Nature's artfulness in Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1667)

Abstract

First staged in 1667, John Dryden and William Davenant's The Tempest was a London hit. As its Shakespearean hypotext, this play possesses a metatheatrical quality and aims at uncovering rather than enhancing the fictionality of stage action. Delight comes from stage machinery but also from the characterisation of Prospero's two daughters and foster son. Their naive approach to life is in fact artificially natural and deliberately exposes the mechanisms of poetic and stage art. The article explores this contrast also showing how it offers both a meditation on poetic creation and a female gendered weapon against Prospero's failing role and rhetoric.