Abstract
Witches and royalty were a sure thrill for the theater-going crowds of Jacobean London, though it was not always easy to distinguish between these character types. In Thomas Middleton’s tragicomedy The Witch (ca. 1616), for example, the Duchess of Ravenna traffics with Hecate, the Witch Queen, who repeatedly calls her “daughter.” In the comedy The Humorous Lieutenant (1619) by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, Antigonus, king of Syria, uses a love-potion to win Celia, his son’s beloved. The Satanic Machiavellian villains driving the complex plots of murder and psychological torture in John Webster’s dark tragedies The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) are dukes or members of the royal family. William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth (ca. 1606) and his romance Cymbeline (ca. 1609) both feature evil queens who resort to devilish practices and rhetoric for political ends; in The Winter’s Tale (1611) Queen Hermione and her lady-in-waiting Paulina prove masters of image magic and vituperative witch-speak; The Tempest (ca. 1611) features a magician whose supernatural powers blend Neo-Platonic magic with low-style witchcraft.
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Notes
Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 121.
The three displays of witch-speak mentioned here are recorded, respectively, in John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 124–25;
Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), p. 91;
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 508. On the structure and effect of early modern English witch-speak, see my “Fighting Words: Witch-Speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-Fiction,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30:2 (2000), pp. 309–38.
Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 44.
Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 162.
David Schalkyk, “A Lady’s ‘Verily’ Is as Potent as a Lord’s’: Women, Word and Witchcraft in The Winter’s Tale” English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), p. 247; Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, p. 162.
Carol Thomas Neely, “The Winter’s Tale: The Triumph of Speech,” in The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), pp. 252–53.
Janet S. Wolf, “‘Like an Old Tale Still’: Paulina, ‘Triple Hecate’, and the Persephone Myth in The Winter’s Tale” in Images of Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature, ed. Elizabeth T Hayes (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 32–44.
Anthony Harris, in Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 143, observes that Charles Lamb interpreted Prospero’s statement, “for one thing she did / They would not take her life” (1.2.268–69) as “a reference to the story of the witch who saved Algiers when it was besieged by Charles V in 1541.”
Mary Ellen Lamb, “Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest” Criticism, 40:4 (1998), pp. 542, 545.
The relationship between Shakespeare’s and Golding’s translation of Medea’s Ovidian speech was first detailed in T. W. Baldwin, William Shaksperes Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:443–53. Lamb, “Engendering the Narrative Act,” pp. 546–47, presses the analogy between Prosperos speech and Medea’s incantation to show how early modern demonological discourse would have interpreted both as authored by the Devil.
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: The Folio Society, 1996), pp. 557–58. As Graves clarifies, Medea’s murder of her two sons is the creation of the dramatist Euripides, bribed with fifteen talents of silver by the Corinthians to absolve them from guilt.
On Caliban’s pastoral poetic, see Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 269,
and David Norbrook, “‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?’: Language and Utopia in The Tempest” in The Poetics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullen and Jonathan Hope (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 21–54.
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© 2003 Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, Debra Barrett-Graves
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Stavreva, K. (2003). “There’s magic in thy majesty”: Queenship and Witch-Speak in Jacobean Shakespeare. In: Levin, C., Carney, J.E., Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10676-6_10
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