ABSTRACT
Contestation over The Tempest’s political valence seemed to reach an apogee around its 400th birthday, as competing appropriations proliferated. In the wake of the global rebellions marked by such mass events as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, the liberatory version again ascended. In the fallout of the economic crisis, the play’s preoccupation with wreckage continued to appeal, and the disintegrative mode retained a strong presence. Liberatory impulses could be seen in innovative artistic re-imaginings, and also eruptions of protest onto the stage itself, while establishment co-optation played out in neoliberal multiculturalist appropriations. The contradictions intensified around an event that drew the largest global audience of any Tempest-related affair in history: the opening ceremony of the summer Olympic Games held in London in 2012. The ‘cultural olympiad’ both invoked and tamed the history of anti-capitalist Tempests, and simultaneously celebrated and undercut disability rights. While the intensity of performances, references, and appropriations has died down in subsequent years, there is no sign that the play’s allusive resonance for global capitalism is diminishing.
