User:Cuddy Banks

Cuddy Banks is the name of a character, referred to as a "Clown" in the dramatis personae, in The Witch of Edmonton, a Jacobean play written by Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley, first acted at Court on 29 December 1621. (The play was first published in 1658, the year that the Puritan Lord Prorector Oliver Cromwell died, signifying the end of the repression of the theater.]] The play was topical when first enacted for Elizabeth Sawyer, the inspiration of the eponymous witch, had been executed on 19 April 1621.

Cuddy Banks is a morris dancer whose invincible innocence allows him to emerge unscathed from his own encounters with the dog Tom, a demon. Cuddy eventually banishes the dog from the stage with the words "Out, and avaunt!" Banks is the optimistic note in the play, which made clear that the execution of the alleged witch had done little or nothing to purge the world of an evil. However, while the devil-dog Tom was not destroyed at the end of the play, he was defeated by Cuddy's innocence, elucidating the theme that a good heart will triumph, individually, over evil.