"Introduction"

This introduction concentrates on how the play’s complexity and contradictions, its semantic, structural, stylistic, poetical and ideological density raise questions without offering final answers, thus making meaning opaque on several levels. The lack of soliloquies does not help make sense of what Prospero really thinks, and lack of narrative coherence does not clarify what is supposed to have truly happened in the past. Dramaturgically, the plot shows a dissonant interlacing of narrative and dramatic modes with a huge display of discursive rhetoric counterpointing massive spectacular effects: why such extreme exhibition of voco-visual possibilities? Does this opacity invest them with indirect signifying power? While offering an overview of recent criticism, this introduction points out how The Tempest's reticence and 'incompletness' allow for ever new ways to re-signify and re-mediated its own story.