SOURCE: Nokes, David. “Spell-bound.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4615 (13 September 1991): 19.

In the following review, Nokes argues that although the central character's performance in Prospero's Books is laudable, the film relies too heavily on technical effects.

Dryden wrote of Shakespeare's apparent lack of book-learning, “he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.” Peter Greenaway disagrees. In Prospero's Books, he assumes the spectacles of books to furnish The Tempest with a highly learned gloss. His myriad visual allusions are like a thousand illuminated footnotes decorating the text. Prospero's island is transformed into a library of Borgesian allegories, a palace garden of earthly delights embellished after the manner of countless Renaissance masters from Bosch to Botticelli. The play itself becomes a kind of cento, a visual and verbal palimpsest, as Greenaway, exploiting all the hi-tech magic of his electronic paintbox, layers the screen...