Full Description
The world that William Shakespeare creates in The Tempest has many features that make it recognizably like the world we live in. There are bad, self-seeking people; brothers fall out with brothers; people who have power are reluctant to give it up; people fall in love; children love their fathers but want to break free. But there are elements in The Tempest's world that are very unlike the world we live in. There is a fairy-spirit; there is music in the very air of the island; and there is a powerful magician who can command the elements and even, he tells us, bring the dead back to life. Combining reality and magic, Shakespeare creates an uncanny but morally coherent world through the play's genre, design, themes, and characters. This edition features a variety of interleaved materials that expand upon allusions in the play and explore elements of its stagecraft. Appendices offer excerpts from Shakespeare's key sources and inspirations, along with historical materials on exploration and colonialism.
Contents
Appendices
Appendix A: From John Dryden and William Davenant's The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island (1670)
Appendix B: Medea's speech from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Bk 7, pp. 89-90). Trans. Arthur Golding (At London : Imprinted by Robert Walde-graue, 1587)
Appendix C: From Bartholomew de las Cases' The Spanish colonie (London : [By Thomas Dawson] for William Brome, 1583)
Appendix D: The Strachey Letter, from Purchas his pilgrimes (London : Printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Rose, 1625)
Appendix E: From Aristotle's discussion of "Natural Slaves" (The Politics, Book 1)
Appendix F: From Michel de Montaigne's "Of the Cannibals." In The Essays of Montaigne. Trans. John Florio, (New York: Modern Library, 1933)
Appendix G: From Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, from The Second Democrate; Or, The Just Causes of the War against the Indians (c. 1548)
