You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Prospero's Books marks an important departure for director Peter Greenaway. His early films, a series of brightly colored black comedies, were beautiful, intricate, fascinating, and repellant. Their principal limitation was the absence of developed characters with whom the viewer could identify.
In Shakespeare's The Tempest , Greenaway has found a literary text that perfectly complements the brilliance of his film technique. Prospero's Books is the unusual film version of Shakespeare's play that adds substantially to the artistic and emotional effect of the play (one of Shakespeare's greatest). This accomplishment is due to Greenaway's extraordinary use of the film medium to visualize Prospero's unconscious fantasy life. John Gielgud, whose first of many triumphs as Prospero came in 1930, is an actor whose reading of Shakespeare is capacious enough to contain all of Greenaway's film pyrotechnics.
Greenaway's search into the depths of Prospero's unconscious mind does not merely embellish or supplement the potent words of Shakespeare's text. It is the solution, and the only possible one in my view, to the major dramatic problem of the play. This is Prospero's almost total control over the action of The Tempest, which deprives the play of the dramatic conflict we see in Shakespeare's other major works.
Prospero's confrontations with Caliban and the conspirators do not create much suspense in the theater. The spectator is hardly convinced that these are dramatic encounters between Prospero and other agents with separate and independent powers. The interest is in Prospero himself, as he acts out his own unconscious conflicts through his tame adversaries. The threats are internal and unconscious. They do not end when Prospero achieves his revenge against the usurpers and villains who rouse his anger.
This dramatic problem is resolved with Greenaway's making