1960 George Schaefer Production

This American television adaptation starred Maurice Evans as Prospero; Richard Burton as Caliban; Roddy McDowall as Ariel; and Lee Remick as Miranda.

J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their helpful critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, quoted from an early review in the New York Times that found the small screen crowded with the characters; asserted the settings “overshadowed the fragility of the narrative”; and considered the close-ups insufficiently “fanciful” (241).

Discussing the production in a 1984 article in the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, Virginia M. Vaughan noted that the play was cut to fit a ninety-minute program; called the result intentionally “something light and airy”; and termed it a “light-hearted Tempest in which everyone—the characters on screen and the audience—has a good time.” Admiring Schaefer’s “imaginative” casting of well-known celebrities in the main roles, Vaughan wrote that Evans’s “Prospero was dignified, old, but loving toward his daughter and influenced by Ariel’s sensitivities,” that “Lee Remick’s Miranda was the best I’ve seen,” and that “Burton’s resonant voice did wonders for Caliban’s poetic passages.” She thought that the cast are “so obviously having a good time that we become involved. There’s nothing pompous or self-important about this production.” Admiring the imaginative sets, with “various colors and textures [that] made each scene appealing,” she thought that in each instance “the physical space seemed strangely unreal but just right.” Vaughan admired the “mysterious[ness]” of the music; found McDowall’s costume the most striking; considered the costumes of most of the other leads appropriate; but thought Ferdinand’s clothing a bit too revealing. She praised the film, admired the camera tricks that could alter Ariel’s size in an instant, and concluded that in “capturing the joy of the original, the production remains faithful to the spirit of Shakespeare’s text,” even if some later productions have proved much less cheerful (3).

In his 2008 book Shakespeare on Film (64–65), Samuel Crowl briefly praised the success of this televised production, while Herbert Coursen, in his 2010 study Contemporary Shakespeare Production, praised the lead actors but found this Ariel occasionally annoying and called Evans’s delivery old-fashioned (65).

Virginia M. Vaughan, in her 2011 survey of performances of the play (171–74), said that this version resembled a televised stage production but used simple special effects to shrink Ariel, who was played with some comic touches by Roddy McDowell. She thought that Caliban (played by Richard Burton) resembled a “puppy-headed monster” (172); said that both Caliban and Ariel overtly rebel but that “Maurice Evans’s grandfatherly magician maintains firm control” (172); and discussed alterations of the play’s structure and text (173). Calling Trinculo and Stephano “disappointingly flat” and lacking in “pizzazz” (173), she praised Burton’s delivery (173); called the staging “good-natured”; and noted its debts to British theatrical traditions (174).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare, Peter Cochran considered the color and design atrocious; mocked Maurice Evans’s stereotypical wizard; described the cast and various cuts to the text; and called this a “jolly” and “pantomime” Tempest, with odd clothing and make-up (351).

1979 Derek Jarman Production

Directed by Derek Jarman, this adaptation featured Peter Bull as Alonso (King of Naples); David Meyer as Ferdinand; Neil Cunningham as Sebastian; Heathcote Williams as Prospero; Kate Temple as young Miranda; Toyah Willcox as Miranda; Richard Warwick as Antonio; Karl Johnson as Ariel; and Jack Birkett as Caliban.

In his 1989 book Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society, John Collick emphasized the play’s own dream-like logic; said that Jarman gave his film “a dream-like” structure (102); thought the movie resembled “masques of the Elizabethan period” (102); and wrote that although the film “challenges orthodox perceptions of Shakespeare,” the “extent of its success is debatable” (103).

Samuel Crowl, in his 1992 study Shakespeare Observed, wrote that Jarman’s film “came as an outrageously invigorating breath of fresh air” in the 1980s (77), with “Karl Johnson’s Ariel … a Marvel: controlled, alert, intelligent, and haunting with no resort to punk or camp idioms” (79) but with Miranda the least successful of the updated characters since Miranda’s “innocence puzzles Jarman,” so that he turns her into “something of a wild child.” According to Crowl, “Jarman, who sees so much so well in his film, cannot translate Miranda into a modern idiom” (79).

Assessing Jarman’s Tempest in his 1994 article “Shakespeare Comedies on Film” (107–9), Russell Jackson called it “the work of an image-maker”; noted its de-emphasis on camera tricks or special effects; admired its “staging tableaux” (107); and observed its stress on inside, often dark, settings. Comparing Prospero to a master attended by servants (108) and noting the production’s modern clothing, Jackson commented that although this version “might suggest a kind of art-school Shakespeare, cheap, showy, cheerful, it does tell the play’s story forcefully and engagingly, moving with the text through illusion, threats, vengeance, and comedy to a joyous sense of release” (109).

Diana Harris and MacDonald P. Jackson, in a 1997 article titled “Stormy Weather: Derek Jarman’s The Tempest,” wrote that Jarman’s movie, “though often bizarre, engages the feelings; it is genuinely moving, and the emotions it arouses are essentially those aroused by Shakespeare’s play. It captures many key aspects of the original, being particularly deft at hinting at the element of psychodrama involving the central trinity of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban.” They said that the film “raises questions about body and mind, restraint and liberty, freedom and control, desire and fulfilment: it balances joy and sadness, innocence and experience, hope and despair; above all it powerfully conveys a sense of the shifting boundaries between illusion and reality, waking and dreaming, the playful and the serious, life and art” (97).

Kenneth Rothwell, in his 1999 overview of a century of Shakespeare films, wrote that in Jarman’s movie the “dialogue is transposed, pushed around, pruned, and yet idiosyncratically intact” and is nonetheless “delivered in decidedly non-transgressive establishment King James accents, while the plot follows Shakespeare’s with considerable fidelity.” He considered the film’s “boldest stroke … the re-invention of Miranda (Toyah Willcox) as a voluptuous tart, a ‘nymphomaniac’ to use Jarman’s own label.” Rothwell considered this Caliban “a giggling obnoxious satyr” and a “lecher.” Noting the production’s stress on blatant nudity (if sometimes from a distance) as well as its touches of “bondage and aggression,” Rothwell also observed that “[c]ampy sequences abound” but reported that some viewers considered “the flashback of a gross, flabby Sycorax nursing a grown-up Caliban … at best ‘intrusive’ and at worst ‘disgusting,’” although he reported that “even that revolting episode has been rationalized as artistically valid.” Ultimately, Rothwell commented that “[d]espite the boldness of interpretation, the actual filming is confined to conventional masters, mid-shots, and close-ups with very little use of a wandering camera” (206).

In his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, Douglas Brode, saying it was easy to “despise” Jarman’s film, accused it of “avant-garde posturing,” of deliberately “distorting the play’s tone and temperament” (224), and of “bitterly undercut[ting] everything Shakespeare set out to say and do in his gentle, forgiving, stylistically frothy yet philosophically formidable play” (225), while Deborah Cartmell, in her own book from 2000 titled Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, noted that the “obscene behaviour of Caliban” had earned the film an adult rating (80).

Daniel Rosenthal, in his 2000 book Shakespeare on Screen, found little “[e]motion and entertainment” in Jarman’s film; called it “monotonous and alienating”; said it “focus[ed] on the characters’ thoughts, not their environment”; and found Prospero and Ariel dull, Miranda “more spirited,” but Caliban “vivid and repulsive” (153).

Writing in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema, Stephen Buhler wrote that “Jarman’s critique of the self-contradictions of mainstream, heterosexist culture centers on the deposed Duke of Milan” (146); commented that “Caliban is portrayed as sheer appetite”; thought that in “an inspired bit of casting, punk diva Toyah Willcox is a gloriously rebellious daughter, by turns sullenly resentful and gleefully impulsive”; and asserted that “Jarman genially subverts the sexual politics of the play’s normalizing marriage” and that with the “marriage secured, the families and kingdoms reconciled, and … celebrated all at once, Jarman concludes the film with the suggestion that The Tempest and its consequences have somehow been confined to Prospero’s own mind” when we “see Prospero asleep in the festival” (148).

Also in 2002, Graham Holderness, in his book Visual Shakespeare (83–87), thought it “arguable that Jarman has side-stepped the very issues of power and authority that preoccupy modern discussions of this play,” partly because “his Tempest is no longer a treatment of colonialism.” Instead, Prospero’s “aspiration seems … to be that of bringing an alienated, expatriate community into social cohesion, rather than that of imposing any rules of equity, rights of legitimacy or structures of authority” (86).

In his 2007 overview of the play (129–30), Trevor Griffiths wrote that “Jarman’s treatment is not particularly ‘faithful’ to Shakespeare’s play in many respects and it is open to criticism that, for example, Miranda seems too old and that her relationship with Caliban is one of amused tolerance rather than fear, but overall the film seems to have qualities of ‘strangeness’ that do some justice to many elements of Shakespeare’s work” (129).

Writing about the movie in her 2008 book dealing with The Tempest on film, Lisa Hopkins suggested that “Jarman’s Tempest is in some ways more traditional than might have been expected” (98), although she did think he sought to “harness Shakespeare to ends other than simple admiration for the play.” Commenting of the film’s interest in architecture (99), she also found it “personal” in emphasis and said it “centres principally on Prospero and Ariel” (102). Offering her own views in scattered remarks, Hopkins frequently quoted from others and cited many and varied critical responses to this film.

In her 2011 book on The Tempest for the Shakespeare in Performance series (180–82), Virginia M. Vaughan commented that the setting “suggests the fruits, as well as the decay, of British colonialism”; that the film emphasizes Prospero’s oppression of Ariel, whom he “uses as a spy to monitor the other characters”; that it underplays Caliban as a sexual threat to Miranda; and that it highlights Fernando’s nude body. Vaughan wrote that it cuts the ending’s heterosexual marriage and replaces it with a male “hornpipe dance” (180); discussed various scenes (181); and called this Caliban “ineffectual,” “leering,” but unintimidating. Observing that both Prospero and Sycorax enjoy torturing others and that the film emphasizes Prospero’s “inner demons” (182), Vaughan noted various cuts and rearrangements that allowed Jarman to make this work an indictment of heterosexual oppression. She found this version a refreshingly dark alternative to early “syrupy” versions made for television and said that Jarman “brilliantly exploited film’s potential to convey a nightmarish vision of Prospero’s power” (182).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare, opened by listing this production’s various oddities and called most of it “camp, camp, camp” but termed it even second-best in this respect to the 1979 BBC production (353).

Also publishing in 2013, Hugh H. Davis, in an article titled “Rounded with a Sleep: Prospero’s Dream in Derek Jarman’s The Tempest,” called this movie “at once a film about a ‘gentle mage’ … and a film about that mage’s dark control over text, characters, and audience. Prospero here is a subtly manipulative figure who refuses to truly relinquish power, even in his dream. He filters all images through his mind and, thanks to the dream motif,” Davis suggested. “Derek Jarman is able to fashion The Tempest to have a sense of fun and to be about forgiveness at the same time that it deconstructs the possibilities of Prospero as a dark magus, maintaining control while managing his island. Jarman’s film marries two conceptions of the text—that Prospero might be both forgiving and self-serving—through the use of the inventive dream framework” (99).

In 2017, in an essay titled “Authority in Crisis? The Dynamic of the Relationship Between Prospero and Miranda in Appropriations of The Tempest” (170), Magdalena Cieslak argued that in Jarman’s film, “Miranda, in her childlike playfulness … retains elements of [the character’s] innocence from the play, but she is not an object that can be freely manipulated. She is an independent subject that makes her own choices.

Also in 2017, in his essay “The Absent Masque in Three Films of The Tempest” (168–73) Russell Jackson noted Jarman’s “small-c” conservative values concerning English historical places (169–70), adding that Jarman depicts “a closed (or, arguably, closeted) world” (171) and then describing much of the film (171–73).

Again, in 2017, Peter J. Smith, in an article titled “‘Something Rich and Strange’: Jarman’s Defamiliarisation of The Tempest,” closely examined both Prospero and the closing masque, saying that Jarman portrays them “warts and all,” refusing “to smooth out the play’s roughnesses” and thus staying “closer to Shakespeare’s work than might at first appear” (147). Smith wrote that Jarman depicts Prospero not as “an ascendant magician” but as one “struggling to assert control” (193), and thereby, in this an in other ways, “undermining his heroic status” (153). The film thus implies a “paradoxical relationship between Jarman’s faith in the magic of filmmaking and the anxious impotence of his magician” (153). Similarly, Smith argued that “[r]ather than melting into the air Prospero’s masque is clamorously demolished” (156), so that the masque here “reinforces the play’s ambiguous attitude toward the tyrannical magus” (157).

1980 BBC Shakespeare Production

This adaptation, directed by John Gorrie, this adaptation featured Michael Hordern as Prospero; Derek Godfrey as Antonio; David Waller as Alonso; Warren Clarke as Caliban; Nigel Hawthorne as Stephano; David Dixon as Ariel; Andrew Sachs as Trinculo; John Nettleton as Gonzalo; and Alan Rowe as Sebastian.

Henry Fenwick, in his essay on “The Production” (17–26) for the booklet the BBC published to accompany the first broadcast, reported that the director, John Gorrie, wanted to avoid using television special effects to make this play seem magical but to rely instead on its magical language. Settings were made to look realistic and the storm to seem real. Costumes were inspired by Carpaccio’s art, so that the realism would heighten any magical elements (17–18). Gustave Doré’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy helped inspire some of the sets, with set designer Paul Joel emphasizing “rock formations” and a huge cliff for Prospero’s “cave.” Three basic settings were used: the cliff, a grove, and a barren beach (17–18). Joel explained how he designed the sets to meet fire code regulations and to emphasize vertical lines. Real trees were used for the grove (18–19). Dave Jervish, responsible for lighting and other electronic effects, impressed Fenwick with his ability to manipulate the appearance of the set and characters, especially in the masque scene, which also involved complex choreography, in which English dances were stressed despite the Mediterranean setting and the Renaissance Italian costumes. Four cameras were used to film the dancing (choreographed by Geoffrey Cauley) in order to depict it from different perspectives. Director Gorrie discussed his reliance on talented actors to make the production a success, especially stressing the need for actors who could effectively perform as Ariel and Caliban (who were played, respectively, by David Dixon and Warren Clarke), whose performances were praised by this production’s director and producer (24–25). Gorrie also hailed Michael Hordern’s Prospero. Hordern wanted to highlight Prospero’s humor, warmth, and love for Miranda and his difficulties with his magic. Hordern, who had played Prospero often before, wanted to play him again to decide why and how the character forgives his enemies as the play ends, especially in terms of Prospero’s relationship with Alonso. Hordern appreciated the intimacy between actors and the new possibilities presented by television (25–26).

J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their 1988 critical anthology, reprint parts of some of the earliest reviews. Thus, a writer in the Shakespeare Quarterly wrote that “[e]verything goes wrong here” and that Hordern’s Prospero “is so droningly grandfatherish that he puts everyone to sleep as effectively as he does Miranda.” On the other hand, a reviewer in the New Orleans Times-Picayune thought that Hordern “saves the day with his marvelous performance,” while a commentator in the Los Angeles Times called the whole production “[h]orrendous” and a “lead-footed, tedious disaster” featuring clumsy and embarrassing dancing. In a similarly negative assessment, a writer for the London Times found it hard to fault but then added “but that perhaps may be the most damning thing you could say about it.” Calling it stiffly conventional, this writer thought it would stir neither anger nor joy but would instead simply sit on the archival shelves. Yet a reviewer for the New York Times, although calling this production “hardly unflawed,” said that it “manages to avoid some of the more familiar pitfalls” of stagings of this play, with a “clean and unfussy” approach, “generally uncluttered designs,” effectively suggestive sets, and even some clever photography that helped make a “flitty-flighty” Ariel appear and disappear in “magical” ways.

Assessing this version in the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, Dominick Grundy began by emphasizing the authoritarianism of Prospero in the play—a trait underemphasized in the BBC version through a “softening of Prospero’s force” and therefore a “slackening of the play’s tensions.” Grundy asserted that the “director (John Gorrie) has smothered disturbing resonances so as to free us … from complexity and ambiguity, so that ‘[e]verything is played down, trimmed, medium-strength, without overt flaws, cuts or abrasions’; it is fidelity without faith. Lines are crisply delivered; dialogue is controlled; groupings are tightly managed,” but the effect is to rob the play of its complications. According to Grundy, this Prospero “is continually nodding, blinking and chucking the camera under its chin, softening with disarming gestures the strong lines he fears he must speak,” so that the most interesting performances come in the “Stephano-Trinculo-Caliban scenes” and from the actors playing Sebastian and Antonio, although even “they are not as edged and tough as they could be.” Grundy felt that “the attractions of this Tempest tend either to be negative—there are no gross excesses—or external,” in the set or music. Meanwhile, at one point Grundy seemed to suggest that this Ariel and this Caliban reminded him of characters already familiar from Star Trek (3).

Susan Willis, in her 1991 book on the BBC Shakespeare plays, wrote that this “production has a full geography of space without a full geography of spirit” (192), adding that the “balance of physical and spiritual wobbles in the various groups on the island; the drunks are successfully physical as is very hairy Caliban, but the nobles are a bit pristine and low-key, Prospero and Miranda almost disembodiedly ethereal, while the spirits are uncharacteristically physical, with all the focus on virtually bare, writhing bodies. Most of the magic,” she thought. “comes from television technology rather than Shakespeare, for frequent invisibility makes the production full of technical tricks, although it does not take long for a viewer to predict just where and when Ariel will disappear” (192).

In her 2008 book on film adaptations of The Tempest, Lisa Hopkins called this production “leaden and undistinguished and entirely devoid of invention” with almost “no attempt to engage with the [television] medium,” even in “some woefully unconvincing rain” (43).

Herbert Coursen, assessing the broadcast in his 2010 book Contemporary Shakespeare Production, called it “dull and dark,” with a boring Prospero who resembles “an irascible schoolmaster,” unconvincing storms, sometimes flawed sound, but a “funny” performance from “Nigel Hawthorne playing a drunk” (126).

Discussing the BBC Tempest in her 2011 book on performances of the play (174–77), Virginia Mason Vaughan called it “stark and spare” as well as “naturalistic and conservative” (174). She found the set unimpressive and the costumes literally colorless (although some actors were almost nude). Although terming the first scene “faithfully rendered,” she said that that this Prospero resembles a “tetchy schoolmaster” (175) and described this Caliban as “apish” and “[b]estial” but also “sympathetic” and not especially “dangerous” (176). She considered Trinculo boring when he confronts Caliban (176); said that Prospero, near the end, resembles an “absent-minded professor” (177); and concluded that this production records “what had become by 1979 Britain’s conventional staging and interpretation, although with some of Prospero’s flaws presented” (177).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare, dismissed this version as “leaden-footed, safe, dull, and obvious,” with inept special effects, various incoherences, bland music, and a “camp” and passionless Ariel. He found Michael Hordern a boring Prospero and Warren Clarke nonthreatening as Caliban and therefore considered Miranda, Antonio, Sebastian, and Gonzalo all more interesting by contrast, although trapped in a production he regarded as too tame, lacking humor, uninspired, and burdened with a tedious masque (352).

1983 Bard Production

Directed by William Woodman, this version featured Duane Black as Ariel; Edward Edwards as Sebastian; Roberta Farkas as Juno; David Graf as Stephano; Nicholas Hammond as Ferdinand; William Hootkins as Caliban; J. E. Taylor as Miranda; and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Prospero.

Herbert Coursen, in his 2010 book Contemporary Shakespeare Production (126–28), disliked the set; criticized television as a medium for theatrical production; and called this Prospero “mildly ingratiating,” insufficiently god-like, and “blandly consistent.” Nevertheless, he still found this version “worth watching”; praised the actor playing Caliban; highly praised the scene involving Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo; and regretted that the production lacked a live audience (127).

Virginia M. Vaughan, in her 2011 book on The Tempest performed, (177–79), noted the simple set created for what is “basically a stage performance” featuring little “dramatic tension” (177) and thought that Prospero, dressed in Jacobean costume, resembles standard depictions of Jesus Christ (177–78). She noted that the actors were minor television stars and thus worked well in this medium and “delivered Shakespeare’s poetry in intimate, low-key tones.” Calling Ariel “exceptional,” with “lithe” movements and real emotional range and calling Prospero “even-tempered” and Caliban “brutish,” she admired the use of camera movements and close-ups (178), saw the closing masque as “straightforward and fully staged” and noted the “subdued delivery” of Prospero’s “set speeches.” However, she criticized the production’s failure to explore the play’s political dimensions, calling it “safe but bland,” and added that this play does not tend to work well on television (179).

1991 Prospero’s Books Version

This adaptation, directed by Peter Greenaway, starred John Gielgud as Prospero; Michael Clark as Caliban; Isabelle Pasco as Miranda; Kenneth Cranham as Sebastian; Mark Rylance as Ferdinand; and Orpheo as Ariel.

Discussing this production in his 1993 book Watching Shakespeare on Television (163–76), Herbert Coursen wrote that the “‘focus’ of the film is diffused among the story being told, the narrator, and the interruptions,” remarking that “the latter add nothing beyond their own ingenuity.” He thought that “Gielgud as narrator displays more vocal virtuosity than most writers at work, but he is otherwise as uninteresting as a writer at work,” which is how the film depicts him. “And the story he tells,” according to Coursen, “is dull, its characters indeed puppets, neither individualized (with the exception of Caliban, a naked dancer with a grotesque deformity) nor differentiated” (164–65). Suggesting that Greenaway expected “an educated audience” and noting that the “range of his allusiveness is vast,” Coursen remarked that nonetheless “we are not learning anything. Our ignorance is being exposed, no doubt, but that darkness is not being lightened by Greenaway’s display of what he knows,” so that the “allusions do not serve the purposes of the film,” which is “self-indulgence masked as ‘intellectual’” (166). According to Coursen, “The constant and unrelenting artifice calls attention to its irrelevance, to its effort to mask purposelessness, and not to the relationship between art and our participation in its illusion” (167). He disliked the “aimless tracking shots” and the absence of “any field of depth” (1993).

Russell Jackson, in his 1994 essay “Shakespeare Comedies on Film” (109–10), considered this production an example of “art historians’ Shakespeare”; noted its use of “the most advanced video techniques available to achieve a multi-layered imaging of the text, often strikingly beautiful and disturbing but sometimes oddly literal” (109); said it “illustrates the story rather than playing it out”; praised the eloquence of John Gielgud as Prospero and the physical inventiveness of Michael Clark as Caliban; and emphasized the production’s stress on grand shows (110).

Writing in 1997 in an essay titled “Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books: A Tempest Between Word and Image,” Mariacristina Cavecchi suggested that “Greenaway develops and focuses on the aesthetic and mannerist aspects of the Shakespearean text, while he does not seem to care too much about the other very important Shakespearean themes, such as power or history. As far as it is possible to generalize about the relation between Prospero’s Books and The Tempest,” she continued, “I am suggesting that the filmmaker reinterprets the Shakespearean text as a mannerist text and creates a new, artificial, and mannerist world by making use of devices and techniques which constitute a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare’s theatrical illusionism” (83).

In another essay published in 1997 (“Shakespeare in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction: Sexual and Electronic Magic in Prospero’s Books”), Peter S. Donaldson asserted that “Prospero’s Books offers a striking interpretation of The Tempest, similar to recent feminist and psychoanalytic accounts, in which Prospero attempts to control female sexuality and ‘appropriate’ the birth-giving powers of the maternal body. Greenaway,” Donaldson thought, “gives such a reading of The Tempest a technological inflection by associating Prospero’s ‘magic’ with the ability of the new medium of digital cinema to create enhanced illusions of life.” Thus, “Greenaway recasts central questions of the play in contemporary terms. And by associating his own electronic medium with earlier wonder-working technologies—the voice of the magus, the printed pages of the Renaissance book—the film suggests that we are still living in the era of Renaissance magic, perhaps at a time toward the end of that era” when machines have become more interesting than humans (169).

Kenneth Rothwell, in his 1999 survey of a hundred years of Shakespeare films, called Prospero’s Books a “post-post-modernist” Tempest “combining conventional 35mm film with television post-production techniques using high-definition television processes” (208). Rothwell considered the result “too mannerist, too rich, too impossible, for consumption by any but the most dedicated specialists” but thought “there is much pleasure in dissecting and examining the parts” (209). He wrote that “the choreography often seems disconnected from everything else, as an inordinate number of young, and not so young, men and women prance around nude, seemingly for the sake of prancing around nude,” including even Sir John Gielgud, who nonetheless, according to Rothwell, “outdoes himself as a singer of verse, his already mellifluous but stagy voice being unnaturally amplified and resonated.” Rothwell concluded: “Notably humorless, the movie leaves you intellectually gorged but emotionally starved” (211).

Commenting on the film in a 2000 essay titled “‘Where’s the Master?’: The Technologies of the Stage, Book, and Screen in The Tempest and Prospero’s Books,” James Andreas suggested that “[s]cript and the authority that springs from ‘scripture’ are the subjects Peter Greenaway sets out to explore in what is entitled a ‘film adaptation’ of Shakespeare’s play, an adaptation I find much more faithful to its scripted source than any of the science fiction treatments of the play than many other Shakespeare films (198),” while Douglas Brode, in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare in the Movies, considered the work full of unanswered puzzles that are “less truly complex than simply confusing” (229). Observing that Gielgud reads every line of every part in the work “while performers play out the scenes as grotesque tableaus and bizarre ballets,” Brode condemned the “outrageous imagery” while admiring “Gielgud’s eloquent voice.” According to Brode, “If Jarman is an incoherent radical, Greenaway is an out-of-control extremist. He insisted on a great deal of nudity, although it was in no way appealingly erotic. His film is antipornographic and caused most audiences to collectively turn their eyes away rather than stare.” Rejecting many of the images as either “repulsive” or “hideous” or both, Brode felt that the film emphasized “cinema’s connection to painting and graphic arts rather than (as with most moviemakers) its relationship to drama and literature” (230).

Also in 2000, Deborah Cartmell, in her book Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, wrote that in this film Caliban’s “movements suggest his primitivism”; that “Prospero keeps his distance from Caliban throughout”; and that “nudity is not employed as a celebration of the body, but rather invokes shades of Nazi concentration camps” (83), while Daniel Rosenthal, in another book from 2000 (Shakespeare on Screen), found the act of viewing “Greenaway’s extraordinary vision … infuriating,” partly because “Shakespeare’s profound human drama and John Gielgud’s captivating Prospero are swamped by a torrent of live action and animated imagery” and “dazzling but dramatically useless visual trickery.” He disliked the film’s “[a]gonizingly slow tracking shots,” its “typically insistent score from Michael Nyman,” and its confusing allusions to the play’s plot. According to Rosenthal, “On the rare occasions when we can watch and listen to 87-year-old Gielgud in full flow, The Tempest comes movingly into focus,” but for the most part Greenaway “turns The Tempest into a multi-media art exhibition” (156).

In an article from 2000 titled “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books,” James Tweedie saw the film “as an allegory of the adaptation of canonical literature to cinema, with The Tempest’s colonial concerns refigured as a confrontation between a ‘masterful’ original and an ‘unfaithful’ follower.” Tweedie “situate[d] the film’s meditation on the literary artifact and neobaroque aesthetics in opposition to the discourses of heritage circulating in Thatcherite Britain” (104).

Discussing the film in an essay from 2001 titled “Claribel, Tunis, and Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books,” William Babula suggested that the “arranged and apparently consummated marriage of Claribel and the African King Tunis” presented in this film “is depicted in the most grotesque fashion” and then provides truly grotesque details. Babula then asked, “Since in Shakespeare’s play there is no scene set in Tunis, and neither Claribel nor Tunis ever actually appears on stage, can the Greenaway depiction be justified by comments in the text about them and about their marriage made by the other characters? And can this terrible depiction be further supported by references to the negative early modern English stage history of the African, to the comparable stereotypes of Africans presented in travel literature of the time, and by the possibility that Caliban, with all of his negative baggage, is, like Tunis, an African?” Babula attempted “to determine the validity of Greenaway’s brutal vision of the marriage, while recognizing that The Tempest itself is an indeterminate and uncertain text and, possibly for this reason, the definitive Shakespeare play for the post-modern twenty-first century” (19).

In his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema (148–50), Stephen Buhler asserted that Greenaway’s film “deliberately sacrifices both drama and emotional play” (150), while in the same year, in an essay titled “The Incorporation of Word as Image in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books,” Lia M. Hotchkiss argued that “Prospero’s Books reduces theater to its constitutive elements of book and image (corresponding to theater as literature on the one hand and performance on the other), claims image for itself (thus further reducing theater to book), and subsequently reincorporates even that bookish remnant of theater as image” (95).

Commenting on the Greenway adaptation in his 2004 book Cinematic Shakespeare (190–201), Michael Anderegg called it both “an ‘art film’ and something resembling soft-core pornography” as well as “a work that resists all attempts at categorization. A book, a film, a video, a product of computer art, a nexus of competing languages, a history of art and a postmodern pastiche, an homage to an actor and a film that seems at times empty of human presence, Greenaway’s film,” in Anderegg’s opinion, “exasperates and exhilarates by turns” (191), sometimes achieving “remarkable results … with minimal means,” especially in imagery that sometimes possesses “notable power” (199) while exhibiting a “constant backward-and-forward movement through time” (200).

In his 2007 overview of the play (130–32), Trevor Griffiths wrote that “[a]mong many interesting aspects of Greenaway’s treatment of Shakespeare was his decision to emphasize the four elements (air, earth, fire and water), the use of multiple Ariels and his decision to have Caliban played by the naked dancer Michael Clark, which meant that Caliban’s deformity was a matter of words rather than his actual physical appearance.” According to Griffiths, “Greenaway also adopted an approach similar to that of Jarman … in presenting parts of the prehistory of the play and offering visual glosses on specific passages. The film features many of the characters who are spoken of but do not appear in Shakespeare’s play; we see Sycorax and the birth of Caliban, [and] Ariel” (130) after of her defloration. Griffiths continued that “[w]hile, in other Tempest films, showing some aspects of the pre-story reduces some of the problems of the play’s notoriously difficult exposition, in Prospero’s Books Greenaway’s painterly vision extends into a somewhat indigestible feast of exposition in which the illustration of context and the use of visual allusion sometimes threatens to swamp the Shakespearean text” (131).

Also publishing in 2007, Alexander McKee, in his essay “Jonson vs. Jones in Prospero’s Books,” argued that Prospero’s Books “calls attention to the conflict between text and image. Over and over again, Greenaway’s movie highlights the word; but it also makes repeated references to classical/mannerist images from architecture and painting. In this way,” McKee thought, “Greenaway resolves the quarrel between [Ben] Jonson and [Inigo] Jones [a seventeenth -century poet and architect who collaborated on masques] by refusing to allow either text or image to take precedence. … Because Prospero’s Books emphasizes the textuality of Shakespeare’s play, it provides little sense of The Tempest as an ‘embodied performance.’ The result is a movie that is sometimes difficult to watch” (127).

Discussing Greenaway’s movie in her 2008 book about The Tempest on film, Lisa Hopkins noted Greenaway’s interest in the opposition of books and film (105); his concern with modes of representation (107); and his skill in presenting “an informed and fundamentally playful engagement with the differences between the written and spoken forms of … words” and with “the range of knowledges on which the play draws, and the range of ideas which it generates” (110). Noting that it is “set almost entirely within buildings” (118) and that the “tension between clothes and nakedness provides a recurring motif” (119), Hopkins also argued that the film’s “drive towards the transhistorical is almost as strong as the drive to contextualise” (124) so that it becomes “a veritable collage of different periods and cultures.” She thought that the “most striking result of its transhistorical perspective is the fact that Greenaway’s film, like Jarman’s, has no interest in a postcolonial reading nor indeed, despite the fact that it was released in the year of Desert Storm [a military operation in Iraq], in any other kind of politically aware reading” (126). Later in her book, Hopkins cited many other and varied critical responses to this film.

Evelyn Tribble, in a 2008 essay titled “Listening to Prospero’s Books,” discussed the film’s “various kinds of sounds,” arguing that eventually it is no longer “possible to identify sounds clearly, as they are not welded to images with the mimetic precision that characterize[s] the first few minutes of the film,” so that the “rhythmic sound of the water-drop acts as a form of acoustic punctuation, fading slightly as it acts as a counterpoint to an emerging new set of sounds” (167). In the same year, Ryan Trimm, in his article “Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux and Text in Prospero’s Books,” similarly wrote that Greenaway’s adaptation “works against the [traditional] heritage film’s generic obsession with setting by foregrounding its soundstage as a textual and performative space” (24).

Commenting on Prospero’s Books in his 2013 volume Small-Screen Shakespeare, Peter Cochran explained the film’s premise but found it self-indulgent and largely incomprehensible, adding, “if you don’t know The Tempest you’ll be baffled, and if you do know it, you’re in danger of being irritated out of your mind” (396). He found either Prospero “too smug” to recognize his flaws or Gielgud too smug to reveal them (397). Calling the voices here of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban unfunny, he also considered this Caliban “too camp,” Gielgud’s range too narrow for the plot, and this Miranda too plain. Cochran also faulted Greenaway’s overemphasis on art and called his direction in general flawed (398). He considered the music boring; disliked the three different Ariels; and suggested that Greenaway had overthought the whole project (399).

In 2017, Victoria Bladen’s essay “Screen Magic in Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books and Taymor’s The Tempest” argued that both films implied that “a play intensely concerned with control is also ultimately about release and the relinquishing of power” (215). She discussed both films’ treatment of magic (216–17), arguing that Greenaway emphasized magic books (217–18) while Taymor emphasized alchemy, cosmology, astronomy, astrology (218–21), and “elemental magic” (221–22). Bladen also discussed “magic and gender” (223–25), especially in Taymor’s film (225–26) as well as magic and/as performance in both films (227).

In the same volume from 2017, an essay by Russell Jackson titled “The Absent Masque in Three Films of The Tempest” reported that Derek Jarman disliked the work of Greenaway, whom he “despised as a faux radical” (173). Jackson noted Greenaway’s interest in the masque genre (174); said Greenaway’s film privileges symbolism over narrative (175); and regarded Prospero’s Books in general as a masque (176). He wrote that “nothing joyous or festive is allowed to invade the [film’s] sacred space,” especially at the end (177).

Again, in the same essay collection from 2017, Randy Laist (in “Prospero’s Books: Hyperreality and the Western Imagination”) claimed that Greenaway emphasized ideas rather than narration, especially the postmodern idea of “hyperreality” (185). He offered a detailed discussion of Gielgud as the film’s (almost) only voice (186–88) and said that Prospero is variously treated as the film’s writer, character, and actor (188). Laist, however, also emphasized Greenaway’s own authorial voice (188–89) and noted that the film’s imagery is carefully planned (190). He discussed such matters as Greenaway’s own comments on the film (191–92), his use of various books (191–92), and his allusions to notable famous paintings (192–93). Observing that the film often juxtaposes beauty and horror and that its depictions of Ariel and Caliban are especially noteworthy (194–95), Laist stressed Prospero’s final attitude of forgiveness (195), allowing the forgiven usurpers to finally speak in their own voices (195–96). Laist argued that “the film implies how the magic of representation has proliferated beyond Prospero’s island to usurp any notion of direct experience and to become the baseline of contemporary reality” (197).

Writing in her 2017 book titled Devouring Time, Philippa Sheppard (208–22; 338–55) argued that Greenaway’s film “revel[s] in the grotesque[s],” reflects our culture’s notion that “violence and entertainment are inextricably linked,” and was a product of the “postmodern cultural moment” (198). She saw Caliban as “the most obvious example of the grotesque” in Prospero’s Books (202); noted the film’s emphasis on hybrid creatures and elements, such as Ariel (208), books (208), Caliban, dancers (209), sea creatures (210), and hybrid sounds (211). Observing that the film “is full of images of bathing and drowning” and that “[w]omen’s flesh is particularly seen to be abused,” so that “[w]omen are as subjugated to the men in the film as Ariel and Caliban are to Prospero” (211), she saw this movie as a combination of horror and fun (217) and of “high art and low action” (218). She wrote that Ariel is associated with “dazzling spectacle” (338); that the film emphasizes “dark” music (338); that it reveals an inconsistent use of postmodernism (339); and that Ariel is eventually “stripped of his voice,” so that the film “nods to the [now-common] postcolonial reading” in this respect (339). Writing that Prospero’s Books emphasizes the ideas of recovering or revisiting the past (342); that it employs “precise, pared-down, mathematical music” (343); that the songs Ariel sings when he is a prisoner “are in the same style as his songs when [he is] free.” Sheppard thought the film presented both Prospero and Ariel in ambiguous ways (347), that it “objectifies Ariel’s body in an almost absurdist, Beckettian way” (349), and that Prospero treats “his spirits … like machines” (350). Sheppard perceived in this film an emphasis on “jiggling flesh and bodily fluids” (350); suggested that Ariel is associated with “carnival release” (351); saw a “complicated bond” between Ariel and Prospero (353); thought that despite a stress on forgiveness, the music is “gloomy” (354); and suggested an emphasis in the music on Ariel’s exploitation (354) despite Greenaway’s nostalgic refusal to really “engage with postcolonial issues” (355).

In his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (58–69), Neil Forsyth called Prospero’s Books “a baroque, dense, claustrophobically rich tribute to the connection of magician and playmaker, though it probably ‘reads’ better on video or DVD than in the cinema and might have made more use of popular magic and less of the austere and constantly writing magus.” Calling the film not really “a version of The Tempest but rather a performance of the retelling of the story,” he also considered it “partly an homage to the elderly Shakespearean actor John Gielgud, who reads all the parts, mostly off-screen,” so that we “realize this is a valedictory performance (Gielgud was eighty-seven), like that of Shakespeare as Prospero” (58), with “a brilliant but disconcerting finale” (60).

Meanwhile, Grace McCarthy, in her 2021 book Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare (73–75, 81–85), highlighted “the physical ability of Greenaway’s Caliban because the narrative requirements of this particular adaptation require a specific reading of Caliban which suppresses physical disability. Cinematographically, Greenaway tends to use long shots and tableau shots, deep focus, and a high depth of field, all of which lend themselves to art-historical pastiche.” Thus, in this film, by “insisting on a highly choreographed representation of Caliban, even the possibility of a Caliban with a disability becomes an impossibility” (80), so that “Greenaway goes wholly the opposite direction from [Julie] Taymor [in her 2010 version of The Tempest], creating a mode of storytelling that actively suppresses even the possibility of an unstable impairment” (85).

2010 Julie Taymor Production

Directed by Julie Taymor, this adaptation starred Felicity Jones as Miranda; Reeve Carney as Prince Ferdinand; David Strathairn as King Alonso; Tom Conti as Gonzalo; Alan Cumming as Sebastian; Chris Cooper as Antonio; Helen Mirren as Prospera; Ben Whishaw as Ariel; Djimon Hounsou as Caliban; Russell Brand as Trinculo; and Alfred Molina as Stephano.

In a 2010 essay titled “Prospera’s Looks: Adapting Shakespearean Reflexivity in The Tempest (Julie Taymor, 2010),” Sébastien Lefait, argued that Taymor’s “major innovation is not the gender switch from Prospero to Prospera, but the choice to present an elaborate apparatus of articulated lenses and planetary models as the fountainhead of Prospera’s powers …. By displacing the focus to Prospera’s optical machine, Taymor’s adaptation proposes a new ‘take’ … on the play. Whereas Greenaway treats reading and writing activities as the foundation of the play’s drama and metadrama, Taymor reshuffles the play’s stakes by foregrounding visual issues rather than verbal/oral ones” (131–32).

Alan Stone, in a 2011 review of the film titled “Drowned Out,” wrote of Taymor that “[r]ather than taking us deep into new understandings … of Shakespeare’s play, she seems on an out-of-control ego trip. All the flourishes that worked in [her earlier adaptation of Shakespeare’s] Titus [Andronicus] seem overwrought in The Tempest. Her style smothers Shakespeare’s substance. Worst of all are the computerized special effects—amateurish, even cartoonish, by contemporary standards, and put to poor use especially in scenes featuring the actor Ben Whishaw as Ariel.” According to Stone, “Taymor’s film is a series of explosive images, not a narrative. Even her settings are distractingly extreme and spectacular: her island in Hawaii is simultaneously a black moonscape of frozen lava, a forest, and a jungle. Each,” he thought, “would have been enough; together they make a visual smorgasbord. To be sure, Taymor’s creativity is evident; every scene signals her artistic ambitions. And even if The Tempest fails as a film, perhaps it can be unpacked, scene by scene, to teach future generations of film students the possibilities of cinematography. Still, the whole is not up to the sum of these parts” (78).

In her 2011 book on the play in performance, (184–91), Virginia M. Vaughan praised the “stellar cast” (184); suggested the film would long remain influential (184–85); and noted its resemblances to an earlier stage production Taymor had directed (185). Reporting that this production’s Caliban had studied Japanese dance to prepare for his performance (185) and that added lines explained why the play’s magician was a woman (Prospera), not a man (Prospero), Vaughan nonetheless observed that most of the production’s language was Shakespeare’s (186). She thought that Prospera’s relationship with Miranda often seemed more plausible than a man’s would be (186); called Prospera a “burning, volcanic force,” as her costuming implied, while Miranda’s blue costumes associated her with the sea (187); and noted that the “natural elements of Prospera’s world—earth, air, fire, and water—were reflected in her clothing and her built space” (187). According to Vaughan, the film’s use of a Hawaiian setting was especially impressive, but Mirren was also “supported by a uniformly convincing cast, except for Russell Brand as Trinculo in ‘the garbadine scene,’” although she thought he improved later on. She commented that Shakespeare’s language was particularly cut in Act 5 (188), an act Vaughan discussed in detail (188–91), noting that Taymor substituted a “celestial light show” for Shakespeare’s concluding masque (189). Vaughan concluded that “Taymor’s Tempest was the first filmic adaptation to realize fully the camera’s potential to convey Shakespeare’s most spectacular play visually as well as verbally … [it] combined great acting, spectacular natural vistas, and exciting innovations in film technology to make Shakespeare’s text accessible to a new and popular audience” (190–91).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (254–55), Peter Cochran highly praised this version, partly thanks to its special effects. He admired Helen Mirren’s performance; commended the settings despite some problems with tying them all together; extolled the cast; and appreciated the avoidance of a colonialist emphasis (354).

Michael D. Friedman, in an essay from 2013 titled “Where Was He Born? Speak! Tell Me!: Julie Taymor’s Tempest, Hawaiian Slavery, and the Birther Controversy,” suggested that in an early stage adaptation of The Tempest some of Taymor’s “performance choices … tended to downplay the racial and political aspects of the text, but when she filmed the play more than two decades later, her transformation of the main character’s gender and her portrayal of Caliban as an African slave both highlighted the colonialist elements in Shakespeare’s play and expunged the history of slavery particular to Hawaii. However,” he continued, “Taymor’s increased attention to the political aspects of the text also opens the film up to a contemporary reading that she herself could not have foreseen: an interpretation that associates Caliban with President Obama and thereby invites contemplation of Hawaii’s relation to the continental United States in terms of national fantasies of country, race, and origin” (449).

Courtney Lehmann, in an essay from 2014 titled “‘Turn off the Dark’: A Tale of Two Shakespeares in Julie Taymor’s Tempest,” reported that Taymor’s film “was almost universally panned by critics expecting a sequel to Titus. But the collision between an early modern play and a postmodern film might enable us,” Lehmann thought, “to examine the fall out in a new way, prompting us, as we sift among the incompatible fragments of this ‘grotesque hybrid,’ to examine our own obsession with dualities and disambiguation, as well as the violence that attends these processes.” She proposed instead “an alternative logic” that “involves resisting binaries and recognizing asymmetries …” (61).

Also in 2014, in an article titled “Melted into Media: Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror,” Don Moore saw a connection between viewers’ experiences of Taymor’s Tempest and their earlier experiences of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and media coverage thereof (115–17). He explored the techniques and theme of “intermediality” (118ff) both in the play and in recent American culture, especially in terms of its relevance to “9/11,” often citing other writers’ ideas while doing so (118–23). Asserting the relevance, in Titus’s film, of Caliban to the political and ethical issues raised by 9/11 (123–27), he further discussed the mutual relevance between the film and 9/11 (127ff), including in terms of such issues as postcolonialism, postmodernism, and recent feminist ideas (138ff). Throughout the essay, Moore expressed skepticism about the “war on terror,” concluding that Taymor’s film helps us “realize that ideological manipulation requires a compliant” willingness to ignore the complex history of events, especially during the eras in which those events occur (145).

In an essay from 2017 titled “The Alternating Utopic Revisions of The Tempest on Film,” Delilah Bermudez Brataas argued that of three films of The Tempest—those by Jarman, Greenaway, and Taymor—“Taymor’s captures the utopic temper of Shakespeare’s play most profoundly” (200). She discussed ideas about utopia (200); the sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration (200–201); and utopia in The Tempest (202). She also discussed the utopic setting in Taymor’s film (203–4), the film’s depictions of Sycorax and Miranda (204–7), and the theme of motherhood (207–10).

Also dealing with motherhood, Magdalena Cieslak, in an essay from 2017 titled “Authority in Crisis? The Dynamic of the Relationship Between Prospero and Miranda in Appropriations of The Tempest,” wrote that in Taymor’s film the “mother and the daughter are very often shot together, standing side by side or with Prospera protecting Miranda. Visually, their relationship is far from the confrontational arrangement that the commanding and dominating language of the play suggests.” Instead, “Prospera, herself aware of her physical weakness, is protective of her daughter not because she treats her as an asset and property, but because she sees an even weaker woman in her. While Shakespeare’s Prospero is motivated primarily by his political agenda and treats Miranda, like other characters, instrumentally, Prospera’s impulses to secure her daughter’s future appear to be both royal and maternal” (179). Meanwhile, Russell Jackson, in a 2017 essay on “The Absent Masque in Three Films of The Tempest,” noted that Taymor completely cut the play’s closing masque because she considered it a “trifle” (177).

In her 2017 book Devouring Time (338–55), Philippa Sheppard wrote that this film’s Ariel imparts a “dazzling spectacle”; noted an emphasis on “dark” music (338); claimed the movie was inconsistently postmodernist; reported that Ariel is stripped of his body; and considered the project not especially postcolonial (339). Writing that Ariel is consistently presented as androgynous, Sheppard saw Prospera as a female victim rather than a victimizer (344); said Taymor showed greater interest in Prospera than in Ariel (345); noted the film’s stress on a “naturalistic world” (349); and heard an emphasis in the music on Ariel’s exploitation (354) despite the film’s general nostalgic refusal to really “engage with postcolonial issues” (355).

Magdalena Cieslak, in a 2019 book titled Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies (99–128), often compared the film to the play and also drew on comments from many other critics; often faulted this film as too conventional, unlike Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; said this Tempest presented a pessimistic view of “female empowerment” (104); and claimed that Prospera herself is “presented as an ambiguous character, and the film complicates not only her status, even her femininity” (105). Cieslak discussed Prospera’s femininity and the ways she uses her magic (106–7); said the film focuses on how she tries to keep her power and even “justifies her violence” (107); but wrote that because Prospera is female, her protectiveness toward Miranda seems more maternal, more understandable, and less potentially incestuous (113–14), so that her concern with Miranda’s virginity makes better sense (115). According to Cieslak, the film “celebrates the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand with images of cosmic and human harmony, validating not only the purity of their intentions, but also those of the mother who blesses their union” (115). She thought Prospera seems less colonialist than if she were male (119); argued that Taymor “endows Prospera with more grace and redeeming power than the play grants to Prospero”; wrote that the relationship between Prospera and Ariel here also seems less problematic than in the play (120); and suggested that the film stresses Prospera’s painful isolation at the end (121). Cieslak maintained before that the “problem of constant struggle for power, however, is one of the film’s troubling aspects” and that Taymor shows the toll such power struggles take on females (123). According to Cieslak, “Since mothers are conceived of as being more loving, caring, and selfless in their treatment of children, Prospera, automatically, is more readily understood as a sacrificial, rather than a controlling or abusive, parent. Consequently,” Cieslak continued, “the political and transactional nature of Miranda’s marriage with Ferdinand is reimagined as romantic and serving Miranda’s best interests, and Prospera’s authoritarian and dominating behavior, something that is not inherently ‘feminine,’ is justified as necessitated by the circumstances” (123). Thus, in this film, Caliban, “despite [his] rebellious attempt, readily accepts his final defeat, punishment, and then pardon” (124). Nevertheless, Cieslak felt that Prospera’s “policy belongs to a dated liberal feminism, assuming that patriarchy can be confronted by women proving they are as good as men,” with “Prospera finally accepting the limits imposed on her power and thus not ‘represent[ing] … subversively powerful femininity’” (125).

Commenting on Taymor’s Tempest in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist, Neil Forsyth wrote that the film which he described as “wild,” had “gone as far as one could wish into the possibilities of doing Shakespearean magic on film,” with one scene in particular “brilliantly beautiful” and another (in which Prospera relates her past life to Miranda) done “with remarkable visual force.” Forsyth thought that “Ben Whishaw makes a suitably ethereal and gender-free Ariel,” functioning as “more of a junior companion to Prospera, or at least not exactly a slave” (56).

In her 2021 on Shakespearean drama and disability (73–75, 81–85), Grace McCarthy wrote that “Taymor insists on Caliban’s humanity, as well as his disability and status as a colonized individual” (81), saying she “gives audiences a more complex, nuanced Caliban than a simple monster, as the stage traditions have done.” According to McCarthy, “As in other films that humanize Caliban, Taymor has [also] seen fit to include some version of his textually unstable disability” (84).

Kade Ivy’s 2022 article titled “Tracing Julie Taymor’s ‘Rough Magic’ in Her Three Screen Shakespeares” suggested that if “we see Taymor’s clear transference of her theatrical techniques in her Titus, the film Tempest finds Taymor keener on using the affordances of film to achieve an aesthetic that is, at least at a surface level, more purely cinematic. With the specificity of its on-location shooting, combined with its bountiful visual effects that conjure storms and materialize spirits, The Tempest is certainly the most conventionally movie-like of Taymor’s three Shakespeare films” (122).

2010 Des MacAnuff Production

Directed by Des McAnuff and performed at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, this adaptation starred Christopher Plummer as Prospero; Dion Johnstone as Caliban; Trish Lindstrom as Miranda; Julyana Soelistyo as Ariel; and Gareth Potter as Ferdinand.

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (355–56), Peter Cochran called this live production “colourful and well-paced,” with a fine Prospero (Christopher Plummer). He admired the well-filmed storm, well-spoken actors, and effective music (355). He enjoyed the crude “gabardine scene” and the “Magic Banquet” (355–56). Reporting that the audience laughed at any “references to abstinence and chastity,” he found Miranda physically attractive and concluded by calling this “a well-acted, beautifully-spoken, imaginative and ideology-free Tempest” (356).

Bibliography