The Tempest

The Tempest presents some of Shakespeare’s most insightful meditations on the cycle of life—ending and beginning, death and regeneration, bondage and freedom. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the First Folio (1623) and is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations.

“Sources and Contexts” offers a rich collection of texts by Ovid, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gaspar Gil Polo, Michel de Montaigne, and William Strachey, among others, centered on the play’s major themes—magic and witchcraft, politics and religion, geography and travel.

“Criticism” includes eighteen interpretive essays on various aspects of The Tempest by John Dryden, Nicholas Rowe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ludwig Tieck, Fanny Kemble, Henry James, Lytton Strachey, G. Wilson Knight, Frank Kermode, Geroeg Lemming, Barbara Mowat, David Lindley, Stephen Orgel, John Gillies, Peter Hulme, Andrew Gurr, Barbara Fuchs, and Leah Marcus.

As a play that foregrounds the power of books, The Tempest has been an enduring source of inspiration and provocation to writers for hundreds of years. “Rewritings and Appropriations” collects seventeen rescriptings, from John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s “The Sea Voyage” to Peter Greenaway’s “Prospero’s Books,” from Percy Shelley’s “With a Guitar, to Jane” to Ted Hughes’s “Setebos.”

A Selected Bibliography is also included.