"Sworn to sweat": Witchcraft, Labor, and Wicked Consumption in Middleton's The Witch

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• “Sworn to sweat”: Witchcraft, Labor, and Wicked Consumption in Middleton’s The Witch
• Molly Hand (bio)

I am cooking as I write this, preparing dinner for my husband and me (with a morsel reserved for Beatrice, our “canine daughter,” of course). I can write while I cook because I have a device that does the work for me: I just place the ingredients in a slow cooker, turn it on, and set the timer. Now, we wait; now, I write. I do not have to spend my time sweating over a cauldron. Nor did I have to go out of my way to source ingredients: I purchased some from our local farmers’ market online (with convenient delivery to my home), others from the grocery store. So whose labor made my dinner possible? This is a question that Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch (c. 1616) calls our attention to.¹ Who grew the things, or sourced them, raised them, killed them, packaged them, and brought them from elsewhere to a vendor for us to buy? In the sweat of whose faces do we eat our bread?²

We can read sweat as the saline solution through which The Witch’s themes are distilled. Though “sweat” and its variant “sweating” appear only four times in the play, it is evoked in each plotline, emblematic of the various types of labor and activity illuminated or elided throughout the play. Sweat attunes us to other repeated sounds and figures that haunt and conjure one another: “sweat,” “sweet,” “surfeit,” “sucket,” “sudden,” “subtle,” “swear,” “sister,” and their variants together constitute a hissy dialogue whose echoes evoke Hecate’s tangle of serpents (1.2.0.2n). Sweat is human effluvium, a bodily response to physical activity, heat, and hard work (like cooking over a kitchen fire, vigorous sex, and the labor of childbirth), and an ingredient in Hecate’s cauldron. In the ducal palace and Antonio’s household, labor is conspicuously absent: that is, the domestic labor of those responsible for producing the confections of the banquet table and other comestibles and concoctions, as well as the indentured and enslaved labor involved with producing or procuring the particular commodities—especially sugar and spice—that are key ingredients in banqueting stuff. This hidden sweat is revealed by contrast to the visible labor of Hecate’s realm, where we find her and her witchy kin “sweating at the vessel” (1.2.6). This essay, accordingly, offers a reappraisal of Middleton’s [End Page 111] play as a domestic drama that explicitly emphasizes domestic production and consumption, the circulation of items sourced and produced, and the often invisible labor of producers. The play juxtaposes wicked consumption, epitomized in surfeit and cannibalism, with effortful, sweaty labor in the witches’ careful preparation of receipts.

Hecate and her companions are laboring over the cauldron, working to procure particular ingredients and to prepare them carefully to capture their virtues and produce an efficacious unguent that will enable their flight. The witches labor for their own ends, but they also work for others: Sebastian, Almachildes, and the Duchess all solicit Hecate’s assistance. The witches are “sworn to sweat” (1.2.127–28) for these citizens: at once an allusion to witches’ demonic compacts and an acknowledgment that the witches are working women who earn their own livings by providing their magical services. Meanwhile, in Ravenna, the emphasis is on the goods consumed and surfeit: who prepares the feast for the Duke’s banquet, including the exquisite marzipan toad and tadpoles that Almachildes brings as a gesture of goodwill to Hecate and her son? Who works in the kitchen when the impotent Antonio calls for a cure to be prepared? Who made the currant custards by which Francisca has been seduced? And at the cost of what human lives are the necessary ingredients—the sugar, the pearl, the spice—made available?³

It is no coincidence that this “witch play” is about labor, food and drink, and the agentive qualities of particular ingredients. The site of early modern witchcraft was, after all, the domus; the targets of maleficia, domestic products and members—beer, brewing, butter, livestock, spouses, and children. Food is a particular concern...