Characters

Abstract

The history of responses to The Tempest is also the criticism of the comedies of Shakespeare, until the work of the Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century — with the unique exception that no play of Shakespeare, or indeed of anyone, has, from the time that it was written right up to the present day, stimulated such remarkable further works of art. This is something that I will take further in Part Two: for now we note that from Milton’s Comus to Auden’s The Sea and The Mirror and beyond, poets (and not only poets) have found their own creative form of comment on the play.