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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.
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. Contemporary 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...