Secret Places in Renaissance Drama

Abstract

In 1584 Reginald Scot published his contribution to the minor genre of discovery literature. What he discovered—that is, revealed—to the world was not the mysteries of remote places or the tricks of cardsharps, but the much-feared secrets of witchcraft. He gave over the entire fourth book of his Discoverie of Witchcraft to the sexual interventions of witches, including the story of a young man who, under a witch's spell, was made 'to leave his instruments of venerie behind him.' The text obviously concerns itself with power—the power of some women to dis-member and re-member men at will. In a brilliant piece of ironic deconstruction through reinscription (a version of the story had appeared in the Malleus maleficarum of 1486), Scot mocks the scare tactics of Roman Catholic witch hunters. Clearly, Scot is having fun at the expense of the writers and gullible readers of the Malleus: a nest bulging with twenty or thirty penises munching on 'provender, as it were at the rack and manger' (78) is rather silly stuff, even as male fantasies go. In Scot's text, the story has the force of an anticlerical fabliau, albeit one that had in former times been passed off by papists as a pious, cautionary tale. Its secrets are sham.

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