The Tempest: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

“Presenting an utterly reliable text, together with a rich collection of social, historical, and performance-based materials, this edition illuminates our understanding of the play as it has been interpreted traditionally, while simultaneously pointing the way to innovative, revisionist readings for the future.”
―S. P. Cerasano, Colgate University

“The Norton Critical Tempest is a truly wonderful resource: it illuminates Shakespeare’s most open-ended play with a wealth of richly suggestive contextual materials―on magic, on human perfectibility, on travel and alien worlds, on colonial domination, on religion and politics. Providing a well-selected sampling of interpretive criticism and artistic rewritings, the edition will inspire students to become researchers and re-creators themselves as they bring these texts into conversation with Shakespeare’s magical and enigmatic creation.”
―Lynne Magnusson, University of Toronto

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• The First Folio (1623) text, accompanied by the editors’ preface and detailed explanatory annotations.
• A rich collection of source materials by Ovid, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, King James I, Michel de Montaigne, and others centered on the play’s major themes of magic, witchcraft, politics, religion, geography, and travel.
• Seventeen wide-ranging scholarly essays, seven of them new to the Second Edition.
• Nineteen rescriptings that speak to The Tempest’s enduring inspiration and provocation for writers from Thomas Heywood and Percy Bysshe Shelley to Aimé Césaire and Ted Hughes.
• A Selected Bibliography.

About the Series

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format―annotated text, contexts, and criticism―helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.