The Tempest

"'Informative, thought-provoking and humane.' - Dr Colin Burrow, University of Oxford 'Footnotes at the bottom of each page gloss unfamiliar items of vocabulary, paraphrase tricky meanings and uncover bawdy puns. There is a universe to be found in these annotations: the Renaissance world of power and fate, sex and death, language and philosophy.' - Times Educational Supplement"

SIR JONATHAN BATE is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Warwick, UK, and the editor of The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. He has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge, and a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A prominent critic, award-winning biographer and broadcaster, he is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador), which was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as "the best modern book on Shakespeare." In June 2006 he was awarded a CBE by HM The Queen 'for services to Higher Education'. ERIC RASMUSSEN is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, USA, and the Textual Editor of The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama and has edited volumes in both the Arden Shakespeare and Oxford World's Classics series. He is the General Textual Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project - one of the most visited Shakespeare websites in the world. For over nine years he has written the annual review of editions and textual studies for the Shakespeare Survey.

Introduction to The Tempest.- Introduction to the Text.- Key Facts.- The Tempest.- Textual Notes.- Second Quarto passages that do not appear in the Folio.- Scene-by-scene Analysis.- The Tempest in Performance: the RSC and Beyond.- Four Centuries of The Tempest: An Overview.- At the RSC.- The Director's Cut: interviews with Peter Brook, Sam Mendes, Rupert Goold.- Shakespeare's Career in the Theatre.- Shakespeare's Works: a Conjectural Chronology.- Further Reading