SOURCE: Cavecchi, Mariacristina. “Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books: A Tempest between Word and Image.” Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1997): 83-9.

[In the following essay, Cavecchi analyzes Peter Greenaway's illusionistic and postmodern film adaptation of The Tempest, entitled Prospero's Books.]

In his film, Greenaway develops and focuses on the aesthetic and mannerist aspects of the Shakespearean text, while he does not seem to care too much about the other very important Shakespearean themes, such as power or history.¹ As far as it is possible to generalize about the relation between Prospero's Books and The Tempest, I am suggesting that the filmmaker reinterprets the Shakespearean text as a mannerist text and creates a new, artificial, and mannerist world by making use of devices and techniques which constitute a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare's theatrical illusionism. He exasperates and amplifies those aspects, which were already there in Shakespeare, where the sense of the crisis makes itself felt most fully and explicitly (Hoy 49-67),² namely the meta-dramatic reflection upon the concept of art and the work of art-artist-spectator relationship and the mannerist tendency to disrupt the spatial unity and to combine things from different spheres of reality (Hauser).

In spite of his cinematic translation and exasperation of certain Shakespearean “tricks,” the filmmaker imposes his meaning on the original text and, by reducing it to a formal mechanism and to a huge stock of images and languages, he creates his own cerebral world which, in turn, offers him the opportunity for a discourse upon the cinema. The film is directed by a filmmaker who is also a painter, who tries to redefine the properties of the filmic frame. Greenaway's magic, like Prospero's, is a strange mixture of science and art. If Shakespeare, like Prospero, is a playwright who exploits all his “charms” (Tempest 1)³—namely, the technical tricks of his days, to stage “the direful spectacle of the wrack” (I.ii.26)—Greenaway uses both conventional film techniques and the resources of high-definition television to layer image upon image, superimposing a second or third frame within his frame. As a matter of fact, his use of the digital Graphic Paintbox, which he defines as the “newest Gutenberg technology” (Greenaway, Prospero's Books 28),⁴ offers a relatively new way of producing cinematic space; and the frame, no longer two-dimensional, reveals multiple layers of spatial dimension. One of those layers refers to the plot traced by Shakespeare's plays; the others are not chronologically or spatially continuous with previous frames. Since Greenaway's premise is that Gonzalo stowed away twenty-four magic books on the leaky boat he provided for Prospero and Miranda's escape from Italy, his film opens each book, offering the spectator the possibility to read Prospero's developing play in relation to the books he has already read. Each book is placed over the frame of the play's action, only partially covering the image, so that it gives virtually every frame at least two space-time orientations.

The film shows the enactment of the plot of The Tempest as Prospero writes and delivers it. We see and hear Prospero building up the scene before us while we simultaneously witness him taking pleasure in this creation. The magical force of his words conjures up his characters before our eyes in elaborate dumb shows.

Within the space of a completely artificial world Greenaway offers his audience spatial dynamics that counterbalance Shakespeare's dramaturgical design. Throughout his film Greenaway/Prospero creates two different space fields: the space of word and the space of image. The word/image juxtaposition parallels not only the relationship of a playwright to a scene—of Prospero/dramatist to Prospero/actor—but also that of a filmmaker to his spatial field. Prospero's activities can thus be interpreted as a metaphor for director Greenaway's filmmaking strategies and for Gielgud's long career as a Shakespearean actor. What prevails is this deeply complex identification, Prospero-Gielgud-Greenaway-Shakespeare, which is crucial in a film characterized by the continuous interplay of parallel creations, reflections, overlaps, and duplications.

THE SPACE OF THE WORD

Greenaway experiments with the possible relationships between the word pronounced, written, and materialized; and in the film there is an extraordinary amount of writing: words etched—in air, on water, in stone, on parchment, in the image itself—create a dimension of writing, unusual for the cinema. In addition, Prospero's books are obviously placed prominently and written pages and sheets of paper are scattered throughout the film. The film is also highly literary and self-referential in its constant reminders that The Tempest is a text: Greenaway conceives the play as Prospero's own creation and we see the magician-play-wright speaking each verse until the final act, as well as his pen as it moves across the parchment. The recurring image of the inkwell is like a “magician's hat” (Rodgers 15), where anything can appear, as an acknowledgment of Shakespeare's creation of the original text. According to Greenaway himself, the film “deliberately emphasizes and celebrates the text as text, as the master material on which all the magic, illusion and deception of the play is based” (9). As a matter of fact, from the very beginning Greenaway emphasizes the importance of books, and the film opens with Gielgud as a voice-over uttering the words from The Tempest as he writes them in close-up: “Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnis'd me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom” (I.ii.166-68).

Greenaway presents shots of Prospero standing white and naked, like a De la Tour St. Jerome or a Bellini St. Anthony (Prospero's Books 39-40),⁵ in a bathhouse, which he deftly contrasts with his close-ups of words being written on a blank sheet of crisp, off-white paper. Prospero begins to conjure up the idea of a scenario for a storm by using the single word “boatswain.”⁶ He plays with this word by experimenting with different recitative styles and by repeating it ruminatively, curiously, interrogatively, while close-ups of the word, handwritten on a sheet of paper, repeatedly fill the screen. The evocation of the word “boatswain” in conjunction with the first book of the film, which is the Book of Water, supposedly compiled by Leonardo Da Vinci,⁷ opens the film; and this link between the ink and the tempest in a game of interference between the graphic sign and the image referent is significant.

THE SPACE OF THE IMAGE

Thanks to the classical/manneristic columns of the bathing room, the architectural capriccios scaled prophetically to Piranesi's Romanticism, the books superimposed, and the connotation of characters and situations with reference to precise figures and tableaux vivants in the history of painting, there is an artificiality about that world, deeply reminiscent of the theater itself. But the spectacle of the shipwreck is enhanced by a plurality and density of images, achievable only through cinema.

Thus the tempest is created through an accumulation of metaphors: a series of associations with watery elements, linked together by the recurring image (and the loud and abrupt noise) of drops of water splashing—in slow motion—into a black pool, probably also an echo of Gonzago's words “every drops of water swear against it” (I.i.56) and authorial self-reference to the first sequence of Greenaway's film Making Splash (1984). Pages from the Book of Water are the first to be framed with their drawings of seas and climate and with the small design of an ink-drawn galleon floating on the choppy water. This same three-masted galleon (or a similar one) is soon seen in the hands of Prospero, who sets it on the bath water where it trembles and bucks in the rough water caused by the urinating (but the word used by Greenaway in his film script is “peeing”) Ariel—a Spirit of Air inspired by the dancing child in Bronzino's mannerist masterpiece Allegory of Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.⁸ As Prospero, in the bathhouse, is confronted by a mirror-image from the Book of Mirrors of the drenched ship's company, the storm he has conjured up becomes a reality (but one might ask which level of reality) and on the line “Out of our way, I say!” the sound track suddenly grows more complex with the “massive burst of aggressively musical sound” by Michael Nyman (Greenaway 43). When the peak of magic is attained we see a pattern of alternative images of smiling Ariel, hovering above the edge of the bath-side and still urinating into the pool; of a full screen flame (appearing eight times throughout the sequence), probably an echo of the strong perception of fire in Ariel's vision of the shipwreck in The Tempest (I.ii.196-206); and of Prospero dressing himself with linen under-robe and a black cloak, magically changing its color, to look like the Venetian Doge Leonardo Loredan in Bellini's portrait.

At the very beginning of the film the audience realizes that Greenaway attempts to create a very particular kind of illusionism. In the decision to create an outdoor effect indoors, the filmmaker follows Shakespeare's mounting a storm complete with a shipwreck on an indoor stage.⁹

Indeed in Shakespeare it is a bravura staging device and the effect dictates the ruling conceit for the whole play. The Tempest, in fact, depends on the initial illusionism of the shipwreck scene, which is the verification of Prospero's magic and the declaration that it is all the work of illusion, a harmless “spectcle” (I.ii.26). Against the scenery of the Banqueting House at Whitehall,¹⁰ the shipwreck is set off by Prospero's magic, consisting in scenic and mechanical skills, the same magic Inigo Jones deployed in his masques. At the beginning of the play the spectators watch the “direful spectacle of the wrack,” which they recognize as having the conventions of Elizabethan courtly drama. There is nothing in the text to suggest any doubt about what they are seeing and the brief scene is marvelously evocative as well as terminologically exact. But this first perception of the shipwreck is then replaced by the compelling pictures of Miranda's (I.ii.1-13) and Ariel's (I.ii.195-206) perspectives, alluding to the other spectacle of the theatrical devices employed to mount the storm.¹¹ The pattern of shifting perception (Pierce 167-73) characterizes The Tempest as a play which consistently arouses, challenges, and disappoints the spectators' expectations. The audience is being kept in suspense and like the courtiers in the shipwreck is never shown which layer of illusionism is presented on the stage.

In Prospero's Books, the image of the model galleon, which is also a hint at the special effects of the cinema (since many storm scenes have been shot using model ships), is followed by an accumulation of images and figures taken from literature and painting and therefore existing at a different level of reality (or illusion). Spirits impersonating classical and Old Testament myths associated with water—such as Moses, Leda, Neptune, a drowning Icarus, Jason, Hero, Leander, and Noah—indicate the growth and wrath of the storm.¹² The storm is also visualized through reference to painting and in particular, according to Greenaway himself, to Botticelli's Birth of Venus: the storm of papers swirling around the library, constructed to look like a facsimile copy of Michelangelo's Laurentiana Library in Florence, is in fact stirred up by naked mythological figures standing on tables, grouped in pairs, their cheeks puffed out, like Botticelli's winds. But, as a matter of fact, this intertextual reference to the winds also has a different source, since Robert Fludd used the image of the blowing winds in the frontispiece of his Meteorologia Cosmica (Yates 60), which is a source of inspiration for Greenaway's Book of Universal Cosmography.

In the film, far from any attempt at realism, Prospero's island has become a place of illusion and deception, full of superimposed images, shifting mirrors, and mirror images where pictures conjured by texts, such as the one of the galleon, can be “as tantalizingly substantial as objects; and facts and events constantly framed and re-framed” (12). Thus, the film's multilayered narrative, with Prospero writing the story in which he is also a character, is matched by a kaleidoscope of images inset in other images so that Shakespeare's island “full of noises” (III.ii.133) and voices, since Prospero's is just one of the possible versions of the story—Caliban's, for example, is a different one—has become an island overflowing with superimposed images derived from the original text by association and contiguity.

In the film I have identified three main kinds of relationships between the images which contribute to visual density: frames-within-frames, mirrored images, and iterated images.

FRAMING

In Prospero's Books framing and re-framing becomes “like a text itself—a motif—reminding the viewer that it is all an illusion which is constantly fitted into a rectangle, into a picture frame—a film frame” (12). The recurring geometrical figure of the film—that of a rectangle, alluding to the frame, to the proscenium arch stage, and also to the cinema screen—reveals Greenaway's deep concern with the medium he is using, so that the references to theater, literature, and painting contribute to his self-conscious reflection upon the cinema, its nature, and its possibilities. Thus, there is an interesting coincidence between the number of the books and the twenty-four frames a second in cinema, and often in the film the camera frames Prospero's image reflected in a TV screen; in particular, at the end of the film, on the last lines of the Epilogue, the camera retreats on Prospero's close-up to show, disruptively, that it is a close-up on a huge screen.

Greenaway uses the frame-within-frame as the cinematic equivalent of Shakespeare's play-within-play: it offers him the possibility to analyze the work of art/artist/spectator relationship; and, besides, however imperfectly, each frame-within-frame undermines the credibility of the surrounding action. He not only revives this Shakespearean device but he also exasperates and exploits it to the utmost so that almost every frame contains a frame within or refers to one outside the screen by means of intertextual quotations to literature, architecture, art, etc.

Frame-within-frames and mirrors contribute to that representation of different kinds and levels of reality, which is a feature Shakespeare himself shared with sixteenth-century mannerist painting (Hoy 49-67).

In The Tempest Shakespeare deals centrally with ideas and concepts of art, and in Prospero's magic he gives full expression to a theme close to the core of his artistic self-consciousness. Despite its realistic dialogue and details, the shipwreck is a show, and in the Epilogue (1-20) Shakespeare deliberately eliminates any barrier between the play world and the real. The audience is invited to enter the play world and assume a role since their hands must release Prospero and their “gentle breath” (Epilogue 11) supply the “auspicious gales” (V.i.314) which he has promised Alonso. The Epilogue thus serves as a bridge between play and audience: a transitional link between art and reality (Egan 171-82).

The artful world of Prospero's Books is built upon different levels of illusion as well: the world of animated books melts into the world of the written words on the off-white pages and into the images of the bathing room with its many columns. The model ship itself enjoys different levels of illusion since it is at the same time an animated picture in a book, a model galleon on the desk of Prospero/dramatist, a toy in his hands as actor, and it is actually the ship transporting the members of the court. In addition, the film animates textual images: the Vesalius Anatomy of Birth disgorges bloody organs, while from the Book of Architecture three-dimensional buildings spring out like models in a pop-up book and Prospero is shown descending “textual” stairs. Furthermore, each character enjoys inter-textual links with literature and painting and the island is referenced with the architecture, paintings, and classical literature Prospero has imported. Greenaway delights in baffling the audience as to where reality (if there is one) actually turns into illusion.

MIRRORS, OR A LABYRINTH OF OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

Mirrors are also recurrent in the film, adding a further layer of illusion and therefore a further element of confusion between reality and illusion. But these mirrors, held by minions and spirits of a Roman/Greek/Renaissance mythology, are very particular “distorting mirrors” (Eco 25-28) since they reflect Prospero's imaginings—good and bad—as though he always needs a mirror to make them manifest. In the first sequences of the film we first see Prospero reflected in the carried mirror and soon after, with a flash, the mirror shows what Prospero sees, the victims of the storm.

The recurring rectangular mirrors contribute to enrich the “framing game” and, because of their nature, to disrupt the link mirror image/image referent,¹³ therefore reflecting optical illusions.

REPETITION, OR AN AESTHETIC OF REDUNDANCY

As a matter of fact, repetition is a fundamental recurring stylistic device in The Tempest. … Lexical repetition is largely responsible for the incantatory appeal of The Tempest (Bower 131-50, McDonald 15-28).

In the same way the film derives much of its metaphoric power from the interplay of repeated images during a sequence, such as the images of the galleon or of the inkwell, or the visual allusions to fire and water. In addition, the Shakespearean text undergoes a further process of duplication; just to quote an example from the first scenes, Shakespearean lines such as “Bestir, bestir” (I.i.4) or “Here, master: what cheer?” (I.i.2), and on the one hand, are repeated more than once as if they were an echo effect, and on the other hand, are also reiterated by Prospero's writing them in full screen many times. In the film the characters are multiplied, too: Gielgud interprets two Prosperos and Ariel is played by four actors.

Verbal patterns are congruent with and supported by larger networks of reiteration, most of them narrative and structural; the symmetries and parodic constructions are obvious in The Tempest and many critics have pointed to the density and congruity of its mirrored actions, which are even more emphasized in Greenaway where the mechanism of doubling is further amplified by multiple intertextual references. The Tempest is also flagrantly intertextual and this audacious kind of authorial self-cannibalism contributes another layer of complexity, on which Greenaway himself feeds (Liberti 24).

The prominence of the figure of repetition in both the verbal style and dramatic structure of The Tempest encourages the audience to analyze the linguistic and structural patterns for meaning, but the text never fulfills the expectations of clarity which the discovery of such patterns engenders (McDonald 15-17). Since order and comprehension are continually promised but never thoroughly realized, the audience participates directly in the atmosphere of evanescence and instability of the play.

Iteration of images, characters' multiple layers of illusion, mirrors and frame-within-frames in Prospero's Books work in the same way and carry out the same function to entice the audience by promising and withholding illumination, demonstrating the impossibility of “significational certainty and creating an atmosphere of hermeneutic instability” (McDonald 16). As a matter of fact, Greenaway's film is informed with a precise pattern made up of the twenty-four magic books,¹⁴ but this pattern is built up by an intricate network of allusions and intertextual references so that, in the end, the filmmaker provides the elements of spectacle but leaves the task of ordering them to the viewer, who becomes, therefore, the final interpreter of the film's shape.¹⁵ The audience is thus established as the subject of the film, occupying a polysemic site where a multiplicity of possible meanings and intertextual relations intersect. To the Shakespearean text Greenaway adds a visual and conceptual density that seems to defy any possibility of finding a stable pattern or meaning. What Derrida terms “the seminal adventure of the trace” (“Structure Sign and Play” 265) is nowhere better exemplified than in Greenaway's film. We move around among the sights, sounds, and accidentals which constitute the film, assembling and disassembling meanings as they fleetingly present themselves.

Prospero's Books is a cultural caprice: The flow of textuality overflows the traditional barriers of what we use to call a “text” into what Derrida calls a “differential network, a fabric of traces, referring endlessly to something other than itself” (qtd. in Atkins and Bergeron 40). The visual and symbolic hyper-stratification and the endless process of quotations lead to a disruption of the filmic unity so that the film absorbs The Tempest's imagery and text and turns into an encyclopedic container of images drawn from literature, painting, architecture, music, etc. By presenting too much to take in at a glance, Greenaway pushes to the limit his ideal of a “painterly cinema” (Masson 36-37) and to complete the effect, text, image, and sound constantly blur into each other in an infinite overlapping of languages and images: “Words making text, and text making pages, and pages making books from which knowledge is fabricated in pictorial form” (Greenaway, Prospero's Books 9).

Like the written word, the oral word also changes into a visual image: The linguistic richness and nuances of Shakespeare's characters turn into the powerful and authoritative, but monotone, voice of Gielgud-Prospero, who speaks the Shakespearean lines aloud, shaping the characters so powerfully through his words that they are conjured before us. In Greenaway's mannerist (or post-modern) interpretation, the Shakespearean word becomes flesh, or metal, or any of the other metamorphoses the books exhibit. A mannerist hieroglyphic. A post-modern hieroglyphic. Celluloid. Cinema.

Notes

1. “Since the film is deliberately built and shaped around the writing of the text of The Tempest, the script follows the play, act by act and scene by scene, with few transpositions and none of any substance to alter the chronology of the original. There have been some shortenings, the greatest being the comedy scenes with Stephano and Trinculo” (Greenaway, Prospero's Books 12).

2. See also Georg Weise, Il Manierismo (Firenze: Olschki, 1976).

3. The Arden edition of The Tempest has been adopted throughout this study.

4. See also John Wrathall, “Mosaic Mindscapes,” Screen International 824 (September 13, 1991): 16-18; and Michael Ciment, “Une conflagration de l'art,” Positif 368 (October 1991): 43.

5. See also Liberti 22-24.

6. In an interview with Adam Barker, Greenaway notes that the first word of the play is “Bosun … which is a very interesting word because it is one that is never written down. It was used by seamen who were basically illiterate, so that when they came to write the word down it was ‘boatswain. It's a nice opening point about the topsy-turvy use of oral and written language” (28).

7. According to Greenaway, Da Vinci “was an indefatigable enthusiast for the quality, motion and substance of water and an ideal authority to consult in the creation of a tempest” (Prospero's Books 38). It is also to note the fascinating analogy between Leonardo's calligraphy in his drawings and Greenaway-Prospero's handwriting. See also J. Kott, “Prospero's Staff,” Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964): 197-202.

8. It is Greenaway himself who gives the indication in Prospero's Books 42.

9. The Tempest was the first play Shakespeare unquestionably wrote for the Blackfriars rather than for the Globe. It was besides presented by Shakespeare's company at court on Hallowmas Eve in 1611 and again during the winter of 1612-13, as part of the astonishing round of entertainment provided during the period of the Elector's visit, particularly between the betrothal and the marriage. See Frank Kermode's introduction to The Tempest, Arden Edition, xxixxii.

10. A sustained attempt to visualize a court performance of the play is Sir Ernest Law's “Shakespeare's Tempest as originally produced at Court,” Shakespeare Association Pamphlet (1919).

11. For a visualization of the performance see also Anna Anzi Cavallone, Varie e strane forme. Shakespeare: il masque e il gusto manieristico (Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 1984): 55-61.

12. In one of the sections of Greenaway's exhibition Watching Water (Venice, Palazzo Fortuny, June-September 1993), the video A Walk through Prospero's Library (1991) presents one by one all the characters that in Prospero's Books are somehow connected with water.

13. The expression “image referent” is my translation of Eco's referente dell'immagine (20; see also 9-37).

14. “I have not infrequently made use of mathematical structures, numbers and counting as an adjunct and companion to the narrative of a film. As author in control of the plot I can choose and dictate the fall-out of events from any number of infinite possibilities—which is a very volatile state of affairs, suggesting the ephemerality of fictional narrative”; (Greenaway, Watching Water 28).

15. “I am interested in an audience that moves, that is not necessarily subject to a fixed frame, that does not have to remain in a fixed seat. Audiences that move are not unknown, but they are rare. Should we attempt to achieve audience movement as a prerequisite of cinema” (Greenaway, Watching Water 49)?

Works Cited

Atkins, G. Douglas, and D. M. Bergeron. Shakespeare and Deconstruction. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.

Barker, Adam. “A Tale of Two Magicians.” Sight and Sound (May 1991).

Brower, Reuben A. “The Mirror of Analogy.” Shakespeare: The Tempest: Casebook Series. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Buchman, Lorne M. “Spatial Multiplicity: Pattern of Viewing in Cinematic Space.” Still in Movement. Shakespeare on Screen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure Sign and Play.” The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1970.

Eco, Umberto. “Freaks: gli specchi deformanti.” Sugli specchie e altri saggi. Milano: Bompiani, 1985.

Egan, Robert. “This Rough Magic: Perspectives of Art and Morality in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly XXIII. No. 2 (Spring 1972).

Greenaway, Peter. Prospero's Books. A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.

Greenaway, Peter. Watching Water. Milano: Electa, 1993.

Hauser, Arnold. Der Manierismus. Die Krise der Renaissance und der modernen Kunst. München: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Oscar Beck, 1964.

Hoy, Cyrus. “Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style.” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973).

Liberti, Fabrizio. “Autoreferenzialità di Prospero's Books.” Cineforum 311 (Jan.-Feb. 1992).

Liberti, Fabrizio. “Prospero e San Girolamo.” Cineforum 311 (Jan.-Feb. 1992).

Masson, Alain. “This insubstantial pageant. Prospero's Books.” Positif 368 (Oct. 1991).

McDonald, Russ. “Reading The Tempest.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production 43 (1991).

Pierce, Robert B. ‘“Very Like A Whale: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1965).

Rodgers, Marlene. “Prospero's Books—Word and Spectacle. An Interview with Peter Greenaway.” Film Quarterly 45.2 (Winter 1991-92).

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden edition. London: Methuen, 1989.

Yates, Frances. Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.