8 - Literary invocations of The Tempest

Summary

Ever since John Dryden and William Davenant's Enchanted Island reshaped The Tempest in accord with Restoration notions of neo-classical decorum, writers have appropriated the play's plot and characters, reshaping them according to changing literary tastes and differing political and social contexts. The Tempest, argued poet W. H. Auden, is 'a mythopoeic work . . . [that] encourages adaptations' and inspires 'people to go on for themselves . . . to make up episodes that [Shakespeare] as it were, forgot to tell us'. The Tempest's setting on an uncharted island somewhere between Naples and Tunis, its representation of public and personal power relationships (king and subject, master and servant, father and daughter), its elliptical action and indefinite ending and its pervasive use of stage spectacle have repeatedly spurred artists in every media - from music, film, theatre, literature and the art of high culture, to popular culture's comic books and cartoons - to reimagine the original within the context of new literary conventions and new circumstances. Hundreds if not thousands of Tempest adaptations and appropriations exist, coming from all eras and all parts of the globe, and no single essay could do justice to them all. The focus here is the ways poets, playwrights and novelists have responded to The Tempest's unusual emphasis on the role of art in human consciousness as well as its limitations, particularly in its relation to the material world. Shakespeare's Prospero spends much of the play torn between fascination with the illusions he creates through magic and his responsibilities, whether in the political world as Duke or in the private world as father.