lightning. It was in two senses a “direful
spectacle
”: terrifying but at the same time clearly the product of theatrical artifice. Finally the waves retreated as the strips of silk were drawn back to reveal a simple wooden raft which represented the island. 22
George C. Wolfe’s 1994–95 New York Shakespeare Festival production likewise employed spectacular staging effects, described here by Robert Brustein:
Bunraku puppets, Indonesian shadow play, Caribbean carnivals, Macy’s Day floats, Asian stilt-walkers, death masks, stick dancing, magical transformations effected through a haze of smokepots. Don’t look to spend any quiet time here. The stage is in constant motion. This may be the busiest
Tempest
in history. 23
If Prospero was traditionally seen as a benign omniscient father-figure, Miranda had been regarded as the perfect daughter. In thelight of feminist thinking, Prospero’s treatment of his daughter and his plans for her future have been seen as an unwholesome desire for patriarchal control. Miranda’s problematic position in colonial discourse has been discussed to the point that the Shakespeare scholar Ann Thompson has posed the question, “What kind of pleasure can a woman and a feminist take in this text beyond the rather grim one of mapping its various patterns of exploitation?” 24 The relationship between father and daughter has accordingly undergone a variety of representations and the lines restored which previous ages thought impossible for Miranda to utter, “Abhorrèd slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill” (1.2.411–413).
Productions of
The Tempest
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have explored many possibilities, adapting it to a variety of styles, ideological inflections and locales, playing on its supreme flexibility; Jonathan Kent’s 2001 watery Almeida Theater production was set on an island littoral and in the same year the role of Prospero was played by a woman, Vanessa Redgrave, at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe.
The Tempest
has been all things to all those concerned with the nature of theater. It has also proved an inspiration in the cinema, from a brief early silent version of 1908 to the 1956 sci-fi adaptation directed by Fred Wilcox,
The Forbidden Planet
(itself the inspiration for the 1989 camp sci-fi rock and roll musical,
Return to the Forbidden Planet
) to Derek Jarman’s 1979 film
The Tempest
, a compelling, dreamlike personal vision, shot in the decaying gothic mansion Stoneleigh Abbey, to Paul Mazursky’s 1982 banal urban update (
Tempest
), and finally Peter Greenaway’s visually spectacular re-imagining of the play to produce a meditation on the power of art culminating in book number 24, a folio volume of 1623, consisting of thirty-six plays,
Prospero
’s
Books
.
AT THE RSC
The Tempest …
distils the poetic essence of the whole Shakespearean universe.
(Program notes to 1963 RSC production, quoting G. Wilson Knight, 1932)
Freedom and oppression, obedience and rebellion, and the corruption of power in both personal and political life are housed in this most mysterious of Shakespeare’s “comedies.” Ideas of kingship, fatherhood, authority, and love inform the three divergent plot lines, coming together in a final scene of revelation and reconciliation.
The Tempest
offers us a world in which its characters operate free from society’s constraints—but what type of world is it, and what is the nature of the characters that inhabit it? As Anne Barton pointed out in the program notes to John Barton’s 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “To perform it in the theater, even to try and talk about it, is inevitably to add to its substance by filling in gaps and silences left deliberately by the dramatist.” Peter Brook, who directed the play for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957, and codirected it in 1963 for the RSC with Clifford Williams,
spectacle
”: terrifying but at the same time clearly the product of theatrical artifice. Finally the waves retreated as the strips of silk were drawn back to reveal a simple wooden raft which represented the island. 22
George C. Wolfe’s 1994–95 New York Shakespeare Festival production likewise employed spectacular staging effects, described here by Robert Brustein:
Bunraku puppets, Indonesian shadow play, Caribbean carnivals, Macy’s Day floats, Asian stilt-walkers, death masks, stick dancing, magical transformations effected through a haze of smokepots. Don’t look to spend any quiet time here. The stage is in constant motion. This may be the busiest
Tempest
in history. 23
If Prospero was traditionally seen as a benign omniscient father-figure, Miranda had been regarded as the perfect daughter. In thelight of feminist thinking, Prospero’s treatment of his daughter and his plans for her future have been seen as an unwholesome desire for patriarchal control. Miranda’s problematic position in colonial discourse has been discussed to the point that the Shakespeare scholar Ann Thompson has posed the question, “What kind of pleasure can a woman and a feminist take in this text beyond the rather grim one of mapping its various patterns of exploitation?” 24 The relationship between father and daughter has accordingly undergone a variety of representations and the lines restored which previous ages thought impossible for Miranda to utter, “Abhorrèd slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill” (1.2.411–413).
Productions of
The Tempest
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have explored many possibilities, adapting it to a variety of styles, ideological inflections and locales, playing on its supreme flexibility; Jonathan Kent’s 2001 watery Almeida Theater production was set on an island littoral and in the same year the role of Prospero was played by a woman, Vanessa Redgrave, at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe.
The Tempest
has been all things to all those concerned with the nature of theater. It has also proved an inspiration in the cinema, from a brief early silent version of 1908 to the 1956 sci-fi adaptation directed by Fred Wilcox,
The Forbidden Planet
(itself the inspiration for the 1989 camp sci-fi rock and roll musical,
Return to the Forbidden Planet
) to Derek Jarman’s 1979 film
The Tempest
, a compelling, dreamlike personal vision, shot in the decaying gothic mansion Stoneleigh Abbey, to Paul Mazursky’s 1982 banal urban update (
Tempest
), and finally Peter Greenaway’s visually spectacular re-imagining of the play to produce a meditation on the power of art culminating in book number 24, a folio volume of 1623, consisting of thirty-six plays,
Prospero
’s
Books
.
AT THE RSC
The Tempest …
distils the poetic essence of the whole Shakespearean universe.
(Program notes to 1963 RSC production, quoting G. Wilson Knight, 1932)
Freedom and oppression, obedience and rebellion, and the corruption of power in both personal and political life are housed in this most mysterious of Shakespeare’s “comedies.” Ideas of kingship, fatherhood, authority, and love inform the three divergent plot lines, coming together in a final scene of revelation and reconciliation.
The Tempest
offers us a world in which its characters operate free from society’s constraints—but what type of world is it, and what is the nature of the characters that inhabit it? As Anne Barton pointed out in the program notes to John Barton’s 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “To perform it in the theater, even to try and talk about it, is inevitably to add to its substance by filling in gaps and silences left deliberately by the dramatist.” Peter Brook, who directed the play for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957, and codirected it in 1963 for the RSC with Clifford Williams,
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