SOURCE: “Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of the The Tempest,” in ELH, Vol. 64, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 333-57.

In the following essay, Wilson contrasts colonial New World interpretations of The Tempest with the view that the play centers on European concerns.

A recent pairing by the Royal Shakespeare Company of The Tempest with Edward Bond's Bingo has reminded critics of the persistence of what they long ago discounted as the “totally spurious” identification of Prospero's story with the dramatist's.¹ While this last comedy has been Americanized on campuses as a tragedy of colonialism in the New World, the professional theater continues to connect its ending to New Place and a retirement in Stratford. These popular and academic traditions seem, in fact, to straddle the play's two hemispheres, and it may be that the New Historicist success in relocating The Tempest in Virginia has transported it...