Winerock, Emily. " "A spectacle of strangeness”: Dancing Witches on the English Renaissance Stage."

Winerock, Emily. " "A spectacle of strangeness”: Dancing Witches on the English Renaissance Stage." Journal of the Northern Renaissance 16 (2025).

URL: https://jnr2.hcommons.org/issues/16-dance-2025/ (Open Access)


From the editorial by Lynsey McCulloch and Emily Winerock:
Emily Winerock addresses dance in a theatrical context—using the representation of witches in early modern English play texts to address the complex interplay of Northern and Southern European cultural traditions. Despite the ubiquity of continental sources relating to female witchcraft—in which gendered sexual deviance was often foregrounded—depictions of witches on the English stage proved remarkably resistant to outside influence. That this resistance is visible in their dancing points to the importance of movement practice as a marker of cultural identity. Notwithstanding the identification of staged dance in early modern England with sexual impropriety, dancing witches in the drama of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, amongst others, were characterised by their strangeness rather than their sexuality. The ‘strange fantastic motions’ described by Ben Jonson in his 1609 Masque of Queens, performed at court, were replicated in the public theatre, where performers inverted dance custom by, for example, dancing back to back or moving counterclockwise.