Women and the Law: The White Devil and The Witch of Edmonton

Abstract

A small but significant number of the Renaissance plays which take women as their main characters focus in particular on the position of women in the eyes of the law. This is partly because the rise of the theatres coincided (perhaps not incidentally) with that of the Inns of Court. Young men from the Inns of Court were well known as regular attenders at the theatres, and a considerable number of those who wrote for the stage, including Beaumont, Fletcher, Marston, Webster and Ford, had had a legal training and were thus particularly well placed to appreciate the considerable dramatic mileage to be had from the antagonistic structures of forensic drama. (Indeed contemporary legal training often required role play.) It was not only the structures of the law that allowed for a number of dramatic possibilities, however; specific laws also offered scope for a pointed exploration of cultural pressure points, particularly in regard to biologically based views of gender.