Unsettling The Tempest

Abstract

1 he Tempest’s link to the Americas reaches back to its initial publication. The frontispiece to the play in the 1623 First Folio featured a woodcut of t an indigenous spearfisher, likely drawn from Theodor De Bry’s illustrations to Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report (1588). The storied connection betweenThe Tempest and theNewWorld has endured throughmany criticalmovements in the field.While early historical scholars insisted on an archival relationship to theNewWorld, citingWilliamStrachey’sTrueRepertory of theWrack (afirsthand account of the Sea Venture’s 1609 wreck off the Bermudas) as an influence on the play’s opening shipwreck, postcolonial and New Historicist scholars have preferred to emphasize a more thematic connection to American settlement, seeing in Prospero’s subjugation of the island’s native inhabitants a fable for imperial conquest.More recently, however, scholars have begun to contest the idea that The