Abstract
Garnering inspiration from Carole Levin’s study of the elaborate protocols of re-gendering absolute power in public representations of Elizabeth I, this essay analyzes the re-gendering of the absolute power of Shakespeare’s magus-ruler Prospero as feminine in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren as Prospera. Through casting, narrative, and performance choices as well as spectacular set and costume design, the film develops a new myth of absolute feminine power. Prospero’s power of magical language is here superseded by Prospera’s power over space. Yet this new myth suggests to contemporary cinema audiences that the wielding of absolute power by a woman is an endeavor whose precariousness and loneliness surpass by far the experience of exile of Shakespeare’s Duke of Milan.
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Notes
- 1.
On Redgrave’s re-gendered Prospero, see Elizabeth Klett, “Gender in Exile”, in Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87–114. A review excerpt of the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company’s productions is available in the “History” section of the company’s website, http://www.lawsc.net/pdf/lawsc_history.pdf. The 2003 Georgia Shakespeare Festival Tempest is discussed in Andrew James Hartley, “Prospera’s Brave New World: Cross-Cast Oppression and the Four-Fold Player in the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s Tempest”, in Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 131–149.
- 2.
See, for instance, Carole Levin, “Lady Jane Grey on Film”, in Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, eds. Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 76–87; “Elizabeth: Romantic Film Heroine or Sixteenth-Century Queen?” Perspectives on History (April 1999), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-1999/elizabeth-romantic-film-heroine-or-sixteenth-century-queen.
- 3.
Virginia Mason Vaughan, The Tempest, Shakespeare in Performance series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 7.
- 4.
Courtney Lehmann, “‘Turn off the dark’: A Tale of Two Shakespeares in Julie Taymor’s Tempest”, Shakespeare Bulletin 32.1 (2014): 45–64; 49; Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 89.
- 5.
Hartley, “Prospera’s Brave New World”, 133.
- 6.
Laury Magnus, “The Tempest and Julie Taymor’s Talkback at BAM for TFNA’s Gala”, Shakespeare Newsletter 60.2, No. 281 (2010): 43.
- 7.
Anita Singh, “Dame Helen Mirren Changes Gender of Prospero in The Tempest”, The Guardian, September 11, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/7996708/Dame-Helen-Mirren-changes-gender-of-Prospero-in-The-Tempest.html.
- 8.
Julie Taymor, “Rough Magic”, in Living with Shakespeare, ed. Susannah Carson (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 466–482; 470.
- 9.
Anthony Breznician, “First look: Helen Mirren in lead role in Julie Taymor’s ‘Tempest’”, USA Today, 7 May 2010. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-05-07-tempest07_ST_N.htm.
- 10.
Singh, “Dame Helen Mirren”; see also Rob Carnevale, “‘The Tempest’: Dame Helen Mirren Interview”, Indie London, http://www.indielondon.co.uk/Film-Review/the-tempest-dame-helen-mirren-interview.
- 11.
Lehmann, “A Tale of Two Shakespeares”, 47.
- 12.
Hartley, “Prospera’s Brave New World”, 134.
- 13.
Kirilka Stavreva, Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 74–83.
- 14.
For a rich discussion of colonizer Prosperos in the long post-colonial performance tradition of the play, see Vaughan, Chap. 5, “Postcolonial Tempests”, 98–126. For analyses of survivor Prosperos, see Elizabeth Klett, Chap. 4, “Gender in Exile: Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero in The Tempest (2000)”, in Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87–114; Boika Sokolova, “Morphing The Tempest: Alexander Morfov’s Bulgarian Wrecks, Shakespeare Bulletin 29: 3 (2011): 279–290; Stavreva, “Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares: Post-Brechtian Tempests in Post-Communist Bulgaria”, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3 (2), http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/781864/show.
- 15.
Lehmann, “A Tale of Two Shakespeares”, 50–51.
- 16.
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 3 (trans. Aldrich), Hesiod, Theogony 176 ff (trans. Evelyn-White), Orphic Hymn 70 to the Eumenides, Orphic Hymn 29 to Persephone, Statius, Thebaid 12. 557 (trans. Mozley), quoted in Aaron J. Atsma, Theoi Greek Mythology: Exploring Mythology in Classical Literature and Art. Website. http://www.theoi.com/.
- 17.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 4. 451 ff (trans. Melville), quoted in Atsma, Greek Mythology.
- 18.
Homer, Il. iii.278ff; xix.260ff.
- 19.
Violet Lucca, “Review. The Tempest”, Film Comment, November/December 2010, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-tempest/.
- 20.
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy by George Puttenham: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 3.19.281.
- 21.
Homer, Il. ix. 454, xxi. 412, Od. xi. 280; Aeschylus Choeph. 406. See Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
- 22.
The close echoes between Prospero’s “Ye elves of hills” speech” (5.1.33–51) and Golding’s translation of Medea’s Ovidian speech was first discussed in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latin & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2: 443–453. Most recently, Judith Buchanan has argued that the parallels between the speeches were meant to be identified by erudite audience members at court and the Blackfriars Theater, and that the play was “licensed … to parade a little well managed erudition”. See “Not Sycorax”, in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, eds. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virgina Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 335–346; 340.
- 23.
Stavreva, Words Like Daggers, 125.
- 24.
Magnus, in “The Tempest and Julie Taymor’s Talkback”, saw the glass vials and “globes” as “allusions to Zeffirelli’s glass-blown tubes… and an evocation of Louise Bourgeois’s art installations”.
- 25.
For a perceptive critique of the patriarchal foundation of Prospera’s power, as represented in her back story, see Lehmann, “A Tale of Two Shakespeares”, 50.
- 26.
Lehmann, 57.
- 27.
Buchanan, “Not Sycorax”, 343, emphasis added. On Prospero’s emulation of Sycorax’s intimidating rhetoric, coupled with an appropriation of female gestational powers, see chap. 5, “Courtly Witch-Speak on the Jacobean Stage”, in Stavreva, Words Like Daggers, 103–127.
- 28.
Vaughan, The Tempest, 189.
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Stavreva, K. (2018). “We Are Such Stuff”: Absolute Feminine Power vs. Cinematic Myth-Making in Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010). In: Bertolet, A. (eds) Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64048-8_5
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