burt yates tempest/tempest... · web viewur essay, via shipwreck—robinson cruose in beast and sov...

Destruction matters, but no the means. Prospero’s use of the “drown” to destroy his books does not invite editorial commentary.

Everyone wants to fill in the blanks--which books did he have? Did he have a magic book?

Repetition, cruxes not called as such. Structure of difference within and without difference generates repetition that is not compulsive but are semantic rather than part of a linear plot.

Mowat passages1

2 filmsTaymor and Greenaway

Then get into oddities of both. Moving the text—only staff from above—epilogue transferred. End titles. Prospero’s mirror shatters, water, burns, hisses like acid.

. Difference between script in P’s Books and film; no paratexts of books in Tyamor’s film. Epilogue not delivered by Prospera, but along with rather than before, as Mowat thinks, the epilogue. Greenaway puts the stff breaking after the book. He doens’;t bury it—it swims away on the surface.

Paratexts.The end title sequence has titles, not the book.What is the relation between book and film ? What is a book without a paratext?

Then get back to the way drown is part of a cluster of cruxes we want to open examine through the films. They both leave the cruxes open. Ook dorwn, people drowning. The play is about biobibliopolitics—rezones the island as an uncertain space-- and archive management. Mowat opens the cruxes only to close them off. Here we depart from NW criticism and deconstruction.

Then get from the crux into the elliptical structure of the play as opposed to a play with ellipses, self-deconstructing oppositions between drowning nad hanging, between a wreck and abandon ship, between sinking and burning a ship. Btewen death by burial and Reading is not Prospero or Prospera centric. Nor Prospero and Caliban. Bring in phantasm and survivance.Then get into Greenaway. Then perhaps a bit into Taymor.It's about Prospero drown his books--why drown,

not burn? and the island as a rezonezing og of biobibliopolitics asarhcive management. Focusing on Prosoer's Books and Taymor's film."This bare island" life (and death). Since Robinson Crusoe has beencompared so often to Prospero, I wil lbe able to triangulate Beast andSov 2 and passages on survivance and burial very eaily. First move isto collapse descostruciotn and New Hisotricism n the book on thearchive--bruend in Archive Fever, Ataued le MOMA, Cinders, Post Card,etc. Inhumation nad cremation , but not "marination" in Beast andSov. Title of chapter "Drown Before Reading: The Tempest's Watermarks"

Tempted to call it Prospero's Unused BooksStrange that book historians never think of books damaged by water.Just pencils, cuts, scratches, tears, rips, burn marks. And of coursethey never think of readers as used, as damaged. Maybe "UsedReadings" Or "Used Readers"

Mowat also radically simplifies the Greenaway away by making Caliban the only one who destroys books (Ariel is peeing on the first book, the book of water) and why she not examine the non-binary of drown and burn--Prospero destroys his books, obviously. So he and Caliban ended wanted to do the same thing using different means. A difference with and without a difference.

This damn'd witch Sycorax,For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terribleTo enter human hearing, from Argier,Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she didThey would not take her life. Is not this true?

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with childAnd here was left by the sailors

within which space she diedAnd left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groansAs fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island--Save for the son that she did litter here,A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with

A human shape.

How do you read these lines?

This damn'd witch Sycorax,For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terribleTo enter human hearing, from Argier,Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she didThey would not take her life. Is not this true?

She was banished for sorceress but what is the one thing she did thatprevented them from executing her? Syntactic parallelism between "Formischiefs" and "for one thing"

Arden glosses "For" as "because in line 272 "for thou wast a spirit . . ."Arden 3 says "debate over the 'one thing' has flourished. "Flourishedstrikes me as a strange verb to use.

Dominant explanation seems to be her pregnancy.But the next line doesn't really make that work:

"The blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child, / And was left by th'sailors.

Editors who favor pregnancy claim that she could not have beenexecuted if she were pregnant. But the play conspicuously does notgloss the “one thing” she did as her being pregnant. Also pregnancy is notsomething a man does, much a less a woman. I supposed you say the onething she did was get pregnant. But that's kind of a stretch becauseshe is not the agent, the guy who other pregnant is.

I would call this passage elliptical. There's a space between onething she did and "brought with child." And should getting pregnantbe singled out as singular, as the one thing? Pregnancy makes sense.it's just that the words don't say what editors want them to say.

It’s may be the cleanest text. It is the text editors are most willing not to emend, the contradictions of which they overlook.

GONZALOAll torment, trouble, wonder and amazementInhabits here: some heavenly power guide us

Out of this fearful country!

ARIELYou are three men of sin, whom Destiny,That hath to instrument this lower worldAnd what is in't, the never-surfeited seaHath caused to belch up you; and on this islandWhere man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst menBeing most unfit to live. I have made you mad;And even with such-like valour men hang and drownTheir proper selves.

Hang and drown—so Gonzalo’s distinction between death by drowning and by hanging is collapsed by Ariel.

“Whilst all the other volumes have been drowned and destroyed, we still do have

these last two books safely fished from the sea.”

91.30 Here begins a montage. As Prospero’s magic is nullified—so the products of

that magic disappear. There are inevitable comparisons and deliberate

correspondences between this breakdowns and the former collapse of the masque.

The wholesale disappearance and destruction is accompanied by ‘natural’ sound.

(2) a pile of books in the bath-colonnade topples over.

(5) Pages fall out of a book.

(10) Text on a page disappears as though attacked by acid a second before the page

itself disappears.

(13) Books in the lbrary begin to fall of the shelves.

(23) More books in the library begin to fall and topple from the shelves—but they

fade away before they reach the floor.

9.29. The whole sequence has been accompanied by Prospero’s magic music. . .

Prospero takes his magic stick—the crozier-like wand—and snaps it in half. (162)

9.2. Taking the book from the wheelbarrow . . . Ariel pases them to Prospero—who

briefly regrds them—then . . . with gestures that are almost non-chalant . . . he hurls

htem into the sea . . . . (161)

Then each book is listed on p. 161-162 with a separate number and referenced back

to the shot in which it first appeared.

That does not happen in the film. We don’t know which books are being destroyed.

Shots of Prospero’s library show that his collection far exceeds the the 25 books

mentioned in the film.

Some shots of books underwater, some shots of pages floating.

Books drowned in Taymor are still intact.

Laureniziana Library atrium, 81

The Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) is a historical

library in Florence, Italy, containing a repository of more than 11,000

manuscripts and

01.25. The book of motion )Shot 82.3)Prospero undies the straps that bind it and all

its pages immediately break free—as though never bound—they blow away.” (162)

Loop of word “aqua” appearing and disappearing on “The End.” Two lines of bleed

through text from right to left on the upper right corner appears and disappears.

9.31. Prospero—on the sea cliff—hurls the two pieces of his wand into the sea.

91.32 On the surface of the sea—the two peces of his wand turn into green sea-

serpents and at once swim away. (163)

91.27 Prospero makes a decision and htrows htem both intot he sea.

Not edibleFull fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

But also edible: Alonso:

O thou mine heir

Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish

Hath made his meal on thee?

Yet the verb “drown” in Prospero’s case does not imply anything like murder, nor

does it call up a final resting place for the corpus of his library, a library already

divided by Gonzalo who gave Prospero only some volumes of his library. The sea is

not a crypt.

Related problem with Mowat’s account is that her account of media is asyncrhonic—history of magic is history of manuscripts; but Prospero refers to his book, not his manuscript. According to Mowat, manuscript was not printed because dangerous.

But it is not a grimier because to is not a manuscript. That is the basic point she misses. It can’t be, by definition.

We could ask even more questions of the usual sort. Does Caliban know how to read? Does he know letters? Can he write? Or can he just speak English? Why doesn’t Caliban tell S and T to get Prospero’s staff? For Prospero, the destruction of both appears to be required. Is Caliban wrong? Is it the staff that is really the technology of power and the book just a recipe book to be consulted, not a book about magic, not a magical book?

Ur essay, via shipwreck—Robinson Cruose in Beast and SOv 2—Crusoe and Prospero—is to reroute the Foucualt of discipline and punish to biopolitics, and biopolitics as , for Foucault, a question of the book, the archive and archive management, or Derrida, archive fever and destruction. We might end with the passage from Don Quixote. The narrator passes on censoring the censor—just doubts the total extermination approach. Fire as weapon of mass destruction.

Start with bury my staff and drown my book.

Let us return to the first crux—book and books? What is a book? Second, book as phantom propThird bury staff versus drown book.

Relation between hand and book—how does Prospero get his book from Ariel, the book of love?

Ferdinand’s corpse appears in line “muddied” and then the text—the manuscript-- gets muddied. Text gets cleaned up, then Ferdinand in close up, coming back to life, Miranda finding him. Black out during the film makes this passage from book to life possible.Book of mirrors images the lifespan of the reader. Different ages. But not necessarily linear. Taymor’s floating books are all open, intact. Recovereable. They are soaking up water, not being marked or damaged by it. Blanchot on the indestruible As if they were wetware, in a cryonic state, like a flm reel. Except not a fil real but a master. Or remastered master.

BLANCHOT'S. "THE. INDESTRUCTIBLE". Infinite Conversation

But first, let’s situate the drowning of books in relation to the medium of books in the play. To our knowledge, no critichas ever asked why. To be sure, Caliban says “burn but his books.” And burn is the def ault for literature, deconstruction, and New Historicism and the book history of the New New historicism. Don Quixote. (Execration Upon Vulcan) Archive Fever. Martial law in the Land of Caokaigyne. We may speculate that critics have not gotten to this question because they have been hung on other questions: why are there no books for proprso Why does Prospero refer to his books and his book? These problems are not cruxes. To my book may mean “one of my books” and thus make sense, but the words do not say that. They may be reasonably interpreted that, but the words as they are printed are in need of glossing precisely because they don’t mean what an editor or critic wants them to mean. Other questions? What books are in the library? Are there magic books? Black magic or white? Or is there only one book, a magic book, a grimoire? Why does he mention his staff and his books, but not his cloak? Materialist criticism bypasses question of the referent in favor of the real. There must be a prop. It is off-stage. Halluginenic. Definitely inhaled. And held it a long time. We having nothing against hallucination. The Tempest is a water-gateway drug. The first one’s always free, so it’s not a coincidence that The Tempest comes first in the Folio. And we are flooding our chapter with questions and have yet to readch our high watermark. Book or books, no books at all, is to say that we have the book or books before the book as well as the question of their destruction. We have a pre and post book.Reroute Derrida on title and book through the parergon—Title to be specified and also Restitutions. Biblion for Derrida is only damaged by fire. Question of description, of what kind of damage. And concern with drowning. Inventory of the living and the dead on the island taken several times. Decide to decide on the fate of the missing corpus. Like critics want to decide the books. Wouldn’t that be fun to think about! Let’s just assume.

Shot Of “Gonzalo, knowing I loved my books.” The books in the

shot? All the books in the library?

Prospero’s books inverts the order of breaking the staff and

drowning the books.

Book history is bibliomania on lithium.

Book shutting scene happens after Prospero responds to Ariels

tender” lines that they have been writin ginthe book. Incredibly

quick sequence; a third of a second in some cases; dust comes

off them, so they have been unread when open; also some shots

show Caliban’s dirty hands holding them and other shots

Prospero’s and other shots the little Ariel. Some texts are

readable if you pause, but most of the time you cannot. Last

book has no hands holding it; dust remains in the shot until it

fades to black.

Right after corpse is shown of Ferdinand and “ooze muddied.” We

see the text written and stopped. The cut to Prospero pausing

and he says the lines. Then Ariel drops onto the book. The book

is drifted, his feathers fall on it from when he was the harpy; then

the feathers disappear, the hand prints disappear, and the pae is

clean; then shot of Ariel all clean.

Book of water has suffered damage by exposure to water.

Every day some sailor’s wife has just our theme of woe.

No books seen in “I’ll drown my books; instead, table created,

Ariel’s draw a circle on a piece of paper; cut to a stage with a

large circle, girls dancing around it; Alonso et al come in.

GONZALOAll torment, trouble, wonder and amazement

Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide usOut of this fearful country!

ARIELYou are three men of sin, whom Destiny,That hath to instrument this lower worldAnd what is in't, the never-surfeited seaHath caused to belch up you; and on this islandWhere man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst menBeing most unfit to live. I have made you mad;And even with such-like valour men hang and drownTheir proper selves.

Hang and drown—so Gonzalo’s distinction between death by drowning and by hanging is collapsed by Ariel.

In our last chapter, we wondered what it means to live the death ofthe medium of cinema. One frequently hears the word "death" inconnection with media, epsecially the book, and the end of the book,as well as the book to come, and so on.[alternate opening--book burning in Don Quixote--not deaht of thebook, but destruction of a library)In The Tempest, we ask what it means for a book to die and wherebooks go when they die. Specicially, we want to ask why Prosperosays he will drown his books. Are Prospro's books even books? Canyou have a book without a paratext? without a support? Can you havea library without an index? These questions cannot be answered interms of book history. The questions cannot be be asked. Any attemptto determine what Prospor's books are already assume that the hasbooks. This assumption is made even though book or books are notmentioned by title or other. Even hte title of Prsopero's Books isinitally uncertain: does the title refer to all of his books in hislibrary? Or only those Gonzalo gave him? To limit the refernt ot htelatter, Greenaway adds a second prologue, a prologue showing Prosperowriting lines about the volumes he prized above his dukedom. Thisfirst book follows. It has a title but no author. Critics regularlyassume that among thse boks is a magic book. Why else would Calbiantell Stefano and Trinculo to burn his books? Mowat wonders why

Prospero refers to his book and books nd decide tht even if there isone book, it is a magic book. SHe insists that hte book as a propr isthere off-stage. And she insists it is a kind of book, a grigmoire.That the book die nto have atitle or author does not bother her.Like the rmaterialist critics doing bok history, she offers facsimilesof pages from these books to deliver a hit of the real. The hitinvolves the hallucination , temporary, of Prospero's book. It istemporary because, by the end of the essay, Mowat takes it all back.The book is not a grimgoire. Similarly, New Hisotricist Focualdianreading skips over book and bokos and also burned versus drowned.Drown does not get a note in hte Arden. We do not have a problem withhis kind of reading. Indeed, we hope you are riding high as you readthis now. For us the reference to book and books, to library and volumewithin, register the divisibility of the book. In The Post Card,Derrida says that the letter is always divisible and hence may notalways arrive at its destination. He does not distinguish between aletter and a postcard. Is the distinction between a book and a letterany more rigorous? Here is what Derrida says about the book and thearchive:We link biopolitics to bibliopolitics. This bare island--thequestion is whether it is habitable. Did anyone ever own it? Thisbare island as a blank--as a bare stage, a kind of wooden O withoutthe wood to pulp for paper. The play does nothing.

Blank Biobioliographics tempest

Derrida on destructibility of letter as divisibility of the letter; ashes, fire, cindres his

default figures for remains. But why is Blanchot’s leter ndsructible in Demeure?

What about Blanchot on the indestructible?

DaSein-feld

Geopolitics of bare island---where is here and now of the epilogue, already

detachable (see noe in Arden 3 note).

Finitude of the support versus infinity of reading.

Since Mannoni and thers have compared The tEmpest to Rbinson Crusoe, we can

work tempest into relation with Beast and Sovereign 2. Get to autobiothangora[hy

thoruwh the epilogue—also rough magic.

I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks hehath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion isperfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to hishanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,for our own doth little advantage. If he be notborn to be hanged, our case is miserable.

or we run ourselves aground:

Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO

Yet again!

ANTONIOHang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.

GONZALOI'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship wereno stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as anunstanched wench.

BoatswainLay her a-hold, a-hold! set her two courses off tosea again; lay her off.

MarinersAll lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost!BoatswainWhat, must our mouths be cold?

{Arden 3 annotates col as drown)

ANTONIOWe are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards:This wide-chapp'd rascal--would thou mightst lie drowningThe washing of ten tides!

ANTONIOLet's all sink with the king.SEBASTIANLet's take leave of him.Exeunt ANTONIO and SEBASTIAN

GONZALONow would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for anacre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done! but I would faindie a dry death.

“All perished” “I would sunk the ocean in the earth” Miranda 1.1.

Poor souls, they perish'd.Had I been any god of power, I wouldHave sunk the sea within the earth or ere

It should the good ship so have swallow'd andThe fraughting souls within her.

Betid to any creature in the vesselWhich thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink.

Me, poor man, my libraryWas dukedom large enough:

MIRANDAWherefore did they notThat hour destroy us?PROSPEROWell demanded, wench:My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not,So dear the love my people bore me, nor setA mark so bloody on the business, butWith colours fairer painted their foul ends.In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,Bore us some leagues to sea; where they preparedA rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very ratsInstinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sighTo the winds whose pity, sighing back again,Did us but loving wrong.

MIRANDAHow came we ashore?PROSPEROBy Providence divine.Some food we had and some fresh water that

A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,Out of his charity, being then appointedMaster of this design, did give us, withRich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd meFrom mine own library with volumes thatI prize above my dukedom.

My enemy inveterate

Extirpate me from the kingdom

Prepared the rotten carcass of a butt

The ship is itself decaying flesh. The very rats had quit it.

By accident most strnage, bountiful Fortune hat h brought mine enimes to this

shore.

Plummer as Propsero holdsa book when he says “I’ll to my book”

You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, 3,3

In Prospero’s Books, The Folio is a blank—it contains all of the other books, but at

some time in the future; The play has been written and is yet to be written, that is

published. In what sense are the books in the film books? Page as frame versus film

frame. COnstnat dispersion of borders, or interference through superimposition.

Books are not drowned—thrown in water, but catch in fire, except for the Folio.

Bibliopolitics—survivance and state of exception—which books live and which

books die? That is the question Greenaway explores, but he does so by producing

both creation and destruction of the book, unfolding the book into a set, turning

pages into part of a mise-en-scene. And if Prospero is a sovereign, his kingdom is a

bathtub with a toy boat. He watches the shipwreck,, in the book of mirrors, in the

form of a Rembrandt group portrait. The page is like an image in an album. Or is he

watching a film? A book projected as a film? The book of plants is actually a

collection of dried leaves. There is a book of sex and a book of love, but not a book

of death, as far as I recall. No book of graveyards.

The play is about the intersection of biopolitics and bibliopolitics. Life of books, life

of persons.

Book history is bibliomania on lithium.

← It tries to quiet the mania by linearizing it and by putting in the means of

production illustrations, like the French Book on exceptional books, Pascal

Fulacher, Livres d’exception : Six siècles d art du livre parmi les collections du

Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits CITADELLES ET MAZENOD (3

septembre 2012)

Relation between the book and the age. See Derrida on the page. Shot of open

books with the violin. Open or closed book?

See Jean Luc-Nacy on opening a book

As a matter of principle, the book is illegible,

and it calls for or commands reading in the name of that illegibility. Illegibility is not

a question of what is too badly formed, crossed out, scribbled: the illegible is what

remains closed in the opening of the book. What slips from page to page but remains

caught, glued, stitched into the binding, or else laboriously jotted as marginalia that

attempt to trip over the secret, that begin to write another book. What is illegible is

not reading at all, yet only by starting

from it does something then offer itself to reading.

—Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Publication of the Unpublished," in On the Commerce of

Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores, 27.

There is always a closed and inviolable book in the middle of every book that is

opened, held apart between the hands that turn its pages, and whose every

revolution, each turn from recto to verso begins to fail to achieve its deciphering, to

shed light on its sense. For that reason every book, inasmuch as it is a book, is

unpublished, even though it repeats and relays individually, as each one does, the

thousands of other books that are reflected in it like worlds in a monad. The book is

unpublished [inedit], and it is that that the publisher [editeur] publishes. The editor

(Latin) is the one who brings to the light of day, exposes to the outside offers (edo)

to view and to knowledge. That doesn't, however, mean that once it is published the

book is no longer unpublished; on the contrary, it remains that, and even becomes it

more and more. It offers in full light of day, in full legibility, the insistent tracing of

its illegibility.

—Jean-Luc Nancy, On the Commerce of Thinking (2008), 28.

"Here There

Open Book, Closed Book

Protestations

Here and there, we find the body and we find

the book, the open and the closed book"

—Jacques Derrida, " . . . , " in The Work of Mourning, 159.

oN board “let’s leave the kind” It is an abandon ship narrative. Also, it’s about being

born to die a certain way, by hanging in the case of the boastswain, according to

Gonzalo.

Undrowning the Book

We discussed what it means to live the death of the medium of cinema in our last

chapter. That question became a question of the burial crypt in the play, a question

of amends promised by the prologue and the future anterior of Juliet’s anxiety of

dying or waking up too early. We not are asking what it means for a book to die, but

more specifically, how drowning is related to burial. Drowning has a singularity.

The books are invisible in two ways—there is material prop—and without

paratexts, no titles, no authors. So if the book is a grimgoire, it is not a particular

grimgoire. It is not a source, uch less a prop; Mowat conflates a source (perhas

derived from AMND rather than a source for it) and a prop. This list of titles is what

Greenaway tries to provide. The only named author is Shakespeare.

The Destruction of Prospero’s Books. Greenaway’s shows Prospero’s library being

reading, books torn, burned, people killed; the book of water (first book) and the

book of mirrors (second mirror show a book being rained on and pages being

destroyed and also being peed on by Ariel. We see Miranda reading a book of

plants. Miranda is sleeping the time in the opening sequence. She is having a

nightmare. Prospero seen writing “I would fain die a dry DEATH.” Greenaway's film

and had forgotten how many times books come up in the "adaptation" part--the

library is destroyed--we see the books Gonzalo gave Prospero; Miranda reads one of

the books. And the first book, the Book of Water, gets rained and the pages we see

appear to be being destroyed by the water; it is also being peed on by Ariel. So there

is a variety of ways in which books are being shown being destroyed before we see

Prospero burn his books by drowning them.

Wake Up Call in The Tempest . Two scenes of books seemingly being destroyed

(library) and also scene of books that Gonzalo gives Prospero. Plus Prospero’s

library plus hot of violin and pages of music and other writing lying off a table and

books opened be low. Book one is written as it is also being destroyed. Water ink

used by Gielgud.

Bring together the passage on the phantasm and sleep as more vigilant than

wakefulness together with the passage on survivance and the corpse, both from

Beast and the Sovereign 2.

The logic of the phantasm, as we are concerned with it here (be it about living death, the

ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous), [this logic of the phantasm] is

not strictly speaking a logic, it resists the logos, the legein of the logos, somewhat in the

same way as the eschato-logical is both the thing of the logos and which exceeds and

comes after the logos, the logic of the logos, the extremity of the last, of the last word of

the last man, the extremity of the last extremity situated both in speech, in logos as the

last word, still and already out of speech, falling out of it into the posthumous that is

already breathing, precisely, the logic of the phantasm resists, defies and dislocates logos

and logic in all its figures, be it a question of logos as reason and as the logic of non-

contradiction and the excluded middle. Of yes or no, of the yes and the no, of the

undecidable either/or, be it a question of logos as speech or be it a question of logos as

gathering and the power of putting together. There is therefore no logic of the phantasm,

strictly speaking, since as Freud reminds us, the phantasm, just as much as the drive, is to

be found on both sides of the limit between two opposing concepts, like what Blanchot

nicknames, especially in The Step Not Beyond (we shall come to this in a moment), the

neuter. There is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm of the ghost or the spectral.

Unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the

resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of

the revenant.

This is why all the things we’re dealing with here, sovereignty the animal, the living

dead, the buried alive, etc., the spectral and the posthumous—well, the dream, the

oneiric, fiction, so-called literary fiction, so-called fantastic literature will always be less

inappropriate, more relevant, if you prefer, than the authority of wakefulness, and the

vigilance of the ego, and the consciousness of so-called philosophical discourse.

Amor (love) tization

Borders of Enlightenment opened up, with tour guide to mark them. Prospero as

guide. But for the Enlightenment to happen the alarm has to be sounded—wake up-

and for the alarm to sound it has to set, and it can be forgotten. The alarm setter

can forget to set his alarm. Prospero is a guide, but he is on a detour, going n a

circle, going back, remember and retrieval. The camera is a kind of tour guide in

Taymor—the split between shots of realism and shots with special effects.

Obvious narrative repetitions are other kinds of repetitions.

Cluster of words book, books,

Corpse is buried at sea. Sleep like death.

Book drowned—people are to drown; question of burial at sea. No one buried on

the island. Al lost at sea; or in ship.

Daniel Heller-Roazen The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (MIT Pres,

There is no state of emergency or martial law in The Tempest. There is no law.

There’s no even piracy. There is a state of exception to the state of exception partly

because the sovereign is not the sovereign, not the decider.

Meting out of punishments in Much Ado (we’ll devise brave punishments for him)

and Measure for Measure (Bernadine and beheading). Measure—coins, stamped,

circulation—numismatic writing. All are punished” Duke in Romeo and Juliet.

Media in Much Ado About Nothing—noting and marking—and in Measure for

Measure (Greenblatt treats and The Tempest as if they were identical cases of

salutary anxiety) but lack of medium—the books as disappeared, out-of-circulation

in The Tempest. Prospero as a book cover. He seems invisible, but he is hiding

something that is neither hidden nor revealed.

Daniel Heller-Roazen The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations

There’s no shoreline, no border in The Tempest.

Survivance –opens up living death but is itself neither life nor death-the near

destruction followed by restoration and reassurance is a structure between two

drownings. Friend and enemy.

Relation between the two undronwings o fhte obok and the undrownings f the

people on board—book does not die, but noether do people. But sharper difference

still—imgained corpses are buried; imgianed destruction of staff is bried. But the

not the book; the book alone is related to drowning, no crypt.

Taymor’s film organized by set pieces, like her other films (Frieda; Titus) and music

videos in Around the Universe. In case of the Tempest, these were designed by Kyle

Cooper, who also did the end title sequence. There is the shipwreck; the harpy

banquet; also added a music video. O Mistress Mine. The rest of the film alternates

between special effects and no special effects. Mostly for Ariel. The shipwreck is

real, then replayed as a special effects set piece. Miranda-centric reading. Miranda

already wide awake—the castle melting in the storm. Taymor’s film is about

getting there in time to stop destruction that has already occurred. Attention

followed by reassurance followed by distraction. Here. Take a xanex now and go to

sleep.

Economy of drowned book an economy of invisibility. You don’t notice the cruxes.

They don’t need to be commented on. Fire and drown is not a crux traditionally

speaking. It is a microform version of the structure of the play. Directors do notice

the missing books and sometimes put them in and other times leave them out.

The play imagines a world in which there is only speech. The scene is entirely

speech, But that world becomes all the less determinate as a consequence—you

don’t know what is real and what is hallucinated. The suspension of the book as

referent generates a kind of generalized psychosis, a missing blank, a recursive

structure of temporality, a question of living and dead, human and animal. Despite

the references to art, rough magic, and theater in the theater, this is a theater

without media. It’s a question of attending, of paying attention but also waiting on,

an attentive attendant. Sort out archival recall and telling, the capacity to tell, and

sleep and death states of consciousness, states of attention, or inattention, or states

of distraction. Like boatswain telling upon waking, also Prospero putting Miranda

to sleep. Sort of collapses the opposition between discipline of attention and the

vacation distraction. “Lie there my art” conflates both Miranda and his art, but art

does not include his books, just his staff and cloak. There is a rift between books.

What do books have to do with the shipwreck. Is Miranda already on stage? She is

a witness in Taymor film, not in Prospero’s Books.

4. Drown before Reading: Vacancy in The Tempest

What does it mean that Prospero says he will drown his books? Why drown rather than burn them? This question arises not only because “drown” is unusual and even enigmatic but because Caliban has told Stefano and Trinculo “burn but his books” and, along with driving a nail through Prospero’s head, they become the sovereign rulers of the island and take Miranda as their prize.2 The question concerning drowning books is our point of departure in this chapter for reading the Juliet Taymor’s Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. We first engage the Arden’s notes on Prospero’s books and then examine both the sequence showing Prospero drowning his books in Prospero’s Books and to books “drowning” in the end title sequence Taymor’s film. Rather that compare these films to the “original” text, we regard both the Arden and the films as editions of the play, editors and directors being roughly comparable in rendering the play’s cruxes books

readable.3 These cruxes include the contradictory references to Prospero’s “book” in the singular and his “books” in the plural and the a between references to Prospero’s cloak and staff as props but not to his book or books. For us, the interest of both films lies in their response to a less familiar crux regarding the preservation contradictory modes of the destruction of Prospero’s library. Despite Caliban’s instruction to “burn” Prospero’s books, Prospero says he will “drown” them. The play includes references both to a singular book (“I'll to my book”; “I'll drown my book”) and to plural books (“books I priz'd above my dukedom”; “burn but his books”). Moreover, there are stage directions for Prospero’s cloak and staff, but none for his book or library. “I’ll

to my book, / For yet ere suppertime must I perform / Much business” (3.1.113–15),

Remember

First to possess his books; for without them

He’s but a sot, as I am; nor hath not

One spirit to command: they all do hate him

As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.

(3.2.91–95)

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me

From mine own library with volumes that

I prize above my dukedom.

(1.2.165–68)

The endings of both films indirectly return us to a question about media raised in

“original and true copie,” or first edition of The Tempest, a question about what

Derrida calls the end of the book (Grammatology) and the survivance of the book:

how does a book to die? how does its biographical destruction differ from the

destruction of bios, of a human corpse? What does it mean to drown books that are

divisible, singular plural, and have no referents on stage? What happens when

books are no material, not props? What kind of library contains books that have no

paratexts, no titles and authors? What does it mean that Prospero effectively

promises to drown his books at some indefinite time in the future, to promise

destruction without delivering it? And what does it mean that The Tempest, a play

in which the main character says he prizes his books above his dukedom, does not

include a scene of reading or of writing, as does a play to which it is often compared,

namely, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?4 Why do books and libraries go

missing in The Tempest, and what is the relation between their drowning, or to be

drowned, to be destroyed by burning, and the biopower is exercised solely through

speech?

New Historicist and New New Historicist criticism of the play miss these

questions and alternately tries to fill in the missing book with a hallucinated prop

somewhere present off-stage or with a copy of an early modern book stored now in

a research library, say, the grimoire, and thereby close off the singular plural of

book(s) in the play.5 Prospero has a book, not books, even though the book is a

composite of pages taken from multiple grimgroires, or it tries to imagine the

destruction of the books exclusively in Caliban’s terms, as burning, skipping over the

oddity of Prospero’s destruction by drowning and displaced by a more general,

characterological question about Prospero: why does he abjure his rough magic?6

Yet Prospero’s books do not need to exist materially in productions of The Tempest. ;

or if they do exist, they need not appear on stage. There are references in

Shakespeare’s text to his staff and to his cloak as required stage props, but not to his

‘book’ or ‘books’ as necessary stage presences: these exist exclusively through

references to a significant but unseen book or books elsewhere. The Shakespeare

text therefore makes no provision for us to see Prospero’s books, much less to

drown them.7

Greenaway—focus on five sequences about there being no metabook, the same way

there is no metaarchive. (metalanguage, for Lacan)

Burial and the book

1. Corpse of Ferdinand and dirty Ariel, dirty book, clean book, clean Ariel.

2. The closed book sequence after three different actors playing Ariel write “mine

would, sir, were I human” versus the descriptions / voice overs about opened pages.

Closing the books doesn’t stop more of them from being opened. Closing the book is

not ending the book. Shots of the hand, of dust.

3. The island as a grave destruction of the book and murder of Ariel and rape of

Miranda; yet no burial

Which Followed by fade to black?

4. The drowning of the book at the end and the not drowning of it at the start-

{rosperondd Miranda both reading.

5. The Folio and tempest

6. The End and title sequence—which are Prospero’s books?

Virginia Mason-Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Arden. 2011

ACT II SCENE II

Section 76

THE ‘ANTIQUARIAN’ BEACH

76.1 As the camera tracks at a steady pace—there are objects on the beach-- . . the

evidence of a buried kingdom, a vast cemetery, a huge columbarium, an

antiquarian’s paradise.” 125

Prospero as antiquarian, 124

“AS well as having his books scattered around him, their lose pages flapping in a

daught, he is surrounded by his antique collection—small marble obelisks,

fragments of antique sculpture, stone heads, small tablet inscriptions . . . the

collection of a diletatante antiquarianof 1611.” 124

(2) . . . we see the oppled Prospero of Calibans thinking—seen from different angles

(3) . . . Bloodied in his studio . . an image of his brain smashed in, his naked stomach

pierced by a large stake, his throat horribly cut. (126)

PROSPERO (playing Caliban):

Burn but his books.

In the faun-held mirrors, a brand is put to Prospero’s books, which immediately

burst into flame—the whirling, twisting, burnt paper fragments blacken the

mirrors . . . and contrast with the unburnt, whirling white pages that swirl about on

the ‘antqiuarian’ beach. 126

(Caliban catches up and leads the trio again—this time faster still—now among a

veritable jungle of statues of tombs, cenotaphs and stone bric-a-brac from the

classical world . . . that begins to dwarf them.) 126

PROSPERO (playing Caliban):

When Prospero is destroyed! (127)

Is the Island a Grave?

1. The Book of Water. This is a waterproof-covered book which has lots its

colour by much contact with water. It is full of nvestigative drawings and

exploratory texts many different thicknesses of paper. P. 17

2. 2. Book of Mirrors. Bound ina oldd cloth and very heavy, this book has some

eighty shining mirrored pages; some opaque , some translucent, some

manufactured with silvered paper,s some coated in paint, some covered in a

film of mercury that will orll of the page unless treated cautiously. Some

mirrors simply reflect the reader, some reflect the reader as he ws three

minutes previously, some reflect the reader as he will e in a year’s time, as he

would be if her were a child, a woman, a monster, an idea, a text or an agnel.

One mirror contantly lies, one mirror sees the world backwards, another

upside down. One mirror holds on to its reflections as frozen moments

infinitely recalled. One mirror simply reflects another mirror acorss a page.

There are ten mirrors whose piurpose Prospero has yet to define. 17

3. 21 he Auobiographies of {asiphae and Semiramis is a pronogrpahy. It is a

blackned and thumbed volume whose illustrations leave small ambiguity as

to the book’s content. The book is bound in black calfskin with damaged

lead covers. The pages are grey-green and scattered with a sludge-green

poweder, crled black hairs and stains of blood and other substnaces. The

slightest taint of steam or smoke rises from the pages when the book I

opened, and it always seems warm—like the little the apparent in drying

plaster or in flat stones after the sun has set. The pages leave acidic stains on

the fingers and it is advisable to wear gloves when reading the volume.

4. 24. Thirty-Six Plays. This is a thick, printed volume of plays dated 1623. All

thrty-six plays are there save one—the first. Nineteen pages are left blank for

its inclusion, It is called The Tempest. The folio collection is modestly bound

in dull green linenen with cardboard covers and the author’s initials are

embossed in gold on the cover—W.S. (25)

5. An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus. Bound ina battered and burnt, enamlled

green cover, this Atlas is divided into twosections. . . When the atlas is

opened, the maps bubble with pitch. Avalanches of hot, loose gravel and

molten and sand fall out of the book to scorch the library floor.

7. The Book of Colours. “when the pages are opened . . .

16. A Book of Love. This is a small, slim, scented volume bound in red and

gold, with knotted crimson ribbons for page-markers.

Book of Utopias is an interactive book “In the remaining pages of the page, every

known and every imagined social community is described and evaluated, and

twenty-five pages are devoted to tables where the characteristics can be isolated,

permitting the reader to sort and match his own utopian ideal” 24

Interaction depends on a table of contents.

10. A Book of Travellers’ Tales. This is a book tat is much damaged, as though used a

great deal by children who treasured it. The scratched and rubbed crimson leather

covers, once inlaid with a figurative gold design, are no so worn that the pattern is

ambiguous and a fit subject for much speculation.” 20

12. A Book of Architecture and Other Music. When the pages are opened in this

book, plans and diagrams spring up fully-formed. . . With this book, Prospero rebuilt

the island into a a palace of libraries that recapitulate all the architectural ideas of

the Renaissance.” 21

4. A Primer of the Small Stars. . . When opened, the primer’s pages twinkle with

travelling planets, flashing meteors and spinning comets. 17; 20

6. A Harsh Book of Geometry. . . . Wen opened, complex three-dimensional

geometrical diagrams rise up out of the pages like models in a pop-up book. 20

13. The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur. “When opened, the book exudes

yellow steam am dot coats the fingers with a black soil.” 21

Prospero’s Used Books

Watermarking Readers

None of Prospero’s book is a magic book.

”Prospero is also . . . a magician. He wears magic robes, uses a magic staff and refers

to his books on magic. Magic is his technology, a means of getting what he wants.

(Arden 3, 25)

One’s reaction to Prospero almost inevitably determines one’s response to the

entire play. (Arden 3, 24)

In Prospero’s library—the books seem unable to contain their arcane knowledge,

and at each book section there is an overspill of objects and people and events. (82)

When Prospero levaes the library—the camera swings ninety degrees as the the

leemnts of his library grow comatose . . . and return to their rightful place inside the

books . . . after ten seconds the library s neat and organized. . . the various figures

and objects and animals gone . . . the library tidy and well disciplined. . . . (83)

Book 9

An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead. This is a funeral volume, long and slim and

bound in silver bark. It contains all the names of the dead who have lived on earth.

The first name is Adam and the last is Susannah, Prospero’s wife. . . The pages of the

book are very old and are watermarked with a collection of designs for tombs and

columbariums, elaborate headstones, graves, sarcophagi, and other architectural

follies for the dead, suggesting the book had other purposes, even before the death

of Adam. (20)

My Blank Pages

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote includes a notable scene of book destruction.

In order to prevent him from going on another request after he has been catured

and returned home, his entire library is burned: “That very night, the housekeeper

set fire to, and consumed, not only all the books that were in the yard, but also every

one she could find in the house; and no doubt many were burned, which deserved to

have been kept as perpetual archives.”8 This scorched book policy takes no

prisoners. With book goes the archive. We cite this example of book burning as one

of many in literature and drama: letters, manuscripts, and printed books are

destroyed by being torn up and burned.9 To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique

in the history of literature in imagining the destruction of books by drowning them.

Prospero’s promise that he will drone his books is singular within the play as well.

Prospero’s intention to burn all the more remarkable in that their destruction is

different from Prospero’s plan to inhume his staff: “I’ll break my staff, /Bury it

certain fathoms in the earth.” Why break bury his staff but not tear and drown his

books? In a play concerned with death by drowning, books are the only items

without a final resting place.

But the singularity of drowning is part of books is not merely a bizarre moment but

the most intense site of pressure in a structure related to burial of corpses as well as

Prospero’s props with differences that rest on a coninuum with microdifferences

between book and books.

Why does drowning turn out to be inhumation for Alonso but not for Prospero?

Something going on the directors and editors want to fill in or to pass over in

silence.

The epilogue implies that Prospero has destroyed his staff—power’s but his

own—or does it? Has he actually destroyed them after he says he will? Why

assume he has, but that scene is elided, not represented. Like Branagh’s inset

flashbacks, the Ariel set piece is illustrative. But Taymor also sorts out the issue by

showing the stff drown—above and below—but the n we only see the boks

underwater. No cross cutting to Prospero throwing them in. And when they show

up, they show up without paratexts. They are like the books in Arcimboldo’s

Librarian. Taymor has Prospera throw her staff unbroken into the ocean. The

books follow. She scorches the earth before removing the spell from her victims.

Prospero’s burial of his staff takes one of the most common form of the preservation

and destruction of human corpses: inhumation and cremation.

What’s constitutes a crux? Ordinarily, a semantic unit, a single word choice.

In this case contradictory variables become a symptom. Plural and singular We

wish turn now to the Arden Three Tempest as one edition among others that

concern Prospero’s books. From this analysis we will read the edited text of the

play in order to make clearer its economy of unreadability as unarchivability.

To focus on the drowning of the book is to reorient what it means for the

book to be singular and plural, for the books not to be a prop, as a question not only

of the referent, of the materiality of the referent, but of its burial, its relation to other

kinds of burial in the play and hence to mourning but also to sleep and death. What

happens if drowning does not mean burial?

[text of play in this note] 10

She ends up rerouting the magic bookissue back to Greenblatt, and she aligns his reading of the play withGreenaway's film. It's totally structuralist--Prospero preservesbooks--good--and Caliban bad; or the opposite. Those are our choices. In her eagerness to get to the magic book she assumes Prospero haswith him, she skips over drown versus bury, of course, but also overthe contradiction between book and books. Ditto for the missing prop. SHe verges so closely on going in the right direction--she sees allthe things getting in her way--but then she veers off into herhallucinogenic comfort zone. I was also struck--so belatedly--by theway New Historicism rebrands the ideal reader of reader responsecriticism--so the reader or the viewer of the past is always in effecta cognitive machine that never breaks down and for whom reading,seeing, and listening are error free and media totally transparent.The tense is the give away "would have." No doubt about it! Notsome,or perhaps, or any similar qualifier necessary. And Mowat canthen relay that reader to the future researcher who will one day beall to conclude something. Totally clerical--onward Shakespearesoldiers.

Anyway, it's a perfect way into the issue of the book as a crux forus--as a cluster-fuck of cruxes that open onto corpses, life and

death, burial, destruction, divisibility, etc. that challenges bothNew Historicism and deconstruction (Derrida defaults to burning justthe way Greenblatt does, both in the anecdote he tells about burnedbooks in Learning to Curse and in the one he tells in ShakespeareanNegotiations.

The magic book , for Mowat, is just one one many “silences” Arden 3 notes (and quotes others as having noticed)—like Antonio’s silence. We are onto a structure of ellipse in the text, not just a text with a few elipses—what happened to CLaribel?

I am afraid the essay may take a some Mowat form, as in Greenaway goodbecause he multiplies cruxes and contradictions already present in thetext rather than resolves them while Taymor is bad because she drawcinematic borders around unzoned areas of the text. She wants topreserve the book by putting it outside the film, in the end titlesequence.

Need to think more about the way Greenaway makes Prospero into apuppet master, turns the ships into toy boats, fold out book into abuilding and the reverse.

Ariel's full fathom five in relation to survivance, use The Beast and the

Sovereign, 2, to talk about "sea change" and drowning books. The dead yet not yet

dead fantasy seems to depend very specifically on water--on a shipwreck that isn't,

on a father drowning who didn't. Are all of these nearly immediate recuperations

necessary for the book to be absent as a prop, to be drowned off stage, to be

diverted by a bottle from Caliban's desire to burn but his books? Strange economy

of survival, the corpse, and the book without embalmment, the book as balm, not

blame, here.11 It is an economy of “undrowning,” to adopt the idiom of the play. But

burial in Prospero’s phrasing also anticipates drowning in that “fathoms” measure

depth of water (as in in “full fathom five”), not earth.

Prospero consoles Miranda. But oddly, Prospero asks Ariel for similarly

assuring answers. He need for reassurance is repated. Whether or not yo see it,

wtness it doesn’t matter. Both Miranda and Prospero saw it.

Ariel gives both a fuller account of the shipwreck than what we have gather

from the boatswain scene in 1.1. and a fuller account of its repair. The same

potentially traumatic vision is repeated, as it were traumatic even though it never

happened. Ariel closes a gap in Prospero’s narrative. Ariel as panoptic narrator.

Dialogue about Ferdinand being drowned or undrowned occurs twice.

Dialogue about Caliban and Tricunclo being “dead or alive?” varies the same pattern,

in this case based on a mistakenly supposed monster (Trinculo and Caliban under a

cloth).

Ferdinand hears that his father lies full fathom five below—sea change and

all—but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried:

Although this lord of wake remembrance – this

Who shall be of little memory

When it is earthed 2.1. 232-34

The King’s son’s alive,

“’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned

As he that sleeps swims. 236-38

Antonio: Will you grant me that Ferdinand is drowned?

Sebastian: He’s gone. 233-34

The Tempest is an abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck narrative like Robinson

Crusoe. In the first scene, the characters on board take their chances with drowning.

They’ve decided to risk drowning. Prosper later decides to drown his books. What

does it mean to drown a person as opposed to drown a person? Let us proceed to

address this question by returning to crux regarding the referent of “book” and

“books” as an exception with regard to their destruction. The irreconcilably

singular and plural references to a book and to books in The Tempest marks a

certain exception with regard to the book that bears on its survival: it is both

singular and divisible. And this exception is sustained by a larger suspension

between two moments in the play, one near the beginning Prospero’s tells Miranda

they cast adrift in a boat along with some of his books and the other when Prospero

promises to drown his book. That promise is never fulfilled in the play (something

on which Mowat does not comment). The book would have drowned to begin with

if they had met their intended fate. In short the book / books are never destroyed in

the play; they appear to be as indestructible as they are non-existent.12

The “book” / “books” crux is exceptional in respect to the survival of characters

and their construction as corpses. Scenes of destruction by shipwreck are resolved

into scenes of reported recovery occur in multiple ways and multiple times. But

even the norm established by the shipwreck, about which he have more to say, is

exceptional. For the ship is not actually not wrecked. And no one dies in. Indeed,

no one dies in the play. (Not even the witch Sycorax is killed; she is exiled.)

Prospero is potentially vulnerable (“destroy him”; “drive a nail into his head”), as

are Alonso and Gonzalo during a brief sleep from which Ariel awakens Gonzalo who

in turn awakens Alonso. But the play’s shipwreck differs from the book undrowning

in that the promise to drown my books implies their destruction but muddies its

exact nature.

Why is the book the vessel that cannot be presented—why is the library the space

that enables?

In shipwreck scenes, characters are let to imagine the fate of corpses, which may or

may not be destroyed. Ferdinand imagines his father’s dead body—turned to coral.

Something artificial and unburied. Other corpses suffer other kinds of changes, one

of which bleeds into Prospero’s promise to drown his book Other burial in the earth.

Prospero calls up the undead that have been buried. The play floats, as it were

various ways of sinking corpses into oblivion while assuring its characters and us

that all of the characters have survived. The spacing of book into book and books

does not allow us to imagine the end or the beginning of the book. The real issue is

not what the book or books are (their referents) or how many there are but the

manner of their destruction and whether they can be destroyed. We don’t know if

they will fall to the bottom in the mud or be scattered, decheminated, as Derrida

puts onto distinerrant paths. Nor are the book ever threatened with destruction in a

scene like the shipwreck. The survivability of the book’s bios differs from the

survival of biological, then, in that the book is divisible and indivisible, both a “book”

and “books.” The problem of the referent raised by the missing prop is more radical

than it may seem at first sight. The issue of referent is not reducible to fauxrensics

—to a genre, much less a single book. “The book” does not have an empirical

material referent, nor is it just a metaphor (as when Stephano tells Caliban twice to

“kiss the book,” the bottle of liquors from which he drinks).

Mourning is given time yet being skipped over—drowning means there’s no

corpse. Lost at sea. No burial. Just storage. Even Alonso’s body is not really a

corpse, just rich and strange. It’s already been turned into a sort of monument,

turned into the subject of a song which is and is not a requiem.

(For Ferdinand, it seems to be requiem.)

Assumed I am the king Ferdinand and Alonso mourning, the mistakenly assumed

deaths. Every third thought will be grave.13

But burial in Prospero’s phrasing also anticipates drowning in that

“fathoms” measure depth of water (as in in “full fathom five”), not earth.

Prospero consoles Miranda

But oddly, Prospero asks Ariel for similarly assuring answers.

Ariel gives both a fuller account of the shipwreck than what we have gather

from the boatswain scene in 1.1. and a fuller account of its repair. The same

potentially traumatic vision is repeated, as it were traumatic even though it never

happened.

Dialogue about Ferdinand being drowned or undrowned occurs twice.

Dialogue about Caliban and Trinculo being “dead or alive?” varies the same pattern,

in this case based on a mistakenly supposed monster (Trinculo and Caliban under a

cloth).

Ferdinand hears that his father lies full fathom five below—sea change and

all—but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried:

Although this lord of wake remembrance – this

Who shall be of little memory

When it is earthed 2.1. 232-34

The King’s son’s alive,

“’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned

As he that sleeps swims. 236-38

Antonio: Will you grant me that Ferdinand is drowned?

Sebastian: He’s gone. 233-34

Alonso:

O thou mine heir

Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish

Hath made his meal on thee?

Francisco: Sir, he may live.

I saw him beat the surges under him

And rid upon their backs. He trod the water . . .

The surge most swoll’n . ..

I doubt not

He came alive to land.

Sebastian:

We have lost your son,

I fear, for ever. Alonso: No, no, he’s gone. 2.1. 112-34

Stephano: I took him to be killed with a thunder stroke.

But art thou not drowned? 2.2.107

Stephano: Here, kiss the book.” [Trinculo drinks] . . .

Come swear to that. Kiss the book. I will furnish it anon with new contents. Swear!

2.2. 127; 139

Wilt thou detroy them then? 3.2. 113

Caliban’s sleep and sleep again “isle is full of noises’ picked up Prospero’s dreams

made on rounded with a little sleep after he recalls the plot and breaks off the

masque 3.2.140; 4.2. 155-57

cloudy, 2.1. 143

Dead or alive? 2.2. 25—another scene of “traumatic misrecognition—Trinculo of

Caliban.

I have not ‘scaped drowning to be afeared now of your four legs, 58-59

Not is it real or not, but what kind of real? Should I be mourning? How should I

take up my relation to this thing I am now archiving? That we are talking through

and should I keep this? Or is it just a dream—Prospero. a retrieval the island

becomes an archival space. In 1.2. Prospero brings back stories, he is the database

and that search engine. He’s the software designer, not the hard drive. The play is a

revenge tragedy. The book –I’ll drown my book—how is the story of P’s being set

adrift in his books and for him to drown his books thereafter? How is that story told

in Milan?

Hear spirits in two ways—magical utopian space and as a grave, as archive, because

it is coded by P’s books, then what is the relation between being setting adrift and

generic crossing and conversion from revenge tragedy to romance? How does that

play with the shipwreck with a romance motif that is coded as tragic, as total loss?

Alonso forced to live as if his son is dead, then have him returned to him by

Prospero—letting live or letting die—sovereignty becomes the management of life.

Foucauldian biopolitical moment at the end. But the book will be drowned? To do

what to separate from the ship? From the ship Prospero is going to get back on?

Abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck.

They take their chances with drowning. They’ve decided to risk drowning. He

decides to drown his books. What does it mean to drown a person as opposed to

drown a person? A figure of an archival oblivion: forgive and forget. Forget about it.

Crimes to be pardoned. Pardon and perjury. Forgiveness. Hostipitality. Friend

and enemy. Witness, testimony, and archive.

Engage the Foucauldian moment at the end of The Tempest with the end of Beast

and Sovereign Vol. 2

Also a species difference because Caliban is left on the island with a story that the

play is not even interested in writing because it is not interested in telling, just a sort

Marination

Ahead of its time. Still of the obsolete past in the future from Bernard Tavernier’s

science-fiction thriller, Death Watch.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews57/death_watch_blu-ray.htm

The idea of a burial at sea strikes me as being so odd. Shouldn't

there be a word for it? Cremation, inhumation (buried in the earth),

and "marination?" When Derrida discusses cremation and inhumation in The Beast

and the

Sovereign, 2, he doesn't mention burial at sea. Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-

vivance” on what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media

transfers, various material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for

not/non/un/reading.

Derrida does not consider animots in relation to corpse disposal in The Animal That

Therefore I am. Says that there is only burial or cremation in Beast and SOv 2, yet

does not talk about burial at sea. These are the only two forms of the and

destruction of corpses, according to Derrida in Beast and the Sovereign vol. 2. Misses

cannibals being both cremated and buried. Synthesize the two works. Animals

disposing of corpses? Only humans? But how do humans do it? Is there a human

way to waste, or what Alonso calls “infinite loss?” Is mourning about the tropics of

formerly human waste disposal? some one who has just be.14

There is no media ecology in the play whereby either corpses or books get recycled.

No food chain. There is predation (fishes eating Ferdinand) and there is not, just

veganism (Caliban seems to be a vegan—shows plants of the island). And then

there is the banquet from which no one eats. The banquet itself is not produced as a

special effect. Ariel’s appearance is.

XXXXXX

A kind of enlightenment at work, but perhaps closer to what Derrida says about

phantasm and sleep being more vigilant than waking.

State of sleeping and state of death are not radically opposed but rendered as

equivalent, as if waking up were being resurrected.

Boatswain’s return

“rigged as wen / We first put out to sea. 5.1. 223-24

The “strange noises” of the isle awaken the sailors:

I were well awake, / I’d strive to tell you. [sleep compromises capacity to retrieve

form the archive, to tell—] We were dead of sleep . . 229-230

We were awaked 235

Even in a dream, were we divided from them / And brought moping hither. 238-89

boatswain goes back to the beginning—we first set out to sea—and skips to the end

—when they were awakened—so they have no story to tell]

And more diversity of sounds, all horrible, 234 (Horrible, horrible, most horrible?)

Ariel leaves the crew of the ship asleep, as if in a cryonic state. Echoes the way

Prospero has put Miranda asleep. “Lie there, my art”—ambiguous referent (another

crux) of “art” as either Miranda or his cloak and staff, his daughter or his props.

Ferdinand asking Miranda if she is a spirit or a human; Miranda asking if Ferdinand

is a sprit (Geist in German translation).

Miranda: What is’t, a spirit? . . .

It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit.” 1.2.410; 412

Prospero: No, wench, it [“it,” not “he”] eats and sleeps and hath such senses

As we have—such [anticipates Prospero’s “Dost thou think so spirit? And Ariel’s

response “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero: “And mine shall. / Hast thou,

which art but air, a touch, a feeing . . .” 5.1.19-23]

This gallant which thou see’st

Was in the wreck, and he’s something stained

With grief. . .413- 416

Prospero addresses Ariel as spirit a few lines later Spirit, fine spirit, / I’ll free thee

1.2. 421.

Ferdinand: My prime request / Which I do last pronounce, is (O, you wonder!) / If

you be maid or no?

Miranda: No wonder, sir. But certainly a maid 426-28

Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being both

singular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for the

disappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt

(there, but invisible, off-stage).

SO The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?

I have not ‘scaped drowning in order

You did not drown? Stephano and Trinculo when “swum ashore like a duck”

Swear to that. Kiss the book. Swear [the book here is the bottle Caliban drinks that

Stephano offers him]

Stephano “Rest drowned, we shall inherit here.”

Prospero on inherit in “These are the stuffs that dreams are made on”

My mother is hard at study.

Kiss means drink (kiss by the book in Romeo and Juliet)

The question devolves into a question of whether Miranda is a virgin or not.

The German is Jungfrau.

Ferdinand “Weeping again the King my father’s wreck” 1.2. 391

Ferdinand wonders if he is dreaming

When Alonso and Gonzalo are put to sleep, so to speak, they survive a near death

experience after Gonzalo is awakened by Ariel.

Remember me—remember—Prospero as Hamlet.

—there’s an expiration on his power. Extradition.

Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s

Books.

Prospero's Book as a life preserver

book as boat.

Book / boat / bark / bottle?

Prospera’s Books

The film does not show the beginning of the book or the end of the book.

No paratexts at any point, so there’s a precursive and recusrsive elippsis of the book

that keeps it by drowning it. Taymor makes explicit a pre-cursive economy of the

book that differs from other economies of drowning in the play; drowning by the

numbers—characters seem to drown but do not. This is a cycle of reassurance; lots

of scenes of reassurance that more or less repeat each other. Prospero even lies

about the drowning of his daughter to Alonso to manufacture a symmetry between

Prospero’s loss and Alonso’s, as if Alonso’s repeated Prospero’s.

Melting sand castle between the opening title for The Tempest, rain begins, camera

dollies back and pans right as we se it begin to melt in a hand that belongs to

Miranda. (use of the words “melt,” “dissolve pace,” and so on in the play) There’s a

storm before the storm. Even before the shipwreck she sees, there is a sandcastle

wreck. Miranda first when she enters the play after the boatswain scene. 1.1.

Melting sand, dissolving sand anticipates Prospero’s

The seven minute long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by

Kyle Cooper, transposes the moment when Prospero “drowns” his books: as the

credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch Prospero’s

books fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the bottom. Taymor

originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In

her book The Tempest, Taymor writes: “The film’s last image of Prospera on the

ocean cliff, her back to the camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks

below, and the staff’s subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut

and timed and scored and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated,

incomplete. I asked Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the

epilogue] and set them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence.

And to that haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and

we drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea” (21).15 Taymor enlarges

authorial agency in the preface to her book, entitled “Rough Magic,” writing that “we

drowned the books of Prospera.” Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship

depends on the expansive, leisurely condensation of Prospera’s transposed and

visualized declaration to “drown” her “books” and Prospera’s ventriloquized

epilogue. I read Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a

residual paratexual storage space, sending off her film and accommodating

areaderly and spectatorial desire for an authorial force by encrypting and

spectralizing the absent writer of the book accompanied by a speech turned

requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the end title

sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The film’s specters are

re/called at the end of tie-in screenplay book. The last two pages of the book show a

still taken from the film’s end title sequence of a book opening up after it has been

plunged into the water with the production and cast credits superimposed over the

left-hand page. See Figures 0 and 0.0, the verso and recto pages).

Figure 0 (verso page) Figure 0.0 (recto page)

Filming an adaptation of The Tempest allows Taymor to perform a paradoxical

salvage operation of the book which is not salvific: precisely because the

drowning books are absent all paratext (no titles or authors are visible on the

covers), the book as a medium serves as a metaphorical storage unit for film, a

book cover like the metal canisters used to house rolls of film that contain, as it

were the author. This paradox may be vividly grasped in the book of the film The

tempest, with the author listed as “Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William

Shakespeare”: in a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back

cover and page opposite, the film credits for the director and actors are printed

just to left of an “uncredited” book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding

it. The book of the film shows a nameless book while also recording Taymor as

the film’s author: the weirdly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of

hybrid authorship-- crediting Shakespeare as her source appears and disappears

in the fold of the of the book as one turns the page and then, presumably, closes

the book. Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable books

makes them unreadable even though the pages are open.

Ariel’s bee song transposed from 51. 87-94 to just before Prospero’s “ My Ariel,

chick ,’That is thy charge.” 5.1. 316

Taymor cuts “Please you draw near.”

Crux of lack of a stage exit for Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, p 305, Arden 3.

Miranda: The sky it seems, would pour down stinking pitch

But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek

Dashes the fire out. 1.2.4-5

Alonso: That they were, I wish

Myself were muddied in that oozy bed

Where my son lies. 5.1. 150-52

Upon this shore when you were wrecked, was landed

To be king on’t. 5.1.161-62

Ariel says he “landed” the survivors; the passive construction here is rather odd

—“who landed” could easily work—but “was landed” is not just “landed” but implies

a missing agent—someone or some force “landed” Prospero.

Sleep versus awake is a strong binary opposition in 1.2. Miranda put to sleep and at

the end when the boatswain is awakened but his sailors are asleep.

There thou shat find the mariners asleep

Under the hatches. The master and the boatswain

Being awake, During the play, sleep and waking blur, sleeping and death, even

sleepy language.

Taymor’s audiocommentary

When you do the play onstage, the cell is off stage, so you never see it. But when you

do a movie (on sequence before A, A, S and G wander (they awoke earlier).

She says the set by the pool is like “an open book,” the white walls like pages.

[PBS Masterpiece] montage of turning blank pages with faces of stars superimposed.

Red cover and blank pages, open book at the end of the logo sequence]

No books in Prospera’s flashbacks, just alchemy and the funeral of her dead

husband, the duke. She now inherits the post. Taymor says that “in the original

play, Prospero reads his books and therefore loses control. Seems like a good

reason, but we . . .”she stresses alchemy because as a witch you could be burned;

you could be burned for alchemy—“set to sea presumably to die”

The question “Is there a book or not?” assumes we know what a book is. We want to

ask a different question Gets at hunatotexuality og Prospeor’s Books, not their

resumed materiality.

Burn but his books versus I’ll drown my books. The book is and is not there, but it is

imagnined takes two very different forms.

Spectrality takes us ot bio—different notion of the island—mangaement of life and

eath—ut with a n economy of loss without loss.

Fake death in Much Ado About Nothing—not directed at the female body,

purification.

Chief focus will be on Taymor’s tempest in art because tshe shows the books

“drowning in the end title sequence.

Made me think that Prospero too is among the living dead—every third thought

shall be my grave—kind of like Robinson Crusoe for Derrida—not fear of being

buried alive, but fear of burying alive or burning alive. Drowning as neurotic

compromise formation. He can live on only because he is as spectral as he is human.

His wife died in childbirth—embryonic fluids? Miranda’s birth as another kind of

shipwreck?

The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.There are two shots of books "drowning." There is also shot of theship burning in the distance.

The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot ofit fully restored in a harbor.

The film is good for us in that it highlights the play's not soobvious opposition between burning and drowning.The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I amrealizing. Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down andProspero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, whocontradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarlyreassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to thesurvivors. Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--Ihad forgotten that.

Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's noflashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of herlibrary WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)on the boat in which they are set adrift.

Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being bothsingular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for the

disappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt(there, but invisible, off-stage).So The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?No book burning there, but also no bookdestruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; nofigurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I itwritten")

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running; The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fireShot of Prospara in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm and after the ship as sunk.No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Airel surrounded by fire too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing it burning.

Boat burning versus book burning.Ariel quotes Ferdinand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)But are they safe?Not a hair perished.

Look. The ship is hidden. So we see the ship in harbor completely restored. Taymor wildly accelerated what we learn only in the final scene of the play, giving us even more reassurance, defaulting the audience to her Ariel-centric reading of the play, as if the audience were Ariel.

Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward tracing.Flashack of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to Prospera with background of forest splashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.“invisible to every eyeball else”

Porspera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our wood.Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.

Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” linesProspera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in Gladiator.

Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdinand hearing ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots, “Where should this music be?Follow it or rather it has drawn me, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Ferdinand is walking—close ups of both Ariel and FerdinandThe ballad does remember my drowned father.The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Ariel from the “real” human characters.

Myself am Naples, ever since my father.

Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in sots of Ferdinand and Miranda. “I charge thee that thou attend me.”(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—doe’st thou mark?”—Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? Tat she has to keep replacing it, redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if Miranda is listening or not?

Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre early modern, I guess. Rags, not ood pulp as source of paper.

Cut to fire in Prospera—“so lie there my art”

Prospera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in focus with racking focus.

Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks in bluish hue. Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the books?) here is also a chest in her boat.Boatswain is blackMusic sounds a like Nymanish

Foul water shalt thy drink

Prospera’s Books

DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never holds her books, no library.

Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same economy of destruction and restoration—through “made wet”Burns cross over from prop to non prop from burning to drowning. “drown my books” last se of “drown” in the play?

Dream/Re/Work

End credits:Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer producer credit Visual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper“which was to please”followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to informcast members show

to title The TempestA Julie Taymor filmAnd cones to below the end the line credits books have Laurence Sterne marble covers“let your indulgence (repeated)last book disappearssets me freeNow I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats released by prayerMore guitar—also a lead guitar-builds louder, same loopNow I want spirits begins over againBy prayer . .which pierces so, pierces that it assaults, mercy itself and frees . . PauseA’as you from faults from

Coda Betha WilliamsLet your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd copyright.

One last book—big—with extra pages, then sound, then an icon with a page, three more icons, then warning,Antipiracy warning

Theater as transcendental object. Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that make the diegesis collapse. “Homo fuge” moment.

All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world. You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.

Prospera’s Bu(t)chdrowning books burn in Greenaway's P's Books Water is all over the film. The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toy boat. Water is all over the film. The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toyboat.

The shot above of the book is rather theological—apocalyptic but in a perverse way—Amen.

The word “creature”—Ferdinand called creature by Prospero to Miranda. “Thing od darkness” Caliban. Animal and Ariel—where the bee sucks there suck I.Lacan on bees reading in Seminar Book XX, chapter 4. [A;lo bees disappearing due to isecticides that mess up the pollen and hten disorient the bees so that they can’t make it back a-hive. Puts the B in Bare life.Speech—taught me language—Ferdinand—you speak my language. Man as speaking animal—but animal also speaks—so do spirits.

Ariel talks about the ship on fire—burning—rather than sinking, getting overwhelmed by waves.

Le Livre Ivre

Caliban as drunken Symbolist poet—ban ban ca ca caliban. Kissing the bottle as kissing the book.

In German TV Der Sturm, Ariel comes out dressed in the identical clothes Prospera is dressed in when Ariel says in English—modernized, not Shakespeare—the bit about how Prospero should forgive his enemies.

“We could isolate the flashbacks . . . color of blue and force perspective and

miniatures in the flashbacks to separate them from the present, in which we used

naturalistic colors.”

Ariel on shipwreck “I divide and burn in many places”

In the published screenplay,

“INT. LIBRARY – DUSK

The room is filled with Prospera’s books. In the center of the small space the young

lovers play chess . . .” 160

Graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth

By my so potent art.

EXT. HIGH PROMONONTORY OVER LOOKING THE OCAEAN – NIGHT

As promised, PROSPERA throws her staff of the cliff and watches it shatter into

millions of pieces on the rocks below.

Prospera’s books sink slowly one by one into the deep, black sea as the main credits

begin. A haunting female voice sings Prospera’s last speech.

Miranda to Prospero, I.2.

“Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?”

Caliban: “Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark,” 2.2. 6

Boatswain: “We were dead of sleep.”

Stephano: Com on your ways, open your mouth. Here is that which will give

language to you, cat. 2.2. 81-82-echoes Caliban’s “you gave me language” to Miranda.

Trinculo: I should know that voice. It should be—but he is drowned, And these are

devils. 2.2. 86-87

Alonso speaking about Ferdinand: He is drowned

Whom we stray to find, and the sea mocks

Our frustrate search on land. 3.3.8-10

Ariel as harpy:

The never surfeited sea

Hath caused to belch you up3.3.55-56

Thee of thy son, Alonso

In film, magic banquet has animals and fruits and then leaves follow out from it and

then crows or ravens and then Ariel.

Audiocommentary over chess scene—the board is made of sand, meant to recall the

sandcastle at the beginning; the chess pieces are made of rock and coral.

No books are visible in these shots of M and F playing chess, contrary to the

published screenplay.

Miranda no longer wearing leggings but a dress (to indicate her return to Europe,

according to Taymor.

“Lava dogs, the bees are not in the original script but you can see better how Ariel is

doing P’s bidding from scene to scene.”

Usually, she doesn’t have the confrontation between Caliban and Prospero—he is

looking directly at the stick. Shot reverse shots in close ups—“he leaves and does

not look back, forever free,” cut back to extreme close up of Prospera (like rough

magic sequence).

“I rearranged where this song happens.”

Another long take until “there I “ and see kaleidoscope in one of her earlier visions

so that he would just become water again.

“And do the murder first” 4.1.432 The part about burning Prospero’s books drops

Ariel as harpy:

But remember

. . that you three

From Milan did supplant good Prospero,

Exposed unto the sea, which hath requite it,

Him and his foul deed” 3.3.68-72

Prospero “When I have decked the sea with drops fall salt” 1.2. 155

Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine,

Fall fellowly drops. 5.1.63-64

The se-change is a form of encrustation—what dissolves becomes permanent-dones

coral, eyes, pearsl. Almost like a sonnet. What is the tense of “are”? Have been made

(as in “are now changed completely”)? Or present? As in “are now being changed, in

the process of”)

Ariel shot in slow-motion—Ben W had to reloop his voice so that iw ould match the

Cut back to Proserpa—you can see a book on her table, but she is turned away from

it. slow motion.

on table—omnivorous. Ariel’s harpy sequence activated by shots of Propsera

dropping a black feather in a glass calchemical bottle. Which turns blue (like ink)

and hten close up of he bottle as water explodes out of it.

They hath bereft thee, and do pronounce by me,

Linger’ng perdition, worse than any death 3.3-75-77

Like supposed destruction a means of speculation on disposal of corpses, sleep is a

kind f suspended animation or cryonic freezing. Prospero puts Miranda asleep.

Ariel later makes Gonzalo and Antonio sleep. Ariel has the men in the ship sleep.

Caliban questions most acutely the border between sleeping and waking.

Sebastian’s a “very sleepy language.”

Repetition of you gave me language.

Even language is not awake.

No print of goodness take versus printless feet.

Mannoni mentions The Tempest in connection to Robinson Cruose, but nt the

footprints.

the destruction of the ship itself is both water and fire.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air:And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolveAnd, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind.

Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'dThe very virtue of compassion in thee,I have with such provision in mine artSo safely ordered that there is no soul--No, not so much perdition as an hairBetid to any creature in the vesselWhich thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;For thou must now know farther.

Bring in Lucretius on the shipwreck?

PROSPEROBut are they, Ariel, safe?ARIELNot a hair perish'd;On their sustaining garments not a blemish,But fresher than before: and, as thou badest me,In troops I have dispersed them 'bout the isle.The king's son have I landed by himself;Whom I left cooling of the air with sighsIn an odd angle of the isle and sitting,His arms in this sad knot.PROSPEROOf the king's shipThe mariners say how thou hast disposedAnd all the rest o' the fleet.ARIELSafely in harbourIs the king's ship; in the deep nook, where onceThou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dewFrom the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there she's hid:The mariners all under hatches stow'd;Who, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour,I have left asleep; and for the rest o' the fleetWhich I dispersed, they all have met againAnd are upon the Mediterranean flote,Bound sadly home for Naples,Supposing that they saw the king's ship wreck'dAnd his great person perish.

Ariel repeats Prospero’s reference to a “hair.”

FERDINANDWhere should this music be? i' the air or the earth?It sounds no more: and sure, it waits uponSome god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,Weeping again the king my father's wreck,This music crept by me upon the waters,Allaying both their fury and my passionWith its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.

No, it begins again.

PROSPEROHow? the best?What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?FERDINANDA single thing, as I am now, that wondersTo hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me;And that he does I weep: myself am Naples,Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheldThe king my father wreck'd.

ALONSOIf thou be'st Prospero,Give us particulars of thy preservation;How thou hast met us here, who three hours sinceWere wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost--How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--My dear son Ferdinand.PROSPEROI am woe for't, sir.ALONSOIrreparable is the loss, and patienceSays it is past her cure.PROSPEROI rather thinkYou have not sought her help, of whose soft graceFor the like loss I have her sovereign aidAnd rest myself content.ALONSOYou the like loss!PROSPEROAs great to me as late; and, supportableTo make the dear loss, have I means much weakerThan you may call to comfort you, for IHave lost my daughter.ALONSOA daughter?O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,The king and queen there! that they were, I wishMyself were mudded in that oozy bedWhere my son lies. When did you lose your daughter?

PROSPEROIn this last tempest. I perceive these lordsAt this encounter do so much admireThat they devour their reason and scarce thinkTheir eyes do offices of truth, their wordsAre natural breath: but, howsoe'er you haveBeen justled from your senses, know for certainThat I am Prospero and that very dukeWhich was thrust forth of Milan, who most strangelyUpon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed,To be the lord on't. No more yet of this;For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,Not a relation for a breakfast norBefitting this first meeting. Welcome, sir;This cell's my court: here have I few attendantsAnd subjects none abroad: pray you, look in.My dukedom since you have given me again,I will requite you with as good a thing;At least bring forth a wonder, to content yeAs much as me my dukedom.Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess

ANTONIOThus, sir:Although this lord of weak remembrance, this,Who shall be of as little memoryWhen he is earth'd, hath here almost persuade,--For he's a spirit of persuasion, onlyProfesses to persuade,--the king his son's alive,'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'dAnd he that sleeps here swims.SEBASTIANI have no hopeThat he's undrown'd.

The seven-minute-long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle

Cooper, however, gives expressive form to the moment when Prospero ‘drowns’ his

book: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch

Prospera’s books (in plural form) fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the

bottom musically accompanied by a haunting version of Shakespeare’s epilogue

scored by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film

script but ended up restoring it. In The Tempest, the book published as a companion

piece to the film, Taymor writes:

The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the camera,

tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s subsequent

shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored and

mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked

Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set

them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that

haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we

drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea. (21)16

Taymor enlarges authorial agency beyond the individual in the ‘Rough Magic’

preface to the book, writing that ‘we drowned the books of Prospera’). (p. 21) Yet

this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on not only shifting Propsoero’s

“rough magic” speech to the end of the film as Prospera’s ventriloquized “Coda,”(p.

21) but on the final credits. Because “the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete, I

asked Elliot [Goldenthal] to take those last great words and set them to music for

the seven-minute-long end title sequence” (21) during we witness the visualized

consequences of Prospera’s declaration of her intent to ‘drown’ her ‘books’ . . I read

Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual

storage space, sending off her film and accommodating a readerly and spectatorial

desire for an authorial force by encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the

book. She accompanies this allegorical depiction of displaced authorship with a

speech-turned-requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the

end credit sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The authorial

specters of the film are re/called at the end of the tie-in screenplay book. The last

two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s closing credit sequence of a

book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the production and

WITH AN ASSUMPTION ABOUT THE TEMPEST that opens onto a set

of related questions. The assumption is that among the highly

valued books that Prospero brought with him into exile is one book

essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult

before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one

that near the end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his

magic. Though Peter Greenaway, in his film Prospero’s Books, did

not include such a book among the twenty-four he decided were

necessary for Prospero’s survival,1 the text indicates that Prospero

cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. (Figures X.1 and X.2 [the verso

and recto pages].)

not only has a magic robe and a magic staff (both of which are

explicitly called for2), but, like Friar Bacon and Doctor Faustus

and other stage magicians before him, he also has a magic book.

Further, the play presents Prospero’s always-offstage book as

crucial to his rule over the island, the magical instrument that

enables him to control the spirits who come from their confines

when Prospero calls, who torment Caliban and keep him obedient,

and who assume as needed the shapes of Greek mythological

figures or vicious hunting dogs.

Granted, the play emphasizes Prospero’s use of spirits much more than it does his dependence on a particular book for the power to so use them. By the time he says“I’ll to my book, / For yet ere suppertime must I perform / Much business” (3.1.113–15), we know without a doubt that Prospero employs materialized spirits to carry out his commands. (1)

They all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.

(3.2.100–104)

Prospero’s spirit magic is thus established early and unequivocally, long before we see groups of spirits actually appear. In contrast, not until Prospero’s exit line,“I’ll to my book,” at the end of 3.1 does the text point to a specific book connected with Prospero’s magic “business.” Further, in only one speech is Prospero’s control of spirits explicitly linked to his book, and that speech refers to his books in the plural:

Remember First to possess his books, for without them

He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath notOne spirit to command. They all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.

(3.2.100–104)

The use here of the plural seems to argue against the significance of any particular book—though surely it is relevant that the speech gives us Caliban’s interpretation of Prospero’s use of his library, and that Prospero himself, in later referring to the instruments that have made possible his magic, uses the singular form: “I’ll break my staff, / . . . And deeper than did ever plummet sound, / I’ll drown my book” (5.1.63, 65–66)—a promise he seems, by play’s end, to have kept, since he describes himself in the Epilogue as being in much the state that Caliban had earlier predicted, without

In a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back cover and facing

page, the film credits for the director and actors are printed just to the left of an

‘uncredited’ book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding it. The book of the

film thus showcases a book displaying neither title nor author while simultaneously

recording Taymor as the film’s ‘author’ (asserted via her writer, director and

one spirit to command.

The first and most obvious question that Shakespeare scholars will ask is why, if the play suggests even equivocally that Prospero has a magic book for the control of spirits, is there so little scholarly curiosity about this book today?

But even those twentieth-century scholars who tried to take the magic seriously tended to be silent about Prospero’s book.11

This new interest in conjuring books raises the next question about Prospero’s book—namely, if we grant the likelihood that Prospero has some version of a manuscript magic book, what are we to imagine that the book contains? We can move toward a tentative answer by looking first at the contents of actual magic books, though we will see later that Prospero’s putative book departs significantly from them. G

producer multiple credits here in combination with the ‘Julie Taymor Adapted from

the Play by William Shakespeare’ authorial designation on the volume’s front

cover): the interstingly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of hybrid

authorship - crediting Shakespeare as her source - appears and disappears as one

turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing on the books

At the same time, however, Prospero’s book is not a grimoire—or at least so it seems today. While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the contents of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as departing in significant ways from extant grimoires.

The significant point here is that, for an early-seventeenth-century audience of The Tempest, Prospero’s references to his “book” and Caliban’s allusions to Prospero as a “magician” and a “sorcerer” would, by placing Prospero in the category of “magician” or “white witch,” have constructed him as a natural enemy of Sycorax.69 This possibility encourages a fresh look at the play in terms of Prospero’s connections back to the Virgil and Solomon magician figures and out to the users of grimoires in Shakespeare’s own day, and it may be especially fruitful in terms of the magician/witch enmity that manifests in Prospero’s antipathy to (even the memory of ) Sycorax. 70 While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the contents of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as departing in significant ways from extant grimoires.

opening as they fall underwater, Taymor invites us to ask a new question, namely,

Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them

unreadable even though the pages are open.

Taymor’s protracted endings. Propsera is literally cut off from her voice, her

promise already made off-camera and fulfilled, after, the end of the film, also in a

The real, historical reader “would have” is no less ideal than “the” ahistorical reader of reader response criticism.

It is based on a functionalist model of cognition—eveyrone sees it. Complete transparency. Unused Readers

Roiented to further research, a s=s if there would come a point when that could happen or ever has happened. As if there is always a march of progress.

But just as The Tempest is more than a play about a magician, so Prospero’s book, within the play’s larger context of epic sea journeys and contemporary Mediterranean/Atlantic voyages, has an additional resonance that at first seems quite other than that carried by the grimoires. That resonance attaches to it in terms of the larger power of the book per se.

It is this resonance that Stephen Greenblatt locates when he reads Caliban’s words “Remember first to possess his books” as having essentially nothing to do with magic but instead as representing a moment in the battle between the lettered European and the unlettered islander. Prospero’s book in this reading represents a source not of magical potency but of the power of the “Civill” over those who, lacking “letters and Writing,” are, in Samuel Purchas’s words, “esteemed Brutish, Savage, Barbarous.”81 Peter Greenaway, like Greenblatt, sees the book as an image of Prospero’s (nonmagical) power and has Caliban tear out and scatter the leaves of Prospero’s books not because the books are magic but because they represent Prospero’s learnedness, his “cultural baggage,” his “litterall advantage.”82 (29)

voice-over. The “O mistress mine” shot has a different kind of incongruity that

nevertheless makes the : the singing is of course dubbed in post-production, but it’s

not clear whether the voice is the actors; at points, it look like he is lip-synching.

This Across the Universe moment has includes some superimposition. But the real

oddity is that the song is taken from another play that of course has a parallel (the

Prospero says of Gonzalo,“Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom” (1.2.198–200), P

As a grimoire—and even more so as a stage-prop grimoire—its historical moment seems much further in the past and its baggage strangely lighter. But it opens up a host of questions about Prospero and his magic, many of which must remain unanswered until we know more about manuscript conjuring books.

Within the frame of literacy as civilization and as power, however, the decision is more ambiguous. When, as in Greenaway’s film, we see Prospero’s books— leather-bound, gorgeous, their pages yielding all the world’s mythologies, its temples, its art, its histories—their destruction seems, to lovers of books and admirers of Western civilization, both problematic and poignant. To those who instead share Caliban’s view of Prospero, who see Prospero as little more than a tyrant and Western civilization as little more than tyranny, the destruction of the book may be more a matter of celebration. Such a divided response to the play today seems almost inevitable, forcing the early-twenty-first-century viewer/reader to grapple with the meanings of literacy, of history, of civilization, and to confront the clash of values and of worlds implied in The Tempest’s larger story.

shipwreck and mistaken believe that a loved one has drowned) but Feste makes no

sense in context since Ferdinand has his mistress.

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming That can sing both high and low; Trip no further, pretty sweeting, Journeys end in lovers’ meeting— Every wise man’s son doth know.

So she reroutes the destruction of the book back through colonialism and Greenblatt.

And Greenblatt, providing a context for Caliban’s “Burn but his books,” recounts the story told by Claude Duret in 1607 about the Hurons who “were convinced that we [Europeans] were sorcerers, imposters come to take possession of their country, after having made them perish by our spells, which were shut up in our inkstands, in our books, etc.—inasmuch that we dared not, without hiding ourselves, open a book or write anything.”85 (30)

3 Survivance—as a structuring structure that generates a series of differences that

matter or don’t according to at various historical moments, what copy you have,

what language it is in, what edition, hardcover or paperback, paper used, etc. and

revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Difference

between archival materials and their publication—recursive since new editions can

be published.

4 Murnau film, Faust throws his book into afire; destroyed by insects; acid-free

paper again in Greenaway film. We might want to discuss the invisible blood

What is love? ’tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What’s to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty,— Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III (1602)17

writing in Faustus too,

by way of contrast. No book brining there, but also no book

destruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; no

figurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I it

written")

Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about notgetting back to me. We could start with our different reading of thesame passage from Marlowe’s Faustus, if we wanted to do.

Greenaway’s piss streaming Ariel versus Marlowe’s blood-streaming?

Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about not

getting back to me. We could start with our different reading of the

same passage, if we wanted to do.

Hi Lowell (and Julian),

I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it

even more than I did before) regarding blood writing. Julian and I have discussing

your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions. If you have left the essay

behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :)

Julian, please contribute at will. :)

Rough magic follows her creating a ring of fire around her as she says “Ye elves” and

also has some superimposed flashbacks in montage form.

The film ends with a series of liberations also not in the play:1. After the Europeans exit, Prospero lets Caliban go. No dialogue. Just lots of cutting back and forth until we see Caliban walking up the steps of the cell and getting away.2. Propsera then lets Aerial go.3. She then fulfills her promise, as if letting herself go--throws staffAnd then "dissolve" into end titles and books.

The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la

lettre?). You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign

the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream. I was thinking about the relation

between congealing and dropping. The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs

for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of

after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm. He can divide

the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it. But is the drop going to go

into Faustus or on him? Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean?

The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down,

hide in the earth, etc. Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my

time is up). When is the drop going to drop? Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is

the economy of the drop? Why can it be divided? God kicks in as he is stopping it--

but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in theB text). What de Man would

call the formal materiality of inscription seems to have the kind of ucanny effect

you discuss within the blood-streaming of time. The drop is another instance of

blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.

Sets up anonymess.

Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s

Books.

The second set of questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material /

messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself. The

congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one

could rightly say. However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny

before the blood congeals. The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm")

would not happen on stage. Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut

mine arm, and with my proper blood” And even if one were to try to use squibs to

fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm,

which is what the stage direction directs. And it is hard to imagine how the actor

could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing. (Julian has talked

about this with me.) So the language of the play and the body of the actor are

already dislocated. Disabled, even. "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am

not asking any questions. :) When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we

have entered further into the uncanny. We do not know what inscription means

here. Who wrote this? With what? blood? Ink? Invisible ink? The medium is not

specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was

repeated earlier. And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the

blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo?

Filling in the Blanks on FIlm

We now turn to the endings of Taymor and Greenaway’s films. Here we examine

specific ways in which the closing sequences adapt the book written and the book

being written in ways that both unify the film and yet also complicate a sense of the

So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood

writing) as the caesura that derails ethics. Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we

get "cuts his arm"? And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus,

repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far

for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is

not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift. Blood is a medium as well

as material. Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself. He cannot

receive Jesus.

In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the

paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt. Faustus is

"given time." Yet not really. The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . ,

by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"

Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.

So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort

of (not), in the deed of gift. It becomes just a deed after he reads it out:

ending of film, of how complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and

the closing paratext begins, and so of when one can legitimately exit the cinema or

turn off the blu-ray player. Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the

end credits begin? Or is one compelled, for fearing of missing something, to stay

seated and keep watching even after ‘The End’? Such announcements of seeming

completion can sometimes, of course, be duplicitous, acting as teasing herald to

Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"

Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking. But then Faustus us

uses "give" in his response:

"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"

"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.

You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc). But I wonder if

Marlowes notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts

(which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less

latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily

uncanny. The spectral “precedes” the material. The text itself is a specter, a record

to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only

Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything. Not even that. At

least not for sure.

P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and

further moments in the textual / paratextual endings beyond ‘The End’ that loop

back the closing paratext to the earlier text of the film. I address these questions

and others in a necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the

end sequences of Taymor abd Greenaway films paradoxically save the film author as

a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or disintegrating the book (auteur, you

non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.

Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-

sensical. A character contemplates its own end, it is not human.

Theater as transcendental object.

Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that

make the diegesis collapse.

“Homo fuge” moment.

All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world.

You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the

character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.

Hi Lowell (and Julian),

I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it even more than I did before) regarding blood writing. Julian and I have discussing your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions. If you have left the essay behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :) Julian, please contribute at will. :)

will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a much higher cultural status than the

more everyday écrivain, or writer).

Prospera’s Books

The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la lettre?). You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream. I was thinking about the relation between congealing and dropping. The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm. He can divide the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it. But is the drop going to go into Faustus or on him? Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean? The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down, hide in the earth, etc. Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my time is up). When is the drop going to drop? Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is the economy of the drop? Why can it be divided? God kicks in as he is stopping it--but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in the B text). What de Man would call the formal materiality of inscription seems to have the kind of uncanny effect you discuss within the blood-streaming of time. The drop is another instance of blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.

The second set of questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material / messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself. The congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one could rightly say. However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny before the blood congeals. The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm") would not happen on stage. Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood” And even if one were to try to use squibs to fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm, which is what the stage direction directs. And it is hard to imagine how the actor could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing. (Julian has talked about this with me.) So the language of the play and the body of the actor are already dislocated. Disabled, even. "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am not asking any questions. :) When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we have entered further into the uncanny. We do not know what inscription means here. Who wrote this? With what? blood? Ink? Invisible ink? The medium is not specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was repeated earlier. And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo?

DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown

burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with

Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her

dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never

holds her books, no library.

So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood writing) as the caesura that derails ethics. Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we get "cuts his arm"? And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus, repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift. Blood is a medium as well as material. Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself. He cannot receive Jesus.

In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt. Faustus is "given time." Yet not really. The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . , by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"

Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.

So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort of (not), in the deed of gift. It becomes just a deed after he reads it out: Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"

Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking. But then Faustus us uses "give" in his response:

"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"

"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.

You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc). But I wonder if Marlowe’s notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts (which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily uncanny. The spectral “precedes” the material. The text itself is a specter, a record to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything. Not even that. At

Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same

eeconomy of destruction and resoration—through “made wet”

Burns cross over from prop to non propr from burning to drowning. “drown my

books” last se of “drow” in the play?

least not for sure.

P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.

Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-sensical. A character contemplates its own end, it is not human.

8 Miguel de Cervantes, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. Trans. Tobias Smollet, (1755 / 2001), 83.9 Burned mansucripts are a staple of literature: see Henry James, The Aspern Papers; Wilke Collins, The Haunted Hotel. Even Shelley’s death by drowning is never connected to his posthumously published poem, “The Triumph of Life.” of In The Post Card, Derrida’s correspondence is burned; elsewhere he refers to ash, cinders, and cremation.10 The Mason-Vaughans’ observe in their introduction to the Arden that the Tempest

has fewer cruxes than do the other plays in the First Folio, and in the section of their

Introduction devoted to “Cruxes,” they include only two, leaving the rest to the

notes. Strictly speaking, the first crux they include is not a crux at all: Whether the

lines in 1.2. about Caliban “Abhorred slave” are attributed to Prospero or to Miranda

is not in doubt in the text. The question has been raised in the play’s performance

and editing history. Restoration dramatists like Dryden and editors like Theobald

had no textual evidence to reassign Prospero’s lines to Miranda. They are amending

the text, not emending an error. We read the Arden 3’s classification of this

Dream/Re/Work

Kindle

The Tempest

reassignment as a symptom, however, not simply an error of classification. The

number of cruxes is less important than the way cruxes in the play do or do not

become visible and the way editors and critics efface them. “Book” versus “books” is

one. The shift from burning to drowning might be another. Is “Prosper” rather than

“Prospero” a crux? If so, is it related to Caliban’s play with his name, “ban ban Ca

Caliban”? Under what conditions does something become a crux rather than a

general critical problem?

The Post Card, burn; The Aspern Papers;

Figure of the library at the beginning, when he’s on the boat, not drowning of

Prospero and Miranda or the books (Gonzalo’s help); the end of the play is a self-

authored return to a possibility to a possibility that the narrative has suggested but

not allowed that reverberates vis-a-vis Caliban’s desire to burn P’s books.

in Prospero’s Books.

PROSPERO

To have no screen between this part he play'd

And him he play'd it for, he needs will be

Absolute Milan. Me, poor man, my library

Was dukedom large enough: of temporal royalties

Fauxsimile done away with Prospero—techno-magical fantasy of seeing with a

master eye done away with but conserved because it’s done away.

Bringing back materiality and book history not in a kind of boring way but in an

interesting way. Nice way to shift the question that Mowat is asking—what is the

book? To what is the fate of the book? The destruction and fate “Unpacking My

He thinks me now incapable; confederates--

So dry he was for sway--wi' the King of Naples

To give him annual tribute, do him homage,

Subject his coronet to his crown and bend

The dukedom yet unbow'd--alas, poor Milan!--

To most ignoble stooping.

Wherefore did they not

That hour destroy us?

PROSPERO

Well demanded, wench:

My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not,

So dear the love my people bore me, nor set

A mark so bloody on the business, but

With colours fairer painted their foul ends.

In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,

Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared

A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,

Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats

Library,” Destination and Drowning; or destinerrance—destructibility of the letter

—divisibility versus destruction (defaults to the trope of burning or tearing the

paper or the support up). In coming back to Materiality and the prop we also to the

question of the support for Derrida.

Instinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,

To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sigh

To the winds whose pity, sighing back again,

Did us but loving wrong.

MIRANDA

Alack, what trouble

Was I then to you!

PROSPERO

O, a cherubim

Thou was’t that did preserve me. Thou didst smile.

Infused with a fortitude from heaven,

When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt,

Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me

An undergoing stomach, to bear up

Against what should ensue.

MIRANDA

How came we ashore?

PROSPERO

What is drowning a book?

No special effects when Prospera spies on Miranda and Ferdunand .

A kind winter light on the location—lots of long shadows.

Special effects when Ariel comes in and spies on Gonzalo etc and puts Gonzalo to

sleep. Then Alonso goes to sleep. Only bried shots of Ariel and then just music.

By Providence divine.

Some food we had and some fresh water that

A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,

Out of his charity, being then appointed

Master of this design, did give us, with

Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,

Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,

Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me

From mine own library with volumes that

I prize above my dukedom.

MIRANDA

Boatswain

Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring

her to try with main-course.

A cry within

A plague upon this howling! they are louder than

the weather or our office.

“strange drowsiness” drowsi and drown?

sleepy language

Ariel appears only when Sebastian ad Antonio draw and prepare to murder.

[The film gets boring once we get to Caliban, then trinculo, then Stephano. Turns

into filmed theater. Conversation between S and A cots reverse shots gradually

Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO

Yet again! what do you here? Shall we give o'er

and drown? Have you a mind to sink?

SEBASTIAN

A pox o' your throat, you bawling, blasphemous,

incharitable dog!

Boatswain

Work you then.

ANTONIO

Hang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!

We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.

GONZALO

I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he

hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is

perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his

hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,

cutting into closer and closer close ups. The editing is supposed to intensify the

drama.

Drown and dorwsy—sleep and drowning

Ariel shows up “thou liest” behind Trinculo. He appears and disappears.

for our own doth little advantage. If he be not

born to be hanged, our case is miserable.

Exeunt

GONZALO

I'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship were

no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an

unstanched wench.

GONZALO

The king and prince at prayers! let's assist them,

For our case is as theirs.

SEBASTIAN

I'm out of patience.

ANTONIO

We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards:

This wide-chapp'd rascal--would thou mightst lie drowning

The washing of ten tides!

GONZALO

When he sleeps thou cans’t knock his [Prospero] head down. Having first seized her

books. But remember first to possess her books first.

Burn but her books and that most deeply consider is the beauty of her daughter.

SHOTS OF ARIEL SEPRATE FROM SHOTS OF HUMANS.

Calbian isle full of noises—sleep and sleep again when asked I cried to dream again.

He'll be hang'd yet,

Though every drop of water swear against it

And gape at widest to glut him.

A confused noise within: 'Mercy on us!'-- 'We split, we split!'--'Farewell, my wife and

children!'-- 'Farewell, brother!'--'We split, we split, we split!'

FERDINAND

Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?

It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon

Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,

Weeping again the king my father's wreck,

This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and my passion

With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,

Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.

No, it begins again.

ARIEL sings

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Between S,T, and C abd A,A<, G, and S, shots of Prospero’s in cell—controlling the

weather—a cn ecipse

Special effect for the banquet, but small part of the screen.

Prospera puts a feather in a glass, it bursts, a bird flies out, turns into Ariel as harpy

with small boobs. His cloak is like Prospera’s. But remember.

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Burthen Ding-dong

Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.

FERDINAND

The ditty does remember my drown'd father.

This is no mortal business, nor no sound

That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.

SEBASTIAN

I have no hope

That he's undrown'd.

ANTONIO

Feathers fall in the background, kind of like books in water. Special effects as

Antonio and Sebastian and Alonso try to fight off the crows that Ariel turns into—

then Prospero crows “they are all within my power. Go bring the rabble.

Ferdinand sings “O mistress mine” long take—like Taymor’s Universe movie.

Ariel’s head on frog that leaps out after Trinculo falls into a pool.

O, out of that 'no hope'

What great hope have you! no hope that way is

Another way so high a hope that even

Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond,

But doubt discovery there. Will you grant with me

That Ferdinand is drown'd?

STEPHANO

What's the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put

tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind, ha? I

have not scaped drowning to be afeard now of your

four legs; for it hath been said, As proper a man as

ever went on four legs cannot make him give ground;

and it shall be said so again while Stephano

breathes at's nostrils.

TRINCULO

I should know that voice: it should be--but he is

drowned; and these are devils: O defend me!

No tongue all eyes be silent

Prospero waves her staff toward the sky—stars / constellations sequence also a

background behind M and F

Like a kaleidoscope/ Superimposed over Prospera. So there is no masque in the

film. Twelfth Night song displaces it.

TRINCULO

I took him to be killed with a thunder-stroke. But

art thou not drowned, Stephano? I hope now thou art

not drowned. Is the storm overblown? I hid me

under the dead moon-calf's gaberdine for fear of

the storm. And art thou living, Stephano? O

Stephano, two Neapolitans 'scaped!

STEPHANO

I prithee now, lead the way without any more

talking. Trinculo, the king and all our company

else being drowned, we will inherit here: here;

bear my bottle: fellow Trinculo, we'll fill him by

and by again.

STEPHANO

My man-monster hath drown'd his tongue in sack:

for my part, the sea cannot drown me; I swam, ere I

could recover the shore, five and thirty leagues off

Our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero does not make eye contact with Ariel most of the time.

Burning dogs chance down Caliban—Ariel also seen with fire behind him.

Shortly shall all my labors end.

Shot of eclipse again.

and on. By this light, thou shalt be my lieutenant,

monster, or my standard.

ALONSO

Old lord, I cannot blame thee,

Who am myself attach'd with weariness,

To the dulling of my spirits: sit down, and rest.

Even here I will put off my hope and keep it

No longer for my flatterer: he is drown'd

Whom thus we stray to find, and the sea mocks

Our frustrate search on land. Well, let him go.

You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,

That hath to instrument this lower world

And what is in't, the never-surfeited sea

Hath caused to belch up you; and on this island

Where man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst men

Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad;

And even with such-like valour men hang and drown

Their senses I shall restore. And they shall be themselves

“printless feet”

Sets a ring of fire around her after sot of the eclipse passing. The fire becomes faking

—back screen fast-forward montage, time-lapse photography of clouds, ends at “by

my so potent art.”

Their proper selves.

PROSPERO

Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou

Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring:

Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated

In what thou hadst to say: so, with good life

And observation strange, my meaner ministers

Their several kinds have done. My high charms work

And these mine enemies are all knit up

In their distractions; they now are in my power;

And in these fits I leave them, while I visit

Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd,

And his and mine loved darling.

CALIBAN

The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean

To dote thus on such luggage? Let's alone

And do the murder first: if he awake,

Burning dogs and burning fire around Ariel’s face and burning of the ship and the

fire around Ariel’s face. In the shipwreck (seen twice in the film, the second as a

montage and flashback) the ship catches on fire. But the play references fire only

when Ariel tells Prospero about it.

Economy of special effects in the film. Saved for Ariel and Prospera—only Ariel and

other charades when he hers them into the cell near the end of the film.

From toe to crown he'll fill our skins with pinches,

Make us strange stuff.

But this rough magic

I here abjure, and, when I have required

Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

GONZALO

Be it so! Amen!

Re-enter ARIEL, with the Master and Boatswain amazedly following

O, look, sir, look, sir! here is more of us:

No special effects for rough magic; almost one for O Mistress mine; and perhaps

none for the last shot.

The books not drowning—I’ll drown them and given by Gonzalo at offs with the

widespread any characters have of another character drowning. A character thought

I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,

This fellow could not drown. Now, blasphemy,

That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?

Hast thou no mouth by land? What is the news?

Boatswain

The best news is, that we have safely found

Our king and company; the next, our ship--

Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split--

Is tight and yare and bravely rigg'd as when

We first put out to sea.

EPILOGUE

SPOKEN BY PROSPERO

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,

Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

drowned we know is alive. Repetition of reassurance—drowning, then no harm:

Prospero of Miranda, then of Proserpa by Ariel.

She addresses them as the are frozen. Hey come awake with “Their understanding

begins to swell.

And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands:

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

11 Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227. Derrida’s practice of

using “faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on

"faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf,

Ge ties the back of her dress, black zipper in front. Back is like corset.

Behold Prospera—frst shot of her where we can see her entre dress.

Er dres—black and zippers, matches Gonzalo’s, and also S and A’s. They have to stop

at the edge of the ring.

Rack behind

Wracked upon this shore.

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a

half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means

“false title.”

On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see

Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the

Hold of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between

the Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.

Survivance—as a structuring structure that generates a series of differences that

matter or don’t according to at various historical moments, what copy you have,

what language it is in, what edition, hardcover or paperback, paper used, etc. and

revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Difference

between archival materials and their publication—recursive since new editions can

be published.

Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with

writing in the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication

introduces media that remediate the archival materials.

Sur-vivance of living dead book.

When did you lose your daughter

Drown reference characters make leave out any mention of burning.

In the Dr/ink

Propsera never writes. In Greenaway film, Gielgud in a bathtub with a toy boat, also

an inkstand containing what seems to be blue water. Water drips can be hear

From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account

of survivance and posthumous publication.

What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning

whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-

vivance.” The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the

French neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the

reader the “words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.”

(131,n30).

Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a

sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death.

(130). The book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it

decomposes or is put to various medical uses before being buried or cremated.

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks

and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might

have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive

Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to

which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read,

<iranda I wonder form close up of her to fast folly out, then cut to Prospera tis new

to thee.

Ariel speaks from pool , same as we saw in the early.

Set Caban and his confederates free. Unite the spell.

interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by

millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed

with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed

up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of

any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each

time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or

deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality

virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and

the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful

death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the

dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the

sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not

thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is

not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or

fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something

sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor

indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends

itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer

Then special effects of Ariel made of bees throwing and blowing out bees at C,S and

T, who end up at the cell.

Prospera’s library books are hidden—never ID’d in the film. They are blanks. The

bookcovers are covered by a sheet over them in which they a package that Gonzalo

the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive”

or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without

superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or

sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something

from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor

and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its

erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is

something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached,

identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or

dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-

called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me

at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is

what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the

very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other

inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my

survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-

dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns,

gives Prospera. That number does not square with the more numerous book falling

in the eater.

After every third thought shall be my grave, several shot reverse shots of Caliban

and Prospera. She lets him go.

drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates

each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other

breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it,

like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body

proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality.

This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to

engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at

work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the

archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living

experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living

experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors

and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like

death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more

originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked

under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance,

comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this

weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to

She lets Ariel, then sequence as he sings where the bee sucks there suck I all in

water with kaleidoscopic patters,

Vut to her

Characters in the play refer to “drowning” make no reference to the ship burning.

Only Ariel, when he describes the shipwreck to Prospero.

death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson

Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a

first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this

book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all]

buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one

must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the

experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-

anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson

Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like

ours, I mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is

happening . . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the

family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132

Course called “Living to Death”

in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family

and / or the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in

the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized

manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .

. deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare

The play is about “unwrecking” (the ship is rebuilt; no one harmed; clothes not wet.

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the

rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running;

ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying

dead (132)

Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies

created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-

vivance.

Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to

“Living On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published)

and Derrida on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.

First, Derrida makes the title the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,”

he writes: “the noun titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]

—was a monk responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the

archivist par excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—

how can there be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be

said of the guardian of titles?” Second, translation complicates ableit in microscopic

ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and how it is to be

glossed.

12 Speech argument doesn’t work because people aren’t sure if they are speaking or

hearing speech We never see the ship after the shipwreck even though it is restored

The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship

burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fire

Shot of Prospera in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm

and after the ship as sunk.

No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”

—Ariel says to Prospero.

Spirits as alcohol—bottle—alcohol—drowning your years in booze. Another liquid

oblivion. Putting out the fire the books, so the fire is put out.

Turns into a the narrator of lost opportunity—Caliban narrates the misfire when A

and S stop for the trumpery. It’s too late to get to the books.

It’s like the threat of an archive whose time is up, the moment when the archive becomes a crypt. Prospero’s hour is now at zenith

13 In addition to the skipwreck in Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, there are also

the ships (Antonio’s) that are to have sunk in The Merchant of Venice but then turn

out miraculously to have survived and come to harbor. The Merchant of Venice is yet

another revenge tragedy turned comedy / romance.

14 [in All Quiet on the Western Friend, a soldier says his friend is dead (just killed in combat). That’s not your friend,” the sergeant barks, “that’s a corpse. Move it back there.” And the other soldiers move it away.] 15 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare

(New York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A

Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991)

serves as a paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the

Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.

Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Ariel surrounded by fire

too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing

it burning.

sources of each the twenty-seven books shown in the films and giving their titles

once again as they are drowned (see p. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray

edition includes a comic booklet version of the film.

16 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare (New

York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A Film of the

Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991) serves as a

paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the sources of

each the twenty-seven books shown in the film and giving their titles once again as

they are drowned (see pp. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray edition includes a

comic booklet version of the film.

These lines are sung by Feste, one of the more complex comic foils to appear in a Shakespearean work. He is something of a jester, of course, but he has an unmistakably philosophical underside (“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”), pressing characters to abandon their self-pity, to recognize that life always brings its burdens — but pressing them also to seize the moment of love, which brings life’s rewards. All of this is very much the message of this sweet, simple, and yet poignant song, which

Boat burning versus book burning.

Ariel quotes Fredidand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)

But are they safe?

Not a hair perished.

Look. The ship is hid So we see the ship in harbor completely restored.

attained celebrity in its own right in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Part of that celebrity was owed not to Shakespeare, however, but to the man who composed the music by which the words came to be known.

Listen to the setting of “O Mistress Mine,” one of the last works composed by Thomas Morley, a student of William Byrd’s who died shortly after the play opened, in the fall of 1602. Although he was an organist at St Paul’s Cathedral and he attempted to write some serious church music, Morley is best known for his perfection of the consort style (the introduction of the “broken consort,” in which wind instruments are added to the conventional strings) and of the English madrigal.

It’s likely that Morley knew and worked with Shakespeare — they lived close to one another in central London and worshiped in the same parish church — and it’s possible that some of his Shakespearean songs were actually commissioned by the Bard, though this has never been firmly established. What’s certain, however, is that Morley was a great admirer of Shakespeare’s writings.

Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward

tracing.

Flashback of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to prospera with background

of forest slashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a

variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.

Morley’s works are known for their light style and their conscious importation of folk melodies (such as his amazing setting of “Under the Green Linden” in the The First Booke of Consort Lessons (1597)). They are less ponderous and downbeat than works by such contemporaries as William Byrd and John Dowland, and so are well suited to Shakespearean comic romances. First, listen to a non-vocal broken-consort rendition of “O Mistress Mine” by Stockholms Barockensemble, then to a traditional theatrical performance by Ensemble Chaconne, with Pamela Dellal as soloist. A superior performance by the great Alfred Deller can be found here. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/09/hbc-900082125 In an essay alluding to the title of Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, cleverly

entitled “Prospero’s Book,” Barbara Mowat claims to have found the “real” book that

is Prospero’s magic book. She reproduces seven facsimile of the manuscripts in her

essay. Mowat undertakes in fact sophisticated philological operation, though

unrecognized as such. Beginning with a set of what she refers to as “assumptions”

that she does not critically examine, Mowat initially uses grimgroires, as they are

known, essentially magic manuscripts rather than magic books, as a supplement to

The Tempest, making book into a magic book—a grimgroire—and thereby rendering

“invisible to every eyeball else”

Prospera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our

Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.

Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” lines

question of his book or books meaningless: the book is a magic book contained

among the books of Prospero’s library. The crux disappears without ever having

being identified as a crux; once the traces of a yet to be read crux have disappeared

and The Tempest restored after having been exorcised, the grimgoire may disappear

(The Tempest is not a grimgroire, she declares, near the end of her essay) and the

play may be folded back, along with Greenway’s film, into its dominant post-colonial

reading. ? Mowat undertakes, without saying so and possibly without knowing so, a

reordering operation: attached the grimgroire to the play, to repair a gap, a leak in

the text, then detach it, leaving the text more securely self-sufficient, never even in

need of repair, deferring further work on manuscript culture and Shakespeare’s

print culture, but it keeping the specter of manuscript culture to remain in recalling

distance (All one has to do is flip back to any of the full page black and white

facsimiles of seven pages from seven different grimgroires.) The point is not to read

Shakespeare, as philologists prepare with a book in mind by repairing but not to

read it, to reread it the same way not by clearing it up but by cleaning it up, leaving a

residue of “the real” in the form of the facsimiles. What we may see here in Mowat’s

operation is not the typical bad faith of philology, presenting a text as open while in

fact closing it, but an avoidance of the decision to read and the decision to stop

Prospera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in

Gladiator.

Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdiand hearing

ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots,

“Where should this music be?

reading, both of which are highly dangerous moments because they are, on the one

hand, violent moments, cutting open and cutting off the text to begin and stop

reading, and because, on the other hand, opening and closing are moments when the

text’s read –ability may be missed, overlooked as so much static to be removed,

much the way digital sound recording eliminates his hisses and related noise from

LP records, even concealed by a sleight of hand, a feat of prestidigit-aliza-tion.

Mowat’s essay evinces a kind of stalling effect one finds frequently in materialist

historicist criticism of the book, a way of keeping the canonical text on hold and in

(its) place, as if storing it for retrieval meant being able to locate it but never to read

it. Mowat claims to have found the “real” book that is Prospero’s, a magic book. She

reproduces seven facsimile of the manuscripts in her essay. Mowat undertakes in

fact sophisticated philological operation, though unrecognized as such. Beginning

with a set of what she refers to as “assumptions” that she does not critically

examine, Mowat initially uses grimgroires, as they are known, essentially magic

manuscripts rather than magic books, as a supplement to The Tempest, making book

into a magic book—a grimgroire—and thereby rendering question of his book or

books meaningless: the book is a magic book contained among the books of

Prospero’s library. The crux disappears without ever having being identified as a

Follow it or rather it has dawn me L, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.

Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Forest is walking—

close ups of both Ariel and Ferdinand

The ballad does remember my drowned father.

crux; once the traces of a yet to be read crux have disappeared and The Tempest

restored after having been exorcised, the grimgoire may disappear (The Tempest is

not a grimgroire, she declares, near the end of her essay) and the play may be folded

back, along with Greenway’s film, into its dominant post-colonial reading. Mowat

undertakes, without saying so and possibly without knowing so, a reordering

operation: attached the grimgroire to the play, to repair a gap, a leak in the text, then

detach it, leaving the text more securely self-sufficient, never even in need of repair,

deferring further work on manuscript culture and Shakespeare’s print culture, but it

keeping the specter of manuscript culture to remain in recalling distance (All one

has to do is flip back to any of the full page black and white facsimiles of seven pages

from seven different grimgroires.) The point is not to read Shakespeare, as

philologists prepare with a book in mind by repairing but not to read it, to reread it

the same way not by clearing it up but by cleaning it up, leaving a residue of “the

real” in the form of the facsimiles. What we may see here in Mowat’s operation is

not the typical bad faith of philology, presenting a text as open while in fact closing

it, but an avoidance of the decision to read and the decision to stop reading, both of

which are highly dangerous moments because they are, on the one hand, violent

moments, cutting open and cutting off the text to begin and stop reading, and

The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also

combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Airiel) from

the “real” human characters.

Myself am Naples, ever since my father.

Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in shots of Ferdinand and Miranda.

because, on the other hand, opening and closing are moments when the text’s read –

ability may be missed, overlooked as so much static to be removed, much the way

digital sound recording eliminates his hisses and related noise from LP records,

even concealed by a sleight of hand, a feat of prestidigit-aliza-tion. Mowat’s essay

evinces a kind of stalling effect one finds frequently in materialist historicist

criticism of the book, a way of keeping the canonical text on hold and in (its) place,

as if storing it for retrieval meant being able to locate it but never to read it. ? What

Mowat misses in divides the magic book form spirits is that the book is itself

spectral, it is off stage, never seen, an invisible proper. She insists on regarding as a

prop on stage like the cloak and staff. But here is no stage direction for it. Her

reading is not in the least bit philological. She argues by authority---people have

thought this way. Well, people thought Coredlia shouldn't die either. Or Hamlet.. Or

Romeo and Juliet. It’s anti-philoloigcal historicism. “The film’s final moments

involve a curious recuperation of Caliban, when the

character who once defecated and vomited on Prospero’s books suddenly saves

one—Shakespeare’s First Folio—after his master makes good on a pledge to “drown

[his] books.” The strangeness of Caliban’s final gesture has elicited quizzical

comments

“I charge thee that thou attend me.”

(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—does’t thou mark?”—

Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? That she has to keep replacing it,

redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if

Miranda is listening or not?

from many critics, who ask whether the film’s “meaningless Caliban” deserves

such a prominent role in the salvation of the First Folio: “Why Caliban?” asks

Coursen.62 These final moments, after Prospero abjures the power of his books,

Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter

Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books

by James Tweedie Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000, 104-26

Like Greenaway, Mowat imagines referents for the unreferenced book and books in

The Tempest. And like other kinds of hallucinogenic fauxrensic criticism we have

examined, Mowat’s performance is symptomatic rather than merely delusional.

Kind of

Lacanian, but the transfer for me is a missing inside and between

that proliferates actings out rather than an objet petit a which

functions as a blind spot and quilting point. The failure of medial transfer and

linguistic translation and psychological transference all part of a dialectic of the

closed and open book to books, the contact zone being a space of proliferation, on

the one hand, but also of retrospective collection, labor (logs) and mourning). The

unreadability of the book is linked to the impossibility of mourning.

Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre ealy modern, I guess. Rags, not wood pulp as

source of paper.

Cut to fire in Propsera’s cave—“so lie there my art”

Propsera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.

My reading is hyperphilological in that the adaptations are a form of criticism

generated by The Tempest, by its first place and its missing—wise and wife. It’s a

philogy the science of which knows that the missing cannot be restored, only

replayed, acted out in a blocked mourning that can never be stopped.

The book to books calls forth their mourning even as they are collected and

remembered in a posthumous memorial volume.

Missing mother.

Book(fri)Ends

from edition to reader’s annotations means re-stored Shakespeare, a relation of

concealment in revealment, a truth that is revealed in the work of art, beauty,

indirectly, and slowly.

Grenaway’s film is regarded as a typicalpostco film, except for Caibran getting the

books. Missing the twofold moment of Caliban—first rescue of Folio, then

Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or

in focus with racking focus.

Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks

in bluish hue.

Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the

books?) here is also a chest in her boat.

destruction—this alternating logic of the book runs throughout the film., bound,

and collected. Claiban’s destruction is out of sequence since The Tempest has just

been written and written down, but not bound with Folilio copy.

Pericles is missing form it.

recent scholarship about medieval and early modern ritual

magic is rapidly changing the state of knowledge about manuscript magic

books.

At the same time, however,Prospero’s book is not a grimoire—or at least so it seems

today. While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the

contents

of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as

departing in significant ways from extant grimoires.

Boatswain is black

Music sounds a like Nymanish

Foul water shalt thy drink

The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).

It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.

Prospero’s book, then, seems to be simultaneously a grimoire and a stage-prop

(or romance-prop) grimoire, just as Prospero himself is simultaneously (or perhaps

alternately) a serious master of spirits and a stage-or-romance wizard who also

reminds us (as I’ve argued elsewhere) of a Renaissance magus and a Jacobean street

magician.80 But just as The Tempest is more than a play about a magician, so

Prospero’s book, within the play’s larger context of epic sea journeys and

contemporary

Mediterranean/Atlantic voyages, has an additional resonance that at first

seems quite other than that carried by the grimoires. That resonance attaches to it

in terms of the larger power of the book per se.

The book of magic that I suggest Shakespeare provides for Prospero carries with

it, as book per se, a long and difficult colonial and postcolonial history, especially

since it is represented as the source of Prospero’s control over the spirits who

torment

Caliban and who make possible Prospero’s rule over his island kingdom. As a

grimoire—and even more so as a stage-prop grimoire—its historical moment

seems much further in the past and its baggage strangely lighter.But it opens up a

There are two hsots of books "drowning." There is also shot of the

ship burning in the distance.

The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot of

it fully restored in a harbor.

The film is good for us in that it highlights the play’s not so

host of questions about Prospero and his magic, many of which must remain

unanswered

until we know more about manuscript conjuring books. As Nicholas

Watson points out, we cannot, for example, fully grasp who Prospero is as a

magician or why his book appears to differ from extant grimoires until our

knowledge of

the field is greater.96We know enough, however, to see that awareness of the

existence

of grimoires forces us to look again at all the early modern wizard and sorcerer

plays and their magic books, beginning with the commedia dell’arte and ending with,

or soon after, The Tempest itself. And even a glimpse into the world of grimoire

masters, of Oberion and Storax, of the Lemegeton and the Clavicle of Solomon brings

us the salutary reminder that there is much yet to learn and understand not only

about The Tempest but also about the world that is supposedly our own scholarly

bailiwick.

While in other kinds of magic manuscripts—books of

image magic, for example—scribes were rather meticulous in their transcriptions

and were proud to cite their sources, with the conjuring books scribes freely altered,

obvious opposition between burning and drowning.

The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I am

realizing. Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down and

Prospero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, who

contradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarly

combined, added, and deleted material. As Klaassen writes, these books “have a

fluid, largely anonymous content, the lineage of which would be very difficult to

trace.”28

Despite this fluidity, however, the grimgroires share many recognizable

characteristics.

All of those that I have examined are, first of all, uniformly religious in tone, with

the “master,” as he is called, summoning spirits only after supplicating God, enlisting

God’s aid, and using God’s holy names as the major source of his power to conjure.

This new interest in conjuring books raises the next question about Prospero’s

book—namely, if we grant the likelihood that Prospero has some version of a

manuscript magic book, what are we to imagine that the book contains? We can

move toward a tentative answer by looking first at the contents of actual magic

books, though we will see later that Prospero’s putative book departs significantly

from them.

This image of Prospero as a Renaissance magus (or, as he is

sometimes problematically called, a “white magician”14), coupled with the tendency

to think in terms of printed books, have combined to encourage even those curious

about Prospero’s magic to ignore (or fail to look for) the only books of any use to a

reassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.

Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to the

survivors. Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--I

had forgotten that.

Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's no

conjuror—namely, manuscript books of magic.

I begin with an assumption about The Tempest that opens onto a set of

related questions. The assumption is that among the highly valued books that

Prospero brought with him into exile is one book essential to his magic, the one

that he goes offstage to consult before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3,

the same one that near the end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his

magic [actually, he promises to drown his books, not his book]. Though Peter

Greenaway, in his film Prospero’s Books, did not include

such a book among the twenty-four he decided were necessary for Prospero’s

survival,

the text indicates that Prospero not only has a magic robe and a magic staff

(both of which are explicitly called for), but, like Friar Bacon and Doctor

Faustus and other stage magicians before him, he also has a magic book. Further,

the play presents Prospero’s always-offstage book as crucial to his rule over the

island, the magical instrument that enables him to control the spirits who come

from their confines when Prospero calls, who torment Caliban and keep him

obedient, and who assume as needed the shapes of Greek mythological figures or

vicious hunting dogs.

flashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of her

library WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)

on the boat in which they are set adrift.

Drowning by Numbers

Rather crude distinction between manuscripts and printed books as media.

l Media, Mourning, and the Incomplete Works of Material Culture

6 Greenblatt “Martial Law in the Land of COcaigne” Strachey tells the story of a state of emergency and a crisis of authority” 149Greenblatt’s reading is also characterological and psychologizing (novelizing)—about inwardness and self-fsahioning, but especially about Prospero’s inwardness:

The entire action of the play rests on the premise that value lies in controlled uneasiness, and hence that a direct reappropriation of the usurped dukedom and a direct punishment of the usurpers has les moral and political value than an elaborate inward restaging of loss, misery, and anxiety. Prospero directs this restaging not only against others but also—even principally—against himself.” 144Goes to subversion and containment: “The ideological effects of The Tempest are ambiguous” 155. The play supports Prospero’s authority and raises troubling questions about it.

Grenblatt ends his chapter by quoting at length Stanley Livingston’e story about how he offered his copy of Shakespeare to saved his notebook from being burned by African natives.

After Stanley’s death, the notebooks . . . were for many years presumed lost. But they were rediscovered. . Their publication revals something odd: while the the notebook entry for his stay at the Mowa records tht the natives were angry at his writing . . Stanley makes no mention of the burning of Shakespeare. Perhaps, to heighten the general interest with which he was concerned, he made up the story. 162-163

Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s

Books. Cataloguing and displaying twenty-four books (twenty-five if we include The

Tempest; in any case, the total falls far short of the thirty five plays published in the

the First Folio) of Prospero’s library in separate sequences, the film has an epilogue

but no closing sequence beyond that. In the final shot, ‘The End’ appears at the

bottom of the screen and remains there with additional logo information as the shot

For Stanley, Shakespeare’s theater had become a book, and the book in turn had become a genial companion . . . . The anxiety in his account . . is relieved only when , as Caliban had hoped, the book is destroyed. But the destruction of he book only saves another, more practical, more deadly. And when he returned to London or New York, Stanley could always buy another copy (Chandon edition) of his genial companion.

7 See Barbara Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Book’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001): 1-33.

The Tempest refers, Mowat notes, both to a singular book (‘I'll to my book’; ‘I'll

drown my book’) and to plural books (‘books I priz'd above my dukedom’; ‘burn but

his books’). Mowat insists that Prospero’s book is present even though there is no

stage direction for it in the text: ‘Prospero's always-offstage book’ is the ‘one book

essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult before the series of

spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the end of the play he

promises to drown as he abjures his magic.’ (p. 1) Prospero’s strangely singular

and clearly spectral singular-plural book/s ‘appear’ only as phantom referents in the

printed script of the play. It makes no sense at all to make a prop for the actor

playing Prospero to consult off-stage. What are we to make of a phantom prop that

is referenced both in the singular and the plural without ever being shown on stage?

What is the relation between the book/s and the spirits Prospero commands?

Greenaway and Taymor address these questions in very different ways by

fades to black. The opening title sequence consists of one of Greenaway’s

characteristic tracking shots, the camera moving at a steady pace as it tracks right in

one long take. The sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a huge book being turned by

a naked man in the opening title sequence is just one of many bizarre and

heterogeneous scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial book sequences that

interrupt the dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and set off with the use of a

digital paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (extra-textual and sometimes

theatrically staged) book drowning in the film's final tour de force montage which

ends with the two final book sequences. Prospero’s last books prove to be

exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to be completed First Folio and The Tempest. All of

the plays have been printed in the Folio, the narrator tell us, except for The Tempest,

which is written in a bound book the same size as the Folio. The first page we saw

Prospero writing on in the film’s prologue returns first as a blank space in what is a

facsimile of the Folio and then as a film prop, a bound, completed manuscript of The

Tempest we saw Prospero begin to write in the prologue.

The permanently blank pages of the Folio become an empty yet potentially

redemptive allegorical space. ‘There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one

more,’ the narrator says; ‘nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front

of the book, just after the preface’ as the camera shows the First Folio page with the

poem entitled “To the Reader.” (Figures X.1-X.4.)

materializing what is missing.

Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3 Figure 4

As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator

offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that ‘We still have these two books, safely

fished from the sea.’

Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film exist

only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both expand

and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: on the one hand, the collected

works are completed; on the other, their completion means splitting the manuscript

of The Tempest from the printed thirty four plays (and implicitly superimposing

Prospero on Shakespeare as author of The Tempest). In any case, the drowning of

Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of Greenaway’s rewriting of the

play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and delivering the epilogue, his close-up

talking-head shot increasingly shrinking into a smaller frame until it occupies only

its centre and is surrounded by black. In an extratextual epilogue, Prospero’s image

then becomes a photograph of Gielgud on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back

at a smooth pace in what Greenaway calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see

Ariel (played by three different actors) running towards the camera as a text begins

to be superimposed over the applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the

film ends as Ariel is shot in slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the

camera.18

In a moment of what Latour and Wiebel term ‘iconoclash’, or uncertainty about

whether this liberation from the page is creative or destructive, the manuscripts of

The Tempest and First Folio are saved only insofar as the collected works are split

into different print media (handwriting and print).19 This differs markedly from the

more symmetrical ending in the screenplay.20 In Greenaway’s unscripted epilogue,

the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single, unbound page looking like

an abstract multi-media painting (fig X.3). The film sequences with ‘Prospero /

Shakespeare’s’ (164) books had already begun to make them partially unreadable.

The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that the date cannot be read on

the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory

poem in the first Folio omits ‘To the memory of my beloved’ at the top of the page,

showing just ‘The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E: A N D what he hath

left us.’ The Tempest is similarly defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme

close up that the film frame cuts off the top and bottom parts of the page (fig X.3).

Writing becomes automatic. A close up of the word ‘boatswain’ we saw Prospero

write in the prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice

pronouncing it (and ‘master’) off screen. But this time an question mark is added

after ‘boatswain’ not by the hand of a visible writer which we by now know well, but

18 On this point, see Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Longman-

Pearson, 2005), especially pp. 229-230.

rather through the apparently agent-less processes of animation (figs X.1-2).

Figure 5 Figure 6

Figure 7 Figure 8

Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper

right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear as

others appear in a recursive cycle (fig X.3). ‘The End’, the date of Prospero’s Books,

and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of the final page but

then only on the otherwise black screen (fig X.4). Genette’s account of the

publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the author’s name on the book cover

and title page) is transformed by Greenaway into an ‘exit’ that involves reading

one’s way out of his film.21

Unauthoring The Tempest

From issue of authorship as raised particularly in Greenaway but also in paratextless drowning books of Taymor, move to authorship and autobiography debate over the The Tempest. Bacon wrote it. Oxford did not. Shakespeare’s

Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.

Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the

And question of burial at sea versus cremation and inhumation.

Ranciere, Names of History Philip II writing desk—death of the king

Prospero never writes in the lay, nor does he ever read.

Derrida Post Card—Love of Lcan why only what he would have said? Why not

would he wold have written? Why does Derrida reverse Lacan, who Derrida says

went from speech to writng without acknowledging Derrida, by going from writing

to speech? What s=is the differencebetweenthe future anterior of what will or

would have been said after Lacan’s death in “For the Love of Lacan” and the Pascal

19 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science,

Religion and Art (2002). Latour and Wiebel write: ‘Iconoclasm is when we know

what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations are for what

autobiography.

Scene in The Amateur with Christopher Plummer, a secret agent, giving a lecture about Bacon being the author of Shakespeare using Prospero’s epilogue, projected on a screen, as his evidence, before a small crowed and the hero, also interested n the Shakespeare authorship debate, escapes from the lecture hall from a would-be assassin. Prospero’s Books as a film adaptation outside the play—leaving the play text blank, a future state of being a book to come, a book that never arrives.The text is written and erased.Water both a medium of writing and of erasure of writing.

Going on Record: PanoptichronPanchronicon—Phoebe demonstrates that one can record one’s voice by citing passage about Bacon being the true author of Shakespeare’s works and is told the cylinder to the phonograph will “talk back.”

The facsimile and prop are like hidden text, the invisible that is incarnated, in the

physical material of the book, but still yet to be read, terra incognita that can

never be recognized except as dirt or ureadable ink. Yet textual critics are no

less empirical than are editors. If there is no lost manuscript to recover, as many

textual critics maintain, just a desire for it, the lost manuscript, if recovered would

be an always already edited manuscript. As McLeod puts it, it would have layers.

appears as a clear project of destruction of art; iconoclash, on the other hand, is

when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there

is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’

20 In the screenplay, the film’s ending loops back to the beginning: ‘A series of ever

decreasing splashes drip and plop into the black water . . . thus the beginning of the

film is reprised. A final splash plops . . . all water-movement ceases and the screen is

a black velvet void.’ (Prospero's Books: A Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest,

The origin is a palimpsest and the untextual book as material thing becomes a

palimpsest. Editors think they linearize the process like CSI. Textual critics think

there is only an infinite regress. One could go back to the mystic writing pad and

celluloid. The unconscious would take one back to arche-writing. Question

concerning technology in textual criticism, editing, and the history of the book.22

To Derrida, biblion and subjectile and facsimile in the text itself—a kind of back

up visible of the back up, but as a ghost matter, at one remove or more, a kind of

immediacy. A kind of anrchivology n the archival effect not recognized as such.

Facsimile poses a problem of narration—materiality and referent—and

historicism.23

And the appeal rather than command or decision at the end takes us to WB’s Trauerspiel (see Sam Weber on Hamlet) with Prospero now a slave, a prisoner, but also returns us to the letter, difference between singular and plural. Christopher Plummer and Jon Savage action film The Amateur (dir. Charles Jarrot, 1982) in which Plummer is a CIA agent who also reads the epilogue as a cryptogram of Bacon’s signature that he wrote the play and, by extension, all of Shakespeare’s plays. John Savage plays Charles Heller, a cryptographer in the employ of the CIAThe missing author (Shakespeare, Prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force

22 The edited world is not going to disappear just because it is revealed to be

wrong. Indeed, which of our abiding wrlds is no innocent as not to be edited

already? Textual criticism is important to imp on editorial practice . . not as

deliverance form its mistakes, but because it an vivid shapes to the problematic,

mythy errors that we shall contiue to fly by.

reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing, integrationist move on the complete works.Book or books? Magic book?

The future anterior of Prospero’s epilogue, as you would me set me free.Request and a command.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,And what strength I have's mine own,Which is most faint. Now, ’tis trueI must be here confined by youOr sent to Naples. Let me not, (5)Since I have my dukedom got,And pardoned the deceiver, dwellIn this bare island by your spell;But release me from my bandsWith the help of your good hands:(10)Gentle breath of yours my sailsMust fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please. Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant,And my ending is despair,(15)Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so, that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.The epilogue installs a future anterior of who will have written “Shakespeare’s” plays. The referent of “me” is no longer Shakespeare. See Looney on The Tempest as NOT autobiographical. And all of the Stratfordians who read it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. The pay-off of imagining a reading yet to come is double: you get to sign for the writer while reading his signature and you get to be mute while doing it. You are merely a kind of medium without a medium. Desire for muteness, See Barbara Johnson. All you have to do is breathe: “Gentle breath” Also compare applause being asked for by Prospero to Agamben’s Power and the Glory and lauding / applauding the sovereign. His last chapter on media.

Also seems like the doubling of authorship allows for the possibility of forgery, that someone else wrote it and forged a signature. There is no paper work in the play, no contract, nothing to sign. Just recognition. So the play becomes a cover, a cover

story, an alibi, just sleep –think but this and all is mended, that you have slept

Homeland episode 2, Claire Danes as comparative philogist using split screen and them boxes around hands in each to show pattern. Crtptologist does not see it, however.But her boss does. Her idea ocmes form watching a jaz group play and watching he ifingering on nstruments.

A reading of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, drowning the books is like throwing

them into acid; Caliban rescues the Folio does not have the open book, a re-opened

book. The end after the interruption of the masque and before the end, which is

really a long epilogue before the epilogue. Anti-climatic last Act.

(Derrida on the signature in Van Gogh—link up to signature in Tempest in Peter

Greenaway Prospero’s Books and the film with Christopher Plummer about Anagram

of Prospero in the epilogue in The Amateur (also has more Shakespeare near the

beginning; compare to Three Days of the Condor—“reader”).

Heading for Taymor film

Prospera’s Books

Greenaway puts in what's not there,

but then leaves the Folio missing The Tempest, which is then contained

in a separate volume as a manuscript. So there is interesting

oscillation between library and book as storage unit / collection in

which the book takes spectral form (the book or books never appear/s

on stage) as it supplements (and doesn't). I'm using a book by

Georges Didi-Huberman entitled La resemblance par contact to talk about

the book / books as a contact zone that makes mimesis possible as chain of iterable

and endless substitutions (a writing of writing, a doubling, mirroring in repetition);

failure to transfer the text from one medium to another (in Benjamin's

the failure to translate, language itself being a medium) because it

would appear, there is no medium specificity to the book).

Precisely because of the twofold moment of writing and affixing in a collection

(archiving)

Arche-writing versus the archive. Doesn’t relate them.

So in P’s Books, its is the spectralization of the book, its going missing , its storing

being singular and plural that allows for and disables a totalized, closed recollection,

and final interiorization. Instead, the end is a gesture, hands clapping, as a liberation.

Mowat says what is to be expected—but that makes the missing text all the more

remarkable.

Also, the closing of the book allows for closure, again spectral—an epilogue, which

opens itself to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Who wrote the books? Tiles and

authors are missing. No paratext, no index. So the epilogue can be read as

Shakespeare’s farewell, autobiographically, or coding as his confession that Bacon

wrote the play.

P Books the "s" goes missing in the play; G goes with the plural.

Because it marks "We split we split moment in the play as storage until

(library as shipwreck ), the Shakespeare corpus has something missing

it, a tear in the mss, something missing incomplete, that has to be

veiled, covered off, even by shocking amounts of nudity. Play seems to

lay the body bare, even Prospero's. But it multiplies / ages Ariels

as shelf-helpers.

closed and open books, scenes of unreading, reading by heart, of textual incarnation,

attachments, casings, and textuality versus signature:

The missing author (Shakespeare, prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the

stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or

Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force

reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing,

integrationist move on the complete works.

Book or books? Magic book?

Set up con-spirational—spirit in conspiracy theory—as in the comic book version as

well as Rembrandt J’accuse

Framing, like framing in Prospero’s Books (also a book of the film).

Becomes a question of missing author who frames and gets framed.

Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books

Singular versus plural, books get voice-overs. We don’t get them in Prospero’s Books

book. In the film, The Tempest is blank, Folio edition is the 24th book, not destroyed

but found by Caliban. Greenaway has a notion of seriality involving closing and

opening the book.

The boatswain scene (1.1.) is really interesting--all about drowning--and of course,

no one drowns and the ship has been rebuilt, according to the boatswain at the end

of the play. I also found a bunch of stuff I had forgot about we could use to make the

transition form The Tempest to Anonymess regarding Prospero as Shakespeare (in

a spy film film called The Amateur--only Prospero is Bacon).

Drowning in relation to friends and enemies—face book / Folio—the reader as

friend?

I now turn to Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films in order to examine specific

ways in which the endings and end title sequences adapt the book in ways that

both unify the film and yet also complicate our sense of the ending of film, of how

the complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and the closing

paratext begins, of when one can exit the cinema or turn off the DVD or blu-ray.

Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the end credits begin? Or is

one compelled for fearing of missing something to stay seated and keep

watching even after “The End,” potentially reentering the film from the moments

in the textual / paratextual endings after “The End” that loop back the closing

paratext to the earlier text of the film? I address these questions and others in a

necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the endings and

end title sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films paradoxically save

the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or distintegrating the

book (“auteur,” you will recall, means “author” in French and has a much higher

cultural status than does the everyday “ecrivain,” or writer).

Prospero’s books do not exist in The Tempest. There are references to his

staff and to his cloak as prop, but not to what is sometimes his “book” or to his

“books.” We never see Prospero drown his books.24

Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s

Books. Cataloguing and displaying all thirty-five books of Prospero’s library in

separate sequences, the film has an epilogue but not an end title sequence. In

the final shot, “The End” appears at the bottom of the screen and remains there

with additional logo information as the shot fades to black. The opening title

sequence consists of one of Greenaway’s characteristic tracking shots, the

camera moving at the same pace as in it moves right in lone long take. The

sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a huge book being turned by a naked man

in the opening title sequence is just one of many bizarre and heterogeneous

scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial book sequences that interrupt the

dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and set off with the use of a digital

paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (never theatrically staged) book drowning in

the film's final tour de force montage which ends with the two final and book

sequences. Prospero’s last books prove to be exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to

be completed First Folio and The Tempest. All of the plays have been printed in

the Folio, the narrator tell us, except for The Tempest, which is written in a bound

book of the same size as the Folio. The first page we saw Prospero writing on in

the film’s prologue returns first as a blank space in what is a facsimile of the Folio

and then as a film prop, a bound, completed manuscript of The Tempest we saw

Prospero begin to write in the prologue.

The permanently blank pages of Folio becomes an empty yet potentially redemptive

allegorical space. “There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one more,” the

narrator says; “nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front of the

book, just after the preface” as the camera shows the First Folio page with the poem

entitled “To the Reader.” (See figures 1-4)

Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3 Figure 4

As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator

offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that “We still have these two books,

safely fished from the sea.”

Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film

exist only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both

expand and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: On the one hand, the

collected works are completed; on the author, their completion means splitting

the manuscript of The Tempest from the printed thirty four works (and implicitly

superimposing Prospero on Shakespeare as authors of The Tempest). In any

case, the drowning of Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of

Greenaway’s rewriting of the play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and

delivering the epilogue, his close up talking head shot increasingly shrinking into

a smaller frame until it occupies only its center and is surrounded by black. In an

extratexutal epilogue, Prospero’s image then becomes a photograph of Gielgud

on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back at a smooth pace in what

Greenaway calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see Ariel (played by three

different actors) running towards the camera as a text begins to be superimposed

over the applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the film ends as Ariel

is shot in slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the camera.

In a moment of “iconoclash,” or uncertainty about whether this liberation from

the page is creative or destructive, the manuscript of The Tempest and of the

First Folio are is saved only insofar as the collected works are split into different

print media (handwriting and print). 25 It differs markedly form the more

symmetrical ending in the screenplay.26 In Greenaway’s extratexutal epilogue,

the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single page an unbound page

looks like an abstract multi-media painting (See figure 7). The sequences with

“Prospero / Shakespeare’s” (164) books had already begun to make them

partially unreadable. The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that

the date cannot be read on the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page

with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem in the first Folio omits “To the memory of my

beloved” at the top of the page, showing just “The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H

A K E S P E A R E : A N D what he hath left us.” The Tempest is similarly

defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme close up that the film frame cuts

off he top and bottom parts of the page. (See figure 7). Writing becomes

automatic. A close up of the word “boatswain” we saw Prospero write in the

prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice

pronouncing it (and “master”) off screen. But this time an exclamation mark is

added after “boatswain” by animation. (See figures 5-6).

Figure 5 Figure 6

Figure 7 Figure 8

Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper

right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear

as others appear in a recursive cycle. (See figure 7.) “The End,” the date of

Prospero’s Books, and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of

the final page but then only on the otherwise black screen. (See figure 8.)

Genette’s account of the publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the

author’s name on the book cover and title page) is transformed by Greenaway in.

Ci-Phi The Reading to Come: Yes, We Can’(t)

Internal reading a matter of awaiting—messianic reading. Mowat too—we have to

wait for the more knowledge to come, but writing, Godot like,is what it’s all about.

''Tis for good and useful writings to nail and rivet it to them, and

its reputation will go _according to the fortune of our state. For

which reason, I am not afraid to insert herein several private

articles, which will spend their use amongst the men now living_, AND

THAT CONCERN THE PARTICULAR KNOWLEDGE OF SOME WHO WILL SEE

FURTHER

INTO THEM THAN THE COMMON READER.' But that the inner reading of these

private articles--that reading which lay farther in--to which he

invites the attention of those whom it concerns--was not expected to

spend its use among the men then living, that which follows might seem

to imply. It was that wrapping of them, it was that gross

superscription which 'the fortune of our state was likely to make

obsolete ere long,' this author thought, as we shall see if we look

into his prophecies a little. 'I will not, after all, as I often hear

dead men spoken of, that men should say of _me_: "He _judged_, and

LIVED SO and SO. Could he have spoken when he was dying, he would have

said _so_ or _so_. I knew him better than any."

Mackaye, Harold Steele. The Panchronicon. New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1904.

Image of “ci-phi” (not cyber fiction but cipher fiction) as image of the not yet read,

the temporality of reading that leaves it open, the archive open, never closed,

finished. Strong historicism , focused on the past, necessarily crosses over into

future, fictional speculation, however. Or gesture of deferral to the future (more

knowledge of a positivist sort) is a way of not having to read, of suspending reading

(we can't know anything yet, but someday soon, we will! But that day never arrives,

of course). So a very perverse structure of empiricist research—you want not to

know enough, just a little will do, preferably with images.

The Reader Conceal-Revealed: The Not Yet Read lost manuscripts of Shakespeare

Look at examples of The Not Yet Read lost manuscript fantasy, including Black

Dossier but focus on the Bacon as Shakespeare controversy. Sir Francis Bacon’s

Cipher Story and Panchronicon as example of uncanny relation of truth and fiction.

Loop in which the revelation of the hidden leads to a pointing to other places of

hiddenness, just waiting to be revealed. Science oriented to fiction, and fiction

oriented to science.

Images of cipher machines and portraits of authors. Cipher story cover with page

from the Folio and the Droeshout portrait superimposed on it without the face (the

folio text constitutes the lines of his face. Shakespeare Code cover. Like Lost

Leonardo—Da Vinci Code is the original for The Shakespeare Code. On a vole la

Jaconda, with Romeo as thief. Cobbe Portrait—use of scientific machines to

establish the truth.

Doctor Who Season3?

Episode going back to Shakespeare’s London

To discover why Love’s Labours Regained Or Love Regained. She shouts “author

author” birthof the author is a retrofit. Do they say that? Now they do. not written—

it’s about race reations in the pre