SOURCE: "Rough Magic: The Tempest," in The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays, Yale University Press, 1972, pp. 146-91.

In the following essay, Young examines The Tempest as an example of pastoral literature, focusing in particular on the play's theatricality, its emphasis on magic, its dreamlike atmosphere, and its treatment of the themes of art and nature.

The story of castaways on a desert island is such a familiar and popular narrative design that we are more apt to think of it in terms of its "modern" manifestations (from Robinson Crusoe to The Admirable Crichton to The Lord of the Flies, not to mention innumerable cartoons, films, and jokes) than to trace its literary ancestry back to the Odyssey or to consider its longstanding relation to the pastoral mode. Yet its pastoral character is undeniable. It embodies the same ambivalence between a desire to escape to a...