“The Baseless Fabric of this Vision” The Poetics of Space in The Tempest
“The Baseless Fabric of this Vision” The Poetics of Space in The Tempest

Summary/Abstract: The paper attempts to survey Shakespeare’s “new world” of the stage in search of creative correspondences between the diverse devices of a dramatic reform “bodied forth” in The Tempest. The spatial analysis of the play confirms the view that Shakespeare’s dramaturgical experiments in his concluding romance aim at rehabilitating the mythical stance of drama through (re)domesticating the fantastic on the stage endowed with creative spatial, temporal and instrumental agencies. The analysis investigates Shakespeare’s innovative strategies in the play in order to see how he deploys the combined forces of the stage’s art in the new genre to legitimize the fantastic for dramatic use, to reopen the mythical dimension for the theatre through dissolving the limited topical and spatial confines of the Renaissance stage. Focusing mostly on the spatial aspects and constituents of the Tempest-world it approaches the play as a pioneering piece of the stage’s spatial redefinition, a topical dramatic eutopia where the abstract, utopian space of humanistic ideas, theological, ethical, phenomenological and social conceptions is turned to shape and gains local habitation through dramatic implacement. The inquiry pays particular attention to the poetic qualities of space as instruments of passage between the spheres of fact and fiction, place and space, the natural and the artistic, i.e., the dialectical twin domains of Prospero’s magical realm.

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