I often have trouble suspending disbelief in fiction. If the writing isn't involving enough to carry me with it, I find myself simply contradicting the narrative when it tells me that this happened or one character said such and such a thing. No, it didn't. No, they didn't. You're just making it up.
I know that a severed head can't speak and a number of other things that Jeanette Winterson claims happened in this novel couldn't have and yet I was quite happy to go along with the idea. Witchcraft has been in decline since 1612 and most of us don't take it quite as seriously as James I and his Protestant fanatics did but Winterson's economical prose here brings it vividly, luridly back.
The ways and means of orthodoxy in 1612 put witchcraft and catholicism together as twin evils with which to accuse their victims and create the climate of fear and repression that governments like. It was much like George Osborne's economic policy is now. And The Daylight Gate is as much about the exercise of power as it is a gloriously grisly picture of suffering and abuse. Again, a little bit paradoxically, although the story is dismal and unrelentingly grim, one enjoys the writing rather than sharing the torment.
Lancashire was where Catholicism had retreated to, as far from London as they could get and so, coincidentally, that was where all the witchcraft went on as well. Winterson brings in a further strain of unlikeliness in having Shakespeare return to the Houghton estate where he may or may not have spent his late teens tutoring the young of the old religion but it's all in the context of a great little book that will make a television adaptation or a film sooner rather than later, one would think. A book so apparently full of contradictions works here exceptionally well, a literary horror, a polemic and a profound study of human nature.