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4. Drown before Reading: Liquidating Prospera’s Books

What does it mean that Prospero says he will drown his books? Why drown rather than burn them? The question arises because Caliban has told Stefano and Trinculo “burn but his books” and, along with driving a nail through Prospero’s head, they become the sovereign rulers of the island and take Miranda as their prize. This question is our point of departure in this chapter for reading the Arden three edition of The Tempest and Juliet Taymor’s Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. We first engage the Arden’s notes on Prospero’s books and then examine both the sequence showing Prospero drowning his books in Prospero’s Books and to books “drowning” in the end title sequence Taymor’s film. Rather tha compare these films to the “original” text each film as yet another edition of the play, another rendering of the play’s cruxes regarding books, These cruxes include the contradictory references to Prospero’s “book” in the singular and his “books” in the plural and the a between references to Prospero’s cloak and staff as props but not to his book or books. For us, the interest of both films lies in their response to a less familiar crux regarding the preservation contradictory modes of the destruction of Prospero’s library. Despite Caliban’s instruction to “burn” Prospero’s books, Prospero says he will “drown” them.

The endings of both films indirectly return us to a question about media raised in “original and true copie,” or first edition of The Tempest, a question about what Derrida calls the end of the book (Grammatology) and the survivance of the book: how does a book to die? how does its biographical destruction differ from the destruction of bios, of a human corpse? What does it mean to drown books that are divisible, singular plural, and have no referents on stage? What happens when books are no material, not props? What kind of library contains books that have no paratexts, no titles and authors? What does it mean that Prospero effectively promises to drown his books at some indefinite time in the future, to promise destruction without delivering it? And what does it mean that The Tempest, a play in which the main character says he prizes his books above his dukedom, does not include a scene of reading or of writing, as does a play to which it is often compared, namely, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?[i] Why do books ad libraries go missing in The Tempest?

New Historicist and New New Historicist criticism of the play miss these questions and alternately tries to fill in the missing book with a hallucinated prop somewhere present off-stage or with a copy of an early modern book stored now in a research library, say, the grimgoire, and thereby close off the singular plural of book(s) in the play.[ii] Prospero has a book, not books, even though the book is a composite of pages taken from multiple grimgoires, or it tries to imagine the destruction of the books exclusively in Caliban’s terms, as burning, skipping over the oddity of Prospero’s destruction by drowning and displaced by a more general, characterological question about Prospero: why does he abjure his rough magic?[iii] Yet Prospero’s books do not need to exist materially in productions of The Tempest. ; or if they do exist, they need not appear on stage. There are references in Shakespeare’s text to his staff and to his cloak as required stage props, but not to his ‘book’ or ‘books’ as necessary stage presences: these exist exclusively through references to a significant but unseen book or books elsewhere. The Shakespeare text therefore makes no provision for us to see Prospero’s books, much less to drown them.[iv]

Our formulation of drowning books as a crux will orient our reading of The Tempest: the island is more an archive about to come to an end that it is a utopian space, and archive management involves what Michel Foucault calls biopower, about the management of life and death. In re-zoning the island from a utopian space to a living dead border, the play also re-zones borders between spirits, humans, animals, and monsters. The question of what counts as life in The Tempest cannot be reduced to human life, however, as Foucault does. Shakespeare floats, so to speak, questions about life as questions of biobiblio(auto-thanato)graphy and questions about species of life, about the indeterminacy of. In short, questions about life are raised as questions of what Derrida calls sur-vivance, not so much survival or living on or even as living death but as living on in a way that cannot be thought in terms of life and death. Sur-vivance is a resistance to reading, as we saw earlier. The Tempest radicalizes unreadability by linking sur-vivance to a past that never becomes fully textual, that can only become paratextual, a prologue, and thereby prolonged (or infinitely “prolougened”). If, as Derrida says, the archive is oriented to the future and hence always incomplete, it follows that the condition of the archive, as we will show more fully in the next chapter, is “incompletemess”; that is to say, the archive is always something of a disaster, a wreck even before it is wrecked, a wrecking of reckoning and recognition. In The Tempest, books are fauxsimiles, blanks waiting for a reading that can never arrive.[v] We suggest that the issue of books is related to a wider, recurrent structure in the play related to survival and safety. In our view, the play does not present a choice between an authoritarian, colonialist reading or the critique of same or mix; rather, it shows that Foucault’s account of the prison is on a continuum with his later accounts of pastoral care. Shipwrecks give rise to philosophical reflection, according to Lucretius in De Rerum Naturum. In The Tempest, however, the ship wreck operates only as a supposition. What looks like a wreck, we quickly learn, is not a wreck at all.

One last signpost before we move on to the Arden Three Tempest and the Taymor and Greenaway films. Our reading of The Tempest differs from avowedly neoFoucauldian historicist readings and new new historicist readings primarily in not psychologizing and not being Prospero-centric. The survivance of the archive involves an economy of repeated destruction, loss, mourning, repair, storage, and restoration, an economy of relay and deferral rather than of pure loss or pure restoration, an economy in which nothing is ever for keeps. The dominant Prospero-centric readings of the play lead to a series of dead end questions we take to be ruses that provide an alibi for the play’s excessive economy of archival repetition and re-enactment: why doesn’t Prospero not recover his dukedom immediately? Why does he abjure his kingdom? Why does he want to leave the island?[vi] At the risk of being somewhat dogmatic, we think these are the wrong questions. Our focus on film adaptations of the play and on media in the play turns Prospero into a database and asks a series of new questions about The Tempest, the archive, editing, and the book, but we will not provide the reader with the kinds of hallucinogenic hits and convenient comforts of elisions on offer in historicist criticism and book history. Attention to drowning books in The Tempest foregrounds a tension in the kind of book history scholars of early modern culture write, a tension between the so-called material book and the book as medium. When does the history of “material” books become a question about the book as a medium, as a textual support and an impression? We maintain that book history and the any history of the book (or of books) cannot be written without being haunted by spectrality and eschatological or messianic time, by deconstructive questions raised by Maurice Blanchot and Derrida about the end of the book and the book to come. Consider The French title of Henri Lefebrve’s L’apparition du livre, translated as The Coming of the Book. The French word “apparition” means “appearance” and “ghost” (an “apparition” in the English sense of a ghost derives, of course, from “appearance”). The English title as The Coming of the Book has clearly messianic connotations, even if those connotations are not intended. And of course books do not serve as media for the dead, just as the occasion for humanist pathos and sometimes irreverent piety, whereas for Derrida the survivance of a text leaves open the question of telepathy, of the last word, in a variety of media and technology because technology cannot, as we have maintained, properly be opposed to organic human life (as an inorganic prosthetic tool or equipment for living).[vii]

Undrowning the Book

We wish turn now to the Arden Three Tempest as one edition among others that constitute the history of the play’s reception history of its cruxes concerning Prospero’s books. To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique in the history of literature in destroying books by drowning them. All other literature and drama in which manuscripts or books are destroyed involve burning.[viii] Drowning his books is all the more remarkable in that their destruction is different from Prospero’s plan to inhume for his staff: “I’ll break my staff, /
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth.” Prospero’s burial of his staff takes most common form of the preservation and destruction of human corpses: inhumation and cremation. Oddly, enough, Prospero’s use of the “drown” to destroy his books does not invite editorial commentary. The Arden 3 edition does not comment on the phrase, though it does comment extensively on roughs in the famous speech that ends with Prospero’s announcement.[ix] Vaugns in the Arden observe that the Tempest has fewer cruxes than do the other plays in the First Folio, and the section of their Introduction devoted to “Cruxes,” they include only two, leaving the rest to the notes. Strictly speaking, the first crux they include regarding the assignment of lines in 1.2. to Prospero or Miranda is not a crux at all but an aspect of the play’s performance and editing history. Restoration dramatists like Dryden and editors like Theobald had no textual evidence to reassign Prospero’s lines. We read the Arden 3’s classification of this reassignment as a symptom, however, not simply an error of classification. The number of cruxes is less important than the way cruxes in the play do or do not become visible and the way editors and critics efface them. “Book” versus “books” is one. The shift from burning to drowning might be another. Is Prosper rather than Prospero a crux? Is it related to Caliban’s inverse self-naming “ban ban Ca Caliban.” Under what conditions does something become a crux rather than a general critical problem.

The irreconcilable singular and plural reference to book and books in The Tempest marks a certain exception with regard to the book that bears on its survival: it is both singular and divisible. And this exception is sustained by a larger suspension between two moments in he play, one near the beginning Prospero’s tells Miranda of the undrowning of his books when he is put with Miranda on a boat and the other when Prospero promises to drown his book. That promise is never fulfilled in the play (something Mowat does not comment on) . In short the book / books are never destroyed in the play; they appear to be as indestructible as they are non-existent.

The “book” / “books” contradiction or crux is exceptional in respect to survival. Scenes of destruction by shipwreck are resolved into scenes of reported recovery occur in multiple ways and multiple times. But even the norm established by the shipwreck, about which he have more to say, is exceptional. For the ship is not actually not wrecked. And no one dies in. Indeed, no one dies in the play. (Not even the witch Sycorax is killed; she is exiled.) Prospero is potentially vulnerable (“destroy him”; “drive a nail into his head”), as are Alonso and Gonzalo during a brief sleep from which Ariel awakens Gonzalo who in turn awakens Alonso. But the play’s shipwreck differs from the book undrowning in that the promise to drown my books implies their destruction but muddies its exact nature.

In shipwreck scenes, characters are let to imagine the fate of corpses, which may or may not be destroyed. Ferdinand imagines his father’s dead body—turned to coral. Something artificial and unburied. Other corpses suffer other kinds of changes, one of which bleeds into Prospero’s promise to drown his book. Alonso wonders what kind of fish eat his son but then says that he will himself dive into the bottom of the sea until he is buried. He uses he very same line Prospero does but adds mud at the end. Cite. Alonso imagines Ferdinand and he buried. Other burial in the earth. Prospero calls up the undead that have been buried. No cremation, but incineration of books by Caliban. The play floats, as it were various ways of sinking corpses into oblivion while assuring its characters and us that all of the characters have survived. The spacing of book into book and books does not allow us to imagine the end or the beginning of the book. The real issue is not what the book or books are (their referents) or how many there are but the manner of their destruction and whether they can be destroyed. We don’t know if they will fall to the bottom in the mud or be scattered, decheminated, as Derrida puts onto distinerrant paths. Nor are the book ever threatened with destruction in a scene like the shipwreck. The survivability of the book’s bios differs from the survival of biological, then, in that the book is divisible and indivisible, both a “book” and “books.” The problem of the referent raised by the missing prop is more radical than it may seem at first sight. The issue of referent is not reducible to fauxrensics—to a genre, much less a single book. “The book” does not have an empirical material referent, nor is it a metaphor (as when Stephano tells Caliban twice to “kiss the book,” the bottle of liquors from which he drinks).

There is no media ecology in the play whereby either corpses or books get recycled. No food chain. There is predation (fishes eating Ferdinand) and there is not, just veganism (Caliban seems to be a vegan—shows plants of the island). And then there is the banquet from which no one eats. The banquet itself is not produced as a special effect. Ariel’s appearance is.[x]

Marination

Derrida does not consider animots in relation to corpse disposal in The Animal That Therefore I am. Says that there is only burial or cremation in Beast and SOv 2, yet does ot talk about burial at sea. These are the only two forms of the and destruction of corpses, according to Derrida in Beast and the Sovereign vol. 2. Misses cannibals being both cremated and buried. Synthesize the two works. Animals disposing of corpses? Only humans? But how do humans do it? Is there a human way to waste, or what Alonso calls “infinite loss?” Is mourning about the tropics of formerly human waste disposal? [in All Quiet on the Western Friend, a soldier says his friend is dead (just killed in combat). That’s not your friend,” the sergeant barks, “that’s a corpse. Move it back ther.” And the other soldiers move it away.] some one who has just be

A kind of enlightenment at work, but perhaps closer to what Derrida says about phantasm and sleep being more vigilant than waking

5.1. Boatswain’s return

“rigged as wen / We first put out to sea. 223-24

The “strange noises” of the isle awaken the sailors:

I were well awake, / I’d strive to tell you. [sleep compromises capacity to retrieve form the archive, to tell—] We were dead of sleep . . 229-230

We were awaked 235

Even in a dream, were we divided from them / And brought moping hither. 238-89 boatswain goes back to the beginning—we first set out to sea—and skips to the end—when they were awakened—so they have no story to tell]

And more diversity of sounds, all horrible, 234 (Horrible horrible, most horrible?)

Ariel leaves the crew of the ship asleep, as if in a cryonic state. Echoes the way Prospero has put Miranda asleep. “Lie there, my art”—ambiguous referent (another crux) of “art” as either Miranda or his cloak and staff, his daughter or his props.

Ferdinand asking Miranda if she is a spirit or a human; Miranda asking if Ferdinand is a sprit (Geist in German translation).

Miranda: What is’t, a spirit? . . .

It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit.” 1.2.410; 412

Prospero: No, wench, it eats and sleeps and hath such senses

As we have—such [anticipates Prospero’s “Dost thou think so spirit? And Ariel’s response “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero: And mine shall. / Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeing . . . 5.1.19-23] This gllant which htou seest

Was in the wreck, and he’s something stained

With grief. . .413- 416

Prospero addresses Ariel as spirit a few lines later Spirit, fine spirit, / I’ll free thee 1.2. 421.

Ferdinand: My prime request / Which I do last pronounce, is (O, you wonder!) / If you be maid or no?

Miranda: No wonder, sir. But certainly a maid 426-28

The question devolves into a question of whether Miranda is a virgin or not.

The German is Jungfrau.

Ferdinand “Weeping again the King my father’s wreck” 1.2. 391

Ferdinand wonders if he is dreaming

When Alsonso and Gonzalo are put to sleep, so to speak, they survive a near death experience after Gonzalo is awakened by Ariel.

Mourning is given time yet being skipped over—drowning means there’s no corpse. Lost at sea. No burial. Just storage. Even Alono’s body is not really a corpse, just rich and strange. It’s already been turned into a sort of monument, turned into the subject of a song which is and is not a requiem.

(For Ferdinand, it seems to be requiem.)

Assumed I am the king Ferdinand and Alonso mourning, the mistakenly assumed deaths. Every third thought will be grave.[xi]

Why is the book the vessel that cannot be presented—why is the library the space that enables

Not is it real or not, but what kind of real? Should I be mourning? How should I take up my relation to this thing I am now archiving? That we are talking through and should I keep this? Or is it just a dream—Prospero. a retrieval the island becomes an archival space. In 1.2. Prospero brings back stories, he is the database and that search engine. He’s the software designer, not the hard drive. The play is a revenge tragedy. The book –I’ll drown my book—how is the story of P’s being set adrift in his books and for him to drown his books thereafter? How is that story told in Milan?

Hear spirits in two ways—magical utopian space and as a grave, as archive, because it is coded by P’s books, then what is the relation between being setting adrift and generic crossing and conversion from revenge tragedy to romance? How does that play with the shipwreck with a romance motif that is coded as tragic, as total loss? Alonso forced to live as if his son is dead, then have him returned to him by Prospero—letting live or letting die—sovereignty becomes the management of life. Foucauldian biopolitical moment at the end. But the book will be drowned? To do what to separate from the ship? From the ship Prospero is going to get back on?

Remember me—remember—Prospero as Hamlet.

Speech argument doesn’t work because people aren’t sure if they are speaking or hearing speech. The book would have drowned to begin with if they had met their intended fate. We never see the ship after the shipwreck even though it is restored—Ariel says to Prospero.

Abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck.

They take their chances with drowning. They’ve decided to risk drowning. He decides to drown his books. What does it mean to drown a person as opposed to drown a person? A figure of an archival oblivion: forgive and forget. Forget about it. Crimes to be pardoned. Pardon and perjury. Forgiveness. Hostipitality. Friend and enemy. Witness, testimony, and archive.

Engage the Foucauldian moment at the end of The Tempest with the end of Beast and Sovereign Vol. 2

Also a species difference because Caliban is left on the island with a story that the play is not even interested in writing because it is not interested in telling, just a sort of

Spirits as alcohol—bottle—alcohol—drowning your years in booze. Another liquid oblivion. Putting out the fire the books, so the fire is put out.

Turns into a the narrator of lost opportunity—Caliban narrates the misfire when A and S stop for the trumpery. It’s too late to get to the books.

Propsero’s hour is now at zenith—there’s an expiration on his power. Extradition.

Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s Books.

Prospero's Book as a life preserver

book as boat.

Book / boat / bark / bottle?

It’s like the threat of an archive whose time is up, the moment when the archive becomes a crypt.

[pic]

Ahead of its time. Still of the obsolete past in the future from Bernard Tavernier’s science-fiction thriller, Death Watch.



The idea of a burial at sea strikes me as being so odd. Shouldn't

there be a word for it? Cremation, inhumation (buried in the earth),

and "marination?" Right, that one's taken.

Btw, when Derrida discusses cremation and inhumation in The Beast and the

Sovereign, 2, he doesn't mention burial at sea. Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading.

We can think about Ariel's full fathom five in relation to survivance, use The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, to talk about "sea change" and drowning books. The dead not dead fantasy seems to depend very specifically on water--on a shipwreck that isn't, on a father drowning who didn't. Are all of these nearly immediate recuperations necessary for the book to be absent as a prop, to be drowned off stage, to be diverted by a bottle from Caliban's desire to burn but his books? Strange economy of survival, the corpse, and the book without embalmment, the book as balm, not blame, here.[xii]

Prospera’s Books

The film does not show the beginning of the book or the end of the book.

No paratexts at any point, so there’s a precursive and recusrsive elippsis of the book that keeps it by drowning it. Taymor makes explicit a pre-cursive economy of the book that differs from other economies of drowning in the play; drowning by the numbers—characters seem to drown but do not. This is a cycle of reassurance; lots of scenes of reassurance that more or les repeat each other. Prospero even lies about the drowning of his daughter to Alonso to manufacture a symmetry between Prospero’s loss and Alonso’s, as if Alonso’s repeated Prospero’s.

Melting sand castle between the opening title for The Tempest, rain begins, camera dollies back and pans right as we se it begin to melt in a hand that belongs to Miranda. (use of the words “melt,” “dissolve pace,” and so on in the play) There’s a storm before the storm. Even before the shipwreck she sees, there is a sandcastle wreck. Miranda first when she enters the play after the boatswain scene. 1.1.

Melting sand, dissolving sand anticipates Prospero’s

The seven minute long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle Cooper, transposes the moment when Prospero “drowns” his books: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch Prospero’s books fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the bottom. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In her book The Tempest, Taymor writes: “The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea” (21).[xiii] Taymor enlarges authorial agency in the preface to her book, entitled “Rough Magic,” writing that “we drowned the books of Prospera.” Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on the expansive, leisurely condensation of Prospera’s transposed and visualized declaration to “drown” her “books” and Prospera’s ventriloquized epilogue. I read Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual storage space, sending off her film and accommodating areaderly and spectatorial desire for an authorial force by encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the book accompanied by a speech turned requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the end title sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The film’s specters are re/called at the end of tie-in screenplay book. The last two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s end title sequence of a book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the production and cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. See Figures 0 and 0.0, the verso and recto pages).

|[pic] |[pic] |

|Figure 0 (verso page) |Figure 0.0 (recto page) |

Filming an adaptation of The Tempest allows Taymor to perform a paradoxical salvage operation of the book which is not salvific: precisely because the drowning books are absent all paratext (no titles or authors are visible on the covers), the book as a medium serves as a metaphorical storage unit for film, a book cover like the metal canisters used to house rolls of film that contain, as it were the author. This paradox may be vividly grasped in the book of the film The tempest, with the author listed as “Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare”: in a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back cover and page opposite, the film credits for the director and actors are printed just to left of an “uncredited” book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding it. The book of the film shows a nameless book while also recording Taymor as the film’s author: the weirdly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of hybrid authorship-- crediting Shakespeare as her source appears and disappears in the fold of the of the book as one turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing on the books opening as they fall underwater, Taymor invites us to ask a question no one has thought to ask, namely, what does it means to “drown a book?” Phrased another way, we might ask: Why does Prospero not follow Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo--“burn but his books”--in order to destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them unreadable even though the pages are open.

Ariel’s bee song transposed from 51. 87-94 to just before Prospero’s “ My Ariel, chick ,’That is thy charge.” 5.1. 316

Taymor cuts “Please you draw near.”

Crux of lack of a stage exit for Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, p 305, Arden 3.

Miranda: The sky it seems, would pour down stinking pitch

But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek

Dashes the fire out. 1.2.4-5

Gonzalo: Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him—his

Complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging; make the rope of destiny our cable 1.1.28-20

I would fain die a dry death.67-68

Alonso: That they were, I wish

Myself were muddied in that oozy bed

Where my son lies. 5.1. 150-52

Upon this shore when you were wrecked, was landed

To be king on’t. 5.1.161-62

Ariel says he “landed” the survivors; the passive contrusciotn here is rhater odd—“who landed” could easily work—but “was landed” is not just “naded” but implies a missing agent—someone or some force“landed” Prospero.

Gonzalo I prophesized, if a gallows were on land

This fellow could not drown. 5.1. 217

Drowning as something to be read—Gonzalo reads the “drowning mark” upon the boatswain as a prophecy in 1.1.

Sleep versus awake is a strong binary opposition in 1.2. Miranda put to sleep and at the end when the boatswain is awakened but his sailors are asleep.

There thou shat find the mariners asleep

Under the hatches. The master and the boatswain

Being awake, During the play, sleep and waking blur, sleeping and death, even sleepy language.

Taymor’s audiocommentary

When you do the play onstage, the cell is off stage, so you never see it. But when you do a movie (on sequence before A, A, S and G wander (they awoke earlier).

She says the set by the pool is like “an open book,” the white walls like pages.

[PBS Masterpiece] montage of turning blank pages with faces of stars superimposed. Red cover and blank pages, open book at the end of the logo sequence]

No books in Prospera’s flashbacks, just alchemy and the funeral of her dead husband, the duke. She now inherits the post. Taymor says that “in the original play, Prospero reads his books and therefore loses control. Seems like a good reason, but we . . .”she stresses alchemy because as a witch you could be burned; you could be burned for alchemy—“set to sea presumably to die”

The question “Is there a book or not?” assumes we know what a book is. We want to ask a different question Gets at hunatotexuality og Prospeor’s Books, not their resumed materiality.

Burn but his books versus I’ll drown my books. The book is and is not there, but it is imagnined takes two very different forms.

Spectrality takes us ot bio—different notion of the island—mangaement of life and eath—ut with a n economy of loss without loss.

Fake death in Much Ado About Nothing—not directed at the female body, purification.

Chief focus will be on Taymor’s tempest in art because tshe shows the books “drowning in the end title sequence.

Made me think that Prospero too is among the living dead—every third thought shall be my grave—kind of like Robinson Crusoe for Derrida—not fear of being buried alive, but fear of burying alive or burning alive. Drowning as neurotic compromise formation. He can live on only because he is as spectral as he is human. His wife died in childbirth—embryonic fluids? Miranda’s birth as another kind of shipwreck?

The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).

It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.

There are two shots of books "drowning." There is also shot of the

ship burning in the distance.

The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot of

it fully restored in a harbor.

Anyway, I am taking notes as I watch. O am a half hour into the film.

The film is good for us in that it highlights the play's not so

obvious opposition between burning and drowning.

The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I am

realizing.  Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down and

Prospero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, who

contradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarly

reassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.

Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to the

survivors.  Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--I

had forgotten that.

Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's no

flashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of her

library  WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)

on the boat in which they are set adrift.

Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being both

singular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for the

disappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt

(there, but invisible, off-stage).

So The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?

We might want to discuss the invisible blood writing in Faustus too,

by way of contrast.  No book burning there, but also no book

destruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; no

figurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I it

written")

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running;

The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fire

Shot of Prospara in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm and after the ship as sunk.

No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”

Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.

Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Airel surrounded by fire too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing it burning.

Boat burning versus book burning.

Ariel quotes Ferdinand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)

But are they safe?

Not a hair perished.

Look. The ship is hidden. So we see the ship in harbor completely restored. Taymor wildly accelerated what we learn only in the final scene of the play, giving us even more reassurance, defaulting the audience to her Ariel-centric reading of the play, as if the audience were Ariel.

Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward tracing.

Flashack of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to Prospera with background of forest splashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.

“invisible to every eyeball else”

Porspera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our wood.

Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.

Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” lines

Prospera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in Gladiator.

Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdinand hearing ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots,

“Where should this music be?

Follow it or rather it has drawn me, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.

Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Ferdinand is walking—close ups of both Ariel and Ferdinand

The ballad does remember my drowned father.

The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Ariel from the “real” human characters.

Myself am Naples, ever since my father.

Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in sots of Ferdinand and Miranda.

“I charge thee that thou attend me.”

(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—doe’st thou mark?”—Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? Tat she has to keep replacing it, redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if Miranda is listening or not?

Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre early modern, I guess. Rags, not ood pulp as source of paper.

Cut to fire in Prospera—“so lie there my art”

Prospera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.

Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in focus with racking focus.

Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks in bluish hue.

Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the books?) here is also a chest in her boat.

Boatswain is black

Music sounds a like Nymanish

Foul water shalt thy drink

Prospera’s Books

DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never holds her books, no library.

Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same economy of destruction and restoration—through “made wet”

Burns cross over from prop to non prop from burning to drowning. “drown my books” last se of “drown” in the play?

Dream/Re/Work

End credits:

Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer producer credit

Visual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper

“which was to please”

followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to inform

cast members show

to title The Tempest

A Julie Taymor film

And cones to below the end the line credits books have Laurence Sterne marble covers

“let your indulgence (repeated)

last book disappears

sets me free

Now I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats released by prayer

More guitar—also a lead guitar-builds louder, same loop

Now I want spirits begins over again

By prayer . .which pierces so, pierces that it assaults, mercy itself and frees . .

Pause

A’as you from faults from

Coda Betha Williams

Let your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd copyright.

One last book—big—with extra pages, then sound, then an icon with a page, three more icons, then warning,

Antipiracy warning

 

Theater as transcendental object.

 

Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that make the diegesis collapse.

 

“Homo fuge” moment.

 

All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world.

 

You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.

Prospera’s Bu(t)ch

drowning books burn in Greenaway's P's Books Water is all over the film.  The shipwreck is written in bluish water

that is supposed to be ink.

Toy boat. Water is all over the film.  The shipwreck is written in bluish water

that is supposed to be ink.

Toyboat.[pic]

The shot above of the book is rather theological—apocalyptic but in a perverse way—Amen.

[pic]

The word “creature”—Ferdinand called creature by Prospero to Miranda. “Thing od darkness” Caliban. Animal and Ariel—where the bee sucks there suck I.

Lacan on bees reading in Seminar Book XX, chapter 4. [A;lo bees disappearing due to isecticides that mess up the pollen and hten disorient the bees so that they can’t make it back a-hive. Puts the B in Bare life.

Speech—taught me language—Ferdinand—you speak my language. Man as speaking animal—but animal also speaks—so do spirits.

Ariel talks about the ship on fire—burning—rather than sinking, getting overwhelmed by waves.

Le Livre Ivre

Caliban as drunken Symbolist poet—ban ban ca ca caliban. Kissing the bottle as kissing the book.

In German TV Der Sturm, Ariel comes out dressed in the identical clothes Prospera is dressed in when Ariel says in English—modernized, not Shakespeare—the bit about how Prospero should forgive his enemies.

“We could isolate the flashbacks . . . color of blue and force perspective and miniatures in the flashbacks to separate them from the present, in which we used naturalistic colors.”

Ariel on shipwreck “I divide and burn in many places”

In the published screenplay,

“INT. LIBRARY – DUSK

The room is filled with Prospera’s books. In the center of the small space the young lovers play chess . . .” 160

Graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth

By my so potent art.

EXT. HIGH PROMONONTORY OVER LOOKING THE OCAEAN – NIGHT

As promised, PROSPERA throws her staff of the cliff and watches it shatter into millions of pieces on the rocks below.

Prospera’s books sink slowly one by one into the deep, black sea as the main credits begin. A haunting female voice sings Prospera’s last speech.

Miranda to Prospero, I.2.

“Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?”

Caliban: “Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark,” 2.2. 6

Boatswain: “We were dead of sleep.”

Stephano: Com on your ways, open your mouth. Here is that which will give language to you, cat. 2.2. 81-82-echoes Caliban’s “you gave me language” to Miranda.

Trinculo: I should know that voice. It should be—but he is drowned, And these are devils. 2.2. 86-87

Alonso speaking about Ferdinand: He is drowned

Whom we stray to find, and the sea mocks

Our frustrate search on land. 3.3.8-10

Ariel as harpy:

The never surfeited sea

Hath caused to belch you up3.3.55-56

Thee of thy son, Alonso

In film, magic banquet has animals and fruits and then leaves follow out from it and then crows or ravens and then Ariel.

Audiocommentary over chess scene—the board is made of sand, meant to recall the sandcastle at the beginning; the chess pieces are made of rock and coral.

No books are visible in these shots of M and F playing chess, contrary to the published screenplay.

Miranda no longer wearing leggings but a dress (to indicate her return to Europe, according to Taymor.

“Lava dogs, the bees are not in the original script but you can see better how Ariel is doing P’s bidding from scene to scene.”

Usually, she doesn’t have the confrontation between Caliban and Prospero—he is looking directly at the stick. Shot reverse shots in close ups—“he leaves and does not look back, forever free,” cut back to extreme close up of Prospera (like rough magic sequence).

“I rearranged where this song happens.”

Another long take until “there I “ and see kaleidoscope in one of her earlier visions so that he would just become water again.

“And do the murder first” 4.1.432 The part about burning Prospero’s books drops out.

Ariel as harpy:

But remember

. . that you three

From Milan did supplant good Prospero,

Exposed unto the sea, which hath requite it,

Him and his foul deed” 3.3.68-72

Prospero “When I have decked the sea with drops fall salt” 1.2. 155

Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine,

Fall fellowly drops. 5.1.63-64

Full fathom five thy father lies;


Of his bones are coral made;


Those are pearls that were his eyes;


Nothing of him that doth fade,


But doth suffer a sea-change


Into something rich and strange.


Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:


Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

The se-change is a form of encrustation—what dissolves becomes permanent-dones coral, eyes, pearsl. Almost like a sonnet. What is the tense of “are”? Have been made (as in “are now changed completely”)? Or present? As in “are now being changed, in the process of”)

We broke the staff and the movie ended here. Create a song; Kyle Cooper would shoot these drowning books

It realy is about the end and of books.

Leads singer is Portishead. And htt is the movie.

Aliban is not naked,a s the screenplay says—he wears a loincloth—and the boos do not fall one by one but sometimes fall in groups.

Ariel shot in slow-motion—Ben W had to reloop his voice so that iw ould match the

Cut back to Proserpa—you can see a book on her table, but she is turned away from it. slow motion.

on table—omnivorous. Ariel’s harpy sequence activated by shots of Propsera dropping a black feather in a glass calchemical bottle. Which turns blue (like ink) and hten close up of he bottle as water explodes out of it.

They hath bereft thee, and do pronounce by me,

Linger’ng perdition, worse than any death 3.3-75-77

Like supposed destruction a means of speculation on disposal of corpses, sleep is a kind f suspended animation or cryonic freezing. Prospero puts Miranda asleep. Ariel later makes Gonzalo and Antonio sleep. Ariel has the men in the ship sleep. Caliban questions most acutely the border between sleeping and waking. Sebastian’s a “very sleepy language.”

Repetition of you gave me language.

Even language is not awake.

No print of goodness take versus printless feet.

Mannoni mentions The Tempest in connection to Robinson Cruose, but nt the footprints.

the destruction of the ship itself is both water and fire.

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-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.

The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd

The very virtue of compassion in thee,

I have with such provision in mine art

So safely ordered that there is no soul--

No, not so much perdition as an hair

Betid to any creature in the vessel

Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;

For thou must now know farther.

Bring in Lucretius on the shipwreck?

PROSPERO

But are they, Ariel, safe?

ARIEL

Not a hair perish'd;

On their sustaining garments not a blemish,

But fresher than before: and, as thou badest me,

In troops I have dispersed them 'bout the isle.

The king's son have I landed by himself;

Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs

In an odd angle of the isle and sitting,

His arms in this sad knot.

PROSPERO

Of the king's ship

The mariners say how thou hast disposed

And all the rest o' the fleet.

ARIEL

Safely in harbour

Is the king's ship; in the deep nook, where once

Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew

From the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there she's hid:

The mariners all under hatches stow'd;

Who, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour,

I have left asleep; and for the rest o' the fleet

Which I dispersed, they all have met again

And are upon the Mediterranean flote,

Bound sadly home for Naples,

Supposing that they saw the king's ship wreck'd

And his great person perish.

Ariel repeats Prospero’s reference to a “hair.”

FERDINAND

Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?

It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon

Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,

Weeping again the king my father's wreck,

This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and my passion

With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,

Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.

No, it begins again.

PROSPERO

How? the best?

What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?

FERDINAND

A single thing, as I am now, that wonders

To hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me;

And that he does I weep: myself am Naples,

Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld

The king my father wreck'd.

ALONSO

If thou be'st Prospero,

Give us particulars of thy preservation;

How thou hast met us here, who three hours since

Were wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost--

How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--

My dear son Ferdinand.

PROSPERO

I am woe for't, sir.

ALONSO

Irreparable is the loss, and patience

Says it is past her cure.

PROSPERO

I rather think

You have not sought her help, of whose soft grace

For the like loss I have her sovereign aid

And rest myself content.

ALONSO

You the like loss!

PROSPERO

As great to me as late; and, supportable

To make the dear loss, have I means much weaker

Than you may call to comfort you, for I

Have lost my daughter.

ALONSO

A daughter?

O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,

The king and queen there! that they were, I wish

Myself were mudded in that oozy bed

Where my son lies. When did you lose your daughter?

PROSPERO

In this last tempest. I perceive these lords

At this encounter do so much admire

That they devour their reason and scarce think

Their eyes do offices of truth, their words

Are natural breath: but, howsoe'er you have

Been justled from your senses, know for certain

That I am Prospero and that very duke

Which was thrust forth of Milan, who most strangely

Upon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed,

To be the lord on't. No more yet of this;

For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,

Not a relation for a breakfast nor

Befitting this first meeting. Welcome, sir;

This cell's my court: here have I few attendants

And subjects none abroad: pray you, look in.

My dukedom since you have given me again,

I will requite you with as good a thing;

At least bring forth a wonder, to content ye

As much as me my dukedom.

Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess

ANTONIO

Thus, sir:

Although this lord of weak remembrance, this,

Who shall be of as little memory

When he is earth'd, hath here almost persuade,--

For he's a spirit of persuasion, only

Professes to persuade,--the king his son's alive,

'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'd

And he that sleeps here swims.

SEBASTIAN

I have no hope

That he's undrown'd.

The seven-minute-long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle Cooper, however, gives expressive form to the moment when Prospero ‘drowns’ his book: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch Prospera’s books (in plural form) fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the bottom musically accompanied by a haunting version of Shakespeare’s epilogue scored by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In The Tempest, the book published as a companion piece to the film, Taymor writes:

The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea. (21)[xiv]

Taymor enlarges authorial agency beyond the individual in the ‘Rough Magic’ preface to the book, writing that ‘we drowned the books of Prospera’). (p. 21) Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on not only shifting Propsoero’s “rough magic” speech to the end of the film as Prospera’s ventriloquized “Coda,”(p. 21) but on the final credits. Because “the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete, I asked Elliot [Goldenthal] to take those last great words and set them to music for the seven-minute-long end title sequence” (21) during we witness the visualized consequences of Prospera’s declaration of her intent to ‘drown’ her ‘books’ . . I read Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual storage space, sending off her film and accommodating a readerly and spectatorial desire for an authorial force by encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the book. She accompanies this allegorical depiction of displaced authorship with a speech-turned-requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the end credit sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The authorial specters of the film are re/called at the end of the tie-in screenplay book. The last two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s closing credit sequence of a book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the production and cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. (Figures X.1 and X.2 [the verso and recto pages].)

|[pic] |[pic] |

|Figure 0 (verso page) |Figure 0.0 (recto page) |

In a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back cover and facing page, the film credits for the director and actors are printed just to the left of an ‘uncredited’ book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding it. The book of the film thus showcases a book displaying neither title nor author while simultaneously recording Taymor as the film’s ‘author’ (asserted via her writer, director and producer multiple credits here in combination with the ‘Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare’ authorial designation on the volume’s front cover): the interstingly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of hybrid authorship - crediting Shakespeare as her source - appears and disappears as one turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing on the books opening as they fall underwater, Taymor invites us to ask a new question, namely, what does it means to ‘drown a book’? Phrased another way, we might ask: Why does Prospero not follow Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo - ‘burn but his books’ - in order to destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them unreadable even though the pages are open.

Taymor’s protracted endings. The last shot of the books underwater is a very long take. Long takes for end title sequences are not unusual. But Taymor’s recalls two earlier unusually long takes in the film, the first when Ferdinand sings “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night” to Mirnda, while both are in close-up, she with her head lying on his shoulder; the second is of Prospera at the end of “our revels now have ended.” Special effects for the speech end just before “This rough magic,” when the film cuts to a straight on shot of Prospera. As she begins to deliver the rest of the speech, the camera gradually dollies in on your face in what becomes an extraordinarily tight close-up of her face: one can no longer she her mouth just before she says “I’ll drown my books.”

Propsera is literally cut off from her voice, her promise already made off-camera nad fulfilled, after, the end of he the film, also in a voice-over. The “O mistress mine” shot has a different kind of incongruity that nevertheless makes the : the sining is of coure dubbed in post-production, but it’s not clear whether the voice is the actors; at points, it look like he is lip-synching. This Across the Universe moment has includes some superimposition. But the real oddity is that the song is taken from another play that of course has a parallel (the shipwreck and mistaken believe that a loved one has drowned) but Feste makes no sense in context since Ferdinand has his mistress.

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming

That can sing both high and low;

Trip no further, pretty sweeting,

Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—

Every wise man’s son doth know.

What is love? ’tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What’s to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty,—

Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III (1602)[xv]

Rough magic follows her creating a ring of fire around her as she says “Ye elves” and also has some superimposed flashbacks in montage form.

The film ends with a series of liberations also not in the play:

1. After the Europeans exit, Prospero lets Caliban go. No dialogue. Just lots of cutting back and forth until we see Caliban walking up the steps of the cell and getting away.

2. Propsera then lets Aerial go.

3. She then fulfills her promise, as if letting herself go--throws staff

And then "dissolve" into end titles and books.

If one reads the sung epilogue with the paratextless books, you can hear the referent of "me" and "I" as the books (floating down one by one). It is certainly not prosper singing. The books are being preserved a way as if in an aquarium, swimming around like jellyfish “biobiblianimots”, and they are also being destroyed. The disappearance of Propsera—along with the absence of paratexts could be as evidence of their liberation. No one, not just Prospera, owns them, no one has title (unlike the end titles), and their "voice" is anonymous. Sets up anonymess.

Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s Books.

Filling in the Blanks on FIlm

We now turn to the endings of Taymor and Greenaway’s films. Here we examine specific ways in which the closing sequences adapt the book written and the book being written in ways that both unify the film and yet also complicate a sense of the ending of film, of how complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and the closing paratext begins, and so of when one can legitimately exit the cinema or turn off the blu-ray player. Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the end credits begin? Or is one compelled, for fearing of missing something, to stay seated and keep watching even after ‘The End’? Such announcements of seeming completion can sometimes, of course, be duplicitous, acting as teasing herald to further moments in the textual / paratextual endings beyond ‘The End’ that loop back the closing paratext to the earlier text of the film. I address these questions and others in a necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the end sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films paradoxically save the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or disintegrating the book (auteur, you will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a much higher cultural status than the more everyday écrivain, or writer).

Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s Books. Cataloguing and displaying twenty-four books (twenty-five if we include The Tempest, far less; in any case, the total falls far short of the thirty five plays published in the the First Folio) of Prospero’s library in separate sequences, the film has an epilogue but no closing sequence beyond that. In the final shot, ‘The End’ appears at the bottom of the screen and remains there with additional logo information as the shot fades to black. The opening title sequence consists of one of Greenaway’s characteristic tracking shots, the camera moving at a steady pace as it tracks right in one long take. The sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a huge book being turned by a naked man in the opening title sequence is just one of many bizarre and heterogeneous scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial book sequences that interrupt the dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and set off with the use of a digital paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (extra-textual and sometimes theatrically staged) book drowning in the film's final tour de force montage which ends with the two final book sequences. Prospero’s last books prove to be exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to be completed First Folio and The Tempest. All of the plays have been printed in the Folio, the narrator tell us, except for The Tempest, which is written in a bound book the same size as the Folio. The first page we saw Prospero writing on in the film’s prologue returns first as a blank space in what is a facsimile of the Folio and then as a film prop, a bound, completed manuscript of The Tempest we saw Prospero begin to write in the prologue.

The permanently blank pages of the Folio become an empty yet potentially redemptive allegorical space. ‘There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one more,’ the narrator says; ‘nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front of the book, just after the preface’ as the camera shows the First Folio page with the poem entitled “To the Reader.” (Figures X.1-X.4.)

|[pic] |[pic] |

|Figure 1 |Figure 2 |

|[pic] |[pic] |

|Figure 3 |Figure 4 |

As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that ‘We still have these two books, safely fished from the sea.’

Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film exist only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both expand and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: on the one hand, the collected works are completed; on the other, their completion means splitting the manuscript of The Tempest from the printed thirty four plays (and implicitly superimposing Prospero on Shakespeare as author of The Tempest). In any case, the drowning of Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of Greenaway’s rewriting of the play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and delivering the epilogue, his close-up talking-head shot increasingly shrinking into a smaller frame until it occupies only its centre and is surrounded by black. In an extratextual epilogue, Prospero’s image then becomes a photograph of Gielgud on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back at a smooth pace in what Greenaway calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see Ariel (played by three different actors) running towards the camera as a text begins to be superimposed over the applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the film ends as Ariel is shot in slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the camera.[xvi]

In a moment of what Latour and Wiebel term ‘iconoclash’, or uncertainty about whether this liberation from the page is creative or destructive, the manuscripts of The Tempest and First Folio are saved only insofar as the collected works are split into different print media (handwriting and print).[xvii] This differs markedly from the more symmetrical ending in the screenplay.[xviii] In Greenaway’s unscripted epilogue, the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single, unbound page looking like an abstract multi-media painting (fig X.3). The film sequences with ‘Prospero / Shakespeare’s’ (164) books had already begun to make them partially unreadable. The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that the date cannot be read on the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem in the first Folio omits ‘To the memory of my beloved’ at the top of the page, showing just ‘The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E: A N D what he hath left us.’ The Tempest is similarly defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme close up that the film frame cuts off the top and bottom parts of the page (fig X.3). Writing becomes automatic. A close up of the word ‘boatswain’ we saw Prospero write in the prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice pronouncing it (and ‘master’) off screen. But this time an question mark is added after ‘boatswain’ not by the hand of a visible writer which we by now know well, but rather through the apparently agent-less processes of animation (figs X.1-2).

|[pic] |[pic] |

|Figure 5 |Figure 6 |

|[pic] |[pic] |

|Figure 7 |Figure 8 |

Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear as others appear in a recursive cycle (fig X.3). ‘The End’, the date of Prospero’s Books, and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of the final page but then only on the otherwise black screen (fig X.4). Genette’s account of the publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the author’s name on the book cover and title page) is transformed by Greenaway into an ‘exit’ that involves reading one’s way out of his film.[xix]

Prospera’s Books

DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never holds her books, no library.

Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same eeconomy of destruction and resoration—through “made wet”

Burns cross over from prop to non propr from burning to drowning. “drown my books” last se of “drow” in the play?

Dream/Re/Work

End credits:

Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer producer credit

Visiual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper

“which was to please”

followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to inform

cast members show

to title The TEpest

A Julie Taymor film

And cones to below the end the line credits boks have Laurence Sterne marble covers

“let your indulgence (repeated)

last book disap

sets me free

Now I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats lreased by prayer

More guitatr—also a lead guitatr-builds louder, same loop

Now I want sirits begins over again

By prayer . .which piecres so, piereces that it assaults, mery itself and frees . .

Puse

A’as you form faults from

Coda Betha Williams

Let your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd copyright.

One last book—big—with extrapages, then sound, then an icon with apage, three moreicons, then warning,

Antipiracy warning

Kindle

The Tempest

Terminating a medium, burning versus drowning. How do books die? What will it mean to have ended the play by drowning books?

Fauxsimile done away with Prospero—techno-magical fantasy of seeing with a master eye done away with but conserved because it’s done away.

Bringing back materiality and book history not in a kind of boring way but in an interesting way. Nice way to shift the question that Mowat is asking—what is the book? To what is the fate of the book? The destruction and fate “Unpacking My Library,” Destination and Drowning; or destinerrance—destructibility of the letter—divisibility versus destruction (defaults to the trope of burning or tearing the paper or the support up). In coming back to Materiality and the prop we also to the question of the support for Derrida.

What is drowning a book?

No special effects when Prospera spies on Miranda and Ferdunand .

A kind winter light on the location—lots of long shadows.

Special effects when Ariel comes in and spies on Gonzalo etc and puts Gonzalo to sleep. Then Alnso goes to sleep. Only bried shots of Ariel and then just music.

“strange drowsiness” dowsi and drown?

sleepy language

Ariel appears only when Sebastian ad Antonio draw and prepare to murder.

[The film gets boring once we get to Caliban, en trinculo, then Stephano. Turns into filmed theaer. Convesation betwenS and A cots reverse shots gradually cutting into closer and closer close ups. The editing is supposed to intensfy the drama.

Ariel shows up “thou liest” behind Trinculo. He appears and disappears.

When he sleeps thou cans’t knowck his [Prospero] head down. Fhaving irst seized her books. But remember first to possess her books first.

Burn but her books and that most deeply consider is the beauty of her daughter.

SHOTS OF ARIEL SEPRATE FROM SHOTS OF HUMANS.

Calbian isle ful of noises—sleep and sleep agan hwen aske I cried to dream again.

Between S,T, and C abd A,A ................
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