"The Tempest" and Its Travels

The Tempest is a play whose meanings and influence have crossed multiple boundaries in the critical sphere. It is probably the work of Shakespeare's that has been reinterpreted more radically and fully than any other by readers, writers, and artists throughout the modern world. At once resistant and ever-subjected to classification, it has been identified as every genre and no genre, located in every place and no place, and viewed from a wide range of perspectives from colonial to anticolonial, political to apolitical.

In "The Tempest" and Its Travels, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman assemble a stellar collection of original essays and visual materials that situate Shakespeare's play in both its original contexts and our own cultural moment. The book launches out to explore the historical circumstances in which The Tempest was written and performed in seventeenth-century England, particularly in the emerging global market economy. Reading outward, the volume moves through the crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean, exploring the play's complex transactions between European and North African cultures and between classical texts and Renaissance politics. In a final section, the book traverses the Atlantic for a look at American and Caribbean readings of the play and its translation into colonial allegory. By means of its innovative collection of historical, critical, and creative materials, "The Tempest" and Its Travels offers a new map of the vast and varied worlds--scholarly, artistic, and political--from which the play arose and in which it has, for centuries, been received.

Contributors: Ric Alsopp, Christy Anderson, Crystal Bartolovich, Gordon Brotherton, Jerry Brotton, Raquel Carrió, Merle Collins, Philip Crispin, David Dabydeen, Elizabeth Fowler, John Gillies, Roland Greene, Donna B. Hamilton, Andrew C. Hess, Peter Hulme, Robin Kirkpatrick, Barbara A. Mowat, Lucy Rix, Joseph Roach, Patricia Seed, Martha Nell Smith, Alden T. Vaughan, Marina Warner.