Is there a Tempest Problem?

Abstract

This book is premised on a renewed interest in the play’s signifying practices. That renewal involves a shift in attention from, broadly speaking, WHAT the play means to HOW it means. And this has a cheering consequence. Because if we are asking what The Tempest means, then the fact that, according to its long, continuing critical history, it has meant so many, often incompatible things is a real problem. But if we are more interested in how The Tempest means what it means, then its prodigious production of meanings is not a problem at all — just the particularly efficient meaning-making operation in question. Still, the editors caution, there is no getting round the play’s mind-defeating power. For, they suggest, The Tempest generates more and more readings precisely by humbling each on the rocks of “intractable and inexplicable ambiguities and contradictions”. This, indeed, is key to its trick of addressing “fundamental human issues without ever exhausting them”.