24 Facts About Sycorax

Sycorax's is a vicious and powerful witch and the mother of Caliban, one of the few native inhabitants of the island on which Prospero, the hero of the play, is stranded.

Memories of Sycorax, who dies several years before the main action of the play begins, define several of the relationships in the play.

Postcolonialist writers and critics see Sycorax as giving voice to peoples, particularly women, recovering from the effects of colonisation.

Sycorax's proceeded to enslave the spirits there, chief among them Ariel, whom she eventually imprisoned in a pine tree for disobedience.

Sycorax birthed Caliban and taught him to worship the demonic god Setebos.

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Sycorax's dies long before the arrival of Prospero and his daughter, Miranda.

Sycorax is similar to Medea, a witch in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in that both are powerful, magical female figures.

Scholars have pointed out that Sycorax resembles the magical Circe from Greek mythology as well as perhaps a version of Circe found in the mythology of the Coraxi tribe in modern-day Georgia.

Sycorax is presented as Brathwaite's muse, possessing him and his computer to give full voice to the history of the silenced, who in Brathwaite's philosophy are not only Caribbean natives, but any culture under-represented during the colonial period.

Interpretations of Sycorax as silenced focus not only on her race but her gender as well.

Also, both Prospero and Sycorax were exiled from their respective homelands and both have children, which was possibly the reason why they were both spared being executed.

Sycorax has been described as the matriarchal figure of The Tempest.

Feminist critics, however, have maintained that matriarchal readings of Sycorax are shallow, as they often find importance only in Sycorax's motherhood rather than in her thoughts, feelings, and past life.

Leah Marcus argues that the phrase "blue-eyed hag", suggests racial uncertainty because "as a blue-eyed Algerian Sycorax would have failed to fit our racial stereotypes in a number of interesting ways [w]e tend not to think of Africans as blue eyed, even though North Africans of 'Argier' and elsewhere sometimes are.

However both Marcus and Diane Purkiss suggest that a reference to race might be implied, suggesting that Sycorax's ethnicity cannot be clearly defined, as although she was born in Algiers, her parentage is not known.

Sycorax has been conceptualised in a variety ways by adapters and directors of The Tempest.

In John Dryden and William Davenant's version of The Tempest, Sycorax is survived by two children, Caliban and a daughter named Sycorax.

In Eugene Scribe's French 1846 version, Sycorax is alive but imprisoned behind some rocks out of sight.

Sycorax's spends most of the play trying to convince her son, Caliban, to free her.

In Derek Jarman's 1979 version, Sycorax is shown leading Ariel around by a chain and breast feeding an adult Caliban.

In Ernest Renan's play Caliban the anti-hero states that Sycorax went to "all the devils" but left him as rightful ruler of the island.

Marina Warner reimagined the witch in her 1992 book Indigo, in which Sycorax is a healer and dyer of indigo who uses her magic to help slaves.

Caliban further states that although mute, Sycorax was able to communicate with him by putting pictures into his mind, and that her death was caused by her choking on a fish bone two years before Prospero and Miranda's arrival.

Sycorax is revived in the "Baroque pastiche" opera The Enchanted Island, devised by Jeremy Sams, in the first production of which she was played by Joyce DiDonato.