The Tempest

Lauren Working is a lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of York. Her research explores how English colonialism influenced taste and politics in seventeenth-century London. Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (2020), jointly won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize in 2021. She has also published on topics including travel and transculturality, female interests in empire, and the colonial gaze in cavalier verse. Her work with museums has led to collaborative projects on shipwrecked porcelain and contemporary poetry, still life painting, and global networks at Oxford and the Inns of Court. She is a consultant for the London National Portrait Gallery and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author or editor of ten books and has published widely on Shakespeare. For the New Oxford Shakespeare, he has edited more than ten of Shakespeare's plays. He is a Series Editor of Studies in Early Modern Authorship (Routledge) and Shakespeare and Text (Cambridge UP), and a General Editor of The Revels Plays series (Manchester UP) and the forthcoming Oxford Marlowe edition.

This edition of The Tempest excellently leverages footnotes to provide greater context to the phrases used during this era. For instance, Shakespeare uses the phrase "dead Indian" (II.ii.30), which the footnote to the line clarifies as "a possible allusion to actual exhibitions of Indigenous Americans in London" during the period (p. 99n). Initially, this phrase may seem obscure, even offensive; the note provides valuable context, shedding light on the colonial mindset of the era in which the play was written. These thoughtful footnotes, along with a comprehensive introduction and preface, greatly enhance the accessibility of this edition of the text for modern readers-particularly those who might otherwise be hesitant to read Shakespearean drama.

• General Editors' Preface to The New Oxford Shakespeare Introduction Note on the Text Select Bibliography A Chronology of William Shakespeare THE TEMPEST