Shakespeare and the Atlantic World
Authors: McInnis David 
Published: August 2014

Shakespeare’s career as a playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s men, later the King’s men, coincided almost exactly with England’s first attempts at establishing a colonial presence in the New World of the Americas. In 1585, shortly before the young Shakespeare is thought to have arrived in London, Sir Walter Ralegh’s first expedition across the Atlantic attempted to settle on Roanoke Island, a venture that proved ultimately to be doomed. Various subsequent attempts were made by Ralegh and others, and in 1607 the first lasting settlement was established at Jamestown, Virginia. News of the English colonial exploits reached home via a number of publications, but Shakespeare scholarship has taken the most interest in the miraculous survival of Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Summers, and others aboard the ship The Sea Venture, which was wrecked off Bermuda in 1609. New ships were built by the crew, who eventually made it safely to the mainland. These events and others reported in the Virginia Company’s official publication, A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia (1609); Sylvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Ile of Divels (1610); A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony in Virginia (1610); and William Strachey’s famous letter, A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight (15 July 1610, published in Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625) are thought to have influenced Shakespeare as he wrote The Tempest (1610–1611). Though none of these can be considered a complete source, critics have identified numerous points in Shakespeare’s play that appear indebted to these accounts for various details. The island in The Tempest is bordered by Mediterranean geography (Naples and Tunis), but references to a Patagonian god named Setebos, to the “still-vexed Bermudas,” and to dead Indians have encouraged scholars to read the island as symbolically engaged with the Atlantic. These topical references, when yoked to the master-slave power dynamics embodied in the figures of Prospero and his servants Caliban and Ariel, have generated numerous postcolonial readings of Shakespeare’s play. Such readings turn on questions of race, psychology, memory, historical contexts, and discursive strategies of description and of control. Scholarship concerned with The Tempest and the New World was especially prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, although even then there were a number of vocal opponents who critiqued the New Historicist and postcolonial approaches and argued forcefully for the reorientation of the play to the Mediterranean (a focus that now dominates criticism of that play). This article surveys the key contributions to these fields, beginning with examples of traditional “source hunting” and vocal opposition to the possibility of New World Sources. A variety of critics have attended to the more aesthetic and epistemological issues pertaining to The Tempest’s possible New World interests (see Depiction of the New World), while a related group of critics read the New World engagement as more ambivalent (at best), and more closely tied to the Old World (see New World/Old World). Postcolonial Readings focuses on those critics who do view the play as an allegory of colonial relations (in the Americas or in Ireland), including psychological, historicist, and discursive approaches. At the heart of colonial readings of the play are the representation of Race and Gender. These include historical overviews of Caliban and American Indians from the perspective of the English; considerations of the fundamentally inchoate position occupied by Caliban, which renders him available to a variety of interpretations; and psychological readings of the lack of women in the play. Despite disagreements about the fundamental location and significance of the island in The Tempest, critics are invariably drawn to the representation of Language, Knowledge, and Memory in the play. The growing shift away from postcolonial readings of the play is represented here by those critics who explore the economic, trade, and legal contexts (see Economics, Trade, and Law), as well as the environmental contexts of 17th-century voyaging (Land and Sea). The Tempest’s afterlife is considered in The Tempest’s Adaptations and Appropriations; however, critics have largely conformed to the postcolonial readings (some notable exceptions, including the science fiction film, Forbidden Planet, are not covered here). Finally, in the Atlantic without The Tempest, the article concludes with a consideration of Shakespeare’s engagement with the Atlantic world beyond the confines of this most celebrated of cases.