This chapter discusses the relationship of the imagination to Christian eschatology. It gives an account of the function of eschatological imagery in the Bible, discusses the changing ways in which art and literature have engaged Christian eschatology, and concludes with an account of a distinctly eschatological imagination.

This essay establishes a link between Garrick’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest, which opened at Drury Lane on 11 February 1756, and the imminent escalation of the French and Indian War (1754–63) into the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In this essay, Massai argues that Garrick’s Tempest, generally dismissed as a flop and as an embarrassing misjudgement on his part, takes on greater topical significance and political resonance if reconsidered alongside the ‘Dialogue’ that Garrick wrote to be performed as prologue to the opera. By means of a close analysis of both texts, alongside Dryden and Davenant’s earlier adaptation of The Tempest (1667), Massai shows how Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ are in fact representative of wartime uses of Shakespeare, which, as this collection shows, often served as an important platform for the fashioning of current attitudes towards military conflict.

Black theology is an academic movement calling for the reevaluation of Christian thought based on the claim that God sides with the oppressed – or, put more vividly, that God is Black. From the perspective of Black theology, many virtues turn out not to be virtuous at all but rather practices that secure white supremacy. What are commonly dismissed as vices may, from the perspective of Black theology, turn out to be virtues: practices essential for survival and flourishing in the face of racial domination. The Tempest is, in part, a meditation on domination, and this chapter explores what it would mean to approach the play from the perspective of Black theology. The apparent virtue of Miranda and Ariel turns out to be white virtue, habits that claim objective goodness but that actually affirm and naturalize arbitrary rule. Caliban, attuned to primal enchantment and desiring liberation from arbitrary rule, exhibits habits that appear vicious but that may be read as virtuous from the framework of Black theology.

This chapter analyses cross-dressing in Restoration Shakespeare – in the main, female characters dressed in male attire – exploring the key question of how this theatrical device was influenced by the advent of the professional actress on the English stage. The approach is twofold. Firstly, the chapter examines the use of cross-dressing in specific Restoration-era adaptations of Shakespeare. One of the earliest of these, Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest (1667), provides additional opportunities for transvestite performance as the play’s new male role of Hippolito was performed as a travesty part by an actress (either Mary Davis or Jane Long) and the female part of Sycorax (also added to the play by the adapters) was likely played by a man. Furthermore, it explores how other adapters treated the cross-dressing already inherent in the Shakespearean texts they chose to rewrite, considering, for example, George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701) and Charles Burnaby’s Love Betrayed (1703), a version of Twelfth Night. Secondly, the chapter investigates the Restoration performance history of Shakespearean ‘originals’ that feature transvestism, including Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The chapter nuances our understanding of gender in Restoration Shakespeare through a detailed consideration of cross-dressing.

This chapter considers the reciprocal productivity between Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s romance The Tempest. It examines the settings of the two plays, their dialectics of making and unmaking, their dynamics of confinement and release, the materiality of air and earth, and the notion of ending. It looks at the insular dominions of Prospero’s island and the space inhabited by Beckett’s characters in Endgame, and argues that the imperfections and shortcomings of a medium are not an end in themselves but become the grounds on which plays such as The Tempest and Endgame transcend the finitude of their art and reflect back on it, asserting its very finitude as a condition of possibility.In both plays, the game of chess figures as a structural and thematic component and reflects on the art of the playwright. The chapter analyses the brief scene in which Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. The scene functions as a mise-en-abîme, as a play-within-the-play, and becomes a metaphor for the play itself. In the many references to chess in Beckett’s works, above all in Endgame, chess, as this chapter argues, presents a matrix of multiplicity that remains tied to form.

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Shakespeare plays contradictory roles. On the one hand, he emblematizes the cultural inheritance Britain shares with the United States; on the other, he serves as the vehicle by which to assert British artistic superiority. The tensions between these roles is explored in a scene in which American service men and women, under the direction of a British vicar, rehearse episodes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through this scene, Powell and Pressburger both mock American movies and betray their anxieties about the British film industry’s postwar future. At the same time, they make the case for the imaginative primacy of British cinema—and, indeed, of their own films—over Hollywood. The chapter concludes by considering links between A Matter of Life and Death and Powell’s unrealized adaptation of The Tempest, in which Prospero stands in for the filmmaker in exile.

The innovative ways in which the human voice is used in performing Thomas Adès’s operas Powder Her Face, The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, have ensured sustained critical attention on voice and vocality in these works. There has, however, been little academic scholarship on the role of the voice in Adès’s operas to date. Reconciling hermeneutic approaches to voice, phenomenal song and narrative with a more recent material turn in voice studies, this chapter will discuss a range of interpretatively salient moments in Adès’s operas, in which the sound and activity of the resonant singing voice itself is used as a narrative parameter independently of what these operatic voices have to say. It aims to interrogate the play between voice as embodied sonority and more metaphorical conceptions of voice as vehicle for meaning, as a way to access and understand traits in the relationship between surface and structure, and the use of musical techniques for semantic ends. In doing so, this chapter provides a long-overdue theoretically grounded hearing of the sonorous voices in Adès’s music and of the performers that capture our attention from the operatic stage.

Thomas Adès described his compositions as the ‘organic, necessary’ linking of ‘tiny cells’ into larger structures by a ‘musical logic.’ This chapter demonstrates how successions of dyads in his two recent operas follow the logic of a specific musical transformation, retrograde-inversion chaining. This distinctively temporal process establishes cyclical patterns which can be realised, twisted or broken in various dramatic situations. In The Tempest, the cycles direct the music in ways that express Prospero’s power and Caliban’s resistance. Such logic, applied to different materials, also permeates The Exterminating Angel. On the surface, the retrograde-inversion chains represent the dissipation of the characters’ will. More deeply, though, the logic underwrites the tonality and form in the Act I lovers’ duet, the ‘Fugue of Panic’ and Leticia’s creative exuberance at a pivotal dramatic moment. These observations offer insight into how Adès controls musical time on the very largest scale.

Chapter Three moves from the front to the middle of the brain, believed to house the rational faculty that assessed forms and ideas, and put them together in novel ways. The chapter explores a persistent early modern connection between fathers, daughters, and the production of new knowledges — one that found expression in the popular emblem of Truth, the daughter of Time (Veritas temporis filia). After analyzing how this figure was used to embody scientific and religious innovation, the chapter then considers the revival of an ancient myth about the potter Dibutades’ daughter, a girl who traces her absent lover’s form and (according to early modern revisions of her story) invents the art of painting. These two daughters help frame the chapter’s analysis of two Shakespearean ones, All’s Well That Ends Well’s orphaned Helen and The Tempest’s island-bound Miranda. After briefly considering how Helen uses her physician-father’s art to produce her own ambitious project, the chapter finishes with a reading of The Tempest. The chapter argues that Miranda’s beating mind challenges her father Prospero’s rough, old art, and that her brainwork signals intellectual progress and the changes, based on observation, that were emerging from new scientific and philosophical ideas.

This extended analysis of The Penelopiad, an alternative “herstory” to Homer’s Odyssey, and Hag-Seed, a radical rewriting of The Tempest staged in a Canadian men’s prison, deals with Atwood’s revisionary practices as she redeploys classic texts for her own purposes. Referencing Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this discussion foregrounds these texts as Atwood’s most sustained adaptation projects, exploring how such revisions involve authorial decisions around purpose, fidelity, commentary, appropriation, and autonomy. Discussion of The Penelopiad centers on Atwood’s reflections on the nature of myth in its contemporary interpretations and on her feminist politics of narrative representation, while Hag-Seed offers a different revisionary perspective with its emphasis on the figure of the author-artist-magician, personified in the theatre director, Prospero’s double. Crossing genre boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow, Atwood exploits the appeal of popular genres while retaining the resonance of literary fiction.

In the first section of this chapter, I focus on the romance intertexts of two of Shakespeare’s late plays, Cymbeline and The Tempest, in order to prompt reconsideration of how they relate to other dramatic offerings of the period. Subsequently, I revisit the series of plays performed at court in 1612–1613 by Shakespeare’s company and others, paying particular attention to what this season looks like if we reassess the dramatic output of the repertory companies without privileging the distorting effect that Shakespeare exerts on our perception of the theatrical marketplace. ‘Cardenio’ necessarily plays a significant part in this discussion. Almost all of the scholarship on this lost play is fixated on attempts to recover the play-text itself; Rather than adding to this abundance of critical energy devoted to recovering or reanimating the play-text, I ask a different question about ‘Cardenio’: How did this play relate to other commercial plays being performed in London? By attempting to answer this, and by understanding ‘Cardenio’ in relation to the other plays performed in repertory with it at court, I clarify the picture of the company’s commercial offerings during the final phase of Shakespeare’s career.

The anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century created new interpretative contexts that drew attention to the racializations at play in Shakespeare’s work, as well as their disruptions. Using The Tempest as a case study, this chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare can be an ally in the struggle against racist abuse of power. Post-colonial methodologies teach us to notice how language secures the interests of the powerful and legitimizes colonial violence. In The Tempest the antagonism between the colonizer and those whose lands are invaded manifests in the battle between Caliban and Prospero: This is Shakespeare’s subject. But post-colonial theory affirms that the opportunity to attend to the vulnerabilities of the disempowered is available to scholars and audiences of every work. Post-colonial approaches do more than simply diversify the creative palette available to theater-makers; they provide the tools and the vocabulary to confront power and privilege, and affirm the possibility of a more just world.

This essay begins from the premise that we can best locate Shakespeare’s historical relationship to racist and anti-racist projects not in speculation about authorial intention but in analysis of performances of his plays. I cover a selection of performances of Othello, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra to argue that whatever progressive potential Shakespeare’s plays have arises at the nexus where stage tradition, audience expectation, local racial politics, directorial concept, and performers' choices coincide. There is nothing in the text of the plays – or even in newer casting traditions – that can guarantee that a performance will aid in the redistribution of the property, protection, and pleasure that have accrued to those who claim whiteness. There is, however, the potential that calculated violation of law or custom in performance can make Shakespeare do such redistributive work.

This chapter explores representations of fantasy and romance in Anglo-American screen productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. It is particularly concerned with how filmmakers of these plays make the fantastical and the romantic believable yet sufficiently otherworldly. Films of A Midsummer Night’s Dream discussed include those by directors Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (1935), Peter Hall (1968), Adrian Noble (1996), and Michael Hoffman (1999). Each uses numerous elements from the cinematic toolbox to create plausible versions of Shakespeare’s faerie world. Films of The Tempest considered include those by Derek Jarman (1979) and Julie Taymor (2010). Airy spirit that he is, Ariel in The Tempest is kin to the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thus directors of The Tempest are faced with similar challenges of crafting verisimilitude as their counterparts face working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; each meets those challenges with their idiosyncratic aplomb that does justice to Shakespeare.

This chapter explores how medical knowledge shaped Shakespeare’s figuration of the passions. According to ancient writers, emotions originate in the organic soul, moving continually among the body, mind, and psyche. The passions are thus psychic in their inception and interstitial in their operations, both within the individual subject and in their transactions between people. Early modern emotions also shuttle between human beings and the meteorological world around them, as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest exemplify. I supplement the precedence granted to Hippocratic and Galenic humoral theory in recent scholarship by charting how other ancient medical and natural philosophical sources informed early modern constructions of emotion. Emergent theories in medicine and natural philosophy (Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsian homeopathy) augmented existing understandings of the passions, as did vernacular medical treatises and popular medical controversies. While Shakespeare did not adhere in any systematic way to particular medical paradigms, their concepts and idioms influenced his eclectic representation of the passions. His plays depict the fundamentally interactive and dynamic nature of the emotions, the psychic intricacy of their physiological, mental, and imaginative functions, and the intensity of their intersubjective transmissions.

Wonder is a key emotion to Shakespeare’s work as a whole, from first to last. Three principal sites of the evocation of wonder are discussed: in narrative, in character, and in language. Discussion of the first focuses on Shakespeare’s career-long interest in romance narratives of marvel, drawing on both ancient and popular traditions. These traditions inform Shakespeare’s writing from The Comedy of Errors through the last plays. In them marvellous events – especially involving recoveries and reunions – reveal a world unexpected in its amplitude, larger than human knowledge can easily understand. Audiences are encouraged to share this perception of the world-opening possibilities of poetry. Wonder experienced by characters provides an opportunity for audiences to examine closely the mechanics of the affect, and the attempts of persons to negotiate and emerge from it into knowledge. Wonder in language touches on Shakespeare’s characteristic extremity of rhetorical style, particularly his use of figures such as paradox, hyperbole, and catachresis. Altogether, this commitment to wonder reveals Shakespeare as a poet of an unclosed universe – one ever rich in possibility and the unexpected.

Martin Butler explores some intertextual relationships between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson’s reservations about Shakespeare’s late plays are well known. In the induction to Bartholomew Fair, Jonson alludes to the grotesque dances at the sheep-shearing in The Winter’s Tale and to the servant-monster Caliban and the 'strange shapes' in The Tempest’s banquet scene, the latter described by Sebastian, in vocabulary which Jonson pointedly echoes, as 'a living drollery'. All of these things 'make nature afraid': that is, they offend against 'nature', by which Jonson seems to mean 'verisimilitude'. This critique of the faults of Shakespeare’s late style is reinforced elsewhere by Jonson’s disparaging allusion to Pericles as a 'mouldy tale', his remarks about the false geography of The Winter’s Tale, and his prologue to the revised version of Every Man In His Humour. As the prologue concludes, 'you, that have so graced monsters, may like men'. If, by complaining about 'monsters', Jonson is referring to Shakespeare’s late plays, and to The Tempest in particular, then evidently, Butler shows, he felt that Shakespeare not only wanted art, he wanted nature too.