ABSTRACT
The paradoxical conditions of early capitalism gave rise to The Tempest. The century of change and revolution saw England transform from a second-class power into the world’s dominant empire. The Tudor and Stuart state balanced between the old feudal lords and the rising capitalists; new global forces led to the transatlantic slave trade and plantation system; the role of women was subject to profound transformations as not only the conditions of production but also of social reproduction changed; enlightenment thought generated entirely new world views and reconfigured notions of human subjectivity. In this era of global transformation, immense creative energy blasted open the bedrock of feudalism, but violent processes of dispossession and exploitation generated new fault lines of intersectional oppression around race, gender, sexuality, and disability. The push and pull of old and new shaped Shakespeare’s biography and the plays that were preserved in the Folios. Looking to sources both classical (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid) and contemporary (‘ripped from the headline’ stories such as the wreck of the Sea Venture), and at the heart of the vibrant and novel business of theatre, The Tempest epitomized these dizzying and contradictory historical developments.
