'Sources and Contexts.' The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. 'Religion.' The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare. 'Shakespeare's Reading.' The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. 'Politics, Religion, Geography and Travel: Historical Contexts of the Last Plays.' The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays. Participants joined worldwide celebrations of Shakespeare’s 400-year legacy, which at UW-Madison included an exhibit of Shakespeare’s original First Folio, arguably the most treasured book to date. It also features some of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable and complex characters: the spirit Ariel, the Algerian witch Sycorax, and her deformed and enslaved son Caliban-an anagram of “cannibal.'Īs they read the play and explored its hundreds of adaptations (including sci-fi movies, prison dramas, and classic opera, and a novelistic adaptation by Margaret Atwood called Hag-Seed), students and educators engaged with the histories and legacies of transatlantic travel, conquest and slavery in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The play offers a reflection on literary creation itself, with Prospero figured as an “author” within the play. Over the course of the 2017-2018 academic year, program participants explored how The Tempest anticipates contemporary debates around colonialism, imperialism, racism, indigeneity, gender, and disability.įirst performed in 1611, The Tempest takes place on a remote island where exiled sorcerer Prospero seeks redemption for himself and his daughter Miranda by orchestrating several encounters between human and supernatural, native and foreign, noble and treacherous characters. The Tempest in Wisconsin connected over 90 teachers and 1500 students throughout the state in the study of William Shakespeare’s last and perhaps most enigmatic play.

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