Shakespeare's Tempest and Capitalism by Helen Scott - 9781032089386

Taylor & Francis

In this forceful study, Helen C. Scott situates The Tempest within Marxist analyses of the \u2018primitive accumulation\u2019 of capital, which she suggests help explain the play\u2019s continued and particular resonance. The \u2018storm\u2019 of the title refers both to Shakespeare\u2019s Tempest hurtling through time, and to Walter Benjamin\u2019s concept of history as a succession of violent catastrophes. Scott begins with an account of the global processes of dispossession\u2014of the peasantry and indigenous populations\u2014accompanying the emergence of capitalism, which generated new class relationships, new understandings of human subjectivity, and new forms of oppression around race, gender, and disability. Developing a detailed reading of the play at its moment of production in the business of theatre in 1611, Scott then moves gracefully through the global reception history, showing how its central thematic concerns and figurative patterns bespeak the upheavals and disposse9