Re-nascences: The Tempest and New Media

Abstract

As Miranda notes, The Tempest is a particularly male play: ‘I do not know/One of my sex’ (3.1.48–9). Despite their significance to the play’s back story, mothers are notably missing from its narrative present. Equally, despite the close attention he pays to his history, all that Prospero explicitly has to say about his wife relates to his own paternity of Miranda: ‘Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and/She said thou wast my daughter’ (1.2.56–7). Yet images of birth and pregnancy recur frequently in the play’s language, just as screen representations of the female body, pregnancy and procreation proliferate throughout Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991). In considering the relation of Shakespeare and Greenaway, of vital importance are the time and technology of the adaptation; this chapter subsequently foregrounds the cinema’s shift to new media that is showcased in Prospero’s Books. How are Shakespeare’s images of pregnancy reworked in the audiovisual tracks of Greenaway’s adaptation, the first digital Shakespeare film? How does Prospero’s Books intertwine The Tempest’s poetic images of pregnancy with its use of new media technology? And how does this relation pertain to broader questions of cultural inheritance and transtextual adaptation?

If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burden of a former child?

Sonnet 59: 1–4