Beginnings and issues -- First appearances -- The genre -- Readings and interpretations -- Wives and mothers -- Magic -- Caliban -- Suitors and rapists -- Renaissance political context: Political marriages -- Utopia and the New World -- Authority -- Epic and history: Italy and Carthage -- The masque: Jacobean Court spectacles -- Masque as image and symbol -- Renunciation and resolution -- Text and date: The text -- The date -- Play on the stage -- Editorial procedures: Abbreviations and references -- The tempest -- Appendix A: Seamanship of act 1, scene 1 -- Appendix B: Strachey letter -- Appendix C: The music -- Appendix D: Florio's montaigne -- 'Of the cannibals' -- From 'of cruelty' -- Appendix E: Medea's incantation: From Ovid, metamorphoses, vii -- From the fifteen books of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis, translated ... by Arthur Golding (1567) -- Appendix F: Lineation -- Index.