In "The Tempest" and Its Travels, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman assemble a stellar collection of original essays and visual materials that situate Shakespeare's play in both its original contexts and our own cultural moment. The book launches out to explore the historical circumstances in which The Tempest was written and performed in seventeenth-century England, particularly in the emerging global market economy. Reading outward, the volume moves through the crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean, exploring the play's complex transactions between European and North African cultures and between classical texts and Renaissance politics. In a final section, the book traverses the Atlantic for a look at American and Caribbean readings of the play and its translation into colonial allegory. By means of its innovative collection of historical, critical, and creative materials, "The Tempest" and Its Travels offers a new map of the vast and varied worlds -- scholarly, artistic, and political -- from which the play arose and in which it has, for centuries, been received.