SOURCE: Rosenfield, Kirstie Gulick. “Nursing Nothing: Witchcraft and Female Sexuality in The Winter's Tale.” Mosaic 35, no. 1 (March 2002): 95-112.

In the following essay, Rosenfield maintains that The Winter's Tale exploits prevailing Jacobean cultural and ideological attitudes that associated feminine sexuality, maternity, and outspokenness with witchcraft. According to the critic, Shakespeare “reappropriates” these socially destabilizing feminine characteristics and cannily transforms them into a metaphor for the magic of artistic creation and theatrical performance.

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...