Surviving The Tempest: Ecologies of Salvage on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe opening catastrophe of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is not simply a providentially ordained storm and shipwreck, but neither is it the singular expression of Prospero’s will. Beginning with a reading of the storm and shipwreck, this article argues that the play produces and reproduces itself through salvage. The actors, costumes, properties and language that the Act One catastrophe disperses continually persist and recollect, forming the larger ecology of the play. This ecology of salvage extends from the fiction of The Tempest to its stage materials, as garments, hand properties and set pieces, which were recycled from prior early modern contexts into theatre storehouses and found their way onto the stage. What is emphasised by the constant recycling of the wreckage that the man-made storm leaves in its wake is that the past continues to exist in the present despite being transformed by human catastrophe. Ultimately, because the remainders left by the storm survive the very devastation they constitute, the play may be said to speak to a contemporary ecocritical desire to envision ways that people and things already endure man-made disaster.