The Tempest (review)

Volumes in the New Cambridge Shakespeare used to open with a preface by the original general editor (Philip Brockbank) explaining that editions in the series would be "more attentive than some earlier editions have been to the realisation of the plays on the stage. . . ." It would have been worth reviving this claim for David Lindley's edition of The Tempest: it is not only more attentive to matters of staging than all earlier editions of the play but delivers more fully on Brockbank's promise than any other volume in the series. It is, however, less attentive than competing editions to some of the issues that have made the play one of the most hotly contested texts in the literary canon.

Lindley foregrounds the play's "dramatic form, stagecraft, and use of music and spectacle" (i). These features, he suggests, are central to what makes it "one of Shakespeare's most suggestive, yet most elusive plays" (i): they help us to account for the surprisingly experimental quality of the play that was probably Shakespeare's last solo effort, and for the uniquely malleable nature of its plot and themes. If these qualities are now associated primarily with the radical readings and rewritings that have emerged from the play's postcolonial travels, they were anticipated by its early movements between the royal court and the private and public theaters, by a series of Restoration refits that displaced the original text for several centuries, by a long tradition of theatrical burlesques and travesties, and by the almost universal tendency (in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century staging) to replace the politically-charged shipwreck of the opening scene with symbolic gestures and atmospheric music.

Such histories, and the issues they raise, are usually presented in a chronological stage history at the end of the introduction. Lindley refuses to separate theatrical from other critical concerns: the decisions of directors and the insights of actors frame or illustrate virtually all of the topics he surveys, and no less than fifty-one of the introduction's eighty-three pages describe at least one production of the play. Lindley builds impressively on the archive presented in Christine Dymkowski's Shakespeare in Production edition,¹ drawing on historic documents and photographs (including a poster for an 1865 production at the Leeds Royal Amphitheatre, promising "Magnificent Scenery, Novel Machinery, Enchanting Music, Immense Cast, and the GREAT STORM AT SEA," and a glimpse of G. Wilson Knight playing an outlandish Caliban in a 1938 student production in Toronto), interviews with actors (especially those involved in Jude Kelly's 1999 production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse), and Lindley's own experience playing Miranda in a 1959 production at the Wolverhampton Grammar School—initiating his more than forty years of work on the play as a student, teacher, scholar, and editor.

Lindley's editorial principles are clear and consistent; and in his notes, his collations, and his exemplary "Textual analysis" he offers some persuasive interventions (particularly concerning the notoriously garbled songs, where his expertise as an interpreter of early music has served him—and us—well) and more information than usual concerning spelling and punctuation in the Folio text. While Lindley's playtext is readable and reliable, his own text contains some surprising errors: Rowe's eighteenth-century editions of the play are dated 1609 and 1614 (xiii), Sebastian is called "Ebastian" in a section title (54), and several other names suffer a sea change (Octave Mannoni becomes "Oscar" [38]; Juliet Dusinberre is called "Judith" [75]; and between pages 55 and 73 Simon Palfrey has been transformed into "Stephen"). It would be reading too much into these slips to point out that several involve postcolonial and feminist critics; but, notwithstanding Lindley's preference for "Prospero's wife" (over "wise") and his excellent discussion of authority and power in the play, this edition takes the spotlight off the political concerns emphasized in the scholarly editions of the 1980s and '90s.

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