Arden Student Guides offer a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical and writng skills students need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on langauge: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's rich and complex dramatic lanaguage, and the student's own critical language and how she can improve and develop this to become a critical writer.This volume on The Tempest discusses the play's early stage history before going on to examine the complexities and ambiguities of its language through close reading and analysis. Further sections look at the play's critical history and in particular contemporary critical responses to it, especially those of postcolonial critics. The sections on students' writing and critical skills focus on helping the student formulate and express a critical response to a play about which so much has been written and which has been staged and adapted in a huge variety of ways.