The Tempest

by Shakespeare, William; Orgel, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780192834140
• ISBN10: 0192834142
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-06-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Though written near the end of his career, The Tempest stands first in Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623. Recently redefined by modern criticism as a romance, the play has been read as an escapist fantasy, a political allegory, and a celebratory fiction. Most often, however, The Tempest isinterpreted as a summary of Shakespeare's view of his own art of playwriting. In this edition, Stephen Orgel reassesses the evidence for each of these critical speculations, and finds the play to be both more open and more historically determined than traditional views have allowed. The text hasbeen newly edited, and includes a stage history of its production, from the radical revisions of Davenant, Dryden, and Shadwell to the recent stagings of Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Brook.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Introduction	1	(88)
Beginnings and Issues	1	(29)
First Appearances	1	(3)
The Genre	4	(1)
Readings and Interpretations	5	(13)
Wives and Mothers	18	(2)
Magic	20	(3)
Caliban	23	(5)
Suitors and Rapists	28	(2)
The Renaissance Political Context	30	(9)
Political Marriages	30	(1)
Utopia and the New World	31	(5)
Authority	36	(3)
Epic and History Italy and Carthage	39	(4)
The Masque	43	(7)
Jacobean Court Spectacles	43	(4)
The Masque as Image and Symbol	47	(3)
Renunciation and Resolution	50	(6)
Text and Date	56	(8)
The Text	56	(6)
The Date	62	(2)
The Play on the Stage	64	(25)
Editorial Procedures	89	(4)
Abbreviations and References	89	(4)
THE TEMPEST	93	(114)
APPENDIX A The Seamanship of Act 1, Scene 1	207	(2)
APPENDIX B The Strachey Letter	209	(11)
APPENDIX C The Music	220	(7)
APPENDIX D Florio's Montaigne	227	(12)
`Of the Cannibals'	227	(11)
From `Of Cruelty'	238	(1)
APPENDIX E Medea's Incantation	239	(3)
From Ovid, Metamorphoses, vii	239	(1)
From The Fifteen Books of P. Ovidius Naso, Entitled Metamorphosis, (1567)	240	(2)
Arthur Golding
APPENDIX F Lineation	242	(3)
INDEX	245