In this forceful study, Helen C. Scott situates The Tempest within Marxist analyses of the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital, which she suggests help explain the play’s continued and particular resonance. The ‘storm’ of the title refers both to Shakespeare’s Tempest hurtling through time, and to Walter Benjamin’s concept of history as a succession of violent catastrophes. Scott begins with an account of the global processes of dispossession—of the peasantry and indigenous populations—accompanying the emergence of capitalism, which generated new class relationships, new understandings of human subjectivity, and new forms of oppression around race, gender, and disability. Developing a detailed reading of the play at its moment of production in the business of theatre in 1611, Scott then moves gracefully through the global reception history, showing how its central thematic concerns and figurative patterns bespeak the upheavals and dispossessions of successive stages of capitalist development. Paying particular attention to moments of social crisis, and unearthing a radical political tradition, Scott follows the play from its hostile takeover in the Restoration, through its revival by the Romantics, and consolidation and contestation in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century transatlantic modernism generated an acutely dystopic Tempest, then during the global transformations of the 1960s postcolonial writers permanently associated it with decolonization. At century’s end the play became a vehicle for exploring intersectional oppression, and the remarkable ‘Sycorax school’ featured iconoclastic readings by writers such as Abena Busia, May Joseph, and Sylvia Wynter. Turning to both popular culture and high-profile stage productions in the twenty-first century, Scott explores the ramifications and figurative potential of Shakespeare's Tempest for global social and ecological crises today. Sensitive to the play’s original concerns and informed by recent scholarship on performance and reception history as well as disability studies, Scott’s moving analysis impels readers towards a fresh understanding of sea-change and metamorphosis as potent symbols for the literal and figurative tempests of capitalism’s old age now threatening ‘the great globe itself.’

"Shakespeare's Tempest attracted countless anti-colonial writers during the period of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and continues to offer rich material for writers and directors interested in the intimate and varied connections between war and empire. In her forceful study, Helen Scott situates The Tempest within Marxist analyses of the early modern process of 'primitive accumulation' of capital, which she suggests offer an explanation for the play's continued resonance at the turn of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the rise of 'postcolonial Shakespeares' followed by a reading of the play at its moment of production in 1611, Scott moves gracefully through more than two centuries of theatrical productions and literary appropriations to map the way the central thematic concerns and figurative patterns of the play bespeak the upheavals and dispossessions that accompanied the birth and growth of capitalism. She traces colonial interpretations of the play from Edmond Malone's 1803 reading to Beerbohm Tree's staging at the end of the nineteenth century, through Octave Mannoni's 1948 Prospero and Caliban and Philip Mason's 1962 'Prospero's Magic,' to the ascendency of postcolonial criticism in the 1980s. The play's significance during the era of national libration struggles emerges in Scott's readings of works by Aimé Cesaire, George Lamming, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Registering anxieties about imperialism and war in mid-twentieth-century Britain, The Tempest became a vehicle for exploring the intersection of oppression around race, class, gender, and sexuality in works by W. H. Auden, Marina Warner, Derek Jarman, and Philip Osment. Turning to twenty-first century productions, including Rupert Goold's 2006 Royal Shakespeare Company staging and Julie Taymor's 2010 film, Scott explores the ramifications and figurative potential of Shakespeare's play for global culture. Sensitive to the play's original concerns and informed by scholarship on performance history, Scott's moving study impels readers towards a fresh understanding of how the metaphors of sea change and metamorphosis betoken the literal and figurative tempests of capitalism's old age that now threaten 'the great globe itself.'"--Provided by publisher.

"Women, the body and primitive accumulation"--Cover.

This book examines how contemporary global novels by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner have evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. Paying close attention to the interrelations between postcolonial, world, and global literatures, this book argues that postcolonial literary studies cannot account for global crises that exceed the national and anti-colonial. Advocating an interdisciplinary framework informed by a synthesis of materialist literary theory with world-systems theory, combining Fredric Jameson and Georg Lukács with Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, this book examines how global literatures metabolise not only socioeconomic conditions, but also transformations in the world-ecology, and emergent developmental and epochal crises of capitalism.

Annual publication including essays and reviews of new books which deal with Shakespeare and his age

Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest , Coriolanus , The Merchant of Venice , King Lear , and Hamlet .

This engaging book provides detailed in-depth discussion of the various influences that an audience in 1611 would have brought to interpreting 'The Tempest'. How did people think about the world, about God, about sin, about kings, about civilized conduct? Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, parenting and family dynamics, court corruption, class tensions, the concept of tragi-comedy - and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play an unsettling picture of a world attempting to come to terms with capitalism and colonialism while re-addressing the nature of rule.