SOURCE: "A Theatre of the Future: The Aeneid and The Tempest, " in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, July, 1984, pp. 193-215.

In the following essay, Pitcher examines Shakespeare's reconstitution of episodes from Vergil's Aeneid in The Tempest, maintaining that in this drama the playwright displays the fruits of his encounter with both the vital and negative aspects of Roman culture.

Twenty five years ago, when H. A. Mason [in Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period, 1959] sought to characterise the achievement of Ben Jonson—in his estimate, the first Englishman to make living contact with the classical past—he wrote that Jonson's 'feelings for the countryside of England were the place where above all the classical and modern meet'. In the soil, and pools and fish and fruit in and around the great houses owned by Jacobean aristocrats and gentry, Jonson could reimagine the culture, growing and...