Recoursing and Divining: The Tempest and Vergilian Time

“The Vergilian presence in The Tempest is often of [a] spectral kind,” Charles Martindale writes, naming it a “ghostly quality.” Recent criticism of the relationship between The Tempest and the Aeneid has begun to acknowledge the unique nature of the relationship between the two works, at once more pervasive and more subtle than other correspondences between Shakespearean plays and their sources. Building on this recent work, I attempt in this project to describe the texts' relationship more fully, which far exceeds simple linguistic or episodic parallels. Vergil's true influence on the play is to be found in The Tempest's sense of temporality, crisis, memory, and expectation, through which the past and future acquire a strange unity, and which I come to refer to collectively as "Vergilian time."