Revisiting the Tempest ─ The Capacity to Signify

In critical history, Shakespeare's The Tempest has been interpreted as a reticent play, a fascinating and yet mysterious blend of magic and verisimilitude, narrative and drama, spectacle and meditation on death. The Tempest seems to raise fundamental issues without ever exhausting them, it captures and appropriates existing motifs and modes, and allows for later appropriations and re-mediations. Is its signifying potential still alive in the third millennium? Does it still speak to us? Revisiting The Tempest aims to explore that potential and examine the play's more 'intractable material' as a fertile source of significance.

The essays that make up this collection range from investigations of the play's position within the European early modern dramatic heritage to its 'domestic' re-writings and/or adaptations in diverse theatrical contexts and media, while also interrogating the play's own resistance to interpretation. Rather than providing new meanings, Revisiting The Tempest explores how this drama makes meaning and reanimates it through time.

Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at Verona University, Italy. She has written extensively on early modern literary culture with special attention to William Shakespeare and John Donne, literature and the visual arts in early twentieth century, textual performance and translation for the theatre. Her recent editions and translations into Italian include John Donne's major poems (with Alessandro Serpieri, 2009) and Romeo and Juliet (2012).

Lisanna Calvi is Lecturer of English Literature at Verona University, Italy. Her main research interests focus on Restoration and early modern drama and literary culture. She wrote a book on Restoration tragedy (2005) and on James II's devotional writings (2009). In 2012, she edited and translated into Italian two early modern female autobiographies.