Shakespeare Quarterly

Challenges to The Tempest's reliance on William Strachey's 1610 True Reportory (first published in 1625) as an inspiration and a source have proliferated in the past fifteen years. Those challenges were once confined to anti-Stratfordian publications but now appear increasingly in mainstream journals, despite the revisionists' serious distortions of the texts and contexts they attempt to overturn. By contrast, this essay argues that the evidence is very strong that Strachey's letter circulated in manuscript, in two or more copies. A comparison of True Reportory to The Tempest strongly suggests that the play has important congruities with the narrative, as it does with many other, mostly European-centered, texts. The play's indebtedness to Strachey confirms that the traditional dating of The Tempest's composition to 1610–11, initially proposed by Edmond Malone and seconded by Morton Luce, remains correct.

Shakespeare studies have avoided the idea of "the aesthetic," but a return to aesthetics may now be on the critical agenda. This essay argues that "impure aesthetics"—borrowing from Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin—is a promising form for the revival to take. Shakespeare himself seems to share some of the ideas of impure aesthetics, especially in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play, one of Shakespeare's fullest explorations of aesthetic ideas, is thus a meta-aesthetic drama, as well as a development of the genre of comedy to unprecedented levels of aesthetic complexity and self-reflection. The play models the relation between the aesthetic and the world in the contrasts between the play's fairy and human realms; Titania and Oberon embody important aspects of the play's aestheticizing strategy by figuring the potential harmony between the human and the natural, while displaying human foibles that disorganize the natural world. Bottom's Dream is another figural representation of the relation of the aesthetic to the social and one that (like the play-within-the-play) highlights the material and bodily bases of art's representation of the ethereal and the spiritual.

Drama lives for us today on computer, television, telephone, and movie screens; on the stages of theaters large and small; and between the pages of books. Yet approaching dramatic performance depends on recognizing the crucial impact of the rise of print on our understanding of plays and playing in the West, the ways the assimilation of dramatic writing to the canons of print culture create a set of expectations, attitudes, and practices for regarding drama on both sides of the frontier between text and performance. This article traces the ways a specific performance—the 2007 Wooster Group Hamlet—focuses our attention on the question of the drama's dual identity. Reenacting the John Gielgud-Richard Burton film Hamlet, the production marks out a genealogy of Hamlet's remediation; much as the Wooster Group production blends live and digitally reproduced performance, Burton's 1964 "Theatrofilm with Electronovision" asserted a cognate technological transformation in the status of stage performance in the enthusiastic rhetoric of cold war futurism. But rather than locating its present work as dependent on this apparently authorizing text, the Wooster Group Hamlet urges an alternative perspective, in which new technologies of enactment necessarily reshape the archive of performance.