tempest drown before reading... · web view4. drown before reading: liquidating prospera’s books

4. Drown before Reading: Liquidating Prospera’s Books

What does it mean that Prospero says he will drown his books? Why drown

rather than burn them? The question arises 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.

This question is our point of departure for reading the Arden three edition of The

Tempest and Juliet Taymor’s Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books in this

chapter. 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 not by comparing these

films to the “original” text but by considering each films as yet another edition of the

play, another rendering of the play’s cruxes regarding books, as well as another

critical reading comparable to historicist criticism of the play related to book

history. 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

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

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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? Why do books go missing in The

Tempest?

New Historicist and New New Historicist criticism of the play missing 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 grimgoire, and thereby close off the singular plural of

book(s) in the play.1 Prospero has a book, not books, even though the book is a

composite of pages taken from multiple grimgoires, 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?2

Our formulation of drowning books as a crux will orient our reading of The

Tempest: the island is more of an archive about to come to an end that it is a

utopian space, and archive management involves what Michel Foucault calls

biopower, about the management of life and death. The question of what counts as

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life The Tempest cannot be reduced to human life, however, as Foucault does.

Shakespeare floats, so to speak, questions about life as questions of biobiblio(auto-

thanato)graphy and questions about species of life, about the indeterminacy of the

borders between spirits, humans, animals, and monsters. In short, questions about

life are raised as questions of what Derrida calls sur-vivance, not so much survival

or living on or even as living death but as living on in a way that cannot be thought

in terms of life and death. Sur-vivance is a resistance to reading, as we saw earlier.

The Tempest radicalizes unreadability by linking sur-vivance to a past that never

becomes fully textual, that can only become paratextual, a prologue, and thereby

prolonged (or infinitely “prolougened”). If, as Derrida says, the archive is oriented

to the future and hence always incomplete, it follows that the condition of the

archive, as we will show more fully in the next chapter, is “incompletemess”; that is

to say, the archive is always something of a disaster, a wreck even before it is

wrecked, a wrecking of reckoning and recognition. In The Tempest, books are

fauxsimiles, blanks waiting for a reading that can never arrive.3 We suggest that the

issue of books is related to a wider, recurrent structure in the play related to

survival and safety. In our view, the play does not present a choice between an

authoritarian, colonialist reading or the critique of same or mix; rather, it shows that

Foucault’s account of the prison is on a continuum with his later accounts of

pastoral care. Shipwrecks give rise to philosophical reflection, according to

Lucretius in De Rerum Naturum. But in The Tempest, the ship wreck operates only

as a supposition. What looks like a wreck, we quickly learn, is not a wreck at all.

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One last signpost before we move on to the Arden Three Tempest and the

Taymor and Greenaway films. Our reading of The Tempest differs from avowedly

neoFoucauldian historicist readings and new new historicist readings primarily in

not psychologizing and not being Prospero-centric. The survivance of the archive

involves an economy of repeated destructions, loss, mourning, repair, storage, and

restoration. Prospero-centric readings of the play lead to a series of dead end

questions we take to be ruses that provide an alibi for the play’s excessive economy

of archival repetition and re-enactment: why doesn’t Prospero not recover his

dukedom immediately? Why does he abjure his kingdom? Why does he want to

leave the island? At the risk of being somewhat dogmatic, we think these are the

wrong questions. Our focus on film adaptations of the play and on media in the play

asks a series of new questions about The Tempest, the archive, editing, and the book,

but we will not provide the reader with the kinds of hallucinogenic hits and

convenient comforts of elisions on offer in historicist criticism and book history.

Attention to drowning books in The Tempest foregrounds a tension in the kind of

book history scholars of early modern culture write, a tension between the so-called

material book and the book as medium. When does the history of “material” books

become a question about the book as a medium, as a textual support and an

impression? We maintain that book history and the any history of the book (or of

books) cannot be written without being haunted by spectrality and eschatological or

messianic time, by deconstructive questions raised by Maurice Blanchot and Derrida

about the end of the book and the book to come. Consider The French title of Henri

Lefebrve’s L’apparition du livre, translated as The Coming of the Book. The French

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word “apparition” means “appearance” and “ghost” (an “apparition” in the English

sense of a ghost derives, of course, from “appearance”). The English title as The

Coming of the Book has clearly messianic connotations, even if those connotations

are not intended. And of course books do not serve as media for the dead, just as the

occasion for humanist pathos and sometimes irreverent piety, whereas for Derrida

the survivance of a text leaves open the question of telepathy, of the last word, in a

variety of media and technology because technology cannot, as we have maintained,

properly be opposed to organic human life (as an inorganic prosthetic tool or

equipment for living).4

Undrowning the Book

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

that constitute the history of the play’s reception history of its cruxes concerning

Prospero’s books. To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique in the history of

literature in destroying books by drowning them. All other literature and drama in

which manuscripts or books are destroyed involve burning.5 Destroying books by

drowning them is all the more remarkable that their destruction is different from

Prospero’s plans for his staff: “I’ll break my staff, /Bury it certain fathoms in the

earth.” Prospero’s burial of his staff provides the second most common form of

destruction: inhumation and cremation. These are the only two forms of the

preservation and destruction of corpses, according to Derrida in Beast and the

Sovereign vol. 2. Oddly, enough, Prospero’s use of the “drown” to destroy his books

does not invite editorial commentary. The Arden 3 edition does not comment on

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the phrase, though it does comment extensively on roughs in the famous speech that

ends with Prospero’s announcement.6 Vaugns in the Arden observe that the

Tempest has fewer cruxes than do the other plays in the First Folio, and 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 regarding the assignment of

lines in 1.2. to Prospero or Miranda is not a crux at all but an aspect of the play’s

performance and editing history. Restoration dramatists like Dryden and editors

like Theobald had no textual evidence to reassign Prospero’s lines. We read the

Arden 3’s classification of this 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? Is it related to Caliban’s inverse self-naming

“ban ban Ca Caliban.” Under what conditions does something become a crux rather

than a general critical problem.

The irreconcilable singular and plural reference to book and 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 he play, one near the beginning Prospero’s

tells Miranda of the undrowning of his books when he is put with Miranda on a boat

and the other when Prospero promises to drown his book. That promise is never

fulfilled in the play (something Mowat does not comment on) . In short the book /

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books are never destroyed in the play; they appear to be as indestructible as they

are non-existent.

The “book” / “books” contradiction or crux is exceptional in respect to survival.

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.

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. Alonso

wonders what kind of fish eat his son but then says that he will himself dive into the

bottom of the sea until he is buried. He uses he very same line Prospero does but

adds mud at the end. Cite. Alonso imagines Ferdinand and he buried. Other burial

in the earth. Prospero calls up the undead that have been buried. No cremation, but

incineration of books by Caliban. 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

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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. 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 a metaphor (as when

Stephano tells Caliban twice to “kiss the book,” the bottle of liquors from which he

drinks).

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.7

Prospera’s Books

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 ot talk about burial at sea. Misses cannibals being both cremated and buried.

Syntehsize 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

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loss?” Is mourning about the tropics of formerly human waste disposal? [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 ther.” And

the other soldiers move it away.] some one who has just be

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

Gonzalo: Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him—his

Complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging; make the rope of

destiny our cable 1.1.28-20

I would fain die a dry death.67-68

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

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Ariel says he “landed” the survivors; the passive contrusciotn here is rhater odd

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

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

Gonzalo I prophesized, if a gallows were on land

This fellow could not drown. 5.1. 217

Drowning as something to be read—Gonzalo reads the “drowning mark” upon the

boatswain as a prophecy in 1.1.

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

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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?

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

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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?”8 9 Second, translation complicates ableit in

microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and

how it is to be glossed.10

8 Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227.

9 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, (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.”

10 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.

1 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

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

phantasm and sleep being more vigilant than waking

5.1. Boatswain’s return

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

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

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

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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

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

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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?)

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

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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.

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

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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

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.

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Prospero: No, wench, it 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 gllant which htou seest

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

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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.

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.

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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

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

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

20

The German is Jungfrau.

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

Ferdinand wonders if he is dreaming

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,

21

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

experience after Gonzalo is awakened by Ariel.

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

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

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

22

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.)

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.

23

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.

Rather crude distinction between manuscripts and printed books as media.

l Media, Mourning, and the Incomplete Works of Material Culture

2 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

24

Re-zones the island form a utopian space to a living dead border also a human and

spectral and human monster—

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

deaths. Every third thought will be grave.

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.

3 So something at stake in book and books other than a contradiction—something like the divisibility of the book, like the letter. Not original versus copy, but like the Folio, the “true original copies.” Foldlio? As well as Fauxlio? The spacing or blank Derrida talks about in Mallarme and later in Instant of My Death. We should look at Murray’s chapter on Greenaway in his book, The Digital Baroque.

4 Move to the history of the book means that the book is made material at the

expense of reading it. The Book as figure, history as figured, goes unread in the face

of interst in used books, who have in short n surplus valuebut whose traves, either

regarded as damaged (marked up) or added it (marginalia, doodling) can be traced

back to the writer / readers. Explicitly Catholic move in the case of Eamon Duffy.

Turning the book into the Eucharist—we get to metabolize it; the thing reading is

not just feel good reading but guilt free reading—evidence like a crime scene (DNA,

radiodendochronology, etc, can be used to track down users without there being a

crime. It’s like the purloined letter without the purloining, though obviously

librarians feel differently and would not allow Eamon Duffy to mark a medieval

manuscript nor does it seem to occur to him to do so. A certain piousness about the

25

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

that enables

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

artefact kicks in automatically, as if a library were also a tomb, books a chance to

speak with the dead.

5 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.6 Check other editions to see if “drown” gets any attention from editors.

7

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

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

We want to consider its future tense, a dramatic economy (the actor never

has to show the books being destroyed just as the actors who have been

shipwrecked do not have to appear in we clothing because Ariel has dry-cleaned

them) but this invisibility is itself worth comment.

Propsero 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.

26

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

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 onder a

cloth).

Fredinand hears that his father lies full fahtm five below—sea change and all

—but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried:

Although this lord of wak 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?

Sebastion: He’s gone. 233-34

Alonso:

O thou mine heir

Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish

Hath made his meal on htee?

27

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

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

Alonso uses same phrase as Prospero does

Therefore my son I’th’ooze is bedded, and

I’ll seek him deeper than ever plummet sounded,

28

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.

And with him lie there mudded. 3.3. 100-02

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book. 5.1.55

Calbian’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 beraks off the

masque 3.2.140; 4.2. 155-57

cloudy, 2.1. 143

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

Caliban.

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

The Tempest is of interest to us, however,

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

29

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?

Remember me—remember—Prospero as Hamlet.

Speech argument doesn’t work because people aren’t sure if they are speaking or

hearing speech.

The book would have drowned to begin with if they had met their intended fate.

We never see the ship after the shipwreck even though it is restored—Ariel says to

Prospero.

of scenes of reassurance that more or les 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

30

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

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

of

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.

Propsero’s hour is now at zenith—there’s an exipiration on his power. Extradition.

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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?

It’s like the threat of an archive whose time is up, the moment when the archive

becomes a crypt.

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

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http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dvdbeaver.com%2Ffilm4%2Fblu-ray_reviews57%2Fdeath_watch_blu-ray.htm&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHL4AXURENg-vd0N9d5DcOGyd0YPg

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

and "marination?" Right, that one's taken.

Btw, 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.

We can think about 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 not

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.

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Survivance—as a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of

differeneces that matter or don’t accrding to at various

historical moments, what copy you have, what lanuguage it is

in, what edition, hardcover or apperback, paper used, etc. and

revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the

archive. Diffference betweenarhcival 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.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.

34

(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,

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

35

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

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,

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,

36

like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body

proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality.

(131)

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

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

37

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

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.

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.

38

The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot ofit fully restored in a harbor.Anyway, I am taking notes as I watch. O am a half hour into the film.

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 thedisappearance 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?We might want to discuss the invisible blood writing in Faustus too,by way of contrast. 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?

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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”

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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 prayer

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More 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.

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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

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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

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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.”

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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

Full 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

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Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

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

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”)

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

shoot these drowning books

It realy is about the end and of books.

Leads singer is Portishead. And htt is the movie.

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.

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,

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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;

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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 passion

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With 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 wish

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Myself 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.

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

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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.11 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)12

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.

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judith buchanan, 07/22/12,

I thought this sentence needed clarifying so I have cheekily had a go at it myself, but do of course feel free to boot me out and look at it yourself. Word(s) missing or word de trop? And since there are of course indisputably ‘references’ to the book as a sort of off-stage prop (!) (Mowatt etc as footnoted), it seem preferable to me to discuss its ‘visible presence’ (or otherwise), or its materiality rather than ‘references’ to it, for sake of clarity. What do you think?


Page ref this quotation from preface? I’ve shifted ‘Rough Magic’ to earlier in sentence to avoid any possible ambiguity about whether she had written a separate book entitled Rough Magic. Also, presumably Taymor uses ‘we’, at the most obvious level, because she is always in such a team in the pre-production planning, principal photography and post-production phases of the production? That is, she has a vision that is hers, but is, of course, always dependent on her intimately collaborative engagements with others (including her long-term artistic collaborator composer husband) in order to deliver on that vision, which inevitably reinvents itself in the processes of exposure to the contributions of others. So the ‘we’ here is presumably, apart from anything else, an honest account of how it feels to her: ie I envisaged but we implemented.

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

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

and recto pages].)

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Why does this enlargement of authorial designation depend upon this?


Does Prospera presumably (unlike Prospero) declare she will drown her books (ie not book)? If so, presumably Taymor puralizes the intended object of the act of drowning in prospect in order to justify the plurality of the poetic visuals of drowning books she has in store for us? Great question. It will have to wait to confirm, I’m afraid, until I get the blu-ray when it comes out next month.

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

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,

what does it means to ‘drown a book’? Phrased another way, we might ask: Why

does Prospero not follow Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo - ‘burn but

his books’ - in order to destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning

Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them unreadable even though the pages are

open.

Taymor’s protracted endings. 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

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Is there a word missing or redundant word in this sentence? I’m struggling to find my way around it at the moment. Fixed it.


I don’t understand what it is that is in the fold of the book. Should I be able to see something on your images? Are you being literal or metaphorical here? Can you clarify?


Is this weird? Isn’t this a conventional (even an expected) shimmy in the authorial credit for an adapted work? Fixed it.

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.”

Propsera is literally cut off from her voice, her promise already made off-camera

nad fulfilled, after, the end of he the film, also in a voice-over. The “O mistress mine”

shot has a different kind of incongruity that nevertheless makes the : the sining is of

coure 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)13

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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.

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. Sets up anonymess.

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

Books.

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

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it fully restored in a harbor.

Anyway, I am taking notes as I watch. O am a half hour into the film.

The film is good for us in that it johlights the plays's not os

obvious opposition between burning and drowning.

The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I am

realizing. Like Miranda freaking out whenhte ship goes down and

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 gves 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 stye are set adrift.

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).

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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 bok. Swear [the book here is the bottle Caiban 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)

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 Alnso goes to sleep. Only bried shots of Ariel and then just music.

“strange drowsiness” dowsi 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, en trinculo, then Stephano. Turns into

filmed theaer. Convesation betwenS and A cots reverse shots gradually cutting into

closer and closer close ups. The editing is supposed to intensfy the drama.

Ariel shows up “thou liest” behind Trinculo. He appears and disappears.

When he sleeps thou cans’t knowck his [Prospero] head down. Fhaving irst seized

her books. But remember first to possess her books first.

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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 ful of noises—sleep and sleep agan hwen aske 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

Soeical effect for the banquer, but small part of the scree.

Prospera puts a faterh ina glass, it bursts,a bird dlies out, turns into Ariel as harpy

with small boobs. His cloak is like Propsera’s. But remember.

Feathers fall in the baclground, 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

Psorepero corws “they are all within my power. Go brng the rabble.

Fredinnand sings “O mistree mine” long take—like Taymor’s Universe movie.

Ariels’s head on frog that leaps out after Trinculo falls int a oool.

No tongue all eyes be silent

Prospero waves her staff toward the sky—starrs / consetlations 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.

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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 burnng firearound Ariel’s face and burning of the ship and the fire

around Ariel’s face. In the shipwreck (seen twicein 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.

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

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

The books not drowning—I’ll drown them and given by Gonzalo at offs with the

widespread any characters hae of another character drowning. A character thought

drowned we know is alive. Repetition of reasrnace—drowning, then no harm:

Prospero of Miranda, then of Proserpa by Ariel.

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.

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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 ver it.

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.

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

<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.

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

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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.

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, Airel surrnded by fire too.

Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivtionfor showing it

burning.

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Boat burning versus book burning.

Ariel quotes Fredidanda 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.

Flashack 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”

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,

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“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 sots of Ferdinand and Miranda.

“I charge thee that thou attend me.”

(Porpserora 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?

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 chem bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in

focus with racking focus.

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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 alsoa chest in her boat.

Boatswain is black

Music 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

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?

Dream/Re/Work

End credits:

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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

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

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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

Kindle

The Tempest

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

mean to have ended the play by drowning books?

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?

67

I now turn to the endings of Taymor and Greenaway’s films. Here I 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

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

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, Greenaway, and Moore’s films paradoxically save the film

author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or disintegrating the book

(auteur, you will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a much higher cultural

status than the more everyday écrivain, or writer).

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, far less; 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

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There are 24 books shown in sequence in the film aren’t there? 25 in total if we include The Tempest as a separate book, as we must. (35 plays within the Folio though.) Greenaway makes a big play about 24 fps, 24 hours in the day etc… Fixed.


Excuse my presumption in intervening on the articulation of the point in this sentence (and for turning it into two sentences as well), but I (naturally!) think this editorial adjustment nails it more clearly. What do you reckon?


I’ve suggested changing ‘our sense’ to ‘a sense’ in order not to have competing perspectives in the same sentence (ie ‘our sense’ competing with the third-person ‘one can exit’ later in the sentence. Alternatively, retain ‘our sense’ and change to ‘we can exit’ I suggest. This is the third appearance of ‘DVD or blu-ray’, so I have suggested the stream-lined catch-all ‘disc’ here in its place. The sentence was also unhelpfully long so I have suggested a way of chopping it into two with a very short crisp opener. Are you OK with this? Do of course counter-propose if not.

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 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.)

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Well it is theatrically staged sometimes, despite there being no textual provision for it. I’ve seen it done! Perhaps amend this parenthesis to (extra-textual)? Yes. Have done.

Figure 1 Figure 2

70

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

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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.14

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).15 This differs markedly from the

more symmetrical ending in the screenplay.16 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

rather through the apparently agent-less processes of animation (figs X.1-2).

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Is this definitely an exclamation mark not a question mark? I’ve suggested punching home the authorless process of writing (or punctuating here) to connect as explicitly as poss with the vol.


Please excuse shameless self-reference here, but in case of interest, here’s what I wrote about this sequence: ‘Prospero’s Books is a film that not only presides over the progressive neglect, rejection and eventual destruction of the book, but also self-consciously celebrates its own ascendancy specifically at the book’s expense. The Shakespeare Folio and the text of The Tempest are allowed to survive, but only, as it were, within the confines of the film which becomes their guardian and vehicle of transmission. In the closing sequence of the film, Ariel jumps on to and then out beyond a piece of parchment. Though it cannot hold the energetic Ariel, this book fragment remains behind as the film’s final cinematic simulacrum: parchment on screen can look persuasively weathered but it neither smells like parchment nor crinkles to the touch. This is a film which glories in reminding us what a book is and can do, only then to present itself as the gleeful agent of its displacement.’ Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Longman-Pearson, 2005), Ch. 8 ‘Cinema as Subject’, this qtn pp. 229-230. I have cited you now. If you want to cut and paste you rquotation too, fine with me. (

Figure 5 Figure 6

12 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.

13

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 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

73

Figure 7 Figure 8known.

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.

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)).

74

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

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-9000821211 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

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVSogD3IvS4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxuab73IBR8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxuab73IBR8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4wDD5O36Xo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4wDD5O36Xo

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.17

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

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

materializing what is missing.

14 On this point, see Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Longman-

Pearson, 2005), especially pp. 229-230.

15 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

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’

(14).

16 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,

164).

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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

17

Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.

Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the

book.

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

note?

77

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.

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.18

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.19

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

18 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.

78

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 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

79

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.

NOTES

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.

80

(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);

the

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

81

(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.

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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).

83

It's hard to tell whether "drown my book" is drawn into the whirlpool of other

mentions of drown / undrown'd, etc or, more likely for us, "drown my book" is the

vortex that draws al of the other mentions of drowning in it. There is a clearly

recursive structure, or recurrent" (ha ha ha--not really) in the play related to

drowning. "drown" is used 20 times in the play.

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).

84

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.20 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 Propsero’s books fall slowly through the

ocean heading toward the bottom. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue

85

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).21 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).

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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 sourceappears and disappears

87

in the fold of the of the book as one 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 question no one has thought to ask, namely, what does it

means to “drown a book?” Phrased another way, we might ask: Why does

Prospero not follow Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo--“burn but his

books”--in order to destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning

Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them unreadable even though the pages

are open.

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

88

English Department, 10/01/12,

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

89

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

90

First Folio are is saved only insofar as the collected works are split into different

print media (handwriting and print). 22 It differs markedly form the more

symmetrical ending in the screenplay.23 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).

91

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 int

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

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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

93

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

Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.

Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the

book.

And question of burial at sea versus cremation and inhumation.

94

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

note?

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.

The origin is a palimpsest and the untextual book as material thing becomes a

95

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.24

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.25

24 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.

25 “emboss the paper with the unlinked type . . . renaissance books routinely

contain hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank. In other words, there

exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing. The Corteginao

is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now,

that is. (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be

able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary)

direction of narrative. (152)

As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those

of the literary narrative” (159). Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a

96

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

remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press. (159)Consider

the photograph, opposite (168). With this image, I want to remind you of what lies

behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper.

(169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay. Book splits right where

the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not

its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings.

Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an

always already redited to default. Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved

editions. Fewer errors. Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and

production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of

textual forensics. McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see

something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point.

(Understand comprehends letters and images).

It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have

occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by

deliberate substitution of one type for the other. But that such discriminate

damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left

no destructive traces is highly improbable. N.20, 156

97

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 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.

Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are . . “ n. 23,156

“textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist)

p. 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay.

(124)

Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts. Vocabulary

of theology “restored” text.

Serial order of the editions numbered. Like Prospero’s Books.

“death bed manuscript” (84)

“The Easter Wings gallery”

A museum tour.

Greek technopaegnia (142)

Photography does not lie, of course. You can trust it, because it just gazes, like

a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie. It does not lie

because it does not analyze. It surfaces while, instantaneously. But the

underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into

being was atomistic, sequential and linear. It is all these because it is a reading,

because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is

abstract and analytical. In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently

98

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)

superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface.

“Shape” as a form (printing)

A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting

inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s

approach to a science (148)

One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s

poetic Enter Reader, 41

Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur.

Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to

Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or

merely befuddled degeneration? (14)

Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited

texts of the last century and a half before form (reading)

McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not

produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop. End in the begin.

At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not?

Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram.

99

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.

And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to

birth (but no after birth.

Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no

reshaping). You want to stay with the shape. Not geneticist, not a textual

eugenics. A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it

is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the

author). It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning. It’s an image, not

text. The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images.

What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert.

So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician.19 “emboss the paper with the unlinked type . . . renaissance books routinely

contain hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank. In other words, there

exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing. The Corteginao

is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now,

that is. (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be

able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary)

direction of narrative. (152)

As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those

of the literary narrative” (159). Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a

100

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”

remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press. (159)Consider

the photograph, opposite (168). With this image, I want to remind you of what lies

behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper.

(169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay. Book splits right where

the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not

its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings.

Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an

always already redited to default. Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved

editions. Fewer errors. Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and

production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of

textual forensics. McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see

something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point.

(Understand comprehends letters and images).

It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have

occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by

deliberate substitution of one type for the other. But that such discriminate

damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left

no destructive traces is highly improbable. N.20, 156

101

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.

Not a book or not a book. Crux is about the fauxsimile. Mowat has attended to it in a curious way—she does and does not establish the Grimgoire as the referent. And she says the book exists, even if only off-stage.But there is a an additional, more enigmatic crux to which she does not attend and

which is not generally recognized as one, namely, the distinction between burning

his books and drown my books.

Lanier, Douglas.Title "Drowning the Book: Prospero's Books and the Textual Shakespeare."Venue/Publisher Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance [F]: 187-209.Head Entry ao230Date 1996

Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are . . “ n. 23,156

“textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist)

p. 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay.

(124)

Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts. Vocabulary

of theology “restored” text.

Serial order of the editions numbered. Like Prospero’s Books.

“death bed manuscript” (84)

“The Easter Wings gallery”

102

Notes/Performers [Warns against reading videos (such as PeterGreenaway's Prospero's Books [q.v.]) as text, arguing that suchreadings "risk an elision of the very historical and materialcontingencies which the return to performance has sought to recover."Reprinted in Shaughnessy, editor, Shakespeare on Film (q.v.).]Stalpaert, Christel,Role editor.Title Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books: Critical Essays.Series Statement (Studies in Performing Arts and Film 3.)Venue/Publisher Ghent: Academia Press, 2000. 223 pp.Date 2000Notes/Performers [Includes seven essays of Shakespeare interest.]Tribble, Evelyn.

A museum tour.

Greek technopaegnia (142)

Photography does not lie, of course. You can trust it, because it just gazes, like

a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie. It does not lie

because it does not analyze. It surfaces while, instantaneously. But the

underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into

being was atomistic, sequential and linear. It is all these because it is a reading,

because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is

abstract and analytical. In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently

superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface.

“Shape” as a form (printing)

A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting

inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s

approach to a science (148)

One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s

poetic Enter Reader, 41

Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur.

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Title "Listening to Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 161-69.Date 2008Notes/Performers [Argues that the "acoustic dimension of Prospero'sBooks [q.v.] is one of the most complex areas of intersection between"Tempest and Peter Greenaway's film.]McMullan, Gordon.Title Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in theProximity of Death.Venue/Publisher Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,2007. xii + 402 pp.

Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to

Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or

merely befuddled degeneration? (14)

Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited

texts of the last century and a half before form (reading)

McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not

produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop. End in the begin.

At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not?

Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram.

And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to

birth (but no after birth.

Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no

reshaping). You want to stay with the shape. Not geneticist, not a textual

eugenics. A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it

is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the

author). It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning. It’s an image, not

text. The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images.

What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert.

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Date 2007Notes/Performers [In addressing the "relationship of creativity to oldage and death," explores "the development of the idea of 'lateShakespeare' from the later eighteenth century to the present, showingthe mismatch between . . . the 'discourse of lateness' and the actualconditions of production and of authorship in the early moderntheatre." In the course of the discussion, examines King Lear as alate play and the performance of late selfhood in Prospero by JohnGielgud (in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [q.v.], Mark Rylance(in Tim Carroll's production [q.v.]), and John Bell as Prospero (inPeter Evans' production [q.v.]).] Voigts-Virchow, Eckart.

So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician.20 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.” 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 (Prospero and the

actor playing him are somewhat psychotically conflated through a psychologistic

reading of the play as literature and performance equated). What are we to

make of a phantom prop that is referenced both in the singular and the plural

without ever be 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 materializing what is missing.

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Title "'Something richer, stranger, more self-indulgent': PeterGreenaway's Fantastic See-Changes in Prospero's Books et al."Venue/Publisher Anglistik und Englischunterricht 59 (1996): 83-99.Date 1996Notes/Performers [Studies the postmodern fantastic in PeterGreenaway's Prospero's Books (q.v.) in relation to "the phenomena ofabstraction, self-reflection, and excess."]

Trimm, Ryan.Title "Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux andText in Prospero's Books."

21 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.

22 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 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 now, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or

constructive” (14).

23 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

106

Venue/Publisher Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (2007): 26-53.Date 2007Notes/Performers [Argues that Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books"works against the heritage film's generic obsession with setting byforegrounding its soundstage as a textual and performative space" andthus is not situated in a specific time or even reality. Englishsummary, 26.]

Nethersole, Reingard.Title "'Burn but his books': The Power of the Library in 16th CenturyEngland and France with Reference to South Africa Today."Venue/Publisher Shakespeare in Southern Africa 8 (1995): 53-63.Date 1995Notes/Performers [Argues that in Tempest, Prospero's library is ametaphor for the power of knowledge. Books become centers of powerbecause they create "products of book learning," that is, people suchas Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand who will rule cities or nations.Also published under the same title in Shakespeare across Cultures[F]: 185-203.]

McKee, Alexander.Title "Jonson vs. Jones in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2007): 121-28.Date 2007Notes/Performers [Argues that by "creating a synthesis between theverbal and the visual" in Prospero's Books (q.v.), Peter Greenawayattempts to resolve the quarrel between Inigo Jones and Ben Jonsonabout the supremacy of the image or the text. Suggests that Greenawaychose Tempest to adapt because of the "way in which it responds to theJonson and Jones debate by exploring the unstable relationship betweenword and spectacle."]

Kearney, James.Title "The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero's Text."Venue/Publisher Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (2002): 433-68.Date 2002Notes/Performers [Inquiring into the significance of the absenceonstage of Prospero's books in Tempest, disputes William Pietz'sgenealogy of the fetish (which traces the fetish back to Africa) tooffer a prehistory of the fetish that originates with the Reformation,in the impact of Protestantism on "'traditional' Christianiconoclasm." Explores the "central role that conceptions of literacy

Shakespeare's The Tempest, 164).

107

and materiality play in the European understanding of the 'barbarous'other" in the Tempest, especially as associated with Prospero's books,to argue that the play "necessarily works within the problematic oficonoclastic discourse concerning materiality, even if thisproblematic is radically displaced."]

Anderegg, Michael.Title "Greenaway's Baroque Mise en scene at the Imaginative Centre ofShakespeare's The Tempest: A Hypertextual Recapitulation of theRivalry between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones?"Venue/Publisher Stalpaert, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [F]: 101-19.Head Entry aab1481Date 2000Notes/Performers [Describes Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (q.v.)as existing in "an interactive hypermedia environment where the entireimage surface would consist of links capable of taking us not only toother frames/fields of the film itself, but to a whole range ofallusive material therein contained as well." Incorporated withrevisions in Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare (q.v.).]Persons Stalpaert, Christel; Greenaway, PeterDescriptive Terms hypermediaDocument Type ArticleSee Also Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare Greenaway, Prospero's BooksGreenaway, Peter.Title "Notes de travail pour Les livres de Prospero."Venue/Publisher Positif 363 (1991): 28-33.Date 1991Notes/Performers [Prints selections from Peter Greenaway's workingnotes for Prospero's Books (q.v.), including an outline of thefundamental ideas informing the film, a synopsis, and comments onShakespeare's Tempest and the decor.]Donaldson, Peter S.Title "Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and theEnd of Books."Venue/Publisher Postmodern Culture 8, no. 2 (1998):http://muse.jhu.edu.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/journals/pmc/v008/8.2donaldson.html.Date 1998Notes/Performers [Examines how Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books(q.v.) "reads The Tempest anachronistically, as a play about the endof books and the advent of electronic forms."] Buchanan, Judith.Title "Cantankerous Scholars and the Production of a Canonical Text:The Appropriation of Hieronymite Space in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Stalpaert, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [F]: 43-100.Head Entry aab1481

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http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmuse.jhu.edu.lp.hscl.ufl.edu%2Fjournals%2Fpmc%2Fv008%2F8.2donaldson.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGr4A6RqMGzt0w0yc_hq1SCwqWpmQ

Date 2000Notes/Performers [Analyzes the parallels between Prospero's story andthe life of St. Jerome as examples of the intertextual andinterdiscursive relation of Prospero's Books (q.v.) with otherShakespeare films and works of art.]Persons Stalpaert, Christel; Greenaway, Peter; St. Jerome

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tempest drown before reading... · web view4. drown before reading: liquidating prospera’s books

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