is disruptive in a very particular way, progressing 'through chaos toward some degree of regularity, from uncontrolled disorder to mockable rusticity, drawing a musical line between the lower-class witches and the beauteous Queens'. 38 The witches are thus constructed by parallel visual and musical tropes as opposites to normative social behaviour and especially the expected conduct at a court masque.…”

“…Following Peter Walls, Eubanks Winkler observes that in Queens, the witches' magical charms are spoken and not sung, and they remain notably ineffectual: 'Sung music and its special magical powers are reserved for the noble participants of the masque proper'. 62 While no definite setting survives, the charm that produces the Duchess's poison is identified in a stage direction as 'a charm song about a vessel', and its text suggests another call-and-response number that involves the full participation of the play's witches, highlighting their unity: The song's refrain, couched in the conventional language of overturned hierarchies we might expect from a witch play, is less a simple othering of the witches here than a reminder that for witches, marginalization through such othering can be embraced as a source of shared identity and community. And that sense of community is, in the song's second verse, clearly aligned with the charm's effectiveness, as each of the witches adds ingredients to the vessel and contributes to the concoction (70-77).…”

“…Hecate and her cohorts simply disappear'. 65 In the absence of additional records, we simply cannot know if this was the case or not. The reading of The Witch I have offered here, however, understands its musical tropes as in dialogue with and indeed inverting and satirizing the conventions of musical representations of witches in early modern England exemplified by court entertainments such as Jonson's masque and lends some additional weight to the possibility.…”