William Shakespeare The Tempest and Macbeth

The Tempest presents some of Shakespeare’s most insightful meditations on the cycle of life―ending and beginning, death and regeneration, bondage and freedom. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the First Folio text and is accompanied by explanatory annotations.

“Sources and Contexts” offers a rich collection of documents on the play’s central themes―magic and witchcraft, politics and religion, geography and travel. Writers include Ovid, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gabriel Naudé, Michel de Montaigne, and William Strachey.

“Criticism” collects eighteen responses to The Tempest, from John Dryden and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stephen Orgel and Leah Marcus. “Rewritings and Appropriations” includes creative reactions to The Tempest, by playwrights, filmmakers, and poets, among them H.D., Peter Greenaway, and Ted Hughes.

Sources and Contexts” provides readers with an understanding of Macbeth’s origins in earlier texts, specifically the works of the Roman playwright Seneca, the Tudor historian Raphael Holinshed, and the medieval drama The Slaughter of the Innocents and the Death of Herod. Contexts for the play include contemporary debates on predestination versus free will (Martin Luther versus Erasmus), witchcraft as fiction or fact (Reginald Scott versus King James I), the ethics of regicide (an Elizabethan homily versus Jan de Mariana, S.J.), and the ethics of equivocation (Henry Garnet, S.J., versus―new to the Second Edition―Sir Edward Coke).