The Tempest and Its Travels

Abstract

For all the centrality of The Tempest to a movement called the New Historicism, the major problem of Shakespeare's play in our time has turned out to be one of geography.In recent accounts of the drama, one question has come to dominate historical scholarship, literary appropriation, and theatrical practice alike: where does The Tempest take place?The enigma of the play's location began with Shakespeare, who gave his setting no exact spatial or temporal co-ordinates; the Folio editors added to the dramatis personae the phrase, "The Scene, an un-inhabited Island," which is neither precise nor, for that matter, true.The geographical indeterminacy has proved irresistible to interpreters."No man can therefore conceive anything," wrote Hobbes of the imagination, "but he must conceive it in some place"; and in recent years The Tempest has been conceived in almost every place on earth, and indeed even beyond.Thus in the introduction to their recent Arden edition of the play, Virginia Mason Vaughn and Alden T. Vaughn adduce Renaissance contexts including the New World, Africa, and Ireland; postcolonial adaptations from India, Canada, and throughout the Americas; and film versions set everywhere from Greece to Altair-IV, the Forbidden Planet of science-fiction fame.The Vaughns note several reasons for the "uncommon transportability" of The Tempest, among them its uncertain source, streamlined characters and relationships, elliptical action, and suspended resolution.In these ways Shakespeare has set his island adrift: as it proceeds, the drama makes momentary landfall somewhere in the Mediterranean, North Atlantic, or Caribbean, only to weigh anchor and float off in a wholly new direction.Despite its unusual respect for the unity of place, therefore, The Tempest has become the Shakespearean classic of displacement.In 2001, when London's Almeida Theatre closed its base in Islington to move for a year to a disused coach depot in King's Cross, the valedictory production was Book Reviews Comptes Rendus

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