Beyond the “Weird Sisters”: Staging Witchcraft in The Witch of EdmontonMaster ClassIn-Person
Friday, Dec 05, 2025
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Location To Be Announced
The most famous witches in Renaissance literature are certainly Macbeth’s “Weird Sisters”—but Shakespeare’s play was not the only theatrical work to put witches on stage in the period, nor the most grounded in reality. This class will focus on The Witch of Edmonton, written in 1621 by Shakespeare’s contemporaries John Ford, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley, and based on the publication that same year of a sensational pamphlet detailing the trial and execution of Elizabeth Sawyer, an old, socially ostracized woman who gives voice to the plight of the accused. This class will be part lecture and part discussion, offering teachers the opportunity to engage critically with both the play and the historical materials that inspired it.
RENAISSANCE ENGLISH LITERATURE, ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS, THEATER
Ramie Targoff
Ramie Targoff is a professor of English, co-chair of Italian Studies, and director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. Born in New York City, Targoff received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of three scholarly books on Renaissance English literature and has published many articles and reviews on Shakespeare. Most recently, she has written two books for a public audience: Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, and a biography of the sixteenth-century Italian poet, Vittoria Colonna, called Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna. Targoff is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; she has also been the senior scholar-in-residence for the Renaissance at the American Academy in Rome.