ABSTRACT
Pagan Halloween marking the end summer and the onset of winter, Christian Hallowmas inaugurating the Christmas season, ceremonial dramatics typified by court masques at Epiphany and Candlemas all refer in their distinctive ways to adjustments in mental perspective that occur as human imagination and desire annually confront winter, the season of death. To interpret The Tempest as an anatomy of this pervasive seasonal mentality—that is the project of this essay—is to employ criticism as a bridge between the profound emotions the play arouses and our comprehension of them. Such explication of The Tempest’s seasonal ceremonial status, far from trivializing the play by confining it to a single occasion, describes broad currents of meaning that account for its enduring power even among audiences in whom modernity has dimmed the awareness of what matters about the seasons. Although the present study has its inevitable archaeological features, its justification is to lend intellectual substance to the feeling, nurtured by many and for long, that this play is among Shakespeare’s most profound—which is to say, one of the highest products of human endeavor.
