ABSTRACT
The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s final solo work, is one of his most popular plays. It continues to inspire artists of every genre. Shakespearean scholars seem desperate to locate this island on a cartographer’s map; it is somewhere between Naples and Tunis, yet they attempt to travel to the exotic locales of Bermuda, the New World, Africa, or even Ireland. Shakespeare introduces a masque. Masques were performed in honour of royal marriages and seemed to have usurped the religious rituals of weddings. Perhaps during the Renaissance in England, the power of the church was not stable enough to evoke the seriousness of marriage and for political and social reasons the masque bestowed legitimacy on the union from not only God but the gods of old as well. The marriage masque marks the beginning of Miranda as a sexual woman. In The Tempest, this tradition—for the first and only time—is preserved.
