Shakespeare’s Hypertextual Performances: Remediating The Tempest in Prospero’s Books

Abstract

The changing political attitudes, cultural issues and aesthetic principles entangled in the fascinating performance history of The Tempest have been investigated at length by recent scholarship. The innumerable versions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s last play, one of the central “interpellative ‘dream-texts’ of Western Literature” (Zabus 1), largely epitomise “the intricate instabilities and contingencies that emerge in conversations ‘about’ and ‘between’ Shakespeare and performance” (Hodgdon 1) and, in a wider perspective, between theatre history and the imaginative recreation of dramatic texts. Claiming that “spectacle can seldom be divorced from the interplay of cultural forces that create it”, Virginia Mason Vaughan has more recently drawn attention to the ‘challenge’ of staging The Tempest which “has frequently forced actors, actor managers and directors to experiment — just as Shakespeare’s King’s Company did — with varied performance values and innovative theatrical technologies”, thus testifying to The Tempest’s role as “a cultural mediator from its inception to the present” (Mason Vaughan 1–2). Each production, the scholar adds, “represents a moment in time, when cultural forces outside the theatre — political, social, economic, and aesthetic — come together in a theatrical performance, which by its nature is a collaborative activity” (ibid.).