Tempest, The Printed as the first play in the Folio, The Tempest has always enjoyed a special prominence in the Shakespeare canon. Its first recorded performance took place at James I's court on 1 November 1611, and it cannot have been much more than a year old then. The Tempest is indebted to three texts unavailable before the autumn of 1610, namely William Strachey's True Reportary of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates (completed in Virginia in July 1610, and circulated in manuscript before its eventual publication in 1625), Sylvester Jourdan's Discovery of the Bermudas (printed in 1610, with a dedication dated 13 October), and the Council of Virginia's True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony in Virginia (entered in the Stationers' Register in November 1610 and printed before the end of the year). An apparently irresistible urge to identify Prospero with Shakespeare (visible since the 1660s) has led many...
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