SOURCE: Daniell, David. “Themes.” In The Tempest, pp. 38-63. London: Macmillan, 1989.

In the following excerpt, Daniell surveys critical approaches to The Tempest from the second half of the twentieth century.

Watching Shakespeare's Tempest [in the seventeenth century, one] would see a pastoral tragicomic romance, with masque elements. It is not only in order, it is essential, to discuss, in dealing with The Tempest, both the traditions of romance drama in England, and the special literary conventions of pastoral romance as they appear, for example, in Sidney's Arcadia and Spenser's Faerie Queene, and to know how the play shares themes within these conventions. One of the many ways in which Frank Kermode's Arden edition of The Tempest was important was that it first, and most lucidly, set out that:

The Tempest, though exceptionally subtle in its structure of ideas, and unique in its development of them, can be understood...