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The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare) |  | Author: William Shakespeare
Creators: Virginia Mason Vaughan, Alden T. Vaughan
Publisher: Arden Shakespeare
List Price: $17.00
Buy Used: $3.45
as of 11/22/2009 07:07 CST details
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Seller: patglaudel
Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 273517
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3rd
Pages: 392
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 1903436087
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.33
EAN: 9781903436080
ASIN: 1903436087
Publication Date: August 13, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Tempest has long dazzled readers and audiences with its intricate blend of magic, music, humour, intrigue and tenderness, its vibrant but ambiguous central characters. As Virginia and Alden Vaughan show, in their wide-ranging new edition of this established favourite, such antithetical extremes exemplify the plays endlessly arguable nature, its appeal to diverse eras and cultures. The Vaughans situate The Tempest at the centre of changing cultural attitudes towards colonialism, power politics and patriarchal hierarchies, and demonstrate how the play both shaped and reflected those changing attitudes. Informed by the concerns of a post-colonial international community, their edition emphasizes the play's world-wide cultural appropriation, and includes an extensive discussion of the play's after-life as well as an appendix of selected appropriations. The interdisciplinary editorial approach contributes a distinctively blended cultural and historical focus. The Vaughans have provided a valuable new edition of the play, one whose expanded contextualisation, especially, will contribute to The Tempests lively and varied afterlife both within and beyond the classroom. Barbara Fuchs, University of Washington, Seattle, Shakespeare Quarterly
Book Description
John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
 a saccharine bagatelle November 1, 2009
Caraculiambro (La Mancha and environs)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The "Tempest" shares the distinction -- along with "Love's Labor's Lost" -- of featuring a plot mostly contrived by Shakespeare himself. And it shows. Thank God for Amazon reviews, since it would be suicidal for somebody in the academy to point out all the obvious flaws of this crud. So allow me:
1. We're constantly being reminded about Ariel's upcoming freedom: Was this meant to be the real tension of the play? Because even at final curtain, we never actually see him freed. This is dramatically unsatisfying.
2. Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his books before sailing back to Milan. So what's to prevent him from being stabbed, thrown overboard, or dispensed with once everybody reaches the shore? He's made tons of enemies - and now he hasn't his magic to protect him. Admit it: this was in the back of your mind as the play ended, marring its grace.
3. Doesn't anybody in this play ever have a look around before jumping to three pages of high-blown philosophical conclusions? (E.g., "This is some monster of the isle...")
4. On this island, what has Miranda been using for tampons and stuff?
5. You get leery when thinking what a cruddy job Prospero does of vetting his daughter's future husband. I suppose the idea of having him make Ferdinand's pursuit of Miranda fraught with difficultly so's he'd appreciate her more was serviceable enough, but all it really amounts to is making him schlep some logs around for an afternoon.
6. It would appear that Prospero was usurped with good reason. He apparently had his nose in books all the time, whereas his brother evidently has the wherewithal to manage affairs of state with a more hardheaded realpolitik. (He's just concluded, for example, a valuable alliance-by-marriage with Tunis.) If Prospero really had the makings of a Prince, he would have demonstrated same by offing Alonso and company right there and then, since permitting them to live is bound to lead Milan into civil war later, when they regroup.
7. That sappy, stilted, and pretentious "masque" scene doesn't belong there. Or at least not at such length. The young lovers aren't even married yet! That's another thing:
8. The subplot between Ferdinand and Miranda is resolved far too early in the play, making the ending intolerably long.
9. The introductory shipwreck scene is totally unnecessary! What does it add? It's like Shakespeare was trying to show off his command of nautical terminology.
10. Most of the poetry is forgettable. Some of it blows outright. E.g.: "You sunburned sicklemen, of August weary, / Come hither from the furrow and be merry. / Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on, / And these fresh nymphs encounter everyone / In country footing." Uh, you're joking, right?
11. What's up with Prospero having Ariel maliciously taunt the bereaved Ferdinand about his drowned father? What did Ferdinand do to deserve that?
12. Seems like there more characters than are really needed. If this has been bandied about as a script these days, any Hollywood studio would have immediately made the obvious decision: combine Antonio, Sebastian, Adrian, and Fransisco into fewer, or delete them. And that studio would have been right.
13. Uh . . . has anybody noticed that the entire five-minute scene between Prospero and Miranda just after the shipwreck scene is nothing more than bald, unimaginative exposition? Master playright, eh? Heck, same thing goes for the scene just after that with Ariel, now that I think about it.
Oh, you're being too literal, too realistic, you might complain. You've been ruined by the 19th century. Okay, then let's take the play on its grander meanings. Here's what it teaches us:
12. Usurpation is bad. Everybody should know their place in society and not rock the boat by getting uppity. Caliban was wrong to have pursued his freedom: he should have known his place as a slave.
13. It's the height of wisdom to marry somebody you just met yesterday without investing a greater effort in trying to get to know them.
14. Women must not have their "virgin knots" broken, or they are impure and will not make acceptable wives.
15. Getting drunk helps you make stupid decisions.
16. Big psychological insight: Instead of endlessly justifying themselves, people have sudden epiphanies where they immediately and clearly perceive their guilt, causing them to change their worldview and lives on the spot (e.g., "Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded.")
17. As always in Shakespeare, prophecies always come true, so it's pointless to try to change one's destiny. Just once I'd like to see some withered old hag utter some omen of doom, then at the end of the play it turns out to be nothing. That, at least, would constitute some insight into the human condition: people can't tell the future!
So literally the play is a flop. And as for the play's deeper meanings - can somebody tell me why such sentiments are thought to be worth our time these days?
I think people find this play gratifying because the setup (i.e., a remote, green, magical island; a shipwreck; a benign magician; a beautiful and innocent daughter; a misshapen fish-like beast) is such an alluring daydream: people like to picture themselves in such a setting. Hard for me to play along, though: apparently that island won't shut up long enough for you to take a nap.
Bard Bids Globe Fans Adieu September 15, 2009
Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA)
"The Tempest" is treated by many critics as the equivalent of a home run during an aging legend's last turn at bat. It's a solid outing, no doubt, but after years of thinking this one of William Shakespeare's greatest plays, I regard it now more as moving curtain call than homer.
Prospero is a banished nobleman who has learned magic while stranded on a mysterious island. With his faithful daughter Miranda, his obedient fairy servant Ariel, and his disagreeable slave Caliban, Prospero waits for the chance to confront those who left him for dead years ago.
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep," Prospero declares. Here the focus is on the fantasy part of life, the parts undreamed of in another Shakespeare character's philosophies, and the notion of imaginative power as the wellspring of transformation. It's all the more powerful coming from Shakespeare, writing what scholars say was his last play (circa 1611) and presenting himself in the character of Prospero breaking his staff, burying his books, and asking the crowd to release him with a final round of applause. How can that not be great?
I thought it was one of Shakespeare's best, in part because it's such a great summing up of the Bard's life work when you get to it at the end of a college course on Shakespeare. But this time, reading it as standalone, I noticed more the flaws. Take the dullish romance between Miranda and Ferdinand. Or that rather odd play-within-a-play that elongates Act IV with verse so ring-ding some experts claim it was inserted after the fact by another hand to stretch what is otherwise a shortish eight-scene comedy. There's not a lot of plot in this play, and the lack of dramatic tension is missed.
But what's stirring about "The Tempest" still stands out. The intoxicating atmosphere established from the first scene on the island sustains through the body of the play. I'm still amused watching Caliban deal with his two drunken "liberators", haughty Stephano and hapless Trinculo - Abbott and Costello in iambic pentameter. And there's something remarkable in the development, however flat dramatically, of the central message of forgiveness, particularly when bestowed on characters who never deserve it. Shakespeare often worked well outside the framework of religious orthodoxy, but this seems to me his most Christian of plays, and a success that way.
"The Tempest" is a great play to watch when performed well, like it was on Shakespeare On The Sound three years ago in my town. But it's a hard play to read. The Signet Classic edition strikes the right balance between illumination and overexplanation, though the puns and metaphors seem more lost in time than they do in other Shakespeare plays.
Everyone should read "The Tempest" themselves. There's the classic language, the beauty of its lines and phrases that echo down to us in common usage like "sea change", "what's past is prologue", and "O brave new world/that has such people in't!" And definitely try to see it performed on stage; it really comes to life there. Only if you're like me, just be aware a second reading might leave you a bit disappointed.
 1964 Signet Classic Shakespeare paperback edition. September 6, 2009
Ted Byrd
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The vast number of critical works which deal wholly or partly with "The Tempest" is testimony to the ultimate impossibility of nailing down it's "meaning" in a neat explanation. After reading the play and the included essays in this Signet edition, I still had the strong feeling that there was much more to be explored.
That is not to say that this edition is sub-par. The introduction by the editor, Robert Langbaum, was the most valuable of the essays to me. It very effectively and concisely outlines the major themes of the play and sketches the traits of the main characters. It was very helpful in preparing me to recognize important elements of the drama.
The footnotes are excellent. Overall I felt I was given a clear understanding of what was being said, as well as indispensable help in identifying puns and allusions, with their specific applications to the story.
The play, on its most important level seemed to me to represent the culmination of realization of a mature, intelligent man as to what he can know and control both about himself and the world around him. To my mind, this play, which is ostensibly about a magician, who through his powers sets right many long-standing wrongs, is a timeless classic which is actually about achieving a personal equilibrium in the world. That is my opinion, which weighs about as much as a grain of sand when compared to everything eminent scholars have written about it.
After the play itself, readers are provided with some evident sources of Shakespeare's inspiration for the setting as well as certain of the ideas found in the play. Accounts of a shipwreck in the Bermudas, and excerpts from an essay by Montaigne as well as from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" show that these sources made a very recognizable contribution to Shakespeare's drama, but in more of a supportive than integral way. Montaigne's concept of a natural Utopia and Ovid's imagery of metamorphoses in nature, compelled by sorcery, provided the germs of ideas which Shakespeare used his characters to play off of.
The five critical essays which follow are all useful, but I don't feel that any of them are penetrating or comprehensive enough to really satisfy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay deals mostly with Shakespeare's imaginative use of stylistic devices which make the most of the story in a vivid and imaginative manner. The titles of the remaining four essays reveal the diverse emphases which different critics place on the play:
"The Tragic Pattern: 'The Tempest'" by E.M.W. Tillyard
"'The Tempest' and the Ancient Comic Tradition" by Bernard Knox
"The Mirror of Analogy: 'The Tempest'" by Reuben A. Brower
"'The Tempest' on the Stage" excerpt by David William
A point of view that I personally found more intriguing than any of these is the psychological analysis given by W.H. Auden in the essay "Balaam and his Ass" in his collection of critical essays, "The Dyer's Hand", in which he looks at separate characters, such as Prospero and Caliban, as though they were different manifestations of psychological aspects of one personality. Prospero represents the highest level of consciousness, tempered by reason and in control of the lesser elements of his nature. These lesser elements seem to terminate in Caliban, who is totally a creature of nature, and can never be taught restraint for a greater good, but must always be coerced into acceptable behavior.
But the almost innumerable attempts to define "The Tempest" show that it is likely futile to try and definitively label or explain it. That is not all bad. It leaves room for the individual to assimilate and adapt a powerful, poetic work to his own specific perception of the world.
Excellent activity based edition February 1, 2007
Bruno
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The Tempest is rightly regarded as being one of the Bard's greatest works, containing some of his deepest thoughts on the nature of power and the relationship between rational man as controller of nature, and the animal man always to be at the mercy of the passions both of himself, others, and the world around him. In fact, this play could be thought of as representing Shakespeare's final and definitive statement on topics that he had explored throughout his cannon. But profound as the philosophy is, and despite the beauty of the poetry and the many magical elements contained within the play, the fact is that as far as the average attention lacking teenager is concerned, not a lot happens. This is why this Cambridge schools edition scores over most others. It is almost entirely activity focused, the expressed aim being to 'bring the play to life'. With at least one suggested activity beside each page of Shakespeare's text (as well as a decent amount of background notes and interpretation), every teacher armed with this book should be able to enthuse his charges with the very real relevance of this play to the world which we have bequeathed them.
 Wonderful play, but no line numbers in Dover Thrift Edition. February 1, 2007
Gavin Richardson (Jackson, TN)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Of course Shakespeare's TEMPEST is an enchanting--and enchanted--play, but my comments here concern the DOVER THRIFT EDITION of the play. Dover is to be commended for making texts such as these affordable for readers on a budget. However, students and teachers alike should note that the Dover edition does not supply line numbers. Students who are considering this text for a class and may have to write about it will not be able to cite specific line numbers as is convention (Act.scene.lines; e.g., 3.1.34-47). Professors and teachers should also be aware of this limitation and weigh it against the affordability of this text.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
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