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In the second scene of The Tempest, Prospero issues two seemingly contradictory commands: Ariel must adopt the shape of a sea-nymph whilst also turning invisible. This paper investigates what such ...

While demonstrating how The Tempest’s magic island serves as an artificial training environment, this essay draws on diverse examples and critiques of neo-liberalism’s gamified work-life to query the relation between the challenges that the play’s characters face and the social roles they are primed to occupy. In the histories of the Bermuda wreck that inspired The Tempest, the sheltered climate and collective endeavor that “seasoned” colonists for the New World were treated as a wonder and a miracle. But this felicity is unsettled by the limited capacity for optimization that the play assigns to certain character types. The Tempest’s regime of gamification is therefore a means of constituting capitalism’s “civilizing” mission as well as a resource for accosting the flaws in that nascent regime.

This paper examines a number of contemporary adaptations of The Tempest – Fred McLeod Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) – which indicate new avenues for exploring the phenomenon of past-and-present re-bonding through re-telling. If adaptation theory suggests, at its best, that an adaptation may encourage the public to read the adapted text, if unfamiliar, as Linda Hutcheon argues, these particular adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, I contend, take a step forward. Not only do they spur their readers/spectators on to (re)- read The Tempest, but they elicit (re)considering the relationships amongst (certain of) Shakespeare’s plays. It is what happened to this author too whilst reading Hag-Seed, even before reaching the page where Atwood’s protagonist – Felix qua Prospero actor and figure – contemplates the opportunity offered by mounting The Tempest to unmask his usurpers. “The play’s the thing”, Felix thinks in Hamletian terms, allowing the readers familiar with Hamlet to complete mentally “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. More than being Shakespeare’s swan song, as typically regarded, The Tempest thus becomes the metatheatrical light on Hamlet’s own metatheatricality – also courtesy of the former’s adaptations.

This article analyses the filtering of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in the Restoration drama repertoire, showing the Restoration revision of the Shakespearean stereotypical delineation of the ‘half-moor’ Caliban in the light of Restoration England’s complex relations of admiration and trepidation with regard to the Muslim Moors and Turks. Dryden-Davenant’s The Tempest or The Enchanted Island (1667) complicates the figures of Caliban and Sycorax as Muslim Moorish friends or foes and possible subjects of Charles II’s English Tangier on the Barbary coast. Dryden-Davenant’s The Enchanted Island makes historical parallels and allusions to Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza and the English possession of Tangier as a part of the marriage dowry.

On Translating One Verse from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Metaphor in drama translation The aim of this article is to discuss the existing Polish translations of one passage from The Tempest in the light of such essential components of the translation process as the need to include the situational context, metaphorical language as well as the socio‑historical background of the source text. The first part of the article discusses the history of drama translation in Poland with reference to The Tempest of William Shakespeare, while the second part describes translation strategies correlating to two divergent interpretations which link character construction in language with the overall meaning of the dramatic work.

Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest raises questions about how adaptation theory and film authorship are often constructed along perceptions of gender. Despite positive reactions to Helen Mirren’s performance as a re-gendered Prospera, the film was critically panned on release. Critics and reviewers criticized Taymor’s film technique, accusing the director of reveling in stylistic excess and relying too heavily on intrusive digital effects that overshadowed the imagination and language of the Folio play-text. These critiques draw attention to what this article suggests is most crucial to Taymor’s adaptation. This article argues that Taymor’s blending of the naturalistic with the artificial represent a deliberate style that emphasizes the collaborative processes of adaptation. Taymor’s intercutting of digital effects and naturalistic footage emphasize the hybrid authorship of film technique—a trait embodied in Ben Whishaw’s performance as the spirit Ariel. The re-gendering of Prospera furthermore situates the film against the grain of the historically gendered and romanticized conception of the film auteur as a stable and overriding masculine genius.

When the boards of Shakespeare’s Globe were once again trodden after months of standing empty, few people might have anticipated that the players would in fact be (scurvy?) politicians. Chancellor ...

Terry Tempest Williams’s assertion that beauty is not something granted;rather, we must create beauty in a broken world. What in another time I might have dismissed as nothing more than a rusting lawn chair, a stand of brittle grass, or the moon tangled in power lines compelled me to make beautiful images.

This article opposes the view that The Tempest knowingly betrays the barbarity implicit in the creation of aesthetically pleasing works of art, thereby disabling the aesthetic as a source of value....

Arab American Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Angel of History appropriates Shakespeare’s The Tempest to comment on its representation of Caliban and his mother, Sycorax, and show how distorted images...

Julie Taymor’s cross-gender casting is neither new nor shocking in any sense since this choice of change in Prospero’s gender can be seen in theatrical productions produced before Taymor’s movie. F...

A distinctive feature of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is its five songs, four of which are sung by Ariel, and the last of which, an instrumental, appears also to be played by that “tricksey Spirit.” M...

The article focuses on the rebellious subplot of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest that forms around Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, and reads it as a satyr play. Demonstrated is how the Dionysian subplot stands in close analogical connection with the play’s main action. It is also argued that the storyline emphasises a dimension of the play that is of high relevance to the analysis of its metatheatrical implications. The correspondences between the main action and the satyr play elements highlight the important role that intemperance, excess and the suspension of control play in the Shakespearean theatrical setting. Le présent article s’intéresse à l’intrigue secondaire de La Tempête, de William Shakespeare, qui s’organise autour de la rébellion de Caliban, de Stephano, de Trinculo, abordée comme drame satyrique. Il démontre comment cette intrigue secondaire dionysiaque comporte des liens analogiques étroits avec l’action principale. L’auteur avance également que la trame de l’action souligne une dimension de la pièce qui s’avère importante pour l’analyse des implications métathéâtrales. Les correspondances entre l’action principale et le drame satyrique mettent en relief le rôle important de l’intempérance, de l’excès et du dérèglement dans un contexte dramatique shakespearien.

This article discusses the Australian artist Loudon Sainthill’s stage and costume designs for Michael Benthall’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production of The Tempest (1951, 1952). Calling...

This article discusses the TV series The Wilds (Amazon Prime, 2020) as an adaptational experiment with Shakespeare’s The Tempest in several respects: as one of the latest complex TV shows to engage with the Shakespearean legacy, it experiments with the serialization of Shakespeare’s plot. Further, being an ‘unmarked’ adaptation that never directly refers to Shakespeare, it tests the limits as to what is ‘Shakespeare’ and what is ‘not Shakespeare’ or ‘no longer Shakespeare’ in the adaptational rhizome created by The Tempest and its reworkings, among which Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, and the TV series Lost are of particular importance for The Wilds. Changing Shakespeare’s character constellation to an all-female group of teenage castaways overseen by a female social scientist modelled on Prospero who seeks to overcome master narratives of fraternal power struggles, colonial exploitation, and patriarchal sexual oppression, The Wilds tests which changes the Shakespeare material can and perhaps needs to undergo to continue to have cultural meaning today. As part of this radical re-gendering, the series multiplies and collates Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban to interrogate contemporary girlhood and the future of intersectional feminism. The article concludes by assessing how the series appeals to differently knowing viewers, some of whom will feel invited to partake in the Tempest experiment, while others will lose Shakespeare’s tracks in The Wilds.

Creation Theatre is a company that performs site-specific productions of classic texts: previous productions have included The Tempest in an Oxford industrial estate, and Dracula in the London Libr...

Comparison of eight Polish translations of the fi nal segment of the Epilogue in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest reveals an essential diversifi cation in the contents of these translated versions. The differences appear in the identity of Prospero and in the discursive structure of his monologue. This article attempts to describe this diversifi cation with the use of the categories of acts and genres of speech, since it is these that form the ‘construction material’ of utterances, including literary texts, creating diverse confi gurations in them. These categories of description, enabling insight into compositional actions done on simple forms of discourse, elevates the analysis of translation practices and consideration of the issue of equivalence of translation to a higher level of text organisation.

The versatility of the appropriation of Shakespeare in recent years has been witnessed in a variety of registers and media, which range from special effects on the stage, music, cartoons, comics, advertisements, all the way to video games. This contribution looks at some of the novels in the Shakespeare Re-told Hogarth series as effigies of the contemporary process of adapting the Elizabethan plays to the environments in which the potential readers/viewers work, become informed, seek entertainment and adjust themselves culturally, being, ultimately, cognitive schemes which are validated by today’s reception processes. The first novel in the series was Jeanette Winterson’s Gap of Time (2016), in which the Shakespearean reference to the years that separate the two moments of The Winter’s Tale’s plot becomes the title of a video game relying mainly on fantasy. Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) rewrites The Tempest as a parable of the theatrical performance and its avatars, as undisputable authority, on the one hand, and source of subversiveness, on the other. Dunbar (2018) is Edward St. Aubyn’s response to the family saga of King Lear, where kingship, territorial division and military conflict are replaced by modern media wars, and the issues of public exposure in the original text are reinterpreted interpreted by resorting to the impact of the audio-visual on every-day life.

This essay examines the scenes in Shakespeare’s romances in which music has a healing and revitalizing power, but it also contains its own subversion. In Pericles, in the palace at Pentapolis, Pericles asks for a musical instrument, which he plays while he sings to himself. The wise doctor Cerimon revives Thaisa’s apparently dead body with the help of music in Pericles. In the final reunion scene with his daughter, Marina, the music of her voice has healing power for her father. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione’s apparently lifeless statue is brought to life while music is playing. Finally, The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays, with songs and music and a masque reviving the action. Shakespeare used songs to establish the character or the mental state of the singer. Music and allusions to music in these plays’ scripts can be interpreted as forms of indirect and covert propaganda, attuned to the politics of the time, but also as individual musical parts, in which music has healing power over the mind. They are like the music of the soul, suggesting interiority. Music is used, therefore, to achieve theatrical effect.

What might Caliban have looked like on the early modern stage? This article argues that at one point in The Tempest (2.2.56–107) Shakespeare presents on stage an elaborate theatregram invoking a sp...

This article introduces a new seventeenth-century play fragment, “The Dismal Tempest,” by Sir Thomas Higgons (1623/4-1691), a Member of Parliament. It presents “The Dismal Tempest” as an act of pol...

This is the first piece of a three-part article about the allegorical aspects of the legend of the Golem and its epistemological, political and ethical implications in our Internet plugged-in connected times. There are three sets of Golem allegories that may refer to questions relating either to language and knowledge, work and technique, or life and existence. The Golem allegories will be read through three major narratives that are also clearly or potentially allegorical: Walter Benjamin’s allegory of the chess player at the very beginning of his theses On the Concept of History, William Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest and James Cameron’s movie The Terminator. Each one of these narratives is going to be considered as a key allegory for a determinate aspect of the Golem, following a three-movement reading of the Golem legend that structures this very text as its logical outcome.