Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.