From "Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives' Tales in The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest" Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Mary Ellen Lamb--

...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)

(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. [Frank Kermode, ed., Shakespeare's The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare (1954; rpt. London: Routledge, 1990)]

(53.) The Annotated Mother Goose, 65; [William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1962)] "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," Cahiers Elisabethains 43 (1993): 57-60.

(55.) Laqueur, 123, 267. [Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)]

(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. [Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992)]

(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; [T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944)] 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 [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.], 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.