'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!'

Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare's genius as a poetic dramatist found its fullest expression. Significantly, it was placed first when published in the First Folio of 1623, and is now generally seen as the playwright's most penetrating statement about his art.

The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare's work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare's work.

The eBook offers a mobile experience and convenient access along with functionality tools and navigation features: Find the eBook on VitalSource.

Features

• Incorporates a wide range of approaches to shed light on the text's connections to colonialism and colonial resistance
• Provides a 'deep context' approach that uses objects, manuscripts, and rare books to reconstruct the world of the play in Shakespeare's time and introduces readers to new perspectives on the play
• Explores The Tempest's Jacobean context while examining how subsequent interpretations have explored gender, resistance, and illusion in new ways
• Combines fresh, new scholarship from leading researchers with authoritative texts and comprehensive notes in order to offer readers a complete guide to Shakespeare
• Uses the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare's work
• Presented in modern spelling and punctuation with accessible critical apparatus to best aid understanding of the plays and poems

ABOUT THE SERIES

For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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

William Shakespeare

Edited by Lauren Working, Lecturer in Early Modern Studies, University of York, Rory Loughnane, University of Kent, and Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Oxford

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.