Abstract

This essay considers Henry James's role as a "critical reader" of Shakespeare as dramatized in his "Introduction to The Tempest" (1907). The "Introduction" is presented as a complex inquiry into the relationship between the human and aesthetic aspects of Shakespeare's identity, within which the playwright's supposed retirement from the stage is seen by James as an "eternal mystery." The essay also attempts to situate the "Introduction" amongst James's contemporaneous work for the prefaces to the New York Edition and his ideas about Shakespearean performance in the English theatre of the late 1890s.

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