SOURCE: “Understanding The Tempest,” in New Literary History, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1999, pp. 373-88.

In the following essay, Pierce attempts to reconcile contradictory interpretations of The Tempest by reexamining the meaning of the play.

Some years ago I wrote an article¹ on Shakespeare's The Tempest in which I gave a reading that was quite sympathetic to Prospero and Miranda. I tried in that article to express an important part of my understanding of the play at that time, and I would still stand behind what I then said. On the other hand, I find much that is appealing and persuasive in a series of New Historical and anticolonialist readings of the play,² which tend to be not at all sympathetic to Prospero and if anything to turn Caliban into a sort of hero or at least victim. How am I to explain this weak-minded doubleness in my understanding of...