ABSTRACT
Walter Cohen has recently noted Mary Shelley’s perceptive reading of the political implications of romance and has proposed a revised utopian reading of The Tempest. Continuing that utopian tradition, Shelley found in The Tempest a central instance of the utopian power in poetry which ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’. Terry Eagleton sees Shakespeare as subordinating language, as signified by Ariel, to a conservative discourse of the body: the plays ‘value social order and stability’, and in seeking an organic unity of body and language The Tempest propagates a ‘ridiculously sanguine ideology of Nature’. If the term ‘humanism’ in current discourse tends to connote an abstract resistance to the materiality of language, then Renaissance humanism was a very different phenomenon. But The Tempest is a hard-headed play, rigorous in following through its own logic once the initial supernatural postulates are granted.
