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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 play's 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 emphasises 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 Tempest's lively and varied afterlife both within and beyond the classroom.'Barbara Fuchs, University of Washington, Seattle, Shakespeare Quarterly
Report
'A valuable new edition of the play...Extensive, up-to-date critical inroduction that incorporates recent and even forthcoming scholarship...The introduction provides a formidable range of materials for teachers, performers, and directors. The section on "The afterlife" of the text is especially strong, with a comprehensive survey of both stage and film productions, particularly valuable is this section's geographical breadth...The notes to the text itself are copious and replete with useful information, from staging possibilities to related literary usages. They also refer frequently to previous editions, providing a virtual map of the text's editorial history. The notes...are a model of thorough scholarship.' Shakespeare Quarterly
