The Tempest: A Critical Reader A Critical Reader

by Vaughan, Virginia Mason; Vaughan, Alden T.

• ISBN13: 9781472518408
• ISBN10: 1472518403
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-11-20
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

Summary

The Tempest, the last play Shakespeare wrote without a collaborator, has become a key text in school and university curricula, not simply in early modern literature courses but in postcolonial and history programs as well. One of Shakespeare's most frequently performed plays, The Tempest is also of great interest to a general audience. This volume will outline the play's most important critical issues and suggest new avenues of research in a format accessible to students, teachers, and the general reader.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

1. Series Introduction: Series Editors Andrew Hiscock & Lisa Hopkins
2. The Tempest Timeline: Editor

3. Introduction: Editors Virginia Mason Vaughan , Clark University, and Alden T. Vaughan, Columbia University

The introductory chapter will explore the major contested issues embedded in The Tempest including the play's genre (Should it be labeled a comedy, romance, or "late play"?); its relation to England's colonization efforts in Virginia; its connection to Jacobean court aesthetics and politics; and the ways Prospero's patriarchal powers have been interpreted and critiqued. The introduction will briefly describe England's historical context at the moment of production (1610-11) and conclude with an overview of the ways the essays in this volume explore these issues.

4. The Critical Backstory: "What's past is prologue." Virginia Mason Vaughan, Clark University
This chapter will begin with an extensive history of The Tempest's critical reception from the Restoration to the mid-twentieth century. As the title suggests, it will demonstrate how each age's interpretation was based on what went before , yet modified in light of new historical and political circumstances.  In the process this chapter will show how changing cultural contexts affected aesthetic judgments about the play as well as modes of representation in the theatre and other media.  John Dryden's and William Davenant's 1660 adaptation, The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island, for example, superimposed onto Shakespeare's text the political concerns of the newly restored king Charles II and re-shaped it in accord with neo-classical aesthetic principles. The fates of the island's blended family --Prospero, Miranda, Caliban and Ariel - and the various ways their interactions have been interpreted will be key to this discussion.  Changing attitudes toward language, whether focused on Prospero's famous speeches, Ariel's songs, censorship of Miranda's more assertive lines, or Caliban's monologs and freedom song, will be highlighted as well.  The chapter will take the discussion through the impact of Charles Darwin's theories on interpretations of Caliban, the rediscovery of Prospero's psychological wounds in the aftermath of Freudian psychology, and a renewed awareness of Prospero's "art" as technology in the 1950s. Throughout, this chapter will demonstrate how subsequent generations have re-interpreted The Tempest in light of their own ideological and aesthetic concerns.
5. Performance History: "The Performance History of Polytext Tempest." Eckart Voigts- Virchow, University of Siegen

As The Tempest is experimental from the beginning and one of the most widely adapted of Shakespeare's plays, this chapter will sketch a history of the struggle for textual authority in adaptation and performance. First, it will provide an overview of performances and textual revisions prior to the twentieth century, including what we know of the Blackfriars performance on November 1, 1611, the Massinger / Fletcher Sea Voyage of 1612-13, Dryden and Davenant's Restoration version, Thomas Shadwell's musical version (1670), David Garrick's restoration of the text in 1765, Francis Waldron's The Virgin Queen (1797), the Romantic poets' version, and 18th and 19th-century performances. The twentieth century has proved particularly rich in actualizations that appropriate The Tempest polytext to specific cultural moments (Forbidden Planet, Prospero's Books, Une Tempête, Indigo, The Forest Princess, This Island's Mine, etc.) Studies of The Tempest on film and on stage in the context of cultural appropriation are legion, so this chapter will focus on the contested issues of postcolonialism, gender and aesthetics (art, authority, visuality and aurality, metatheatre). The Tempest feeds into national cultural traditions, as an analysis of the more adventurous performances (Jonathan Miller, Peter Brook, Giorgio Strehler, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Julie Taymor, German Registheater) from across the globe will show. This chapter will argue that performances, adaptations and appropriations adapt not necessarily The Tempest, but rather the performance history of The Tempest in a variety of media, forms, genres, and discourses.
6. "The Tempest in Current Critical Research." Tobias Döring, University of Munich

This chapter will survey the more prominent trends in Tempest criticism since the early 1980s, with reference also to a few important earlier contributions (such as George Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile) whose impact on the wider research debate only became evident, it will be argued, a generation later. The two main critical developments in Shakespeare studies since the 1980s are the turn towards postcolonial perspectives, with the increasing interest also in global or transcultural adaptations, and the rise of New Historicism, with its attention to the material as well as political context of play writing and production. Both these developments made The Tempest a central focus and a test case for their claims and, in this process, brought about a sea-change in opinion about its cultural premises, dramatic strategies, and political consequences which are, in many ways, still with us and can be seen, for instance, when comparing Frank Kermode's 1950s introduction to the second Arden Tempest with the 1999 introduction to the Third Arden edition. Central issues in these ongoing debates are questions of geography and cultural location (e.g. is The Tempest a New World play?), questions of language and power (e.g. should Prospero's acts of language teaching be seen as beneficial?) as well as questions of identity formation (especially with regard to Prospero's three subalterns) -questions which also always reflect some general concerns of the specific times when they have been articulated. This chapter will argue that these issues have not just been enriched but also motivated by creative projects and rewritings (like Marina Warner's Indigo) that engage with the old text in new, contemporary ways. Such intersections, or interactions, of critical with creative work are also prominent in some more recent research, which has explored the notions of "late style" that long surround this play and so give evidence of underlying cultural assumptions.
7. New Directions

These essays will chart relatively unexplored territory in Tempest studies.  Each will present new material and suggest new avenues for interpretation and representation.
a. "The Tempest's Genesis." Andrew Gurr, University of Reading
The Tempest is easily the least source-reliant play of any by Shakespeare.  It raises the question most acutely of why he chose the sources he did use - perhaps Strachey's letter about the shipwreck at Bermuda, certainly Virgil, Ovid, and Montaigne, and most likely Jonson's Hymenaei  for Prospero's masque. What he did with these sources raises the most basic of questions about what was in his mind when he started to write the play, and what the sources he opted to use gave to this aspect of his work.  This essay analyses some of these uses, including most conspicuously the Strachey letter, and assesses all of the chosen sources to examine what he had in mind when composing the play.
b. "Worlds on Worlds - The Politics of Romance in The Tempest.'  Brinda Charry, Keene State University
It was not until the nineteenth century that The Tempest was described as a "romance," first by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but it is a designation that has persisted.  This essay will examine the implications of this generic categorization on the play's language and structure and more specifically, on the work it does as socio-political discourse. Although George Puttenham mentions romances in The Arte of English Poesie, he refers to them with some condescension as "stories of old time." So how does Shakespeare look to the (literary) past, into the "dark backward and abysm of time" (1.2.50) and find fresh material? Identifying features of the medieval romance include its setting (far removed in time and space from the real), the protagonist's movement through this space, and the resulting transformation of both self and the landscape. This essay will argue that these literary motifs are politicized in the Shakespeare text and particularly allow the playwright to engage with the complexities of Europe's engagement with North Africa and the Muslim world. It will also argue that the romance genre allows for the island to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time. As a result both Old World (i.e. the Mediterranean) and New World readings of the island can coexist and interrogate each other, leading to a complex understanding of both Renaissance cross-cultural engagement and of the Renaissance's uses of romance.
c. "Telling Fool from Clown in The Tempest."  Helen Whall, College of the Holy Cross
No matter how approximate the chronology of is works, Shakespeare deliberately positions plays within plays from the beginning to the end of his career that reveal an evolving attitude toward stage comedy.  In The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and The Tempest, general claims about dramatic representation remain fairly consistent. But over the course of the canon Shakespeare's consideration of comic technique - more than of comedy itself - becomes increasingly troubled. Some have speculated that Shakespeare's growing discontent with clowns reflects his anger with Will Kempe, who abruptly left the Lord Chamberlain's Men about the time Hamlet was being staged. This essay will argue that although Kempe may well have played a part in provoking Shakespeare's distaste for clowns who improvise, it was more his new understanding of Italianate commedia dell'arte that led to his rejection of a comic manner, not comedic method, in The Tempest.  Shakespeare never demonstrates more profoundly his appreciation for the fool's 'infinite jest' than he does in The Tempest. In that play, however, he also most explicitly outlines the dangers of clowning as embodied in Stephano and Trinculo. The warnings introduced in Hamlet seem to have grown darker as Shakespeare distinguished between the clowning of medieval allegory and the improvisation nature of commedia. Recent scholarship has bolstered suggestions made as early as 1901 that Shakespeare at some point knew more about the commedia than can be explained by native source material. The parallels in plot between The Tempest and Flaminia la Scala's 1611 collection of commedia scenario have become compelling, especially when matched up against similar work showing the relationship of Othello to other commedia plots. This essay will review existing criticism about Shakespeare and commedia dell'arte in order to map out a few locales where others might yet find evidence for Shakespeare's knowledge not just of plots but of actual commedia acting conventions. It is here, in the elusive, transient world of performance, that The Tempest makes Shakespeare's strongest statement about any human's regrettable tendency to 'act like a clown'.
d. "The Great Globe, or, Our Little Life: Scientific Romance and Speculative Realism in The Tempest." Scott Maisano, University of Massachusetts at Boston
It is no accident that The Tempest begins with a dramatization of what Lucretius presents as the ideal of comfort -standing on solid ground and observing others struggling at sea—nor that Prospero uses the occasion to instruct his daughter, who is traumatized by the apparent shipwreck, to "Be collected" and "have comfort" (1.2.13, 25). The goal of atomistic philosophy, according to both Epicurus and Lucretius, is attaining the state of ataraxia or tranquility of mind. Toward the end of the play, in his "revels speech," Prospero speculates on the emergence and extinction of humanity within an infinite and aleatory universe. This essay argues that Prospero's "great globe itself" does not refer to the terrestrial globe, the earth, but rather to the celestial globe, the heavens; from there, it proposes that Prospero's "revels speech" doubles as a theory of everything in which the audience (both onstage and off) discovers that all perceptible entities, from the outermost celestial sphere to our inmost mental images, are composed of a singular, imperceptible, but nonetheless physical "stuff": Epicurean atoms. Most importantly, it suggests that Prospero is an experimental atomist, who not only sees but reaches into and manipulates the most miniscule, invisible Lucretian "elements" of nature. The essay will draw on provocative primary and secondary materials, including but not limited to Thomas Digges's A Perfit Description of the Celestiall Orbs (1577), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Eugene Thacker's After Life (2010), and Gerard Passannante's The Lucretian Renaissance (2011).
8. Resources: N. Amos Rothschild, Boston University

This chapter will offer a survey of resources for approaching The Tempest in the university classroom -resources to aid the professor in presenting the play, and resources to assist the student or scholar in interpreting it. It begins with an account of the major editions of Shakespeare's text, assessing the pedagogical and scholarly context in which each would be most appropriate and useful, before proceeding to an analogous assessment of available online resources. Next, it will detail a number of lenses that might lend focus to classroom discussion or written analysis of The Tempest: social hierarchy and politics; magic and education;  travel, geography, and colonialism; masculinities and femininities; and music, masque, and performance. In elaborating each of these lenses, the chapter will highlight particular late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts that will help teachers to present and students to explore the variety of early modern discourses that shaped The Tempest and were shaped by it (and the resources through which such texts can be found).  The chapter will then offer a brief account of the various reinterpretations and appropriations of The Tempest that teacher and student alike might use as additional avenues to approach the play. The chapter will conclude with an extensive annotated bibliography structured to complement the preceding list of pedagogical and critical approaches