Starting from the first lines of the play, the question of power and the loss of control explode violently: who can govern? Or better, is sovereignty needed at all? Where is the Master? This question bounces back and forth between Gonzalo and the Boatswain, while the boat is at the mercy of furious waves, against which the words of a chief, are of no use… What care these roarers for the name of King?
From this point of view, our Tempest has become the storm of a social and political universe completely re-founded through contact with the diversity of an alien island and stranger inhabiting it. The island, in the Renaissance imaginary, is a utopia – an alternative to authority, oppression, usurpation… as Gonzalo imagines it: No sovereignty… All things in common nature…
As “political animals”, we thus bring to the stage an experience of re-appropriation – in the spaces, in the experiences themselves – always immersed in the Shakespearean tempest, which, let’s remember, does not appear a world at end. As Agostino Lombardo writes in the introduction to his translation into Italian, it is a world on the verge of a new beginning.