Prospero's Books

“Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

The Tempest, Act I.2

Magic books. Books of fearsome spells, forbidden knowledge, unspeakable wonders… Aside from his beautiful daughter Miranda, they are Prospero’s only consolation on the remote island to which he has been banished by his evil brother, Antonio. To pass the time, he has populated it with spirits and beings conjured from those same books: the “airy” Ariel, the half-man-half-animal Caliban and a horde of lesser sprites and imps. And then, one day, a magically-induced shipwreck lands the false duke Antonio and his men on the shores of Prospero’s island... 

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last play, as well as his most fantastic and puzzling. It seems alternately a fairy tale, a metaphysical allegory, a farewell to the theatre or perhaps to life itself. And through it all there is a disturbing sense of unreality and fakery, of fiction unmasked, dissolving before our eyes like an illusionist’s trick. As a work of dramatic art, it still seems surprisingly avant-garde.

There have been many film and TV versions, but surely none as extravagant as Peter Greenaway’s 1991 adaptation, Prospero’s Books. With Greenaway’s own Prosperesque style (channelling Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Fellini), Michael Nyman’s pulsating musical score, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation, Sir John Gielgud, as Prospero, and a script by, well, you-know-who, the result may be a bit overpowering for some, but it is one of those films that must be seen (and in better quality than these YouTube clips!). To call it baroque would be an understatement, but keep in mind that the original play was written in 1611, roughly contemporary with Velázquez, Bach and Bernini. Would Shakespeare approve? I’d like to think he would.

Greenaway’s own contribution to the story is to intercut the action with filmic imaginings of the various books in Prospero’s library: the Book of Utopias, the Book of Mirrors, The Book of Mythologies, and so forth. It’s a good pretext for showing off the documentary techniques he developed while making training films for the UK’s Central Office of Information from 1965 to 1980.  

Caliban  

CALIBAN: “You taught me language, and my profit on’it is that I know how to curse.”

I.2

19th-century illustration showing Caliban, Miranda and Prospero

In the dramatis personae to the play, Caliban is described as “a savage and deformed slave”. We get the impression that he is a kind of failed experiment, like one of Dr. Moreau’s beasts (and Jules Verne certainly knew the The Tempest!) or Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. On the stage, he has been envisioned physically in many ways; Shakespeare, in any case, created him as the embodiment of envy and spite, of the hatred felt by the powerless for the powerful.

And all because of those books!

CALIBAN: “For without [his books] he’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not one spirit to command. They all do hate him as rootedly as I”.

(“Because without his books, he’s only a fool, like me, and doesn’t have even one spirit to command. They all hate him as deeply as I do.”)

III.2

Caliban enlists the aid of two drunken criminals, Stephano and Trinculo, in a plot to steal Prospero’s books, kill him and take control of the island.

 “There thou mayst brain him, having first seized his books; or with a log batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, or cut his weasand with thy knife.”

(“There you can club him over the head, after you take away his books; or smash his skull with a log, or stab him with a stake, or cut his throat with your knife.”)

III.2

Greenaway’s Caliban, played by Scottish ballet star Michael Clark, is neither minotaur nor werewolf, but something like Nijinsky’s faun. And, rather than prosthetics or special effects, it is the dancer’s obviously painful contortions that express his character’s deformities.

Vaslav Nijinsky in Debussy's 
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1912)

  
Click here to watch Michael Clark in Prospero's Books

Miranda and Ferdinand

Is The Tempest a comedy or a tragedy? There isn’t much humour here, or grand drama, but, if we take as a guide the convention that comedies end in a marriage and tragedies in a death, it must be the former. The climax of the play is the wedding of Miranda and Ferdinand, future King of Naples. Greenaway gives them an especially lavish banquet, with a multitude of half-dressed spirits offering gifts and a musical number that goes on and on and on…

Miranda meets Ferdinand

The Book of Mythologies and the wedding

And then, at the beginning of Act IV, it all begins to unravel.

Here we come to one of the most famous speeches in all of Shakespeare, and in all of English literature:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air; and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

IV.1

Sorry, no film clip. But here’s an audio of a young Gielgud reciting it on record many years ago.

The company thus dismissed, Prospero returns to the stage for one last appearance, in the epilogue – the last speech in the last scene of Shakespeare’s last play. Having married off his daughter, regained his dukedom, freed his enslaved spirits and found peace, Prospero takes his final bows and bids us all good night (and so, it is usually thought, does Shakespeare). 

Films by Peter Greenaway:

The Falls (1980)

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

The Belly of an Architect (1987)

Drowning by Numbers (1988)

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover (1989)

Prospero’s Books (1991)
The Baby of Macôn (1993)

The Pillow Book (1996)

8 1/2 Women (1999)

The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2004)

Nightwatching (2007)

Magic Bob