The sur-vivance of The Tempest and the comparative philological equivalence

between print edition and film adaptation we develop under its rubric can be more

fully appreciated as an archival problem in relation to the paratexts of books but to

the paratexts of modern editions of the play and cinematic paratexts of its

adaptations. We take the epilogue to be part of a crucial paratextual zone of that

resists and enables biopolitical archival management as a state of emergent

ignorance. Prospero asks to be sent off, to disembark with the gentle air of the

audience to fill his sails, as if he were a boat, set free, as if her were a spirit like Ariel,

whom he set free only a few lines earlier. The Tempest is widely recognized for its

highly elliptical narrative structure, and we want to add that it also invites or

appears to allow the reader silently to fill these ellipses, or in the idiom of the play,

to be “inclined to sleep” and “cease more questions” (1.2. 185; 184). We turn first to

the last page of the Folio and the Arden Three edition of the Folio, then to Taymor

and Greenaway’s title sequences, prologues, epilogues, and endings the better to

understand how in this zone drowning a book can drown but not die; the book

doesn’t get buried or cremated, and is without a beginning or an ending.

1

As we observed near the beginning of this essay, the Epilogue has raised

questions for editors and directors by dividing Prospero’s name from his character

in the play. While whoever speaks under the name “Prospero” exercises a weak

sovereignty over the play in some respects, readings default to a proper name

whose gets retro-projected in more or less spectral over back over the play that

name stands apart from and follows. Readers tend to assume that Prospero must

have drowned his book because he says in the Epilogue “all my charms ‘oerthrown”

and “ Now I lack spirits to enchant.” The assumption is almost what seems to go

without saying. Nevertheless, to infer from the Epilogue that Prospero has

destroyed his books is to fill in an ellipsis without giving the filled in event a specific

2

place. The Epilogue serves as a kind of guarantee that the text as a place holder for

the event it does not narrate or represent, namely the destruction of the staff and

book.

We think this is a rather strange interpretive operation, all the stranger because it

is so easy to perform that one may not notice having performed it, so strange that it

warrants further reflection. What are the limits of the reader’s backward projection

of Prospero into the play, if any? Why do so many productions and adaptations of

the play show Prospero or Miranda present for the shipwreck in the first scene even

though the stage direction for their entrance occurs at the beginning of the second

scene of Act One? Why, in short, do readers, editors, and directors all use a paratext

in which Prospero is no longer himself to extend his sovereignty across the play

sometimes even when he is not on stage, effectively beginning the play begin before

it begins? The epilogue functions in a Prospero-centric manner. Readers tend not

to wonder if other books have been left behind, if Caliban is left on the island as a

kind of librarian, Prospero becoming to Caliban as Gonzalo was to him when

Prospero and Miranda were set adrift.

Yet the textual place form that “Prospero” speaks is itself vulnerable. In the

Arden edition, the Vaughan Masons say that it can be cut: “The epilogue is not

required for a coherent reading or production because the play’s action is complete..

. .” We are not so sure. The last line of the play presents an editor and a director

with a problem of deciding how to interpret last line of the play, the epilogue:

“Please you, draw near”: Is this line addressed to the characters on stage who “Exit

3

omnes” after it is delivered? Or is it the first line of the epilogue, “you” referring to

the audience? The Vaughan-Masons interpolate two bracketed stage directions

“[aside to Ariel]” and “to the others]” just before “Please you, draw near” and the

Epilogue begins on the facing page (307). In a note at the bottom of the page (307),

the credit the Signet for these stage directions.1 The problem is that “Please you

draw near” does not make sense either way. “Draw near” is not synonymous with

the line “Come follow” that ends the first Act since it implies that the speaker is

stationary. But does Properso leave? When Richard II tells Mowbray and

Bolingbroke to “draw near,” Richard II remains in the same place. To make the

meaning of “you” as the characters who remain on stage in the play work, the V-M’s

have to imagine an off-stage cell to which the actors are going. They gloss the

sentence as follows: “Please . . . near. This line is usually delivered to Prospero

draws the court party into his cell, offstage. If Prospero remains on stage for the

Epilogue, the line can be delivered to the audience as he moves forward.” p. 307. If

Prospero moves forward, he, not “you” is moving. A related problem arises from the

stage direction “Exuent omnes.” Does Prospero exit and then return? Or does he

stay on stage and not exit until after the epilogue, which is followed by the very

The Arden edition is a particularly usefulexample of what for us is re-editing

rather than un-editing the already edited Folio not only because it includes a

discussion of the Greenaway and Taymor films but because it reproduces a facsimile

of the last page of The Tempest, to which they append a note as follows: Note 21

The final page of The Tempest in Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies

(1623), with the “EPILOGVE” and “Names of the Actors” and, bleeding through from

4

the verso part of the sheet, part of the title and text of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

p. 128. Certain semantic features disappear in the note. They omit “The Scene, an

unvn-inhabited island” as well as the “The” at the bottom right that is meant to help

the reader find his place at the top of the next page, the title “The” Two Gentleman of

Verona. The end of the last page text is the beginning of the next, and the definite

article the first word of a title.

The Vaughan-Masons perform other operations on the Folio tat, while far from

controversial, are nevertheless strange enough to deserve critical attention. They

silently move the “names of the actors” up to the second page of the edited text

(162), just after the title page (161). The first variant is listed as “0] “The Scene, an

vn-inhabited island” at the bottom of the page. They have zeroed it out. Extending

the ambiguity about the speaker of the epilogue, they introduce as a probability that

the final paratext after the epilogue. In their introduction, the Mason-Vaughans say,

without offering any justification, that “the Folio’s ‘Names of the Actors’ describes

Caliban as a ‘sauage and deformed slaue,’ words that may not be Shakespeare’s.”

(32). In their notes they write: “0.1 NAMES OF THE ACTORS This list, originally

appended to the text in F and recorded here verbatim, was probably compiled by

the scrivener Ralph Crane; the descriptive terms may reflect his knowledge of

contemporary stage practice and perhaps, too, his personal assessment of the

characters performed at the time. See Introduction, p. 127” (p. 163). One mystery

remains unsolved by the Vaughan-Masons: who write the line “Scene, an Vn-

inhabitable island?”

5

Drowning the Paratext

With this understanding of the strange kinds of things that can happen when the

Folio is re-edited in mind, we are now in a better position to appreciate how the

epilogue motivates decisions in Greenaway and Taymor film adaptations concerning

when to show Prospero or Prospera, when to show Miranda, when to show the

destruction of Prospero’s books, how to show it, and how manage those decisions in

their cinematic paratexts. Although the two films are strikingly different, Taymor’s

being far more accessible than Greenawya’s, Both films begin before the beginning

and end after the ending.

THAT’S IT FOR NOVEMBER 6

6

7

8

9

Problem of attribution. In their introduction to the Arden 3, the Vaughans say, without offering any justification, that: “the Folio’s ‘Names of the Actors’ describes Caliban as a ‘sauage and deformed slaue,’ words that may not be Shakespeare’s.” (32)

Caliban as anagram, 31 “it was either too obvious or too cryptic for critical comment until 1778 (31)Prospero is also, as briefly discussed above, a magician. He wears a magic robe, uses a magic staff, and refers to his books on magic. Magic is his technology, a means of getting what he wants.” (25)Only at Prospero’s final invitation, ‘Please you draw near,’ do they join in one place. (17)A correlation though not necessary but nevertheless motivated between the end title sequence and the opening title sequence, There is opening title sequence in the The Tempest.Miranda is present, but almost overly so. The footage s undercranked so that she appears to be running at a superhuman speed, as if she were a spirit like Airlel or had magical powers like Propsera. She also gets Prospera to clam down as riel does.

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

10

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.

11

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

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.

12

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.

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—after 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 Williams

13

Let 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.

“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.

“Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?”

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

14

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.”

15

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

out.

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

16

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.”

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,

17

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)2

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

18

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

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

and recto pages].)

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

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

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

19

turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing on the books

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

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

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. 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)3

20

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 Ariel speaks from pool , same as we saw in the early.

Set Caban and his confederates free. Unite the spell.

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

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.

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.

The play is about “unwrecking” (the ship is rebuilt; no one harmed; clothes not wet.

21

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 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 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.

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.

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.

“invisible to every eyeball else”

22

Prospera 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” lines

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?

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.

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.

“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?

23

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.

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 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.

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

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

24

Prospero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, who

contradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarly

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

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.

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

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?

25

Dream/Re/Work

Kindle

The Tempest

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

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.

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.

“strange drowsiness” drowsi and drown?

sleepy language

Ariel appears only when Sebastian ad Antonio draw and prepare to murder.

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[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

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.

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.

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.

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.

No tongue all eyes be silent

27

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.

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.

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.”

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.

No special effects for rough magic; almost one for O Mistress mine; and perhaps

none for the last shot.

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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

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.

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.

When did you lose your daughter

Drown reference characters make leave out any mention of burning.

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

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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

1 The Two Gentleman has the same template, but just Names of the Actors spread

out over two columns evenly, no scene, and it has “FINIS.” Ditto for Merry Wives.

Every other play has “Finis” sometimes at the very bottom of the column of the text,

sometimes set off in part of a blank page as in Macbeth, Hamlet, with an ornament

and sometimes no ornament as in Lear, etc.. There is “the scene Vienna” and a list

for names of the actors in Measure for Measure and “FINIS” across two columns.

Roslaind speaks her epilogue in character. “Ros” There is not “EPILOGVE” separting

her epilogue form the rest of the play.

2 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.

3

These lines are sung by Feste, one of the more

30

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

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 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.

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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

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.

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-90008212

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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).4 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

4 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 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.

33

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

34

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

35

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]

Question of drowning the book is where it happens in he play, assumng it does.

Sometime before the epilogue, as Mowat indicates. This may be the motivation forh

the prologue, to guanrantee a place for the destruction in the plot. Epilogue not

enitrely superfulous, as Vaughns suggest. Neverthelss, the EPiloge is not the end f te

play, as least not in the First Folio. The end is the scene and he cast of characters.

Drowning the bok registered not in the phyiscal destruction but in a state of

suspended ignorance, of repetion in Greenaway’s case, of recitation. But this

heterogeneity is offset by the monlogical presence of Propsero. The epilogue isa

monologue. It is “spoken by Prospero.” And yet the epilogue has a superfluity, not a

lack. It kicks in because of a lack—but the cause of htat lack and the extent of

Propero before are troubled waters. It makes up for lot sof different lacks—when di

it happen? Problems with the placement in both films.

We can see how the problem plays out across the beginning of the play—title

sequence in Greenaway and end title.

36

Even more clear in more streamlined adpatian of Taymor’s The Tempest.

Water Trouble

the film has an epilogue but not an end title sequence. 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, two of whch we have already seen

before the opening title sequence begins.

Destruction itself is divisible:

Sometime I’d divide / And burn in many places—on the topmast,

The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,

Then meet and join 1.2. 198-200

Ariel burns. He divides, disperses, then meets and joins. If the book is a spirit, it can’t

be burned.

FINIS. It

“You have oft begun to tell”

His cell, his closet, libraryNeglect of biopolitics for bibliomania is what ended up on him on the island

What is to be left on an uninhabitable island? Caliban as libraraian? Or is the epilogue a kind of casting off, a stage direction that retroprojects Prospero’s power and preence back to the very start of the play? Whereas there is no stage direction for him, and in Taymor’s fim, Miranda is the one watching—there’s an affect short-

37

ciuiting because she doesn’t know how to sfeel because she doesn’t knowwhat her senses are telling her.Destruciton of the ship by fire and by water.The plays is lke an archive that can’t become a crypt. I fyouwant to read “grave” as a coded reference ot the text as a crypt, you are dealing with the drowning of the book by trying to arrest its falling. No rest fo rhte books in Taymor’s films. Absnece of the book cretes problems fo rht contents of the books but also for the contents of the play iself, the extent to which it contains itself. The frist scene frame is a problem as much as the epilogue.

If you read “grave” as crypt, you allow yourself to posit an author, a presence, rather than specter, a referent that is ever present across the text. You not only fill in what isn’t there. SO the moment Propsoer is already gone, about to be gone, on his way out—where did that exit begin? is the moment where he can be nstalled as a commanding presence over the play, a sort of Gielgud, except that for Greenaway, even this fantasy gets disrupted. The detective genre wants to to turn the island as archive in to a crypt, whereas as an unihabitabble island, it is an archive htat refuses to become a crypt. The epilogue doesn’t settle, it keep turning. You can try to turn” the text as a Cold War spy irng might. But it can’t stop it, divide it into sides.

Caliban is left without the books in Taymor’s film.

Full fathom five—already sung earlier by Prospero. SO it too repeats. Starting with Miranda only means you have to shuffle the ending around.

If Propsero has exited and returned, he may have doffed some of his ducal trappings and appear I a simple shirt or gown. Such theatrical choices can indiciate Prospoer’s loss ofp power or the actor’s loss of his role.

The drowning of the book is a mourning that doesn’t end or a mourning that never begins. “set me free”The line about “Scene, an uninhabited island goes missing in the edition. 0] , it is cited, then other words are numbered +1, +4 but hten 6, 8, 12, and 15 to indicate modernized spellings. The facing page begins by glossing “Nmaes of the Actors” as 0.1.Have you a mind to sink?1.1.38 Boatswain “I’ll warrant him for drowning” 1.1.45 Gonzalo 1.2. “Enter PROPSERO and MIRANDA” p. 171

Epilogue—a peritext, but sounds like an epitext. Prospero’s Books drops out the

“Enter” and “Master. So who is speaking the line “boatswain” no stage direction for

Prospero to be or for Miranda to be there. You have to wait. Like Hamlet, there is

38

something there before the plays begin, but in Tempest, there is a scene described

that goes missing in Arden 3. Uninhabitable island.

Where to interpolate the book destruction related to where the films begin and how

they begin though the decisions can be made. Retrosporjection of Prospero over the

entire play—not just hs book that matters, but his presernce—his retroprojection is

also a spectraorphaics which shows where he is not there—but nevertheless , for

some readers, filmmakers, and so on, already there. There’s a beginning befre the

beginning. Where exactly before the epilogue did he do it? Where do you show it?

Crates a new problem Mowat doesn’t address.

No one ever quite makes it to the island—a shipwreck, but we learn after the fact of

their arrival

Suspended ignorance, repetition already in first scene—consequence of drowning a

book-doesn’t begin and doesn’t end –cast off cast-away books as cast-off like Caliban

we depart form Derrida always fine-but now marination.

Drowning a book means casting, being cast off, disembarking no beginning, no

ending, only a kind of repetition with ellipsis. Book never arrives, nor do which

closure available through figures of burning, ash, cinders, fire—in Derrida. No

metarchive because something cannot be archived, but there is also a problem

“internal’ in this case the un-inhabitable island. Ends with disembarkation. No

book, no media, no material support either. Miranda’s position if suspended

ignorance has to be fully resolved “Sit down, / For now though must know further.”

1.2.33

And to him put

39

The manage of my state, as at that time

Through all the signories it was the first,

And Prospero the prime Duke, being so reputed

In dignity, and for the liberal arts

Without a parallel; those being all my study,

The government I cast upon my brother

And to my state grew stranger, being transported

And rapt in secret studies. 1.2. 69-77

Me, poor man, my library / Was dukedom large enough. 1.2. 109-110

So dry he was for sway 1.1.112

And by my prescience

I find my zenith doth depend upon

A most auspicious star 1.2. 180-81

But her state of suspended ignorance does not come to an end, her questions put to

an end:

“Here cease more questions.” 1.2. 183 And he puts her to sleep. “Thou art inclined

to sleep; ‘tis a good dullness” 1.2. 185

This is one of the places where sleep and dullness are transvalued.

40

The Arden 3 reproduces the last page of the Folio on p. 128 It includes “Finis.” in a

border through the blank space—about the a third of the bottom of the page—

below the EPILOGVE.

41

42

In Heidegger’s sense of Gestell, or enframing, the text is messed up at the end, since

exuent omnes would include Prospero. Of course, Prospero could go off stage and

then return, but that would confuse audiences since they would think the play was

over and start clapping before Prospero had a chance to return. Or Prospero could

almost go off-stage but then stop and turn around. [In Prospero’s Books, Greenaway

has Prospero look out to his right as he says “please you draw near” and then furn to

facae the camera, looking out over it rather than at it, as he dleivers the epilogue. ]

43

44

Page layout of the Folio. Epilogue—has Prospero in front of it. Rosalind in and out

of the epilogue.

{repetition of the word “charms”

Your charm so strongly works ‘em 5.1.17 (p. 285)

The airy charm” 5.1. 54, p. 288)

Now my charms are all o’erthrown (Epilogue, 1, p. 307)]

Notice too that “Please you draw near,” which is the beginning of the epilogue,

precedes it. The play ends in a rather strange way. The page layout divides the text

and paratexts (Epilogue and dramatis personae in a way that makes both

unreadable in relation to the other (both text and epilogue that is). Dramatis

Personae always come too late to be of much help. Even the “Names of the Actors”

45

heads the list, does their placement also turn the proper names of the characters

into citations? I suppose critics must have talked about the line “Scene, an

uninhabitable island” as well. What is the temporality of that line? Is it referring tot

the beginning, t o an island which Caliban and Prospero have managed to inhabit?

Or does it refer to the island after Prospero and friends have left? “Unhabitable”

differs from uninhabited in a curious way in either case.

“Please you draw” also can make sense. As a stage direction it makes no sense for

Prospero to tell the characters to come close when they are in the process of exiting

the stage. It makes no sense to the audience or can’t physically come closer to the

stage. I suppose some people, groundlings, could squeeze forward a bit. But “draw

near” is a stage direction in other lays, like Richard II, where one character tells

other characters to come closer while that character (who commands) remains

stationary.

Even “if please you draw near” is an invitation to the groundlings, the “you” is

divisible—those in the boxes cannot come closer—though I suppose they could lean

forward a bit. But they would thus still be divisible because they would be drawing

near in a different way. So the addressee is a divided destination that Prospero’s

letter will never have arrived but that requires and indebts the addressee to sign –

with his or her (“your) hands” and “gentle breath.” (“Gentle” of course elevates the

groundlings to aristocrats) The audience has to remember to breath, and, in

Derrida’s terms, to posthume, and then to pray silently (“relieved by prayer”).

“Indulgence” is a gift economy that archives a kind of counterfeiting: “set me free”

(20, p. 308) repeats Prospero’s “be free” (5.1. 317) to Ariel, though Prospero does

46

not invoke Ariel but the “deceiver” as his precursor (odd that Prospero uses the

singular “deceiver,” not the plural “deceivers,” since Alonso is obviously not the only

deceiver Prospero pardons). Is Prospero making himself into a dramatis persona

non gratis?

the "every third

thought shall be my grave."  Most readers, as far as I know, focus on

the word "third."  They assume grave refers to a burial plot.  [And editors refer to it

when trying to gloss “for I / have given you here a third of my life, / Or that for

which I live, who once again, I tender to thy hand.” See Adren 3, n 41.3. p. 264, for

example. The “third” gets routed to a measurement of Prospero’s age by editors.

But there is anarchivity in the repetition since the third thought cannot refer back to

Miranda because Prospero calls her—weirdly—“a third of mine own life,” which

actually makes no sense) But, back to the meaning of “grave” as burial plot . . .

. , without wanting to put too much pressure on "grave," I wonder if

this isn't also possible to read as an invitation, or as an

auto-activation of a readin gof what follows as encrypted, the book

itself being the grave.  Like engraving.  I know. Kind of ridiculous.

Yet . . .  There's also "shall" rather than "will," as if Prospero is

predicting an arc of repetition that has nothing to with desire--an

archiving of triple time that blocks the death drive?  I mean it

sounds compulsive--every third--yet it also skips two beats rather

than repeats every beat, as it would in Freud--every thought will be of

my burial plot. . I was thinking more too about the strangeness of

47

the epilogue--I mean why are there epilogues without prologues

sometimes n Shakespeare, or a frame (Christopher Sly) that does not

return?  Why isn't R and J the norm?  AMND is already off of being R

and J's comic opposite in this respect.  I also want to check to see

which plays in the Folio--0other than The Tempest have the dramatis

personae at the end.   Everyone talks about The Tempest coming first

even though it is assumed to be have been written last. No one seems

to read the Folio--the page layout.  The "Scene, Uninhabited Island"

line is particularly odd since it has to be retrospectively across the

entire play from end to beginning and back (or so I would say).

Uninhabitable is at odds with habited, not habited, the terms on which

hte plot of the play is based (repetitively--first Caliban, who recalls Sycorax,--“this

island’s mine” then Prospero—and before Sycorax?

Taymor film:

She is stream(line)ing the film, changing the book into the liquefaction of cinema.

She is retrofitting of the epilogue in the play follows form keeping Prospero out of

the beginning but putting Miranda in instead. Castle melting—anticipates cloud

capp’d towers—she is a kind of proto-Prospera, even as that is cut from the film.

The text as a kind of media installation, or Ge-stell, in Heidegger, an enframing, or

infrastructure.

48

Spoken by Prospero is rather odd because he was the last to speak. So it indicates

some kind of break. Opens up divisions—author-function becomes a name

“a drowning mark”

“again” used twice in 1.2. Alonso et al come back on deck “again” and then

Boatswain says “again”

Alreadya repetition in the shipwreck.

No master calling boatswain Taymor’s film

Miranda becomes something like Ariel in the first scene-mine would , were I

human,,” who sees Prospera still in a rage (enter Prospero and Miranda—we remain

in ignorance longer int eh f the play htan we do in Taymor’s film.

Taymor moves the epilogue into the paratextual space of the end title sequence-

designed by Kyle Cooper so it has some relation to the internalseqiuecnes designed

by him as well; special effects. Low tech in the case of the end titles. The books

never reach the bootm, never come ot a rest. And Epilogue is spoken by Prospero in

the text but by Portishad, turned intoa song and a music video, like “O Mistress

Mine.” The ending of the fiom, the transposition of the destruction, the casting off of

Claiban after the others have left, even though the stage direction calls for his exit

earlier, with Stephano and Trinculo, reated to the beginning of the film with

Miranda wide awake, on high alert, in a state of ermergency. Retroprojetio of a

woman to woman linkfrom beginning to end even as Prospera disappears. We don’t

see her throw the books in. She is here only insofar as she is the person off screen

throwing the boks in, one by on. First line spoken by the master before we know he

49

is the master (on stage). Text fills in something htat is missing, with te stage

direction. Drowning mark. Drowning as a kind of writing of deat, of destiny, cables.

End after the end of the epilogue in the tempest a Airle flies out of the screen.

We broke the staff and the movie ended here. Create a song; Kyle Cooper would

shoot these drowning books

It really is about the end of books.

The last shot of the books underwater is a very long take. Long takes for end title

sequences are not unusual. But Taymor’s recalls two earlier unusually long takes in

the film, the first when Ferdinand sings “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night” to

Mirnda, while both are in close-up, she with her head lying on his shoulder; the

second is of Prospera at the end of “our revels now have ended.” Special effects for

the speech end just before “This rough magic,” when the film cuts to a straight on

shot of Prospera. As she begins to deliver the rest of the speech, the camera

gradually dollies in on your face in what becomes an extraordinarily tight close-up

of her face: one can no longer she her mouth just before she says “I’ll drown my

books.”

End credits:

Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer

producer credit

Visiual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper

“which was to please”

50

followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to inform

cast members show

to title The TEpest

A Julie Taymor film

And cones to below the end the line credits boks have Laurence Sterne marble

covers

“let your indulgence (repeated)

last book disap

sets me free

Now I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats lreased by prayer

More guitatr—also a lead guitatr-builds louder, same loop

Now I want sirits begins over again

By prayer . .which piecres so, piereces that it assaults, mery itself and frees . .

Puse

A’as you form faults from

Coda Betha Williams

Let your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd

copyright.

One last book—big—with extrapages, then sound, then an icon with apage, three

moreicons, then warning,

51

Antipiracy warning

Leads singer is Portishead. And htt is the movie. If one reads the sung epilogue with

the paratextless books, you can hear the referent of "me" and "I" as the books

(floating down one by one). It is certainly not prosper singing. The books are being

preserved a way as if in an aquarium, swimming around like jellyfish

“biobiblianimots”, and they are also being destroyed. The disappearance of

Propsera—along with the absence of paratexts could be as evidence of their

liberation. No one, not just Prospera, owns them, no one has title (unlike the end

titles), and their "voice" is anonymous.

Aliban is not naked,a s the screenplay says—he wears a loincloth—and the boos do

not fall one by one but sometimes fall in groups.

Prospera’s books are covered in a white sheet. GOnazalo hands them to Prospera as

he sails of f with Mrana. So they are never identifiable.

Then close up of Mirren “But this rough magic I here abjure. Camera dollies in to a

tighter and tighter close up I’ll drown my books. You can only see her eyes.

Shot of Ariel in special effects lead A, S G to the burnt circle. She freezes them )

freeze tag) . The burnt circle still operates—A and S find that they cannot step over

it.

Taymor film:

52

We broke the staff and the movie ended here. Create a song; Kyle Cooper would

shoot these drowning books

It really is about the end and of books.

Terminating a medium, burning versus drowning. How do books die? What will it

mean to have ended the play by drowning books?

The last shot of the books underwater is a very long take. Long takes for end title

sequences are not unusual. But Taymor’s recalls two earlier unusually long takes in

the film, the first when Ferdinand sings “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night” to

Mirnda, while both are in close-up, she with her head lying on his shoulder; the

second is of Prospera at the end of “our revels now have ended.” Special effects for

the speech end just before “This rough magic,” when the film cuts to a straight on

shot of Prospera. As she begins to deliver the rest of the speech, the camera

gradually dollies in on your face in what becomes an extraordinarily tight close-up

of her face: one can no longer she her mouth just before she says “I’ll drown my

books.”

End credits:

Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer

producer credit

Visiual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper

“which was to please”

followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to inform

cast members show

53

to title The TEpest

A Julie Taymor film

And cones to below the end the line credits boks have Laurence Sterne marble

covers

“let your indulgence (repeated)

last book disap

sets me free

Now I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats lreased by prayer

More guitatr—also a lead guitatr-builds louder, same loop

Now I want sirits begins over again

By prayer . .which piecres so, piereces that it assaults, mery itself and frees . .

Puse

A’as you form faults from

Coda Betha Williams

Let your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd

copyright.

One last book—big—with extrapages, then sound, then an icon with apage, three

moreicons, then warning,

Antipiracy warning

54

Leads singer is Portishead. And htt is the movie. If one reads the sung epilogue with

the paratextless books, you can hear the referent of "me" and "I" as the books

(floating down one by one). It is certainly not prosper singing. The books are being

preserved a way as if in an aquarium, swimming around like jellyfish

“biobiblianimots”, and they are also being destroyed. The disappearance of

Propsera—along with the absence of paratexts could be as evidence of their

liberation. No one, not just Prospera, owns them, no one has title (unlike the end

titles), and their "voice" is anonymous.

Aliban is not naked,a s the screenplay says—he wears a loincloth—and the boos do

not fall one by one but sometimes fall in groups.

Prospera’s books are covered in a white sheet. GOnazalo hands them to Prospera as

he sails of f with Mrana. So they are never identifiable.

Then close up of Mirren “But this rough magic I here abjure. Camera dollies in to a

tighter and tighter close up I’ll drown my books. You can only see her eyes.

Shot of Ariel in special effects lead A, S G to the burnt circle. She freezes them )

freeze tag) . The burnt circle still operates—A and S find that they cannot step over

it.

Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud burning?

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have

burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive

fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of

his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge.

With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond

55

suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without

a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.

Naples, 22-28 May 19945

In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text

that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever

in relation to the archive and the death drive, to the archive oriented toward the

future, not the past, in which anarchival repetition is, if not without repetition, at

least repetition without compulsion. 6

The plethora of repetitions of shots in the film that recall previous shots that may

in turn recall other shots do not collect themselves into an archive that could

generate a reading of the film; if the destruction of the books is their archiving, so

the film is the archiving of its own repetitions without an archive. Even before the

books are drowned and destroyed in this sequence, some have already been shown

underwater and damaged. The Book of Water, the first to be inventoried is being

5 Archive Fever Postscript,” op cit, 101. We may add in passing that what Freud

burned of his archive is itself uncertain. See the the introduction to Sigmund Freud

and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud

and C. G Jung, xix.

56

rained on and urinated on by the youngest Ariel appears, its pages clearing being

damaged so much that they start to go blank and come unbound. This book is the

only one to be followed by a second film of an inventoried book. After the first book

We see pages of a book being rained in this second, inventoried inventory, and it is

impossible to tell if this book shows more pages from the Book of Water inventoried

before it or a book that has gone missing, a book that surfaces as a book that has not

been archived. Similarly, there are no books in the shot when Prospero says “’ll

drown my books” [sic] and the shot of his books being burned called for in the

shooting script is not in the film; in its place, but in a slightly different order, we see

6 Post Card, op cit, 41. See also “The librarian seemed to know me . . . but this did not

get me out of the oath. She asked me to read it . . . Therefore I read it and handed her

back the cardboard covered with a transparent paper that had tendered me. At this

point, she starts to insist, I had not understood: no, you have to read it out loud. I did

so . . . What would an oath that you did not say out loud be worth, an oath that you

would only read, or not say be worth, an oath that you would only read, or that

while writing you would only read? Or that you would telephone? Or whose tape

you would send? I leave you to follow up.” 208 “Did I tell you, the oath that I had to

swear out loud (and without which I could never have been permitted to enter,

stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the

premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any

fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the library.” 215-16. And see,

among others, the passages relating reading and fire on pp. 23; 40; 58; 171; 176;

180; 233; and 225.

57

Prospero on he floor, his head bleeding, his right arm raised, as pages of books and

sand swirl past him.7

Put in ways in which Taymor streamlines drowning and books. Contrast with

Prospero’s Books—tak about together rather than sequentially, one at a time.

7 A pile of books in Prospero’s library are shown being burned.

58