ABSTRACT
Every adaptation or recasting of a literary text is at least implicitly a reinterpretation or repositioning of that text in a new cultural formation. My example here will be primarily W.H. Auden’s “Commentary” on The Tempest, The Sea and the Mirror, written between 1942 and 1944 1 and published in the volume For the Time Being (1944), and the cultural formation is what might be called “late Anglo-American Modernism.” While I focus on Auden’s work, I want also to show how the preoccupations of that work are more generalized in related Modernist works, and, therefore, I will look briefly at Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941). Finally, to accentuate certain contrasts, I want to consider another recasting of The Tempest by a rough contemporary of Auden’s and Woolf’s—Michael Tippet, who also shared the same intellectual and social milieu but who composed a much different work at a much later date, an opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970.
