The Tempest

Abstract

The Tempest has a special place in Shakespeare’s work: not only his last complete play, but also his shortest; one of the handful he wrote which seem to obey the classical unities; one of the few for which there is no known literary source; and (the significance of this we can only guess at) given pride of place by Heminge and Condell at the front of the First Folio. For all the admiration it has received, it is not a play that one instinctively warms to. The enchanted island resists any easy identification with our own familiar world. The play’s appeal lies both in the sense of wonder induced by its strangeness, its otherness, and, at a rather different level, in the fact that it has always been something of a challenge for critics. The play is an enigma, seeming both to contain Meaning, of a kind conceivably more significant than that of Shakespeare’s previous plays, and yet refusing to disclose what that meaning is. The Tempest may not have produced the greatest amount of critical disagreement of all the plays; there are too many candidates vying for that particular honour. But it can probably lay claim to have inspired the greatest number of really daft interpretations.