ABSTRACT

In the final moments of The Tempest, Prospero boasts that he will "bring forth a wonder". This chapter explains the much-discussed question of The Tempest as a colonial play. It suggests that a key point of intersection between the play and colonial discourse lies in its relationship to New World promotional literature, which transports the English ideology of cultivation overseas. Within this new context agricultural labor emerges as essential to the success of the plantation. The authors of firsthand accounts of English travel and plantation draw on a language of good husbandry and estate management in envisioning and promoting colonialism. They present a fantasy of land that is unclaimed, arable, and so fertile that it yields bounty even without hard labor, a vision the author calls "marvellous husbandry." Functionally, Prospero acts as lord of the island, which is interpreted at times as either a kind of country estate or as a foreign land inhabited by strange beings.