The Tempest to 1756

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shakespeare’s plays were often read and performed in ‘altered’ versions. This chapter explores the characteristics and rationale of the Davenant and Dryden adaptation of The Tempest and others up to 1756. The aim is to explore the uses to which The Tempest was put in the construction of ‘Shakespeare’s originality’ during a period of change in theatrical culture, scholarship, editing, and aesthetics, over the course of which the play was believed to have been written without sources. By investigating the drama’s debts to the writings of Virgil, Montaigne, and William Strachey, and also to ideas about empire, colonization, and ecology, this chapter underlines the extent to which this belief was mistaken while setting up an analysis of the play’s relationship with agricultural science and ecological anxiety—both factors that complicate the image of Shakespeare as a poet of Nature.