Prospero's Island is a compelling study of islands and how they can contribute to the quality of concern and caring that human beings have for one another, specifically in Christian ministry work. Roger Grainger spent eighteen years as chaplain of a large psychiatric hospital and now works as a parish minister in Wakefield, England. He brings to life the characters from William Shakespeare's final play The Tempest as he utilizes the story of Prospero and Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, and the shipwrecked courtiers and clowns who were forced ashore by a tempest in order to emphasize that pastoral care can be an island for refuge and resources for those who need to come in from the storm. Using the image of an island as a metaphor for the human condition at its most vulnerable state, Grainger illustrates how Prospero demonstrates a particular purpose for his island that results in renewal rather than revenge. Prospero's Island innovatively compares Shakespeare's inspirational characters with real life as it takes an in-depth look at pastoral care as a nurturing process that lives in, and depends upon, the quality of personal relationships just like Prospero did on a deserted island so many years ago.

Presents Prospero's Island discussion by Edward Everett Hale with an introduction by Henry Cabot Lodge.

Critical and historical notes accompany Shakespeare's play about a shipwrecked duke who learns to command the spirits.

From a member of the real-life family portrayed in The Durrells in Corfu, this memoir of the idyllic Greek island is “among the best books ever written” (The New York Times). Before Lawrence Durrell became a renowned novelist, poet, and travel writer, he spent four youthful years on Corfu, an island jewel with beauty to match the long and fascinating history within its rocky shores. While his brother, Gerald, was collecting animals as a budding naturalist, Lawrence fished, drank, and lived with the natives in the years leading up to World War II, sheltered from the tumult that was engulfing Europe—until finally he could ignore the world no longer. Durrell left for Alexandria, to serve his country as a wartime diplomat, but never forgot the wonders of Corfu. In this “brilliant” journey through that idyllic time and place, Durrell returns to the land that made him so happy, blending his love of history with memories of his adventures there (The Economist). Like the blue Aegean, Prospero’s Cell is deep and crystal clear, offering a perfect view straight to the heart of a nation.

At the same time, it documents how Brook, Ninagawa, and Strehler adapted and applied African storytelling techniques, textual deconstruction, traditional Japanese art and theatrical forms, and Italian stage tradition to the performance of Shakespeare and investigates how these three directors' diverse applications to the same canonical work have contributed to the development of the modern stage director."--Jacket.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, in the journals of explorers and scientists such as James Cook and Charles Darwin, and in Hollywood cinema. It traces the ways in which literary and cinematic islands have functioned as malleable spatial figures that offer vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the material energies of words and images and the energies of the physical world. The chapters focus on America's island gateways (Roanoke and Ellis Island), visions of tropical islands (Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the US-Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest, and the imaginative appeal of mutable islands. It argues that modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual and cognitive challenges to the experience of space, and that these challenges were negotiated in complex and contradictory ways via poetic engagement with islands. Discussions of island narratives in postcolonial theory have broadened understanding of how islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions, bounded spaces easily subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story. In this alternative account, the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space. Drawing on and rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that the modern experience of islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a dispersal, fragmentation, and diversification of spatial experience, and it explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by both non-fictional and fictional responses.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s final, great play, The Tempest, in a gripping and emotionally rich novel of passion and revenge. “A marvel of gorgeous yet economical prose, in the service of a story that’s utterly heartbreaking yet pierced by humor, with a plot that retains considerable subtlety even as the original’s back story falls neatly into place.”—The New York Times Book Review Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Now he’s staging aTempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, but it will also heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge, which, after twelve years, arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Margaret Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. Praise for Hag-Seed “What makes the book thrilling, and hugely pleasurable, is how closely Atwood hews to Shakespeare even as she casts her own potent charms, rap-composition included. . . . Part Shakespeare, part Atwood, Hag-Seed is a most delicate monster—and that’s ‘delicate’ in the 17th-century sense. It’s delightful.”—Boston Globe “Atwood has designed an ingenious doubling of the plot of The Tempest: Felix, the usurped director, finds himself cast by circumstances as a real-life version of Prospero, the usurped Duke. If you know the play well, these echoes grow stronger when Felix decides to exact his revenge by conjuring up a new version of The Tempest designed to overwhelm his enemies.”—Washington Post “A funny and heartwarming tale of revenge and redemption . . . Hag-Seed is a remarkable contribution to the canon.”—Bustle

Prospero's Island is Rhode Island. Prospero's Cell is the John Dee Tower of 1583. (Which still stands today in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island) The characters in The Tempest represent the main players in the Elizabethan colonization effort of the 1580s. (Plus two French humanists and two angels)

Corfu, Kefalonia, Zakynthos and the other Ionian islands are home to one of the finest cuisines of the Mediterranean. The stamping-ground of Captain Corelli and Lawrence Durrell, the Ionians have always held a particular, almost mystical, fascination for visitors, and, for many of the thousands who travel to the region each year, it is the special nature of Ionian cooking that forms an essential and unforgettable part of their experience. The recipes in "Prospero's Kitchen" come mostly from family notebooks handed down through the generations and reflect the cosmopolitan nature of Ionian cuisine. Together, they provide a unique and tantalising taste of the variety of Ionian cuisine. Featuring over 150 easy-to-follow recipes as well as fascinating information on Ionian cooking and customs, beautiful photographs and original illustrations, "Prospero's Kitchen" is an essential kitchen addition for anyone with a passion for the beautiful and lyrical Ionian islands.