Part one: Shakespeare and The tempest -- The life and work of William Shakespeare -- The text of The tempest -- Part two: A case study in critical controversy -- Why study critical controversies about The tempest? -- Literary study, politics, and Shakespeare: a debate -- George Will, Literary politics -- Stephen Greenblatt, The best way to kill our literary inheritance is to turn it into a decorous celebration of the new world order -- Sources and contexts -- Michel de Montaigne, from Of the cannibals -- William Strachey, from True repertory of the wrack -- Sylvester Jourdain, from A discovery of the Barmudes -- Richard Hakluyt, Reasons for colonization -- Bartolomé de Las Casas, from Letter to Philip, great prince of Spain -- Daniel Wilson, The monster caliban -- A portfolio of images of caliban -- E.M.W. Tillyard, from The elizabethan world picture -- Ronald Takaki, The "tempest" in the wilderness -- Shakespeare and the power of order -- Frank Kermode, from Shakespeare: the final plays -- Reuben A. Brower, The mirror of analogy: The tempest -- Leah Marcus, The blue-eyed witch -- The challenge of postcolonial criticism -- Paul Brown, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine"; The tempest and the discourse of colonialism -- Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The tempest -- Aimé Césaire, from A tempest -- Responding to the challenge -- Deborah Willis, Shakespeare's Tempest and the discourse of colonialism -- David Scott Kastan, "The duke of Milan / and his brave son"'; old histories and new in The tempest -- Meredith Anne Skura, Discourse and the individual: the case of colonialism in The tempest -- The challenge of feminist criticism -- Ania Loomba, from Gender, race, renaissance drama -- Ann Thompson, "Miranda, where's your sister?": reading Shakespeare's The tempest -- Writing about critical controversy and The tempest.