The Tempest: The New Oxford Shakespeare

’How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!’

Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare’s genius as a poetic dramatist found its fullest expression. Significantly, it was placed first when published in the First Folio of 1623, and is now generally seen as the playwright’s most penetrating statement about his art.

The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare’s works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare’s work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare’s work.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

William Shakespeare

Lauren Working is a lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of York. Her research explores how English colonialism influenced taste and politics in seventeenth-century London. Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (2020), jointly won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2021. She has also published on topics including travel and transculturality, female interests in empire, and the colonial gaze in cavalier verse. Her work with museums has led to collaborative projects on shipwrecked porcelain and contemporary poetry, still life painting, and global networks at Oxford and the Inns of Court. She is a consultant for the London National Portrait Gallery and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.

Rory Loughlane is Reader in Early Modern Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent. He is an award-winning scholar of early modern textual studies, authorship, intellectual history, theatre history, and literary criticism. He is an Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare and co-authored with Gary Taylor a book-length study about ’The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s works’ and, in a series of attribution studies, he first identified Thomas Middleton as adapter of All’s Well That Ends Well.