This Kindle edition of Shakespeare's late (some think final) play, "The Tempest," is in fact two books in one, both illustrated, both from around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The text of the book has no pretensions to be a scholarly contribution, or an aide to students, or even a guide for would-be actors or directors. It is just an attractive presentation of a one of Shakespeare's most tightly-constructed plays, with a supplement.
Since I just reviewed the "Norton Critical Edition" of the play, with its textual notes, glosses to the text, and selected source-texts and critical essays, I found this a welcome change.
The first of the two is a 1901 illustrated edition, the work of Robert Anning Bell: about eighty full, half, and quarter-page illustrations and page decorations. with the text of the then-current "Cambridge Edition." This is reproduced with some loss; the text combined with pictures is omitted, and a separate digital text provided; half the front end-paper is missing; facing pages no longer face each other. However, the reproduction of the art is crisp and clean. The cover art has been colored, which definitely adds to the clarity. Since the text of "The Tempest" is in unusually good condition, the lack of annotations or glossary is a relatively minor concern. However, unless you've read the play before, having an annotated or glossed edition handy might be useful.
Those curious about the differences between the print and Kindle versions can check using two digitalized copies (in different states of repair, and slightly sepia-toned) on the Library of Congress site (archive.org); search under the illustrator's name, it is a lot easier than sorting through pages of Shakespeare!
Bell's illustrations from time to time remind me of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to Malory's "Morte D'Arthur" and of the Waite-Ryder Tarot deck. The general description of the style as art nouveau, without reference to specific influences, is reasonable. His version of the half-human (we are told) Caliban looks something like a Skrull (old foes of The Fantastic Four, as Marvel fans may recall), and something like a marooned Vulcan (which I don't think needs an explanation yet).
The second part is a set of eight full-page illustrations to the play by the famous illustrator Walter Crane, originally published by Dent in 1894. The Kindle versions of these are supposed to be in high resolution, and they show up crisp and clear on my monitor. What purports to be a separate Kindle edition of these illustrations by Crane was apparently transferred from Project Gutenberg, and, somehow, the art is actually missing -- it just has the selected texts Crane chose to illustrate. (Of course, that version is free, so your only loss will be a little time and frustration.) Crane, best known today for his groundbreaking illustrations for children's books, does a good job with the Shakespearean setting and characters. In his case, I think I see reflections of the Pre-Raphaelites, in particular Burne-Jones -- but an art historian may see it as a matter of period styles. Crane's illustrations also appeared in a 1908 edition by Oliver Smeaton (Henry Holt, New York), and possibly elsewhere.
For those not already familiar with the play, it is one of the few Shakespeare works without a recognizable source for the main plot, although there is documentation for many details in the voyage literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Most of the other parallels which have been suggested are too general to tie to the play, or just too distant. The mysterious magician, his beautiful daughter, the handsome young hero, the magician's attendant spirits -- all the commonplaces of traditional fairytales and romances and of the commedia dell'arte, too. (G. Wilson Knight even found some parallels in the Ming Dynasty novel "Journey to the West," otherwise known as "Monkey," to the relations of Prospero to Ariel and Caliban; see his "The Crown of Life," pages 229-230.)
Of course, this works the other way, as well. For some time I've consider "The Tempest" to be a fore-runner, if not an ancestor, of much genre fantasy. It is all there; the elaborate back-story, the conniving courtiers, the magician's seemingly arbitrary actions, the touchingly naive heroine, and the magical apparatus. Leaving aside the constraints of the stage, and the glorious language, the main difference I can see is that in "The Tempest" there is serious question of whether evil should be punished, or if the evil-doers should be forgiven, and vengeance, and the evils it generates, be forsaken.
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Reviews with images
Binding on the Folger Shakespeare Library edition is terrible
This review is about this particular edition of the text, not the story itself. I love The Tempest -- it's a delightful play.I am a high school English teacher, and we ordered 120 of these for our freshmen. After a week, the books were falling apart. By the end of the unit, students had taped their books together, used binder clips to hold in chunks of pages that had fallen out, and were carrying around Ziploc bags with pages in them. (The attached pictures are just a sample from one of eight classes).It's frustrating that this was their experience with such a beautiful play. I haven't had this problem with other Folger Shakespeare Library editions (as we've used them for Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello at our school), so I'm not sure what happened here. Regardless, we will not be using this version next year.
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