I Put a Spell on You (2019)

Part of the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, I Put a Spell on You featured poets Annie Finch and Kiki Petrosino reading from their work in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre on October 28, 2019 at 7:30pm. The two poets explored the realms of witchcraft and womanhood in all seasons of life.

The reading was preceded by a pop-up exhibition in the Paster Reading Room, which featured items from the Folger collections releated to witches, witchcraft, spells, and magic. The pop-up was curated by Teri Cross-Davis, Poetry Coordinator, and Beth DeBold, Assistant Curator of Collections. For more information on this past event, please visit the event page.

The exhibition catalog is available for download as a PDF file.

Items included

1). Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
Mr VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies.
London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623
Call Number: STC 22273 Fo.1 no.72
Binding images for STC 22273 Fo.1 no.72
As the title and portrait in no.72 are not digitized, here is the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare in STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68

After William Shakespeare died in 1616, two friends from his acting company put together the history-making book that's best known as the "First Folio" of Shakespeare. Published in 1623, seven years after his death, it contains 36 of Shakespeare’s plays---almost all of them. Eighteen of the plays, including Macbeth and Twelfth Night, had never been published before and may have been lost without the creation of the First Folio. Largely because of this book we know them all. A “folio” was a large, expensive book, usually reserved for Bibles or important works of history, law, and science--- not plays. Shakespeare was one of the first English playwrights to have his plays collected in a folio.

The Folger owns 82 copies of this first printed edition of Shakespeare’s works. This copy once belonged to Rachell Paule, a woman living in 17th-century London.

Text by Caroline Duroselle-Melish

2). Bell, Robert Anning, 1863-1933
Trio of illustrations from Bell’s edition of The Tempest
[1900] Call Numbers: ART Box B433 no.7 (size S); Digital Image of ART Box B433 no.7 (size S)
ART Box B433 no.10 (size S); Digital Image of ART Box B433 no.10 (size S)
ART Box B433 no.20 (size S); Digital Image of ART Box B433 no.20 (size S)

Although many of Shakespeare’s plays feature magic and the supernatural, The Tempest is the only one to deal so directly with characters who are human practitioners of magic. These original pen and ink illustrations were made by Bell for his edition of the play, published in 1901. We never meet the witch Sycorax in the real time of the play, but she casts a long shadow—the dead mother of the monstrous Caliban, her wickedness and depravity in her use of magic make her the perfect foil for the supposedly beneficent sorcerer Prospero.

Here, Caliban is portrayed as half fish, half man—reminiscent of a sea monster. In Bell’s Frontispiece to Act I, we see him before the arrival of Prospero on the island and his subsequent enslavement, sitting with the spirit Ariel who has been imprisoned in a pine tree by Sycorax. Bell also provides us with an illustration of the witch, described in the play as a “blue-eyed hag.” Contrast the two with Bell’s depiction of a freed Ariel. Scholars have long noted the racialized and gendered tensions present in the play, which was written in 1611, at the beginning of England’s colonial depredations in the Caribbean. These themes, as well as the tensions present in Bell’s early twentieth century, are evident in these illustrations.

Sycorax and Caliban are two characters that have lived rich lives outside the bounds of Shakespeare’s words, inspiring novels, plays, poems, and art from the 19th century on. Text by Beth DeBold