Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Tempest
Synopsis
Is Shakespeare’s The Tempest a Mediterranean play? This volume explores the relationship between The Tempest and the Mediterranean Sea and analyses it from different perspectives. Some essays focus on close readings of the text in order to explore the importance of the Mediterranean Sea for the genesis of the play and the narration of the past and present events in which the Shakespearean characters participate. Other chapters investigate the relationship between the Shakespearean play, its resources from the Mediterranean Graeco-Latin past and its afterlives in twentieth-century poems looking at the Mediterranean dimension of the play. Moreover, influences on and of The Tempest are investigated, looking at how Italian Renaissance music may have influenced some choices concerning Ariel’s song(s) and how The Tempest has shaped the production of twentieth-century Italian directors. Finally, other chapters try to reaffirm the centrality of the Mediterranean Sea in The Tempest, bringing to the fore new textual evidence in support of the Mediterraneity of the play, by adopting and/or criticising recent approaches.
Chapters
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Introduction
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How Did Shakespeare Write The Tempest?
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Navigating Time: Memories of Mediterranean Worlds in The Tempest
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Prospero, or the Demiurge. Platonic Resonances in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean
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Auden and the ‘Myth’ of The Tempest
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Ariel’s Music in Italian and English Madrigal Forms
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The Tempest in Italian Dialects
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Shakespeare’s Nature in Time. Contextualising Ecocritical Readings of The Tempest
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Mediterranean Echoes in the The Tempest: the Rape of Miranda between Race and Politics
