In some ways _The Witch of Edmonton_ is the most interesting and valuable of the witch dramas, because here we have the hag stripped of the least vestige of glamour and romance presented to us in the starkest realism. We see her dwelling apart in a wretched hovel, “shunned and hated like a sickness,” miserably poor, buckl’d and bent together, dragging her palsied limbs wearily through the fields, as she clutches her dirty rags round her withered frame. And if she but dare to gather a few dried sticks in a corner she is driven from the spot with hard words and blows. What wonder her mouth is full of cursing and revenge? ’Tis all one To be a witch as to be counted one. Then appears the Black Dog and seals a contract with her blood. She blights the corn and sends a murrain on the cattle of her persecutors; here a horse has the glanders, there a sow casts her farrow; the maid churns butter nine hours and it will not come; above all a farmer’s wife, whom she hates, goes mad and dies in frantic agony; mischief and evil run riot through the town. But presently her familiar deserts her, she falls into the hands of human justice, and after due trial is dragged to Tyburn shrieking and crying out in hideous despair. It is a sordid and a terrible, but one cannot doubt, a true picture. It is obvious that in this drama[10] Frank Thorney, a most subtle and minute study of weakness and degeneracy, is wholly Ford’s. Frank Thorney may be closely paralleled with Giovanni in _’Tis Pity She’s a Whore_. Winnifride, too, has all the sentimental charm of Ford’s heroines, Annabella and Penthea. Carter is unmistakably the creation of Dekker. Simon Eyre and Orlando Friscobaldo are the same hearty, bluff, hospitable, essentially honest old fellows. To Dekker also I would assign Mother Sawyer herself. Rowley’s hand is especially discernible in the scenes where Cuddy Banks and the clowns make their appearance. It may be mentioned that Elizabeth Sawyer figures in Caulfield’s _Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons_, 1794; and she is also referred to in Robinson’s _History and Antiquities of the Parish of Edmonton_ with a woodcut “from a rare print in the collection of W. Beckford, esq.”