The Wise Woman In The Awakening

However, Sawyer repents and condemns the Devil. An old man urges Doctor Faustus to repent which Faustus rejects, but no one urges Sawyer to repent. Finally, Mother Sawyer leaves the stage with difficulty and professes a new feeling of goodness in her repentance:
These Dogs will mad me: I was well resolv’d
To die in my repentance; though ’tis true,
I would live longer if I might; yet since
I cannot, pray torment me not; my conscience
Is setled as it shall be: all take heed
How they believe the Devil, at last hee’l cheat you.
OLD CARTER, Tha’dst best confess all truly.
SAWYER, Yet again?
Have I scarce breath enough to say my Prayers?
And would you force me to spend that in bawling?
Bear witness, I repent all former evil;
There is no damned Conjurer

The Wise Woman does not resemble the classical nor Elizabethan black witch. As we have seen, Mother Bombie is white witch but the Wise Woman is a charlatan who pretends to be is a white witch for her personal gain. The titular woman pretends to have the ability to control the supernatural order. The play has three subplots, in which Second Luce, Luce (a goldsmith’s daughter) and Sencer (a conceited gentleman) disguise themselves. Chartley leaves his betrothed Luce and comes to London where he is married secretly to another woman of the same name. However, Luce follows him to London and by means of a scheme assisted by the Wise Woman, Chartley’s secret marriage to the second Luce takes place in the dark. The intriguer characters who have a role in the scheming are the Wise Woman (chief intriguer), Second Luce, Luce, Chartley (a wild-headed gentleman), and Sencer. The Wise Woman of Hogsdon is very well managed despite having complications in its plot between the two Luces, a young Lady and a young Chartley. Luce and the Wise Woman have a very good friendship. Lucy’s father, Sir Harry (a knight), portrays the figure of a wise old man, and Sir Boniface is an ignorant pedant or schoolmaster. The pair of lovers are in complicated relationships: Gratiana (Sir Harry’s daughter) and Sencer; Luce is married to Boyster (a blunt fellow) but then Chartely restored to her. Second Luce is disguised as Jack, the wise woman’s boy

Gibbons argues that Heywood in writing The Wise Woman of Hogsdon ‘was capable not only of satirizing the typically ineffectual civil authorities, gullible or venal citizens, and wily rogues of his day but also of sustained literary reflection on the social challenges posted by the dynamic conditions of urban life in the seventeenth century’. The Wise Woman of Hogsdon is a comedy of English life, and, unlike some of the other plays discussed earlier, there are no murders and suicides. Heywood depicts an English domestic life and in particular the picture of the surface of London life. There is not a direct source for the plots of The Wise Woman of Hogsdon. Cromwell argues that the play is a clever comedy of intrigue, ‘the centre of the action being the “wise woman” of Hogsdon (Hoxton), a charlatan whose prototype may well have been an actual London figure’. Sawyer lives in Edmonton and the Wise Woman lives in Hoxton, both located in the suburbs of London. Mother Bombie resides in Rochester in Kent. Cunning women, witches, gamblers, and prostitutes live in the suburbs as it is the place free of city jurisdiction for their licentious behaviour. This is also why most of the theatres, gaming houses, pools and yards, and brothels were outside the jurisdiction of London. The three plays have an urban setting and