Since its earliest records, Shakespeare's Tempest has undergone continuous change. It is a play by which readers, spectators and critics just as artists, writers, actors ordirectors try to understand themselves. Over the courseof four centuries and across the many different cultural,political or aesthetic fields in which The Tempest hasbeen seen, performed, produced, appropriated, translated,read, reread, debated, changed, adapted, painted,filmed and taught - if there is one thing that emergesfrom this rich history and impact, it must be the prominencethat this particular drama holds for processes ofself-seeking or self-positioning. Each place and culture,all periods and generations that encountered this Shakespeareandrama and have engaged with it creatively orcritically have found it a persistent stimulus or challengealso for encountering themselves and for exploring consequencesand conditions of the creative acts that theythemselves perform.The present volume aims to chart this history in parts,placing special emphasis on the early seventeenth centuryand the present, Shakespeare's time and our own. Thefirst six essays here presented explore some of the literary,historical, philosophical, religious and/or culturalconnections through which this text is interrelated - andinteracts - with discourses and practices in the period ofits first Production. The remaining seven essays explorewhat contemporary meanings have been made by it.Whether in Cuba, China, Germany or Japan, whether intheatrical staging or rewriting, in DIY versions onYouTube or in arthouse films on screen, all these criticaland cultural transformations of the play are nothing ifnot rich and strange.