conclusion
A Brave New World
In 1611, someseven years after the emergence of Othello,The Tempestwould
turn to a new dramatic space and subject, pointing suggestively to the New
World that was fast becoming the preoccupying centerpiece of England’s
reach outward. The full text of William Strachey’s “true reportory” of “the
wrack on Bermuda” ( 1610 ), a key source, ultimately charts a voyage to
Jamestown, a colony that has been long considered a crucial landmark of
“the birth of America.”^1 Yet the colonial geography of The Tempestis no-
tably vague, its “brave new world” poised somewhere, but not definitively
anywhere, between Europe and the west ( 5. 1. 183 ).^2 In fact, what the play
maps more precisely is the geographic and ideological transition to this new
world from the “old” world of “Afric,” Shakespeare’s one explicit reference
to the proper name ( 2. 1. 69 ). Having just celebrated the “sweet marriage” of
his “fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis” ( 2. 1. 70 – 71 ), the Neapolitan
king and his party find themselves shipwrecked on what seems an “uninhab-
itable, and almost inaccessible” island ( 2. 1. 39 ). As they try to make sense of
where they are, Africa becomes their familiarizing touchstone: imagining
that their “garments are now as fresh as when [they] put them on first in
Afric” ( 2. 1. 68 – 69 ), they squabble knowingly over the precedent of Africa’s
legendary past (over the difference between Tunis and Carthage) to praise
Claribel as “that rarest that e’er came there” since “widow Dido’s time”
( 2. 1. 97 , 75 ). Sebastian chastises his brother, the king, for choosing not to
“bless our Europe with your daughter, / But rather lose her to an African”
( 2. 1. 123 – 24 ), but only in the face of the “great loss” of the Neapolitan prince,
Ferdinand, who seems to have drowned in the tempest. Otherwise, the