ABSTRACT
Shakespeare did not write city comedies in the manner of, for example, Jonson with Everyman In, Everyman Out, Epicoene, The Alchemist or Bartholomew Fair, or Middleton so brilliantly with A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and half a dozen others. Modern attempts to make the island's monster Caliban represent the native Caribbean or American, exploited and punished by the wicked colonizer Prospero, the type of the sadistic absolute ruler of black slaves, have led to The Tempest becoming in some quarters 'Shakespeare's American play'. There is no escaping Blackfriars and the City of London. That theatre was a City public theatre and the only one. City financiers as well as courtiers attended it. It clearly had, in 1611, a remarkable company. Though Shakespeare's first poems are dedicated to Southampton, there is not a scrap of evidence that they ever met, or even corresponded.
