SOURCE: Stephens, Charles. “Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare's Island: Essays on Creativity, pp. 6-31. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Stephens presents an overview of The Tempest and surveys such subjects as setting, historical context, theme, and character. The critic describes the work as fundamentally “a play about the salvation of ordinary individuals” from natural, supernatural, and human threats.

‘Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu.’

Tristan und Isolde

‘Oed’ und leer das Meer’

Ibid

William Shakespeare's The Tempest takes place on an island surrounded on all sides by an ocean, but it is no New Atlantis or Citta del Sole. Prospero's island is not named, but it is clear that it must lie somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Alonso's fleet was sailing from Naples to Tunis, where his daughter Claribel was to be married to the King, when Prospero's tempest caused its shipwreck. In Shakespeare's time, there was no...