William Shakespeare, c. 1611
Normally I teach Hamlet in my AP Literature class, but last year I had fewer than ninety instructional days to work with due to the pandemic, so I had to make some changes. The emergency schedule called for us to break each course up into four units of four to five weeks each, so I did one unit on short fiction, one on the novel (we did The Remains of the Day), one on poetry, and one on literary theory. In the last of these, we did a whirlwind tour of various flavors of literary theory, and then I needed a text for the students to apply it all to. We hadn’t yet done a play by Shakespeare—the one author cited by name by the Common Core State Standards as a required part of the 12th-grade curriculum—and, even though it had been nearly thirty years since I’d read it, I dimly recalled that The Tempest might be a good candidate. For one thing, it was short enough that we could actually plow through it in the two weeks we had available to us!
I was actually pretty shocked to find how short it was once I reread it myself: nine scenes total, only a couple of them of any real length. I even started to worry that there wouldn’t be enough material for the students to work with, but when their writeups started rolling in, I was relieved to discover that it had indeed turned out to be a pretty good pick. As I had hoped, the students found that no matter which school of literary theory they chose to focus on, there was something relevant in The Tempest for them to comment on. Post-colonialism? They wrote about how Prospero comes to the island on which the play is set and establishes hegemony over both its indigenous inhabitant, Caliban, and the spirits that his study of sorcery allows him to command. Feminism? They wrote about how the only female character in the play, Miranda, is valued by the other characters exclusively for her virginity, to the point that she is largely treated as a life support system for a hymen. Socioeconomic criticism? I was pleased to find that, despite the archaic language, many of them did pick up on the exchange in the first scene in which a nobleman on a sinking ship tries to inspire the boatswain to save the vessel by reminding him that the king is on board, as if that would provide more motivation than self-preservation would—i.e., the nobleman thinks so little of the life of a commoner that he can’t conceive that the commoner’s life might be valuable to himself. I generally had to supply the structuralist angle, pointing out the places where the play delves into its own conventions, as when Prospero essentially says, well, this is a romantic comedy, and in a romantic comedy the lovers need to overcome obstacles to be together, so even though I actually arranged for these two to pair up, I’ll invent some obstacles for them in order to fulfill the requirements of the genre.
I also tended to focus more than the students did on a line of inquiry that was a focus of the cultural studies classes I took back in the day: though teachers may try to show their students how to get better at interpreting and analyzing stories and thereby get more out of them, those skills tend to be left at the classroom door. Audiences tend to treat the stories they take in on their own time as experience delivery systems. So how does the relationship between a given text and its audience work on that level? What experience does The Tempest deliver? It did strike me that one reason The Tempest is so short may well be simply that a lot of the experience just doesn’t appear on the page. Audiences showed up at the theater to see a shipwreck, to watch some magic tricks, and to take in a masque of the spirits—this is a play stuffed to the gills with 17th-century special effects. Which brings me to:
William Shakespeare and Peter Greenaway, 1991
When I have taught Hamlet, I have shown my classes the Kenneth Branagh film, which is unabridged (four hours, two minutes!), lovely to look at, and fairly dynamic. Should I ever teach The Tempest in the future, I will not be showing my classes Prospero’s Books. But I did decide that I should finally check it out myself. It had recently been released when I first read The Tempest back in college, and I’d read about it in the film sections of the free weeklies I would always flip through as I ate my nachos at Zona Rosa. It sounded simultaneously like it would be interesting and like it would be a chore to sit through, and both of those assessments proved correct.
The basic idea behind Prospero’s Books is that it is an avant-garde production of The Tempest done as a moving tableau vivant—which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but which perhaps makes more sense in the Internet age, with its animated GIFs that contain motion yet remain in place. It is explained to us that Prospero—played by 87-year-old John Gielgud—and his daughter Miranda have indeed been exiled to an island that teems with spirits and is home to a creature called Caliban, but that the events of The Tempest that we see unfold are just part of a play Prospero is imagining. Prospero actually speaks all the dialogue, even Miranda’s. The plot of the play unfolds much as it does in more conventional productions, but here each scene is about its own spectacle, with wild stage dressing and dozens or even hundreds of spirits moving in eccentric rhythms around the central action. Often one of these moving tableaux will be turned into the frame for another one, dropped into the center of the screen as an inset; sometimes this inset will be only partially superimposed over the background, making for a sort of double exposure. Intercut with the Shakespearean material are précis of the two dozen titular books, which Prospero was so obsessed with studying that he neglected his duties as duke and found himself deposed: these range from the Book of Water to the Primer of the Small Stars to the Book of Utopias to, you guessed it, Shakespeare’s First Folio. Again, as interesting as this is for a few minutes, I don’t know that I would have been able to sit through over two hours of it without a break. But the ’90s are over, and I was able to watch Prospero’s Books in small chunks without having to worry about getting the videocassette back to the store before incurring a late fee.
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