The Tempest (Norton Critical Editions)

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 text and is accompanied by explanatory annotations.

“Sources and Contexts” offers a rich collection of documents on the play’s central themes―magic and witchcraft, politics and religion, geography and travel. Writers include Ovid, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gabriel Naudé, Michel de Montaigne, and William Strachey.

“Criticism” collects eighteen responses to The Tempest, from John Dryden and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stephen Orgel and Leah Marcus. “Rewritings and Appropriations” includes creative reactions to The Tempest, by playwrights, filmmakers, and poets, among them H.D., Peter Greenaway, and Ted Hughes.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. He is the author of Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 and Remnants of Conquest: The Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998. He is co-editor, with William H. Sherman, of The Tempest and Its Travels and, with Tim Young, of the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.

William H. Sherman is Professor of Early Modern Studies in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance and of many articles on Renaissance literature, travel writing, and the history of the book. He has also edited The Tempest and Its Travels with Peter Hulme, and the new Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist with Peter Holland.