SEXUAL AND SPIRITUAL POLITICS
character Robin tells how Mal Spencer took him over three hundred miles in eight hours and claims that Mrs Generous could move over a hundred miles in a quarter of an hour (ll. 1210–11 and 1691–2). The London references suggest to the audience that such disruptive energies cannot be safely contained in the particular social context of a Lancashire village. The witches also cause an excess of noise. They frighten the miller and the soldier with ‘such catterwawling, & such scratching and clawing’ (ll. 801–2) as the men cannot endure. The play’s comic dramatisation of the wedding feast of two servants, Lawrence and Parnell, shows that the witches’ superabundant energy re-animates the dead meat in the dishes. The mutton grows horns, the birds emerge from a pie and Joan reports that ‘all the meat is flowne out o’ the chimney top’ and transformed into live snakes, bats, frogs, bees and hornets (ll. 1147–9). The spectator Tomkyns notes this inversion of festivity: ‘the conveying away of the good cheere and bringing in a mock feast of bones and stones in steed thereof and the filling of pies with living birds and yong catts &c’, a spectacle apparently effected on stage, with obvious novelty appeal. This is only one element of the chaos enacted by the witches. Following charivary traditions, they disrupt the ‘house rites’ promising ‘joy and tranquility’ (ll. 1033–4) by substituting bran for the wedding cake which was supposed to be broken over the bride’s head on entering the house (‘As they lift up the Cake, the Spirit snatches it, and powres down bran’, l. 1075). The wedding entertainment proves no more successful; the bewitched musicians ‘play the battle’ (music designed to accompany battle scenes on stage), a signal of the disharmony which is to characterise the relationship between the married couple (l. 1071). The parodic interruption of a wedding parade along these lines was a form of charivary in early modern England, as Tom Pettit has shown.32 The play’s nuptial charivary is somewhat different though. Normally the charivary was a stylised form of social criticism undertaken by villagers to signal the community’s disapproval of the match (usually by casting aspersions on the bride’s sexual continency). In contrast, the play’s charivary is enacted by a group of women who have made metaphysical pacts which allow them to transcend social conventions. Isolated from the community’s laws, the witches invert the charivary’s usual function to destroy rather than restore social order, possibly as an expression of their rejection of the institution of marriage. While the wedding descends into chaos, order and ‘jollitie’ is found at their alternative, all-female ‘bevy of beldames’ (l. 1515) with its music and paired dancing (ll. 1558–73), and the service of the wedding dishes ‘with all sorts of meate and drinke conveyed unto them by their familiars upon the pulling of a cord’, as Tomkyns tells us. The play self-consciously comments on the failure of charivary as a social corrective through the behaviour of the bewitched Lawrence and Parnell. The couple present an exaggerated picture of gender disorder in Parnell’s aggressive dominance over her impotent husband. A 155