David Bevington, "The Tempest as Utopia"

"The Tempest as Utopia"
University of Chicago Humanities Day
October 18, 2014
David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature
The Tempest is officially Shakespeare’s last play. In it he fantasizes what it would be like to live on an isolated island as a father with a daughter as one’s constant companion, who then, under the father’s guidance, meets the young man she will marry, while the father contemplates old age, retirement, an end to his creative work as artist, and eventually death. A deformed native islander and an aerial spirit are also part of this Utopian world, far away from European civilization and wars.
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