ABSTRACT
During the period leading up to, during, and following England’s early bourgeois revolution, the play fell out of favor and was usurped by The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, co-authored by William Davenant and John Dryden. This 1667 play is the prototype of the integrative Tempest: in order to consolidate a conservative worldview, it had to engage in full-scale dismantling and reconstruction, leading to a different work entirely. In the Romantic period, dubbed the ‘Age of Revolution’ by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, Shakespeare’s play exerted a powerful aura of attraction for English writers and artists. They ushered in a largely disintegrative reading that became a point of reference in the ensuing reception history. The Victorian establishment shifted toward an overwhelmingly integrative Tempest—one that has also had a lasting influence. While The Tempest was not a great favorite on the Victorian stage, it was yoked into the service of nationalism, imperialism, and racism, but the era also produced an emancipatory version, one that connected back to the Romantic and forward to the modern critique of capitalism.
