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 or directors try to understand themselves. Over the course of four centuries and across the many different cultural, political or aesthetic fields in which The Tempest has been seen, performed, produced, appropriated, translated, read, reread, debated, changed, adapted, painted, filmed and taught - if there is one thing that emerges from this rich history and impact, it must be the prominence that this particular drama holds for processes of selfseeking or selfpositioning. Each place and culture, all periods and generations that encountered this Shakespearean drama and have engaged with it creatively or critically have found it a persistent stimulus or challenge also for encountering themselves and for exploring consequences and conditions of the creative acts that they themselves perform. The present volume aims to chart this history in parts, placing special emphasis on the early seventeenth century and the present, Shakespeare's time and our own. The first six essays here presented explore some of the literary, historical, philosophical, religious and/or cultural connections through which this text is interrelated - and interacts with discourses and practices in the period of its first production. The remaining seven essays explore what contemporary meanings have been made by it. Whether in Cuba, China, Germany or Japan, whether in theatrical staging or rewriting, in DIY versions on YouTube or in arthouse films on screen, all these critical and cultural transformations of the play are nothing if not rich and strange.