To People an Isle: The Tempest and Colonialism

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

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‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427814.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Pierre Iselin

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Early Modern England ◽

Medical Discourse ◽

Modern Music ◽

Twelfth Night ◽

The Tempest ◽

Dramatic Text ◽

Musical Event ◽

The Subject ◽

The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

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The Tempest of Axel Heyst

Nineteenth-Century Fiction ◽

10.1525/ncl.1962.17.2.99p0128y ◽

1962 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 95-113

Author(s):

Donald A. Dike

Keyword(s):

The Tempest

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Maritime Fantasies and Gender Space in Three Shakespearean Comedies

Gender Studies ◽

10.2478/v10320-012-0026-5 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 23-37

Author(s):

Wai Fong Cheang

Keyword(s):

Female Characters ◽

Merchant Of Venice ◽

Twelfth Night ◽

The Merchant Of Venice ◽

The Tempest ◽

Gender Space ◽

And Gender ◽

Gender And Space

Abstract Laden with sea images, Shakespeare‘s plays dramatise the maritime fantasies of his time. This paper discusses the representation of maritime elements in Twelfth Night, The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice by relating them to gender and space issues. It focuses on Shakespeare‘s creation of maritime space as space of liberty for his female characters.

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Feminist Shakespeares: Adapting Shakespeare for a Modern Audience in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

10.31237/osf.io/d25xy ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Colleen Etman

Keyword(s):

Margaret Atwood ◽

Female Characters ◽

Adaptation Theory ◽

Contemporary Culture ◽

The Winter's Tale ◽

Winter's Tale ◽

Female Authors ◽

The Tempest ◽

And Gender ◽

Female Characterization

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project presents a way to view Shakespeare’s plays through a different lens. These books allow for a feminist reading of Shakespeare, looking at some of Shakespeare’s ill-treated female characters to construct a new idea of female characterization. Three of the plays adapted, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew, were adapted by female authors. By investigating how these plays are being adapted for a more contemporary audience, with modern conceptions of feminism and gender roles, we can gain insight as to how these concepts have changed since Shakespeare’s time. By looking at these modern adaptations, we can interrogate how modern audiences as a whole conceptualize and, potentially, idealize Shakespeare, as well as understanding the progression of treatment of women in contemporary culture since Shakespeare’s time. The novels addressed in this project are The Gap of Time by Jeannette Winterson, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler. The project concludes that, of the three, Vinegar Girl does the most effective job addressing the problematic aspects of its adapted play in a new way, distinguishing it from previous adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. This project also investigates the role that adaptation theory plays in addressing Shakespeare adaptations, particularly the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.

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The Night of 'The Tempest' (On César Vidal's Novel)

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.1086164 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Jose Angel Garcia Landa

Keyword(s):

The Tempest

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‘Time is chasing us’

10.1093/oso/9780198828556.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Charlotte Scott

Keyword(s):

Central Question ◽

The Winter's Tale ◽

Winter's Tale ◽

The Tempest

Moving into the late plays or romances, Chapter 5 engages the book’s central question: why are children so important and so unique to Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination? Focusing on the extraordinary collection of plays, including The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles, this chapter considers the formative impact of the child on Shakespeare’s stage. Thinking about memory and grief, loss and childhood, the section on The Winter’s Tale attends to the child as a young body but also as an adult’s memory of its former self. The focus in TheTempest is on servitude and teaching and the narratives of love through which parents justify power. In the section on Pericles, the chapter studies anxieties about incest and desire, redemption and hope. In all the plays under discussion here, the child becomes a unique and staggeringly assertive character of redemption as well as loss.

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The Aesthetics of Island Space

10.1093/oso/9780198832409.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Johannes Riquet

Keyword(s):

Pacific Northwest ◽

Physical World ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Spatial Experience ◽

Spatial Poetics ◽

The Tempest ◽

The Pacific ◽

Age Of Discovery ◽

Words And Images ◽

Modern Experience

The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts (from The Tempest to The Hungry Tide), journals of explorers and scientists (such as Cook and Darwin), and Hollywood cinema (e.g. The Hurricane and King Kong), tracing how islands have offered vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the poetic energies of words and images and the material energies of the physical world. Its chapters focus on America’s island gateways (e.g. Roanoke and Ellis Island), tropical islands (e.g. Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the Pacific Northwest, and mutable islands (e.g. the volcanic and coral islands in Wells’s fiction). The book argues that the modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual challenges to spatial experience, and that these challenges were negotiated via the poetic engagement with islands. Postcolonial theorists maintain that islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story: the experience of islands in the age of discovery also went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of global space. Rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space suggests that the modern encounters with islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a diversification of spatial experience, and explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by non-fictional and fictional responses.

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