escalating, competitive glamour, increasing with each new day: ...now this masque Was cried incomparable; and the ensuing night Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings, Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst, As presence did present them (1.1.26-30) Both Shakespeare and Davies share a sense of the inflationary rhetoric that surrounds these events. Davies worries that if he has used too many ‘Hyperboles’, then ‘Art should discharge ... MUCH on loves effect’ (ll. 376–7). Shakespeare, as dramatist, is able to stand askance, representing in the Duke of Norfolk someone who, like Davies, struggles to find words rich enough appreciate the royal scene. Shakespeare’s Norfolk, like Davies, conflates the two kings: ... him in eye, Still him in praise: and, being present both ‘Twas said they saw but one (1.1.30-32) But Norfolk adds a revealing comment on his own observation: ... no discerner Durst wag his tongue in censure. When these suns— For so they phrase ‘em—by their heralds challenged The noble spirits to arms, they did perform Beyond thought’s compass (1.1.33-36) ‘Beyond thought’s compass’ is a phrase that gives away the strategy that we have been straining to follow. It gives a name to this royal hyperbole that points toward praise beyond our abilities to ex- press in language. Indeed, it draws our attention to the requirement of one performing the inability to give adequate praise: praise beyond praise. Of course, Christian IV’s state visit was not the Field of Cloth of Gold with its hyper competitive, latent aggression underlying every moment. But Shakespeare’s parody of royal observers is so well keyed to the tone and strategies used by Davies that one is tempted to wonder if Shakespeare had read his poem to the Danes and had it in mind. JOSEPH STERRETT Aarhus University, Denmark https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjae014 # The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication 1 February, 2024 SYCORAX’S ‘RAVEN’S FEATHER’ (THE TEMPEST I.ii.324): WERE RAVENS BIRDS OF WITCHCRAFT IN SHAKESPEARE’S DAY? In popular imagination ravens are birds of witch- craft. Ever since Francis Douce published his Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners in 1807, the ‘raven’s feather’, with which Sycorax is said to have ‘brushed’‘wicked dew ... from unwholesome fen’ (Tempest I.ii.322–4), has been related to her name. 1 One of his followers, John Wesley Hales asserted that ‘ravens are asso- ciated with witchcraft and such superstitions’, 2 and Stephen Orgel clearly shares the same convic- tion when supporting the notion of Medea, and by implication, Sycorax as ‘the Scythian raven’. 3 In a similar vein, Garry Wills claims that ‘the raven was a regular “familiar”’ whose ominously croak- ing voice accompanies the witch-like appearance of Lady Macbeth shortly before Duncan’s arrival at Inverness (Macbeth I.v.37–8). 4 Funding support for this article was provided by The National Science Centre (Poland) (2016/23/N/HS2/01857). 1 Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners, 2 vols. (London, 1807), I, 8. From now onwards all quotations from Shakespeare are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor et al. Unless otherwise noted, each occurrence of emphasis is mine. Shakespeare’s Works are abbreviated as in the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions. See Giorgio Melchiori (ed.), King Edward III (Cambridge, 1998), xi–xii. For the etymology of Sycorax’s name as a coinage of the Greek rῦ1 and jόqan, see John Wesley Hales, ‘Shakspeare’s Greek Names’, in Notes and Essays on Shakespeare (London, 1884), 105–19, 113–14; Horace Howard Furness (ed.), The Tempest (Philadelphia, 1892), note to 1.2.305; Frank Kermode (ed.), The Tempest (London, 1954), note to 1.2.258; Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Tempest, 1987 (Oxford, 2008), 19, note to 1.2.258; Vaughan and Vaughan (eds.), The Tempest, 1999 (London, 2011), note to 1.2.258; Lindley (ed.), The Tempest (Cambridge, 2002), note to 1.2.258. 2 Hales, ‘Shakspeare’s Greek Names’, 113–14. 3 Orgel (ed.), The Tempest, note to 1.2.321-2. The scholar not- ably asserts that ‘ravens ... are mentioned in connection with the sorcery of both Sycorax and Prospero’ (19, n. 1), whereas the raven is alluded to only once in the play in the above-mentioned words of Caliban who associates it exclusively with her mother’s spell (I.ii.323–5). 4 Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New York; Oxford, 1995), 81–2, emphasis added. See also Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (eds.), Macbeth (London, 2015), note to 1.5.38. Marina Warner even asserts that Medea was one of the witches who had a familiar in the form of a raven. See ‘“The foul witch” and Her “freckled whelp”: Circean Mutations in the New World’ in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds.), ‘The Tempest' and Its Travels (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2000), 97–113, 101. 64 NOTES AND QUERIES March 2024 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/71/1/64/7607267 by guest on 14 March 2024