SOURCE: Phelan, Peggy. “Numbering Prospero's Books.” Performing Arts Journal 41, no. 2 (May 1992): 43–50.

In the following essay, Phelan analyzes the important role that numbers and numerical structures play in Prospero's Books.

James I, like many powerful men, had a short attention span. Like the “target audience” for most contemporary Hollywood films, James preferred fast action, elaborate scenery, and good music with a simple plot. Given the politics of theatrical patronage it is not surprising that Renaissance drama lost out to the masque as the King's favorite mode of nationalist art. Before the masque triumphed, however, theatre tried to accommodate the King's taste by giving some stage time to the special effects of the masque. All four of Shakespeare's Romances, and especially The Tempest, his last, are full of disappearing tricks which seem like embryonic special effects in film. Peter Greenaway's breathtaking cinematic treatment of The Tempest, Prospero's Books, accents the...