Terry Foreman on 7 Nov 2010  •  Link

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skillful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's low nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.
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The Tempest did not attract a significant amount of attention before the closing of the theatres in 1642, and only attained popularity after the Restoration, and then only in adapted versions.
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Sir William Davenant's Duke's Company had the rights to perform The Tempest.[48] In 1667 Davenant and John Dryden made heavy cuts and adapted it as The Tempest or, The Enchanted Island. They tried to appeal to upper-class audiences by emphasising royalist political and social ideals: monarchy is the natural form of government; patriarchal authority decisive in education and marriage; and patrilineality preeminent in inheritance and ownership of property.[47] They also added characters and plotlines: Miranda has a sister, named Dorinda; and Caliban a sister, also named Sycorax. As a parallel to Shakespeare's Miranda/Ferdinand plot, Prospero has a foster-son, Hippolito, who has never set eyes on a woman.[49] Hippolito was a popular breeches role, a man played by a woman, popular with Restoration theatre management for the opportunity to reveal actresses' legs.[50] Scholar Michael Dobson has described Enchanted Island as "the most frequently revived play of the entire Restoration" and as establishing the importance of enhanced and additional roles for women.[51] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_…

Terry Foreman on 10 May 2011  •  Link

The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island
By William Davenant and John Dryden Edited by Jack Lynch
The text comes from the edition of 1670. It is intended as a reading edition, not a critical text. Speech prefixes are spelled out in full. Line numbers follow those in the electronic text prepared by Chadwyck-Healey.
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jly…

Terry Foreman on 29 Mar 2016  •  Link

The Tempest
In Our Time
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Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Written in around 1610, it is thought to be one of the playwright's final works and contains some of the most poetic and memorable passages in all his output. It was influenced by accounts of distant lands written by contemporary explorers, and by the complex international politics of the early Jacobean age.

The Tempest is set entirely on an unnamed island inhabited by the magician Prospero, his daughter Miranda and the monstrous Caliban, one of the most intriguing characters in Shakespeare's output. Its themes include magic and the nature of theatre itself - and some modern critics have seen it as an early meditation on the ethics of colonialism. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b…