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Article Excerpt
The text of The Winter's Tale associates witchcraft with voracious sexuality, perverted maternity, and inappropriate speech but then suggests that performance is witchcraft. Shakespeare's reappropriation of witchcraft as a metaphor for theatre can be read as a critique of anti-theatricality and as a cultural narrative linking femininity and birthing to art.
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When modern readers think of Shakespearean witches, most likely The Winter's Tale is not the first play to come to mind. More likely we think of Macbeth's weird sisters; those aged hags of prophecy and chaos, while never explicitly labelled as such within the text, bear the common traits of the village woman accused of witchcraft in early modern England. In The Winter's Tale, however, the specter of witchcraft haunts the text as eerily as it does in Macbeth. Every primary female character is eventually accused of this specifically female crime. Paulina, the "mankind witch" (2.3.8), falls foul of Leontes on account of her role as midwife and her vociferousness. Hermione's perceived sexual infidelity leads to a spectacle trial and potential burning, a punishment with which Leontes also condemns his daughter Perdita. Perdita is a "fresh piece / of excellent witchcraft" (4.4.424-5), labelled this way because her poverty and her upwardly mobile marriage to Florizel threaten to disrupt social hierarchy. Contemporar y witchcraft belief incorporated all these images into the definition of the witch. She was the village beggar, disorderly and cursing; she was the woman outside patriarchal structure, unmarried, widowed, or sexually active; she was the healer or midwife, in contest with the emerging medical profession; she was the storyteller and woman of action. Such belief was pervasive in Shakespeare's England and was Complexly constructed from both popular local customs and theological doctrines of more Continental influence. The witch, whether through malevolent neighbourhood practices or satanic sabbats, possessed the English imagination as the embodiment of disorder and evil, the opposite of all that was godly and good.
The Winter's Tale, written during a heightening of public interest in witchcraft, subtly manipulates the cultural and ideological constructions that underlie witchcraft belief. The text identifies female vocality; sexuality, maternity, and midwifery with the witch and then reveals those associations as accusations designed to contain the threat of the transgressing woman. Female menace transforms to an affirmation of patriarchal order during the play, but that order itself is questioned. Witchcraft is realigned with healing, art, rebirth, and the power of theatrical performance, in a formulation that connects femininity to creativity and simultaneously undermines the rhetoric of the anti-theatrical movement. By correlating witchcraft, performance, and spectacle, the play weds the anti-theatrical movement in the early seventeenth century--which accused the theatre of being a form of witchcraft--to ideological constructions of perverted femininity. Shakespeare's re-appropriation of witchcraft as a complex metap hor for artistic creation can be read both as a critique of anti-theatricality and as part of a cultural narrative that links femininity and birthing to art.
Recent readings of Shakespearean witchcraft (primarily dealing with Macbeth) rely on a psychoanalytic approach that suggests that the representation of the witch's body is an extension of an anxiety created by mothering. Such anxiety results from the duality of the maternal body, which is necessarily both nurturing and sexual. Janet Adelman, for example, argues that Macbeth represents a powerful construction of absolute and destructive maternal power, expressed through the witches and Lady Macbeth's witch-like traits. The play offers the fantasy of escape from that power through a world of masculine generation (Adelman 90-121). Deborah Willis addresses a wider range of texts but uses a similar theoretical lens. This psychoanalytic approach problematically naturalizes hostility toward women by ignoring historical and cultural concerns. Instead, the emphasis on an essentialist ambivalence surrounding the mother's body, correlating construction of the nurturing mother and the nursing witch, insists that the moth er must universally be rejected for appropriate psychological development of the child. In her important work on early modern femininity, Karen Newman argues instead for a political reading of maternal ambiguity: the Renaissance construction of the maternal as natural is part of a struggle for male cultural authority in which women, while nurturing, are not representing themselves and therefore are not producing their own cultural authority (65). The Winter's Tale sexualizes witchcraft by linking it to voracious sexual appetite, perverted maternity, and breast-feeding but then identifies these linkages as cultural constructions rather than "natural" psycho-social developments, thus undermining a traditional psychoanalytic reading. Male appropriation of the symbols of mothering (pregnancy, birthing, lactation, nursing) in the play attempts to redefine the reproductive process as the production of male cultural authority while eliminating female representational potency. The ideology of maternity that associate s mothers with whores and the process of reproduction with witchcraft is exposed as the rhetoric of threatened masculinity, which is similar to the rhetoric that defines women as witches. The play suggests that the conflation of sexuality and maternity with witchcraft is a projection of male anxiety about birth, paternal proof, and the male construction of self. The text haunts fantasies of male reproduction with the impotency of something created from male nothing--that is, words and rumours, as opposed to the children that female "nothing" generates. The metaphor of birthing by the male imagination, symbolized by the word nothing, appropriates female reproductive authority, attempting to redefine the reproductive process as the production of male cultural authority. Such appropriation, however, whether through the representation of ideas as a form of male pregnancy, or through the metaphor of children as printed copies of their fathers, are inversions of feminine power. Those inversions, according to The Wi nter's Tale, are as perverted as the inversion of maternity contained within witchcraft belief.
Leontes and Polixenes share a perception that all women are witches, corrupted by the spirit of Eve and their own sexual desire. A similar view is expressed by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger in Malleus Maleficarum; they argue that witchcraft finds its very roots in the nature of the female, a nature that fundamentally desires the betrayal of humankind. The "fall of Man" is rooted in Woman, and Woman is rooted in evil, proved by the female pact with the devil and, tautologically, by her propensity to witchcraft (47). For Polixenes and Leontes, female desire is the root of male temptation and the source of all evil, and the two men fondly recall their days as "twinned lambs" and "unbreached" youth, when they "dreamed not/The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed / That any did" (1.2.69-71). Sexual passion, however, is the fall from grace, and women, as...
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