n Shakespeare in Southern Africa - "We are all at sea" : performing The Tempest in Last Summer

Abstract

At the outset of his 2010 novel Last Summer, Craig Higginson includes an epigraph from Prospero's epilogue to The Tempest ("Now my charms are all o'erthrown,/And what strength I have's mine own,/Which is most faint"; E.1-3). For the reader expecting an intertextually saturated re-visioning of what is widely considered to be Shakespeare's last play, in the vein of Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1968) or Marina Warner's Indigo (1994), the citation is suitably more playful and provocative. As such, it sets the tone for the literary encounter to come. In order to explore some of the nuances of Higginson's text in light of The Tempest, I offer my own epigraph, taken from the play's final act, to gesture towards what I consider to be some of the enduring achievements of Last Summer.