Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England.

Deborah Willis's book straddles history - English witchcraft trials under the statute of 1563 - and literature - representations of witchcraft in plays of the period, primarily those of Shakespeare. Her unifying interest is the variety of discourses in both, approached in terms of feminism and psychoanalysis. The results are new and stimulating readings, especially of the gender roles defined in the historical tracts.

Willis differentiates two levels of discourse on the basis of class, gender, and the personal and political anxieties they reveal. Her main concern is "village level," often arising from conflicts among peasant women, to explain the prominent role of women in making charges of witchcraft - of bringing sickness and death to their neighbors. These accusations attribute independent power to witches who reverse the nurturing role of mothers, most deafly by the suckling of familiars at a third breast. The accused often emerge as defenders of traditional neighborly values, the accusers as retaliating against charges of insufficient nurturing. This is related to Melanie Klein's description of fantasies of maternal persecution, especially associated with weaning. Unlike some feminists, Willis does not see village witches exclusively as victims of male power.

"Gentry-level" or elite discourse sees witches as subordinate to Satan, treasonably transferring political and religious allegiance to an alternate male figure. Willis illustrates this by analyzing pamphlets by George Giffard (1587, 1591) and William Perkins (1608), and the role of King James VI of Scotland at the North Berwick trials of 1590-91. The general direction of elite discourse is to differentiate Protestant from Catholic practice, part of a more general, national interest in social order and patriarchal hierarchy. James's involvement is linked to conflicts with two powerful women - his mother Mary Stuart and his cousin Elizabeth I - and his concurrent marriage to Anne of Denmark, which the witches allegedly tried to frustrate.

Willis's last two chapters concentrate on plays, especially Shakespeare's first tetralogy and Macbeth. She analyzes the women of the early history plays, those who are literally accused of witchcraft (Joan la Pucelle, Margery Jordan) and those who are metaphorically characterized this way, especially in Richard III. There is a separate chapter on Macbeth, developing the interpretation of Janet Adelman in Suffocating Mothers, on the maternal malevolence displayed by the lower-class witches and the aristocratic Lady Macbeth. Willis sees the end of the play as ambivalent about the order implicit in Malcolm's restoration of patrilineal rule.

All of this requires careful balancing. Witchcraft needs to be distinguished from sorcery (usually male) and the white magic of the cunning folk. Following earlier scholars, Willis differentiates English witch hunting from its Continental, Scottish, and American varieties. Much of the discourse is hybrid, with both peasant and gentry elements, as well as components from Continental, classical, and Biblical sources, which complicates the task of untangling them.

Missing from the discussion of Shakespeare are several prominent instances of witch hunting or much awareness that it could be turned to comedy. For example, Willis discusses the Duchess of Gloucester's visit to Margery Jordan the witch and Roger Bolingbrook the conjurer in Henry VI Part 2, but omits their sentencing (2.3) and the implications of the intervening comic scene of Simpcox's fraudulent miracle (2.1). Dr. Pinch of Comedy of Errors, one of the more ridiculous figures in the history of exorcism, becomes a "benign male magician" in a note, while Willis ignores the scene in which Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse regard the Courtesan as a witch, a sorceress, "the devil's dam" (4.3). More substantially, there is no discussion of the witch of Brainford scene in Merry Wives of Windsor (4.2), a play much concerned with class and gender.

DAVID G. HALE State University of New York, Brockport