Where is William Shakespeare? The Tempest between both sides of the ocean

Abstract

The Tempest of Shakespeare belongs together with The Winter’s Tale (1611) and Henry VIII (1612) to the very last writings of the English playwright, and critics say it is even the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone; furthermore it is accepted that this play, supposed to be written in 1610-1611, just six years before the death of the author in 1616, is amidst the most difficult works of Shakespeare, because of its scenic complexity, its richness of meaning and the overlapping on it of supernatural and (ante literam) “magical realism”, together with geopolitical, ethical and philosophical dimensions. Among the most crucial philosophical points here is the incontestable fact that certain sentences of the play are literally taken from the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, and precisely from Des Cannibales, which is the chapter XXX of the Essays (1562), giving a palimpsest which would be familiar in nowadays “intertextuality”. We try here to see The Tempest of Shakespeare through its dissemination of meaning in translations and resemantisations, understanding this play as a symbol of the encounter and misencounter with the Other, and seeing its effects in connection with the problem of Latin-American and European difference and identity, in the frame both of philosophy of history and of material anthropology of history. Through this constellation of meaning we try to show how the meanings cross the ocean since Renan’s Caliban (1878) to Dario’s Caliban (1898) and to Rodo’s Ariel (1900) from Europe to Latin America and return.