Storm at Sea: The Tempest, Cultural Materialism and the Early Modern Political Aesthetic

Abstract

Critical reception of The Tempest has shifted over time from broadly aesthetic matters—the sublimating passage of matter into spirit, the work's self-conscious artfulness—to a concern with material context, particularly its status as colonial encounter. In fact, that division of critical attention has foreclosed engagement with the work's deepest political stakes. For it is precisely in its preoccupation with the problem of the aesthetic, and particularly with aesthetic autonomy, that the play encounters the most radical dimensions of its material and historical causation, this essay argues. In that sense, The Tempest is an important corrective to forms of cultural materialist analysis that have sought to historicize early modern works by bracketing the problem of the aesthetic altogether.