Where is Ireland in The Tempest?

Abstract

Sir D. Plunket Barton declared in 1925 that ‘the search for a connecting link’ between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ireland ‘is a fruitless one’. 1 The play’s ‘scene’, he said, ‘is rightly located in the realms of Fancy’. 2 The Tempest poses a ‘geographical problem’ that ‘can best be solved by means of an allegorical or poetical interpretation’. Witness Sir Edward Strachey, who has called the play’s island ‘“a true Atlantis of poetry”’, and James Russell Lowell, who has said that ‘“in The Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map”’. ‘“At once nowhere and everywhere,”’ it lay somewhere in ‘“the soul of man … between the upper and nether world, and liable to incursions from both”’. Prospero’s island was not Ireland. Indeed, it could be no earthly island at all. Even in Lowell, however, this ‘poetical’ refusal of specificity can seem uneasy: ‘“Nowhere then?”’ 3 In this essay, I will say that The Tempest does indeed pose a ‘geographical problem’. The play seems, to borrow a phrase, ‘ hypertopical , both placeless and overplaced’, and we do it a disservice, surely, if we try to confine it to any fixed set of map coordinates. 4 However, this is not a ‘geographical problem’ that can be solved by abstracting geography from the play, or the play from geography. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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