The Tempest

Content Group

Overview
The Tempest: Miss Brown as Miranda, Mr. Mattocks as Ferdinand

This play is among Shakespeare's most popular with modern audiences, particularly in America, where it is seen as his American play because of allusions picked up from accounts of the Virginia voyages in William Strachey's manuscript Sea Adventure and Sylvester Jourdain's A Discovery of the Bermudas, which contribute details to Propero's island. Caliban's name is an anagram of "cannibal," which derives from the fierce tribe of Caribs who also gave their name to the Caribbean Sea (see Renaissance Marriages: The Caribbean for the Caribbean in English visual culture). The script also appeals to modern radicals (like Manoni, in our bibliography) who find Caliban to be an example of abused natives in the colonized zones of America, though Prospero's island clearly lies within the Mediterranean. This sympathy is reinforced by the comic misconduct of the clowns. However, great audience appeal lies in the innocent loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, fostered by Prospero's benevolent magic. The play is also sentimentally seen as Shakespeare's last, so that Prospero's surrender of his magical powers becomes a figure for Shakespeare's own retirement. However, he was involved in several other scripts thereafter, particularly Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, though scholars attempt to assign the former partly to his successor John Fletcher, and much of the latter to Fletcher too. Modern staging of The Tempest exploits the scenic enrichment developed in the script (as with other late Shakespearean romances) by the King's Men's use of an indoor theatre at Blackfriars. Modern staging tends to the spectacular (see Shakespeare and Co. 2001), particularly through the magical effects of Ariel, as in the elaborate Masque of Ceres.

Images
The Tempest, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1982
The Tempest, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998
The Tempest, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1993
The Tempest, Prince's Theatre, 1864
The Tempest, Margaret Webster Production, 1945
The Tempest, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998
The Tempest, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998
The Tempest, Berkeley Shakespeare Program, 1993
The Tempest, Margaret Webster Production, 1945
A Wedding at the Valois Court
Tempest, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1993
The Tempest, Shakespeare and Company, 2001
The Tempest, National Theatre Company, 1988
The Tempest, Robert Atkins as Caliban, 20th Century
The Tempest, Berkeley Shakespeare Program, 1993
The Tempest, Berkeley Shakespeare Program, 1993

Pages

Slideshows
Renaissance Marriages: France
Renaissance Marriages: The Caribbean
Renaissance Marriages: Venice, the Veneto, and Italy
Bibliography

Bartholomeusz, Dennis. "A Question of Theory and The Tempest in Performance (1970-1990)." Shakespeare Worldwide 14-15 (1995): 299-315.

Brown, John Russell, ed. The Tempest. New York and London: Applause, 1996.

Césaire, Aimé. Une tempête d'apres 'La tempête' de Shakespeare: Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

Charney, Maurice. "Caribbean Shakespeare: Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête." Journal of Theatre and Drama 4

Cholij, Irena. "'A thousand twangling instruments': Music and The Tempest on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage." Shakespeare Survey 51 (1998): 79-94.

Coppedge, Walter. "Derek Jarman's The Tempest." Creative Screenwriting 5, no. 2 (1998): 12-15.

Cinpoes, Nicoleta, and Boika Sokolova, eds. "Un/Happy Wrecks: Post-1989 Tempests." Special issue, Shakespeare Bulletin 29, no. 3 (Fall 2011).

Demaray, John G. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: "The Tempest" and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

Dymkowski, Christine, ed. The Tempest. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Egan, Gabriel. "Ariel's Costume in the Original Staging of The Tempest." Theatre Notebook 51 (1997): 62-72.

Franssen, Paul J. C. M. "Canute or Neptune? The Dominion of the Seas and Two Versions of The Tempest." Cahiers Élisabéthains 57 (2000): 79-94.

Fujita, Minoru. "Tradition and the Bunraku Adaptation of The Tempest." In Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, edited by Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring, 186-96. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

George, David. "Casebook: The Tempest in Bali, a Director's Log." Australasian Drama Studies 15-16 (1989-1990): 21-46.

George, David. "The Tempest in Bali." Performing Arts Journal 11, no. 3 – 12, no. 1 (1989): 84-107.

Green, William. "Caliban by the Yellow Sands: Percy MacKaye's Adaptation of The Tempest." Maske und Kothurn 35, no. 1 (1989): 59-69.

Greenaway, Peter. Prospero's Books: A Film of the Shakespeare's "The Tempest." London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.

Guffrey, George R. "Politics, Weather, and the Contemporary Reception of the Dryden-Davenant Tempest." Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 8, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 1-9.

Gurr, Andrew. "The Tempest's Tempest at Blackfriars." Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 91-102.

Harris, Diana, and MacDonald Jackson. "Stormy Weather: Derek Jarman's The Tempest." Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1997): 90-98.

Henderson, Diana E. "The Tempest in Performance." In A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, vol. 4, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 216-39. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Hirst, David L. "The Tempest": Text and Performance. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Knelman, Martin. A Stratford "Tempest." Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Leonard, Paul. "The Tempest x 2 in Toronto." Canadian Theatre Review 54 (Spring 1988): 7-12.

Lindley, David, ed. The Tempest. London: Arden, 2003.

Lindley, David, ed. "Shakespeare, The Tempest, Adapted by Beerbohm Tree."

Manoni, O. Prospero and Caliban, translated by Pamela Powesland. London: Methuen, 1956.

McDowell, John H. "Spectacular Effects in The Tempest." Theatre Studies 18 (1972): 46-54.

McMullan, Gordon. "The Tempest and the Uses of Late Shakespeare in the Cultures of Performance: Prospero, Gielgud, Rylance." In Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, edited by Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir Burlington, 145-168. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.

McNamara, Kevin R. "Golden Worlds at Court: The Tempest and Its Masque." Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 183-202.

Miller, Anthony. "'In This Last Tempest': Modernising Shakespeare's Tempest on Film." Sydney Studies in English 23 (1997-98): 24-40.

Net, Mariana. "Scenery-Text and Scenery-Character Relationships in Dramatic Performance: Liviu Ciueli Staging The Tempest." Synthesis (Bucharest) 14 (1987): 65-75.

O'Shea, Edward. "Modernist Versions of The Tempest: Auden, Woolf, Tippett." In The Tempest: Critical Essays, edited by Patrick Murphy, 543-59. New York; London: Routledge, 2001.

Richmond, Hugh Macrae. "Teaching The Tempest and the Late Plays by Performance." In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare: "The Tempest" and Other Late Romances, edited by Maurice Hunt, 125-32. New York: MLA, 1992.

Smith, Heather A. "Theories in Performance: The Miranda-Caliban Relationship in Recent Productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest." On Stage Studies 23 (2000): 91-97.

Stalpaert, Christel, ed. Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books: Critical Essays. Ghent: Academia, 2000.

Suchet, David. "Caliban in The Tempest." In Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, edited by Philip Brockbank, 167-79. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

The Tempest at Talkin' Broadway.

Taylor, Geoffrey. Paul Mazursky's "Tempest." New York: New York Zoetrope, 1982.

Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Wells, Stanley. "Problems of Stagecraft in The Tempest." New Theatre Quarterly 10 (1994): 348-57.

  • 4903 reads

Please offer comments and suggestions on any aspects the site to: Director Hugh Richmond at richmondh77@gmail.com. See samples at the site Blog.

Except where otherwise specified, all written commentary is © 2016, Hugh Macrae Richmond.