Prospero's Planet. Critical Quandaries around Shakespeare's Last Play

Stormy things do come and go, but Shakespeare's last tribute to human perfidy and awe kept coming back for the past four centuries. Andrei Zlatescu charts off the enigmatic Tempest's interpretations in an orderly, solid and original afterplay, itself staged so as to guide the perplexed, contain the wild and coddle the lover of intempestive festivities. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu The rightful Duke of Milan does not belong to the time of his determinate condition as a shipwrecked aristocrat. By recourse to magic, Prospero masters the future, reversing his fate and staging an ultimate revenge against his usurpers, Sebastian and Antonio. An anti-cathartic play, whose meaning has been disputed for centuries by English culture's loftiest minds, The Tempest can be read as a dramatized manual of imperial politics - one that inaugurates the conventions of modern propaganda, where alternative futures are channeled through theatricalized politics. Andrei Zlatescu