SOURCE: “Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives' Tales in The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest,” in Criticism, Vol. XL, No. 4, Fall, 1998, pp. 529-53.

[In the following essay, Lamb analyzes the role of women's folk tales and their influence in The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest.]

As Macbeth stares in terror at Banquo's ghost during a banquet for the Scottish lords, Lady Macbeth contemptuously compares his hallucination to oral narratives circulated among women:

                                                            O proper stuff!
This the very painting of your fear;
This the air-drawn dagger which you said
Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts
(Imposters to true fear) would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authoriz’d by her grandam. Shame itself,
Why do you make such faces?(1)

Framing her criticism with attacks against his masculinity—“Are you a man?” and “What, quite unmanned in folly?”—Lady Macbeth represents Macbeth's fearfulness as a degrading regression to the androgyny of childhood. Her anxious allusion to women's tales in this context suggests their continuing and threatening power, and the effeminizing attraction of the early bonds with women they signify. Paradoxically, Lady Macbeth's accusation becomes self-reflexive to the play which includes it. The “air-drawn dagger” which Lady Macbeth denigrates as appropriate only to women's tales places Macbeth squarely within this devalued oral tradition; so do its ghosts and its witches. Macbeth is not alone in its self-reflexive allusions to this early scene of narration. Passages within The Winter's Tale and The Tempest also invoke this oral tradition as originary to their art. Together, these allusions expose the power of childhood tales as prototypes for the fictions of the stage.

From this distance in time, it is impossible to judge whether these stories were primarily “authoriz’d” by “grandams” or also composed and performed by men. The gender of their authors was, however, largely irrelevant to the reception of these tales by young children at the knees of the women who told them. Whatever the point of origin, the location of fiction within the special space shared between young children and the women who raised them contributed to what the narrative act meant. This space contained meanings specific to the early modern period. As Stephen Orgel has pointed out, within almost every early modern male there would have lurked a childhood memory of a self not fully distinguished from women.² Whether male or female, babies and children at the breast were thought to imbibe femaleness along with their nurses' other qualities.³ Gender was especially blurred through the custom of dressing little boys in coats until they were “breech’d,” sometime around the age of five.⁴ Within a one-sex gender system distinguishing gender by social markers, gender differences were not yet fully present in young boys dominated as well as nurtured by women.⁵ Not yet old enough to assume the social power defining their masculinity, boys younger than the age of seven were not yet considered fully rational, either; and so, much like women, young boys were perceived as creatures more of their bodies than their minds.⁶ Shared with the seemingly large female bodies surrounding them, this sense of bodiliness served as a primary marker of an early effeminacy which invested the narrative act with gendered meanings specific to the early modern period.

The gendered meanings of this early female-dominated environment, implicit within the narratives it circulated, may not have become apparent to a boy until, sometime between seven and thirteen, he was given to male tutors or schoolmasters to learn Latin in what has been characterized by Walter Ong as a male puberty rite.⁷ While scholars have recently debated the severity of humanist pedagogy, there remains little doubt that the standard exercises of intellect—the attainment of fluency in Latin, the ability to reason abstractly and to present logical arguments, the knowledge of classical cultures—created gender differences reinforcing the physiological differences between the sexes.⁸ According to Keith Thomas, further gender distinctions were created through the process of learning Latin—the rigorous routines and disciplines—which required of boys an “instinctual renunciation” through which they were to master their bodily passions as a condition of their future privilege.⁹ Underlying this version of masculinity was an analogical system which naturalized the subordination of the feminized body to the masculine mind.¹⁰ Reinforced by the masculinizing aura of the humanist schoolroom, the flight from the feminine became a flight from corporeality itself.¹¹

Nostalgia for this childhood period of effeminacy and its pleasures, including its narrative pleasures, could not be easily reconciled with a self built upon the rejection of the feminine and the corporeal. Humanist sentiment suggests that the highly intellectual form of masculinity achieved through the translation of classical texts within this literate culture did not easily accommodate the oral tradition of tales circulated among women at a winter's fire. Lady Macbeth's implicit opposition of the authority of grandams and pedagogues in her contemptuous juxtaposition of the words “grandam” and “authoriz’d” appears even more forcefully in Erasmus's similarly contemptuous dismissal of this vernacular oral tradition: “A boy (may) learn a pretty story from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives' fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women.”¹² Erasmus's expression of anxiety over these narratives as a source of female influence, and especially lower-class female influence, over children, was not isolated. It appears as well in childrearing manuals, which warned against the widespread existence of this oral tradition and its harmful potential as a means by which women—whether mothers or lower-class wet nurses—could exert permanent influence over young minds.¹³

The often abrupt removal of boys from a feminine space to a masculinizing schoolroom environment posed a form of gender trouble to many early modern males of the middle or upper classes. Individual boys undoubtedly experienced the conflict between these contradictory cultures, as well as their own differently gendered selves formed within them, with differing intensities, and they chose from a range of strategies available to manage these conflicts. While Erasmus dismissed this early environment and its narratives with contempt, John Aubrey expressed nostalgia for the vernacular tales of his own early seventeenth century childhood, when he had heard “old women and mayds” telling “fabulous stories nightimes, of Sprights and walking of Ghosts.”¹⁴ In several of Shakespeare's plays, the oral tradition shared between women and children implicates the narrative act composing the play itself. The responses to this form of female influence staged within these plays are complex and ambivalent, embracing nostalgia, horror, resignation, and perhaps even celebration. These gender conflicts arising from this sudden juxtaposition of highly gendered cultures remain central, I will argue, to the act of narration as represented in The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest.¹⁵

1. THE WINTER'S TALE

With its title explicitly identifying itself as a part of this oral tradition, The Winter's Tale provides an obvious starting point for an exploration of the continuing powers of these tales. Tales told in winter were commonly attributed to women not only because many middle-or upper-class children experienced woman as their first storyteller. Represented as simple entertainment to pass away long evenings when the cold and darkness prevented other chores or distractions, tales told in winter also became a trope for tales without serious purpose. In this period before fiction had become sufficiently theorized, tales told on long evenings before a fire required a woman storyteller because, presumably, a man would have had something more useful to do.¹⁶ Stories told by women were of necessity without purpose; stories without purpose were most appropriately told by women. This sense emerges, for example, from Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Gods: “A maundering old woman, sitting with others late of a winter's night at the home fireside, making up tales of Hell, the fates, Ghosts and the like … to scare the little ones, or divert the young ladies, or amuse the old, or at least show the power of fortune.”¹⁷ In this context, Shakespeare's titling of the Winter's Tale reopens the question, circulating within his culture, not only of the power of this devalued tradition, but of the deeper purposes of writing fiction for pleasure.

As Mamillius tells his mother, “A sad tale's best for winter. I have one / Of sprites and goblins” (II.i.25-26), his creation of his own winter's tale makes the self-identification of The Winter's Tale with these oral tales of childhood explicit. The gender reversal of the expected audience and narrator further connects Mamillius' winter tale with the male-authored Winter's Tale, by showing their mutual appropriation of a tradition of “old wives' tales” usually gendered as female. Mamillius' tale demonstrates a debt to the easy intimacy staged in this play for the primarily female environment of childhood, as one of the queen's ladies offers to be his “playfellow” while another lets Mamillius tease her about her blue-painted eyebrows. This scene between Hermione and Mamillius suggests the centrality of this affective bond for the creation of Mamillius' own winter's tale, and by extension, of the play Winter's Tale itself. In her active role as audience, Hermione elicits his story, as she invites him to “Pray you, sit by us, / And tell 's a tale” (21-22). As she invites him again to sit down beside her, her praise for his ability reveals that this scene of narration has been enacted many times: “Come on, sit down, come on, and do your best / To fright me with your sprites: you’re pow’rful at it” (27-28). This physical closeness to his mother forms a condition of his narration. As he offers to tell her his story so softly that “yond crickets shall not hear it” (30), Hermione asks him to “give’t me in mine ear” (II.i.32). In this scene, Hermione is more than a receptive audience; as he whispers the first words, “There was a man … Dwelt by a churchyard” (28, 30), Mamillius is composing not only a story but a self defined in terms of an intimate and very physical bond with his visibly pregnant mother as well as with her surrounding ladies, who care for him.

The Winter's Tale also reveals the threat posed by this bond which in some sense forms its source. The dangerous centrality of this relationship between mother and son is amply demonstrated by Mamillius' response to his mother's imprisonment. Removed from her presence, in “mere conceit and fear / Of the Queen's speed” (III.ii.144-45), Mamillius dies. Leontes's sudden separation of Mamillius from his mother replicates the potentially traumatic entry of boys into a masculine environment. Like the traditional removal of boys from their early female-dominated environment, this sudden separation expresses rejection not only of the female, but of the female in Mamillius, as Leontes explains: “Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” (II.i.56-57). The business is completed in a few lines, as Leontes orders, “Give me the boy,” and “Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about her. / Away with him!” (59-60). Yet the rejection of Mamillius' inner femininity is not so easily accomplished for a boy whose name is derived from the Latin word for “breasts.”¹⁸ While, as Leontes notes, Hermione had not actually nursed Mamillius, her physical closeness is as important as that of any nurse to an infant. Mamillius' illness duplicates the classic symptoms of depression as he “threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep / And downright languish’d” (II.iii.16-17). The one grave in which both Hermione and Mamillius are allegedly buried signifies this symbiotic union and continues it beyond death.¹⁹

Mamillius' death expresses the danger or even the impossibility of a complete transition from androgynous boyhood to adult masculinity. Even Leontes mourns the loss of his early effeminacy as, looking at Mamillius, Leontes succumbs to nostalgia, remembering himself at that age:

                                                            Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methought I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove
(As ornament oft does) too dangerous.

(I.ii.153-58)

Leontes's regressive identification with Mamillius conveys more than a conventionally Freudian desire to unite with the mother.²⁰ Instead (or in addition), Leontes's reminiscences provide a window into a historically specific practice of childrearing now defunct. In representing that time when he still wore the coat also worn by girls, Leontes adds a detail unrecorded in histories of children's clothing: he remembers that he also wore a dagger, and that the dagger was muzzled.

If Leontes's memory reflects widespread early modern practice, then boys may have been somewhat differentiated from girls before breeching: perhaps even small boys displayed this highly visible sign of their masculinity. This instrument of aggression and / or sexuality was, however, muzzled and thus unavailable for their present use; it remained a promise of future potency. Leontes's description of his muzzled dagger as an ornament conveys a sense of its detachability, of its exteriority, of its nonessentiality. As an ornament, it could be laid aside, rendering the boy-Leontes again undifferentiated from girls. This passage raises questions critical to an understanding of early modern gender construction. If the dagger was in fact worn by young boys still in coats, when was it unmuzzled? During the breeching ceremony? If so, then the breeching ceremony itself constructed a boy's masculinity in terms of overt and possibly deadly aggression. While this passage points to the necessity of further research in children's clothing and the customs surrounding breeching, it seems clear that the term “muzzled,” appropriate to a dangerous beast, reinforces a sense of aggression implicit in early modern masculinity. Leontes's representation of his muzzled dagger of early boyhood implies that since that time, his masculinity, as represented by his now unmuzzled dagger/phallus, has become able to bite its master, to become an instrument of self-aggression rather than of love for another. The dangerous potential of his muzzled dagger has been irrevocably released. No longer only an ornament, his adult dagger/phallus has made the easy intimacy of boyhood no longer possible.

The destructiveness of Leontes's phallic masculinity is borne out as the first two acts of The Winter's Tale follow a conventional tragic plot. It is the miraculous unlikelihood of the last three acts in which The Winter's Tale most resembles the oral narratives of childhood, as it points to its own profound implausibility by twice referring to itself as an “old tale.” Relating the offstage reunion of Leontes and his daughter Perdita, the second Gentleman exclaims that “this news, which is call’d true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (V.ii.27-29). Similarly, the third Gentleman describes the bear's fatal mauling of Antigonus as “like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep and not an ear open” (V.ii.61-63). While neither gentleman designates the probable gender of the teller of such old tales, the evocation of garrulity unimpeded by disbelief, indifference, or even sleepiness draws on a stereotype of talkative old women.²¹ In their apologetic references to “old tales,” first and second Gentleman call on their listeners and by extension the audience, to move beyond the critical judgment of adulthood to be filled with the wonder of children again.

In The Winter's Tale, this wonder characterizes not only children, but country folk gullible enough to buy the absurd ballads sold by Autolycus. Like Mamillius, like the first and second Gentleman, perhaps like the playwright of The Winter's Tale himself, Autolycus becomes yet another male purveyor of improbable tales associated with women. While his given name derives from classical literature, his self-representation reveals his own androgynous identification with the female tradition of narratives. In his self-defense, “Why should I carry lies abroad?” he describes himself by an expanded version of the name he had improvised as the supposed author, a Mistress Taleporter (or “carrier of tales/lies”). “Her” story of the usurer's wife who gave birth to twenty moneybags derives its point from the astonishing capacities of the female reproductive body, used in this tale as an analogue of capitalistic profits, much as Autolycus performs the capitalistic miracle of making money from such women's tales/tails. This supposed Mistress Taleporter, who signed her name to verify the truth of this story, gains her authority from her role as midwife. In selling “her” story, Autolycus appropriates not only the tradition, but the physicality of women's narratives as the sign of their power over the life and death of infants and children. In this ballad, however, women's very physical powers are parodied rather than rejected; rather than eliciting horror, they promote sales.²²

Like Autolycus, Shakespeare appropriates the power of the female body to compose the miraculous conclusion of The Winter's Tale. As Hermione steps down from her pedestal, Shakespeare's stagecraft merges with Paulina's, for his audience is as ignorant as hers that Hermione still lives. Hermione's continuing love for Leontes represents perhaps the most wonderful implausiblity of the play; and it is this statue scene, often associated with the power of the playwright, which makes of this play a “winter's tale.” Moreover, it is in this scene that a woman directly takes on a creative role. Like Mistress Taleporter's ballad, Paulina's stagecraft is also inseparable from the female body. Like the stories of early childhood, her “play” represents the culmination of her faithful attending to physical needs; for Paulina's visits to the statue “twice or thrice a day” (V.ii.105) were clearly designed to feed Hermione. In this sense, Leontes's representation of Paulina's art as “lawful as eating” (V.iii.111) has special point. Paulina's stagecraft is finally inseparable from acts of feeding and eating. Her art is also inseparable from the lives of those she cares for. Paulina cannot conclude her sixteen-year play until Perdita, the fruit of Hermione's visible pregnancy in Act I, is recovered.

Various critics have noted the psychoanalytic implications of Paulina's play, culminating in the statue scene. Murray Schwartz has read this final scene as expressing Shakespeare's acceptance and then renunciation of the “wish for fusion with the creative and destructive mother of infancy.”²³ Adelman has pointed out that this scene figures “the loss and recovery of the world in the mother's body.”²⁴ Erickson claims that “the play's final scene reenacts the symbiotic unity that Leontes now mourns.”²⁵ These insights gain validity from a historical grounding of Paulina's play in childrearing practices. Overseeing Leontes's grief and enforcing his refusal to wed again until the oracle is fulfilled, Paulina uses her powers as playwright to return Leontes to the female dominance of boyhood. As Leontes puts himself in the hands of a woman he has called a “mankind witch” (II.iii.68), arguably both a nurse and a playwright, The Winter's Tale reenacts Macbeth's regressive receptivity to women's narratives with a difference. For Leontes, Paulina's narrative is redemptive. Under her direction, Leontes is in a sense permitted what was forbidden to early modern males: an extended period of mourning for “what was lost” in the transition away from the female environment of early childhood. And “what is found” is not only Perdita, not only Hermione, not only the Mother, but the bond with women inseparable from the “winter's tales” of childhood.

If the statue scene can be taken as a self-reflexive exploration of the playwright's art, what are its implications for The Winter's Tale? Does the gender of Paulina blur the outlines of the male playwright with a female caregiver of early childhood to reveal her influence even at the cost of exposing a humiliating dependency at the core of narrative? Or does it, as Abbe Blum argues, reveal a desire to “partake of an originary or originating moment” identified with the “preoedipal and the power of the mother,” only to circumscribe that “maternal power with that of the male playwright?”²⁶ Either way this scene is read, the imagery of witchcraft in The Winter's Tale reveals that anxiety about women's influence over men, including male playwrights, is far from resolved. Paulina must draw careful lines around her stagecraft to distinguish it from demonic art. Cautiously placing her scene in a chapel, Paulina voices the fear that onlookers will “think (which I protest against) I am assisted by wicked powers” (V.iii.90-91). When Hermione steps down from her pedestal, Leontes expresses his sense of the miraculous by carefully marking off the differences between this magic from the unlawful kind (V.iii.109-11). These deliberate distinctions between sacred and demonic magic, designed to separate and contain the demonic powers of the witch-narrator, disclose the presence of the continuing threat of the power of women's tales. The nature of this threat is best explored in Macbeth, which collapses such distinctions to portray women's narratives as purely demonic.

2. MACBETH

In her contempt for “a woman's story at a winter's fire,” Lady Macbeth shows her attempt to unsex herself, as she identifies with a critical perspective outside this oral tradition. Paradoxically, Lady Macbeth's contempt for women's narratives participates in the same cultural imperative expressed by Erasmus: to become fully masculine, males were to leave marks of female influence behind them. In this respect, the warrior culture of Macbeth was not unlike the humanist culture of the early modern period. In their strong constructions of masculinity, neither culture tolerated signs of boyhood androgyny in adult males. But in the circular doublethink of this play, Lady Macbeth herself authors a narrative of a murdered baby which profoundly motivates Macbeth to murder Duncan. Thus, Lady Macbeth's scorn for women's narratives within a play largely driven by women's narratives, including her own, dramatizes the impossibility of eradicating their power, or the power of the women who told them.

This power which could not be eradicated could, however, be demonized. As critics have noted, in their absolute power over the lives especially of male infants, Lady Macbeth and the witches enact a subjectivity lying outside the boundaries of patriarchy: they become demonic. It has not yet been noted that they become authors as well. While they themselves perform no murders, they achieve their will through the effect of these narratives—and the constructions of gender within them—on Macbeth. It is through women's stories that Macbeth stages the fantasy of maternal power which Macbeth cannot escape, which can only be escaped, in Adelman's memorable argument, by one “not of woman born.”²⁷ It is through their compelling narratives that Lady Macbeth and the witches create their absolute authority over the infant that Macbeth in some sense becomes. Fleeing the effeminacy of his childhood, Macbeth acts out not only the desires, but also the magical narratives told by women who dominate him.

Participating in their patriarchal culture's dark fantasy of the overwhelming power and the demonic nature of the reproductive female body, these narratives told by women are, like Paulina's play in the Winter's Tale, inseparable from the female body. In their sheer corporeality, these narrative acts create Macbeth as a “woman's story” in their saturation with imagery of nursing, menstruation, and bloody births.²⁸ The extent to which women's authorship is empowered by their dangerous biological functions is especially evident in Lady Macbeth's imagined murder of an infant nursing at her breast, which makes it chillingly apparent that women's power to nurture also bestows upon them the power to destroy (I.vii.54-59). Critics have noted the infantilizing effect of this speech on Macbeth in its recreation of his own vulnerability to a murderous mother now represented by his wife.²⁹ He responds obediently by killing Duncan. But it has not been noted that Lady Macbeth is no more able than her husband to escape the power of her own maternal body. Her imagined divestment of her femininity paradoxically only makes her reproductive body more rather than less abundantly present to the audience. As she asks her blood to be thickened, her menstruation or “visitings of Nature”³⁰ to be stopped, her milk to become gall, her invocation confirms rather than denies her identification with the flesh (gendered female) rather than the mind (gendered male). Far from masculinized, her imagination invokes Night as performing the function of a sinister mother/nurse, pulling a blanket over Duncan's murder to prevent heaven from seeing the deed. This blanket of smoke is one of several images which make of Scotland a claustrophobic womb:

Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’

(I.v.50-54)

While Lady Macbeth and the witches never meet, their narratives share a form of dangerous authorship permeated by female functions, especially nursing. Adelman has noted that the distinctions between Lady Macbeth and the witches blur in a common “image of perverse nursery” (135). Willis and Callagan have ably explored the ways in which the witchcraft persecutions manifested not only women's victimization but their symbolic power as mothers as well.³¹ This power was also invested in the lower-class nurses whose care of upper-class infants sometimes proved lethal.³² According to a larger patriarchal plot of the culture, the act of nursing opened up one strategy for exposing witches, as authorities searched even old women's bodies for signs of the “devil's teat,” the mark left anywhere on their skin to show where they provided suck to the devil or his familiars.³³ This life-and-death authority demonizing mothers/nurses is evoked by a very physical form of authorship: the recipe of body parts included in the witches' womb-like cauldron. A smaller version of the “pilot's thumb” (I.iii.28), the “finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-deliver’d by a drab” gathers into the play a contemporary horror over infanticides committed primarily by desperate single mothers.³⁴ The blood of the sow “that hath eaten / Her nine farrow” enacts a blurring of human and animal in a gruesome transformation of nursing into cannibalism (IV.i.30-31, 64-65).

This double capacity to destroy and create is especially displayed in the witches' authorship of the bloody babe script to the anxious Macbeth.³⁵ In their staging of this scene, the witches have authored a highly equivocal play identified with the body. The blood (if it is his) signifies the baby's own vulnerability to physical injury and/or (if the blood is his mother's) his maternal origin. Both of these remain at odds with his advice to Macbeth, to “be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The pow’r of man; for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (IV.i.79-81). Interpreted in terms of the blood on the babe, the injunction to “be bloody” becomes multivalent: it can mean at the same time to be cruel (as Macbeth takes it), to be wounded, and to memorialize his abject dependence upon his mother.³⁶ In its ability to “mean” in various ways, the apparition of the bloody babe resembles nothing so much as a Shakespeare play.

It has not yet been observed, however, that the witches' incantations draw their power from another very physical connection to the bodies of the women of childhood. Verging on nonsense, the “magic” of spells is performed through their sounds, as in the hypnotic incantation “Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble” (IV.i.10-11). In their form and sound—their alliteration, emphatic tetrameters, frequent rhymes—these incantations present a striking resemblance to early modern nursery rhymes.³⁷ In their exaggerated reliance on sound to make language “mean,” the witches' spells, like nursery rhymes, recapitulate a young child's early and very physical bond with nurses and/or mothers who rocked and bounced them to their sounds. This insistent linkage between bodily power and narrative gains further support from the writings of Julia Kristeva, who theorizes that poetry's nonsignifying practices, such as rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration, derive their “meaning” from what she calls the semiotic: the pulsations, rhythms, and tones which orient the preoedipal self to the mother's body.³⁸ While Kristeva's theory applies with special intensity to witches' spells and nursery rhymes as archaic forms of poetry, it is not essential to an understanding of how the rhythm of the heart and the repetition of the sounds in the mouth create a nonlogical assent for a couplet such as “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (I.i.11-12). As Adelman notes, Macbeth's echo of the witches' rhyme in his first words, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen” casts doubts on “the very possibility of autonomous identity” of Macbeth from the witches.³⁹ This echo also casts doubts on the autonomy of Shakespeare's play from childhood nursery rhymes and from the women's bodies which gave them their primal meanings.

If this infantilizing and possibly even preoedipal material, closely tied to the female body experienced in childhood, forms the content of the cultural fantasy of the witches, what then is its function? Peter Stallybrass has explored the way Macbeth uses the witches to validate their antithesis, the godly rule of Banquo's heirs, including of course James I himself.⁴⁰Macbeth undoubtedly functions in this way; this cleansing of Scotland of demonic female powers also reflects a liberating sense of James's rule in Great Britain after so many decades of the rules of his “mothers” Mary Stuart and Elizabeth.⁴¹ But this use of the witches to legitimate a godly masculine alternative is not so clear-cut. Macduff's identity as “not of woman born” rests on a technicality.⁴² No less than any other human, Macduff required his mother's body to conceive him, and a wet nurse's body to feed him. The meaning of his status as “not of woman born” is derived, finally, from an apparition staged by witches; and this women's narrative is as equivocal as Macbeth itself. Within Macbeth there is no clear escape from women's power, even in the political arena. James's own sovereignty, and even his life, remain contingent on the uninterrupted lineage staged in the witches' show of the eight kings descended from Banquo. The survival of Banquo's heirs still depends upon the terrifying and uncontrollable powers invested in the female reproductive body.

As a demonic version of women's authority experienced in childhood, the witches' narratives perform a yet more central function. In Macbeth, horror serves as an antidote to nostalgia. The sheer excess of the nightmare world of Macbeth suggests its defensive role as over-compensation, deriving from desire rather than revulsion for the childhood world of female dominance. This yearning for the closeness of childhood relationships with women surfaces in the heart-rending sweetness of the scene between Lady Macduff and her son, which radiates the same comfortable and comforting intimacy as the mother-son scene in Winter's Tale. The presence of this relationship between a mother and an actual child points to the emptiness of the cultural fantasy of regression staged in Macbeth.

Rather than nightmare horrors, the brief scene between Lady Macduff and her son provides the few moments of genuine intimacy the play affords. Theirs is a female-dominated environment; having joined Malcolm's forces, the father is noticeably absent, and Lady Macduff even pretends he is dead. Their interactions are marked by mutuality rather than dominance, so that the son can assertively answer his mother's question, “How will you do for a father?” with his own question, “Nay, how will you do for a husband?” (IV.ii.39-40). In easy collaboration, they author a fantasy, beginning with Lady Macduff's announcement of her husband's death, which her son does not believe, and ending with the son's humorous if morbid vision of the outnumbered honest men foolishly attempting to hang all the liars and swearers. Instead of the procreative functions permeating the narratives of Lady Macbeth and the witches, this fantasy touchingly evokes a sense of vulnerability and loss. But this scene of mutual and creative playfulness ends with the horrifying murder of the boy. Enacting a sudden and forced separation from his mother, his death, like that of Mamillius, recapitulates a potentially traumatic entry of boys into a masculine environment. While counterdiscourses also arose, the ethos of a warrior/humanist culture required androgynous boys to die into a newly formed masculine self.

3. THE TEMPEST

The subject of women's demonic authorship reappears in the Tempest, where the witchcraft of Sycorax defines, by opposition, the magic of Prospero. Prospero's allegation that Sycorax engaged in intercourse with the devil invests her bodily functions, like those of Shakespeare's other witches, with a power dangerously outside patriarchal control. Sycorax's demonic maternity, like theirs, also permeates her art. The one magical act reported for this witch, dead before the play begins, was her confinement of Ariel in a “cloven pine” because he was “Too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands” (I.ii.273-74). Her imprisonment of Ariel in a tree trunk, especially one “cloven” like a vagina, suggests a forced return to the womb. In the context of the anxieties about maternal dominance staged, for example, in Macbeth, Sycorax's punishment of Ariel was particularly horrifying; for this entrapment in the denigrated female body was precisely his object, and the object of any male in the early modern system, to escape. The twelve years of Ariel's suffering before he was rescued by Prospero points to this imprisonment as a misogynistic version of the early female environment; for boys were removed (or, from a humanist perspective, freed) sometime between the ages of seven and thirteen.

This demonic physicality of Sycorax's magic provides her with a dramatic function accounting for the otherwise puzzling prominence of her memorialization in The Tempest; for she is, to a much greater extent than Prospero's wife, given a name, a history, and a presence forcefully remembered by her survivors.⁴³ The debasement of Sycorax's female black magic exalts Prospero's magic, and the theatrical spectacles he stages, as white and masculine. Deriving from an elaborate Neoplatonic system, the distinctions between Sycorax's black magic or “goety” and Prospero's white magic or “theurgy” articulate the split between body and mind organizing the Neoplatonic system.⁴⁴ As described by Curry, the Neoplatonic cosmos was highly vertical, stretching from base matter at the bottom to Absolute Light at the top. Between these floated three forms of daemons classified by spiritual levels: the intellectual substances, the rational or “aereal” substances, and the irrational substances (175). The human soul was similarly verticalized between a higher or transcendent soul, able to unite mystically with the divine, and the lower or sensual soul, unable to survive separation from the body (176-77). Through the development of his upper soul, the theurgist could move beyond his body and its passions to participate harmoniously in the intellectual or divine spheres, which granted him the power to command the higher daemons. Motivated by the selfish passions of the lower soul, the geotist, on the other hand, disturbed the order of the cosmos with an inferior magic dependent on the lowest or irrational daemons. This magic further debased the geotist to the control of passion (180).

The plausibility of this Neoplatonic system depended on its rehearsal of the gendered relationships to the body accepted as “true” by early modern gender ideology. This ideology rendered legible, even predictable, the power of Prospero's theurgic art to transcend or deny the material body through the refinement of his higher spirit and the reading of learned books. The qualities empowering his magic also characterize the masculinity inculcated in boys in the humanist classroom: the transcendence of the body and the lower passions to engage in the exercise of reason and intellect.⁴⁵ Sycorax's “earthy and abhorr’d commands,” on the other hand, identify her as a geotist, whose physicality is only exacerbated by her function as sinister Maternal.⁴⁶ While Sycorax left little magic behind her beyond her punishment of Ariel, she did give birth to Caliban, “a freckled whelp, hag-born, not honor’d with / A human shape” whom she “littered” on the island (I.ii.282-83). Like his mother, Caliban is closely associated with his body and “brutish” passions. He is marginally human; Trinculo at first mistakes him for a fish (II.ii.24). Never proceeding farther than Miranda's elementary language instruction, Caliban presents a monitory example of a male too base to be inducted into schoolroom masculinity. While Caliban is hardly androgynous by modern definitions, his identity as “hag-seed” (I.ii.368) legitimates Prospero's domination, at least to Prospero. According to this system, Caliban's “female” bodiliness justifies his subjection to Prospero, just as Prospero's own body remains subjected to the rule of his masculine mind.⁴⁷

Demonstrating the masculinity as well as the sublimity of his art, Prospero's masterful transcendence of the material body is thoroughly exhibited by his successful use of Ariel, whose name identifies him with the rational substances inhabiting the “aerial” sphere. According to Agrippa, an ariel spirit was composed of pure intelligence, “free from all gross and putrefying mass of a body.”⁴⁸ The plays Prospero produces through this daemon of intelligence, as Kermode notes, are designed to “liberate the soul from the passions.”⁴⁹ Addressing the court party as “three men of sin” (III.iii.52), Ariel makes clear that his performance as a harpy is intended not to amuse but to reform. The spirit-hounds Prospero and Ariel set on Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo replicate the punishment for passion in Golding's moralization of Ovid's Actaeon myth.⁵⁰ Prospero's graceful masque of Ceres forbids the presence of Venus or her “blind boy's scandall’d company” (IV.i.90). These classical references display an ideological connection between the goal of subjecting passions and Prospero's masculine attainment of a classical education. These characteristics inform The Tempest as a whole, with its allusions to Virgil's Aeneid and its conformity to the classical unities of time and place.⁵¹ In marked contrast to Macbeth and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest may be called, in a humanist sense, one of Shakespeare's most “masculine” works.

Paradoxically, the very rigidity of these divisions between masculine and feminine, mind and body, white and black magic presage their collapse by the end of The Tempest. These distinctions begin to weaken where they seem strongest: in Ariel's performances. Kermode has discussed the attributes Ariel shares with English fairies: he is small enough to couch in a cowslip's bell; he abhors unchastity; and like Puck, he leads mortals into standing pools.⁵² These similarities link Ariel, the “airy spirit” of Neoplatonic philosophy, to the diminutive creatures of childhood stories. Even more striking are the noises of beasts—the “bow-wow” of dogs, the “cock-a-diddle-dow” of a rooster (I.ii.382, 384, 386)—in the songs of this “spirit of pure intelligence.” Like the incantations of the witches in Macbeth, the “magic” of Ariel's songs bears striking resemblances to the nursery rhymes of early modern childhood in which these noises also appeared, such as “Bow, wow, wow, / Whose dog art thou? / Little Tom Tinker's Dog, / Bow, wow, wow” or the ancient “onomatoplasm” of “Cock a doodle doo, / My Dame has lost her shoe.” The “ding dong bell” of his ethereal song “Full fathom five” echoes the rhyme “Ding dong Bell, / The Cat is in the Well.”⁵³ In these rhymes, Ariel's art perhaps reveals its debt to his twelve years in Sycorax's tree/womb.

Caliban's sensitivity to music also blurs the otherwise exaggerated distinctions between the ethereal Ariel and this bestial “hag-seed” of Sycorax. Caliban's moving description of these “sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not” evoke a child's intense response to a lullaby:

                                                            And then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d
cried to dream again.

(III.ii.139-42)

Like Ariel's songs, Caliban's song shows the influence of nursery rhymes. Caliban's composition, however, contributes a specifically political angle: his jingle, “’Ban, ’Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master, get a new man” (II.ii.184-85), adapts a common derivation of numerous nursery rhymes as expressions of popular protest.⁵⁴

This blurring of the initially clear differences between Ariel and Caliban, between classical myth and nursery rhyme, implicitly weakens Prospero's claim as ruler of this island. Demonstrated in the rational control of the body and its passions, the masculinity instilled in the schoolroom was to legitimate authority over others. As various critics have pointed out, however, Prospero is not always rational. He becomes irritated at Miranda on little pretext and he apparently desires vengeance on the court party. Most destructive to these gendered distinctions, however, is his vengeful threat to Ariel to enact the same form of punishment inflicted by Sycorax for resistance to his commands: to “rend an oak, / And peg thee in his knotty entrails” (I.ii.295-96). It is surely no coincidence that this image blurs the differences between male and female bodies. The pronoun “his” describing the tree's entrails reveals that Prospero's trunk, like that of Sycorax, has a human interior. The placement of a creature inside the entrails of a male, to form a kind of male womb, expresses the early modern sense of the essential physiological similarity of the genitalia of men and women.⁵⁵

Prospero's earlier description of his own body as a trunk in the process of destruction by Antonio prepares for this dissolution of distinctions based on gender. In addition to identifying the similarities of genitalia, this image expresses what for Prospero is perhaps an even more radical identification of himself as a “trunk,” or a physical body apart from soul or mind:

                                                            He was
The ivy which hid my princely trunk,
And suck’d my verdure out on’t.

(I.ii.85-87)

In this representation of Antonio's sucking, an image of oral sexuality merges with that of maternal nursing. Prospero has become a lactating male who nourishes his parasite/child through the loss of his own semen/milk. He is effeminized, not by a homoerotic act, but by the power relationship it inscribes.⁵⁶

The circumstances leading up to Antonio's sucking out of Prospero's strength call into question the humanist version of masculinity structuring The Tempest. Prospero lost his power over Antonio as well as Milan by engaging precisely in those practices upon which he based his magic: by reading learned books. “Rapt in secret studies” (I.ii.77), Prospero gave Antonio the “manage” of his state. Prospero chose his library as “dukedom large enough,” while Antonio thought him “incapable” of “temporal royalties” (I.ii.110-11). Like Sycorax, he was banished from his realm. The image of fantasized pregnancy he uses to describe his care of his three-year-old daughter stresses its effeminizing effect. As Adelman notes, “he ‘groan’d’ under his ‘burthen’: her smiles ‘rais’d in [him] / An undergoing stomach, to bear up / Against what should ensue’” (I.ii.156-58).⁵⁷ The intellectual mastery empowering Prospero's control of his island did not work in Milan. Precisely because of his “trunk,” his bodiliness, Prospero was vulnerable to physical force. Faced with naked political power, men of intellect—including magicians/playwrights—become as powerless as women.

Perhaps because of this failure of Prospero's learned magic, and the form of masculinity it implied, Prospero renounces his art as he prepares to return to Milan. Various critics have noted that the lines between white and black magic begin to blur in Prospero's renunciation, especially in his claim that “graves at my command / Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth / By my so potent art” (V.i.48-50).⁵⁸ The intertextual meanings of this speech within early modern culture further blur these lines, so that the differences between male magus and female witch collapse entirely; so do the differences between magus and playwright. Surpassing Golding's popular translation from which it draws, Prospero's speech displays Shakespeare's virtuoso ability to render the Latin of Ovid's Metamorphoses into excellent English poetry.⁵⁹ In the experience of privileged early modern males, this fluency in Latin was itself a marker of masculinity. But the actual lines translated were spoken by Medea, an enchantress often represented as a witch in the early modern period.⁶⁰ A few years later, Sandys's 1632 commentary on this passage makes this conflation explicit: like a witch, Medea had no powers of her own, but acted as the dupe of demonic powers: “These wonders were not effected by the vertue of words, or skill of Medea; but rather by wicked Angels, who seem to subject themselves, the better to delude, to the art of the Inchantresse.”⁶¹

Shakespeare's choice to translate this specific passage gains further force from its status in contemporary knowledges of witches. Shortly after The Tempest, a perception of Prospero's speech as an act of ventriloquism of the words of a female witch appears in Middleton's choice to give the Latin form of Medea's speech to Hecate in his play The Witch (1614).⁶² According to Jean Bodin's influential Demonomanie des sorciers, these lines composed an actual witch's incantation which the devil had seduced Ovid into including in his work.⁶³ So who was the actual author of Medea's words? As he concludes his discussion of Medea's lines with the warning that the Devil has deceived men in all languages, including Latin, Bodin represents the poet as no more in control of his text than his character Medea. Ovid was only an intermediary; the real author was the Devil. With this claim, Ovid's mastery of Medea is no longer so clear. In Bodin's reading, this learned Latin text collapses into the demonic incantation it contains. And so, by implication, does Shakespeare's rendering of Prospero's renunciation, a translation of Ovid's lines spoken by Medea. Latin poet, classical enchantress, female witch, male magus, and even male playwright: all become indistinguishable in a whirling witch's brew.⁶⁴

The issue at stake in Shakespeare's use of a witch's incantation is not so much literal belief as the identification of the male playwright with the very real powers attributed to female narratives through the staging of witches. As Prospero stands forward on the stage to speak the forbidden incantation of a witch, he not only renounces his art, but also the gender distinctions which that art rehearsed. With Prospero's renunciation, Shakespeare, in a sense, returns his own writing to the androgynous period dominated by women when narratives really were magic. This return is signified by the fairy tale lore embedded within his translation from Ovid. Like Golding, Shakespeare translates “di” as “elves” in the line, “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” (V.i.32), but he has no apparent source for the invocation to “demi-puppets that / By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, / Whereof the ewe not bites” (36-38) or to “you whose pastime / Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice / To hear the solemn curfew” (38-40). It is through the aid of these local deities, “weak masters” though they be, that Prospero, and Shakespeare as well, “bedimm’d / The noontide sun” and even, like Paulina, seemed to open graves. Is there a connection between Prospero's renunciation of his art and this passage which is simultaneously a Latin poem, a witch's incantation, and fairy tale lore? Does this connection imply a parallel renunciation by the playwright of an art indebted to childhood narratives told by women?

There is another possibility, however, which suggests an acceptance rather than a rejection of old wives' tales. In the face of death, the mortal meanings of the physical body cannot be denied; and under the pressure of mortality, Prospero returns to his body. Soon after his renunciation speech, Prospero expresses his vulnerability to death, to foresee that in his retirement in Milan, “every third thought shall be my grave” (V.i.311). Enacting a return of the repressed, a series of womb images enscribes this movement towards death as a full-circle return to the comfort of women's bodies, represented as the locus of mortality as well as life. In Act III, Alonzo believes that his son “i’ th’ ooze is bedded” (III.iii.101); later he repeats this image in his desire to lie “mudded in that oozy bed / Where my son lies” (V.i.151-52). These repeated images of drowning as lying “bedded” in “ooze” imagine death by drowning as a return to the womb. Ariel's song, “Full fathom five,” strikingly enacts the miraculous power of the art of birth/death practiced by this sea womb upon the body, capable of turning bones to coral and eyes to pearls. It is to this sea womb that Prospero returns his book, drowning it “deeper than did ever plummet sound” (V.i.55). In drowning his book, Prospero renounces not only his art, but the form of learned masculinity it signifies.

As Prospero perceives himself in terms of his mortal bodiliness, the power of his learning to elevate him above the flesh and the feminine loses its relevance. Stepping forward to ask the prayers of the audience, Prospero enacts a new and moving dependence. Freed from the authoritative presence of the learned magus, Prospero returns to the wise vulnerability of a child as he embarks on his longer journey towards the womb of death.

Notes

1. Macbeth, III.iv.60-68; this and other quotations are taken from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

2. Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 14.

3. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 200; Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7; Patricia Crawford, “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), 8.

4. The age of breeching appears to have varied from about five until eight, according to Susan Snyder, “Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter's Tale,” paper delivered at Shakespeare Association, April 1998; my thanks to Professor Snyder for providing me a copy of her meticulously researched paper. See English Family Life, 1576-1716: An Anthology from Diaries, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 150, 147, 164. For ages somewhat later in the seventeenth century, see Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 407 and Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessopp (London: George Bell, 1890), 216. See also Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 251; Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage, 1962), 58-59.

5. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 123-27.

6. Phyllis Rackin, “Foreign Country: The Place of Women and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Historical World,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 74; Leah Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), 10.

7. Walter Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 113-41. Sometimes children were also sent away as servants in other households: see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 83.

8. Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 28; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 27; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney's Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School,” Criticism 36 (1994): 505-6. Gendered implications are traced ably by Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. 141-46 on the “woman's hand”; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 55-57, passim on issues facing humanist women. Bushnell represents humanist education as kinder than have Goldberg and Grafton and Jardine.

9. Keith Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Reading: University of Reading, 1976), 8; Bushnell, 62. Routines and punishments are detailed in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:353-72. These revived a classical technique of the self designed for the ruling class, as described by Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Methuen, 1986), 84-85, 173.

10. Rackin, 76; this early modern commonplace was publicized from, for example, the homily on marriage, cited in Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row), 198.

11. This flight was not limited to early modern schoolrooms: see R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1987): 15, who defines misogyny as “the desire to escape the sense, perception, the corporeal”; he also associates the literary with the feminine, although for different reasons from mine.

12. Erasmus, De pueris instituendis, in William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (New York: Columbia University Teacher's College, 1964), 214; also cited Halpern, 25.

13. Bartholomeus Battus, De Oeconomia Christiana, trans. J. William Lowth as The Christian Mans Closet (London, 1581), 02; John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Government (London: 1612), Q6v.

14. John Aubrey, “The Life and Times of John Aubrey,” prefatory to Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950), xxix, xxxiii; see also Stone, 170.

15. This issue is posed in partial answer to the seminal essay by Mary Beth Rose, “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 307. The effeminizing potential of fictions for other authors has recently been explored by Juliet Fleming, “The Ladies' Man and the Age of Elizabeth,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158-81, Lamb, “Apologizing for Pleasure,” and Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 32-36.

16. Fleming, 158, notes that since “the category of the aesthetic” was “absent” in early modern England, fictions written primarily to entertain were often represented as only “trifles” or “toys” suitable only to reading by women. George Peele's Old Wives' Tales conveys the delight possible to a late night tale told by a lower-class woman to three young pages.

17. Giovanni Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, ed. Charles Osgood (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 54.

18. The implications of Mamillius' name are discussed well by Paster, 265; her discussion of the forceful removal of an infant through wet-nursing prefigures and exaggerates the later trauma of a boy's separation from the women who raised him.

19. Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 158, discusses this symbiotic union in the grave.

20. This regressive identification is discussed well by Paster, 265; Adelman, 224-25; and Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 216, who notes that Leontes is emotionally stuck in the symbiotic stage of development.

21. The stereotype of talkative old women is ably discussed by Patricia Parker, “Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of Text,” in Literary Fat Ladies (London: Methuen, 1987), 8-35.

22. This argument extends my discussion on the self-reflexive nature of these ballads in “Ovid and The Winter's Tale: Conflicting Views toward Art,” in Shakespeare and the Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S. F. Johnson, ed. W. R. Elton and William B. Long (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 78-79.

23. Murray Schwartz, “The Winter's Tale: Loss and Transformation,” American Imago 32 (1975): 198.

24. Adelman, 235.

25. Erickson, 158.

26. Abbe Blum, “‘Strike all that look upon with mar(b)le’: Monumentalizing Women in Shakespeare's Plays,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 112-13.

27. Adelman, 131-47. An early influential study is David B. Barron, “The Babe that Milks: An Organic Study of Macbeth,” in The Design Within, ed. M. D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), 251-80. See also Kahn, 151-91; David Willbern, “Phantasmagoric Macbeth,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 520-49; Paster, 220.

28. Alice Fox, “Obstetrics and Gynecology in Macbeth,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 127-42.

29. Baron, 265; Kahn, 153-54; Willbern, 522-30.

30. Fox, 129.

31. Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Dympna Callagan, “Wicked Women in Macbeth: A Study of Power, Ideology, and the Production of Motherhood,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1992), 355, 367; see also Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 58.

32. For association of witches and nurses, see Willis, 36-37; Paster, 248-60; Stone, 65; Adelman, 4; Karen Newman, 58. Dorothy McLaren, “Marital Fertility and Lactation, 1570-1720,” in Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 32 suggests the actual infant mortality rate for wet-nursed infants may be exaggerated. However, see also Keith Wrightson, “Infanticide in European History,” Criminal Justice History 3 (1982): 12, who discusses the apparently deliberate role of certain wet nurses who “tacitly guaranteed” an “early death” for unwanted babies.

33. Willis, 64.

34. Wrightson, “Infanticide,” 6-7, discusses cultural forces motivating infanticide by single mothers; see also Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 69-94.

35. Kahn, 181; for slightly different readings see Adelman, 140 and Callagan, 361.

36. This double meaning of blood relates to the paradoxical significances of wounds as at once attesting to “a (feminine) vulnerability” and serving as “a cultural marker of manly virtue,” as ably discussed by Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routeldge, 1997), 18.

37. William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1962), 56; this book contains many examples of forcefully alliterative tetrameter nursery rhymes.

38. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 89-136; also pertinent is her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 75.

39. Adelman, 131.

40. Peter Stallybrass, “Macbeth and Witchcraft,” in Focus on Macbeth (London: Routeldge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 189-209.

41. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

42. Adelman, 140, further notes that “the play curiously enacts the fantasy that it seems to deny.”

43. The near-absence of Prospero's wife is discussed in Stephen Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 50-64.

44. W. C. Curry, Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1936), 144-95; Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 108-59; K. M. Briggs, Pale Hecate's Team (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 56-57, 83; Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 44-47, 159-60; Frank Kermode, ed., Shakespeare's The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare (1954; rpt. London: Routledge, 1990), xlvii-li, 143-47.

45. Adelman, 237, suggests the connection between the intellectuality of Prospero's art and his banishment of the mother in the form of Sycorax as Prospero reshapes “the world in the image of his own mind.”

46. The horror (or the even more frightening nostalgia) for this period of female domination is perhaps the source of the “dread potential within Shakespeare's imagination of women” discerned in the representation of Sycorax's art by C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 336.

47. This naturalization of Prospero's rule over Caliban connects a gendered reading of The Tempest with recent colonialist readings to confirm Klaus Theweleit's claim that “the imperialist drives of the European world against ‘primitive’ peoples” formed one aspect of an “inner imperialism that took as its territories lands formed from the subjugated nature of female bodies” (Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway [Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987], 322).

48. As quoted and discussed by Kermode, 143.

49. Kermode, xlvii.

50. Golding moralizes the hounds of the Acteon myth to represent punishment for excesses of the flesh including drunkenness in Shakespeare's Ovid (London, Centaur Press, 1961), 3.

51. One of many such discussions of The Tempest's debt to Virgil is Donna B. Hamilton, “Defiguring Virgil in The Tempest,” Style 23 (1989): 352-75.

52. Kermode, 142-45.

53. The Annotated Mother Goose, 65; “bow wow” was also the conclusion to “Old Mother Hubbard,” written in the early nineteenth century from much earlier, undated sources, 56, 58.

54. Albert Mason Stevens, The Nursery Rhyme: Remnant of Popular Protest (Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1968); The Annotated Mother Goose; Martin W. Walsh, “‘Get a New Man’: Caliban's Son and Autumnal Hiring Customs,” Cashiers Elisabethains 43 (1993): 57-60.

55. Laqueur, 123, 267.

56. Power relations in early modern homoeroticism are well discussed by Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 185-95, passim.

57. Adelman, 237.

58. Cosmo Corfield, “Why Does Prospero Abjure His ‘Rough Magic’?” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 32-33, ably summarizes the extended debate on the relative whiteness or blackness of Shakespeare's magic, concluding that the impurities introduced into his theurgy by his renunciation created him as more human. I would claim they also create him as more feminine. Numerous contemporary thinkers, such as Bodin and Sandys, did not admit even a theoretical difference between any white magic and black magic.

59. Perhaps the most learned discussion of the relationship between these translations is T. W. Baldwin, 2:443-53; Baldwin, 445, relates Shakespeare's translation to the “school mode of translating.”

60. Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, pt. 1 (London, 1583), F5v; Robert Greene, “Debate between Follie and Love” in Works, ed. Alexander Grosart, 4:202; Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York: Dover, 1988), 92. Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” 61, also notes the collapse of black and white magic as Prospero speaks the words of Medea.

61. Kermode, 149; and see Compendium Maleficarum, 17, on the witch as devil's dupe.

62. In Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (c.1614), Hecate speaks this speech, untranslated from Latin; ed W. W. Greg (Oxford: Oxford University Press for Malone Society, 1948), 2:5.

63. Jean Bodin, La Demonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1579), G2. Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1584), N8, R3, remained skeptical about the efficacy of this and other spells.

64. Any discussion of the relationship between magic and Shakespeare's stagecraft must be indebted to Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985): 163-87.

My thanks to Barbara Hodgdon for reading an earlier draft of this essay.