“‘Most Majestic’ or ‘Baseless Fabric’: The Alternating Utopic (re)Visions of The Tempest”

Shakespeare and his characters appear in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2012) to offer readers recognizable figures to which Moore can connect a variety of fluidly recreated historical and fictional characters. The result is a multimodal virtual space where all literary figures coexist to confound time and space (science fiction’s primary realms of utopic possibility). In this paper, I demonstrate how Shakespeare, as the icon of “original” literature, anchors the infinite fluidity of the League’s many worlds thus allowing the fictionality of familiar literature to fade as readers enter the particularly creative simulacrum of Moore’s concluding Black Dossier (2005).