Recommendations
Books Like The Tempest
Best books to read after The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Readers who love The Tempest are drawn to its combination of Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre, the mysterious island, Caliban's claim of dispossession, Ariel's longing for freedom, and Prospero's final renunciation of his magic. They want works that deal with colonial power and the colonized voice, the relationship between art and control, and the long tradition of writers who have rewritten The Tempest for their own time.
- 1Buy
Une Tempête
by Aimé Césaire
The postcolonial rewriting that is the most important response to The Tempest in world literature — Martinican poet Césaire rewrites the play with Prospero as white colonizer, Caliban as Black slave asserting his freedom, and Ariel as mulatto collaborator; the work that transformed how the play is read.
- 2Buy
Hagseed
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's retelling as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series — a disgraced theatre director stages The Tempest in a prison with inmates as his cast; one of the most intelligent modern retellings of the play and one of the best books in the Hogarth Shakespeare project.
- 3Buy
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
The contemporary novel using The Tempest as an organizing myth — a travelling Shakespeare theatre company performs the play in a post-pandemic world; shares The Tempest's concern with art's power to sustain civilization and with beginning again after catastrophe.
- 4Buy
The Sea, The Sea
by Iris Murdoch
The Booker Prize-winning novel with Prospero as its explicit model — a retired theatre director in a coastal cottage trying to control those around him reimagines the Prospero figure in contemporary England; Murdoch's most direct engagement with Shakespeare.
- 5Buy
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
The postcolonial novel that rewrites the colonized other's story — Rhys gives Bertha Mason (the 'madwoman in the attic' from Jane Eyre) a voice in a parallel operation to what Césaire does for Caliban; both works restore subjectivity to the figure the original marginalizes.
- 6Buy
The Drowned World
by J.G. Ballard
Ballard's science fiction novel with Prospero's island as its unconscious model — a flooded future London where a scientist surrenders to primordial regression shares The Tempest's concern with the stripping away of civilization's defences and what remains when they are gone.
- 7Buy
Prospero's Books
by Peter Greenaway
Greenaway's experimental film meditation on Prospero's library — treating the books of magic as the organizing principle of the play, Greenaway reveals the play's concern with art, knowledge, and the power of representation; available to stream and the most visually striking Shakespeare adaptation.
- 8Buy
Caliban and the Witch
by Silvia Federici
The feminist history that provides the historical context for The Tempest's colonial dynamics — Federici's account of the witch trials and the primitive accumulation of capitalism in the period when Caliban's dispossession was happening in the actual Americas; essential context for the play's politics.
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