"Shakespeare's Hypertextual Performances: Remediating The Tempest in Prospero's Books"

Against a multifaceted theoretical background which has investigated the changing cultural contexts of the performances of The Tempest, my paper primarily focuses on Prospero’s Books (1991) by Peter Greenaway. The film mostly raises the issue of the performability of the play in the light of the radical redefinition of the status of textuality, and of the notions of writing/reading and performing space, within the context of what Gunther Kress calls “the new media age” (Kress 2003). The books of Prospero’s library, whose pages are continuously read aloud, quoted and visualized in frames that appear on the screen, often embedded one into another, are not only interactive hypertexts which break the bounds of conventional writing and reading: they also explore the potentialities of a new ‘performing space’ which high-definition digital tools free from the constraints of any physical medium, thus allowing enhanced forms of interaction between word, image, sound and video. In this sense Greenaway addresses the major issue of the ‘performability’ of the text (McGann 1995) in the context of new modes of interaction of different media, which largely respond to Richard Grusin and David Bolter’s notion of ‘remediation’: “a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media. ” (Bolter-Grusin 1999, 98) Against this over-elaborate contamination of media, blending illusion and reality, Sir John Gielgud’s performance of Prospero acquires particular relevance. While enhancing the film’s deliberate cross-identification between Prospero and Shakespeare, the 87 year-old actor increasingly becomes a sort of “third figure in an indivisible trinity” (McMullan: 2008, 157) whose finely enunciated recitation and priest-like stage presence bear echoes of his four precedent performances of the same role for the theatre. Gielgud’s virtuosity as an experienced Shakespearean actor is thus deliberately used to break the cinematic illusion and to reinforce Greenaway’s weaving of codes, media and performing levels.