Navigating Time: Memories of Mediterranean Worlds in The Tempest

As Frank Kermode has aptly summarised, The Tempest starts where other romances end (2000, 286), and this demands long expositions and recapitulations. Narratives articulate memories and give them new shapes. The Tempest accommodates within its romance frame memories of the ancient past as well as of contemporary Mediterranean models and archetypes. It develops through a continuous display of theatrical spectacle and narrative rhetoric, which, while inhibiting dramatic action, parallels, and competes with, visual gesture and pageantry. This essay concentrates on the role of memory within the play and in the dynamic relation with other memories of the Mediterranean past. Special attention is devoted to Prospero’s painful memorising in relation to Aeneas’ own woeful story-telling in book 2 of the Aeneid, and questions are raised on the role of sources and their positions in relation to reception stances. By exploring narrative intricacies at an intertextual level as well as within the play itself, the essay offers a reflection on human capacity to make sense of time and memory in un unstable world of deluding appearances.