SOURCE: Cavecchi, Mariacristina. “Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books: A Tempest between Word and Image.” Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1997): 83-9.

In the following essay, Cavecchi analyzes Peter Greenaway's illusionistic and postmodern film adaptation of The Tempest, entitled Prospero's Books.

In his film, Greenaway develops and focuses on the aesthetic and mannerist aspects of the Shakespearean text, while he does not seem to care too much about the other very important Shakespearean themes, such as power or history.¹ As far as it is possible to generalize about the relation between Prospero's Books and The Tempest, I am suggesting that the filmmaker reinterprets the Shakespearean text as a mannerist text and creates a new, artificial, and mannerist world by making use of devices and techniques which constitute a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare's theatrical illusionism. He exasperates and amplifies those aspects, which were already there in Shakespeare, where the sense of the crisis...