She 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.

Later versions of The Tempest, beginning with William Davenant's seventeenth-century adaptation, have given Sycorax a vocal role in the play, but maintained her image as a malevolent antagonist to Prospero.

In The Tempest, Prospero describes Sycorax as an ancient and foul witch native to Algiers, and banished to the island for practising sorcery "so strong / That [she] could control the Moon".

[1] Prospero further relates that many years earlier, sailors had brought her to the island, while she was pregnant with her son, Caliban, and abandoned her there, as, due to her pregnancy, she was spared being put to death.

One critic searched for a connection to Sycorax's North African heritage, and found a parallel in Shokereth שוקרת, a Hebrew word meaning "deceiver".

[4][5] An especially odd and early guess at a meaning by one critic was sic or rex, a Latin homophone alluding to Queen Elizabeth's pride.

According to Romantic literary critic Charles Lamb, a witch, whose name has been lost to history, had been banished from North Africa about half a century before the time Shakespeare was writing the play; her similarity to Sycorax has struck a few scholars as notable.

Because she is native to Algiers and her story is only heard through others (Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban), she is championed by some scholars as a representation of the silenced African woman.

In an attempt to give voice to unspoken indigenous cultures, Brathwaite's poems outline the history of the Caribbean through Sycorax's eyes.

Skeptical of female virtue in general, he refuses to accept Caliban's prior claim to the island, accusing him of being a bastard "got by the devil himself / Upon thy wicked dam.

[16] Modernist authors such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have alluded to Sycorax in their writing to illustrate destructive feminine power.

As Hughes writes, "... the difficult task of any poet in English [is] to locate the force which Shakespeare called Venus in his first poems and Sycorax in his last."

By emphasising the female power found in characters such as Sycorax, Plath and Hughes hoped to counteract what they saw as the patriarchal nature of canonical Western literature.

"[19] Scholars have wondered what it was that Sycorax did to avoid execution, as described in act one, scene two by Prospero: "for one thing she did / They [the Algerians] would not take her life."

Charles Lamb, a Romantic writer fascinated by Shakespeare and his works, and particularly intrigued by this question, found in John Ogilby's "Accurate Description of Africa" (1670) two versions of a story about Emperor Charles V's invasion of Algiers in 1541, relating that a witch (not named in the source text) had advised the commander of the city not to surrender, predicting the destruction of the besieging fleet, which was accomplished nine days later by a "dreadful tempest".

Die Geisterinsel, a 1778 version of the play in German, includes a living Sycorax, a witch who has full power during the night, while Prospero rules the day.

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

[23] 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.

[27] Sycorax is also 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.