Numbering Prospero’s Books

Numbering Prospero's Books Peggy Phelan Say good-bye to Hollywood Say good-bye my baby Billy Joel JAMES I, LIKE many powerful men, had a short attention span. Like the "target audience" for most contemporary Hollywood films, James preferred fast action, elaborate scenery, and good music with a simple plot. Given the politics of theatrical patronage it is not surprising that Renaissance drama lost out to the masque as the King's favorite mode of nationalist art. Before the masque triumphed, however, theatre tried to accommodate the King's taste by giving some stage time to the special effects of the masque. All four of Shakespeare's Romances, and especially The Tempest, his last, are full of disappearing tricks which seem like embryonic special effects in film. Peter Greenaway's breathtaking cinematic treatment of The Tempest, Prospero'sBooks, accents the strange moment in the history of theatre when drama discovers the beguiling power of visual seduction. While it has long been the custom to read The Tempest as Shakespeare's farewell to theatre, (even though he went on to write Henry VIII and parts of Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher), Greenaway doubles and triples the possibilities of reading the play as an autobiography of artist as Magus. Sir John Gielgud plays Prospero-and recites everyone else's lines for the first four acts. This Prospero writes The Tempest in front of our eyes. As he imagines the drama, he mouths the lines of the other characters and more extraordinarily, sees their images appear and disappear in mobile mirrors. Virtually every frame in Prospero'sBooks operates on at least two planes of space-time. One of those planes refers to the "plot" traced by Shakespeare's play, the others are not chronological 43 or spatially continuous with previous frames. Prospero's mirror is a metaphor for theatre and a surrogate screen. Greenaway's film feels as if it is a film of the film Prospero might have made, had he world enough and time. Combining the Renaissance convention that theatre's job is to hold a mirror up to nature and the intricate contemporary critical theory of the cinema as both a mirror and a screen for the spectator's "identifications ," Greenaway's film simultaneously projects a deeply accurate Renaissance worldview and an exhilarating illustration of the most technically innovative possibilities of contemporary cinema. Greenaway's first premise is that Gonzalo put twenty-four books into the leaky boat he provided for Prospero's and Miranda's escape from Italy. His film opens each book, allowing the spectator to read Prospero's developing play in relation to the books he has already read. Each book is placed over the frame of the play's action, thus giving virtually every frame at least two orientations in time-space. While Shakespeare/Prospero may have thought of himself as an exiled ruler from a court panting after a different sort of magic, Greenaway sees himself as a herald for a radically different form of technology. "0 brave new world" Greenaway thinks-and then illustrates its remarkable beauty and seductive power. His film then is "about" a playwright leaving the theatre, performed by an actor who may be thinking about retiring, and is directed by a man who wants to redefine the properties of the filmic frame. Greenaway's magic, like Prospero's, is a strange mix of science and art. "The Graphic Paintbox" is a digital, electronic canvas which allows the filmmaker to compose images on a computer screen that can then be reshot and added to traditionally shot filmic images. The paintbox images are astonishing because they seem to combine both the personal signature of a single artist and the neutrality and "authenticity" of mechanical reproduction . The filmmaker, working on the computer, has access to a library of images and texts which can be called up and recombined with "new" images or with other images (words, numbers, and so on). Additionally , the filmmaker has an electronic palette from which colors can be mixed and matched with precise nuance or careless abandon. Greenaway's lavish use of this technology overthrows the confining rules of perspective which have defined Hollywood film practice since...