Sammendrag
Shakespeare’s plays are crowded with memorable and iconic characters, yet only a few regularly “migrate” beyond the limits of their original plays to be reinvented and revised in endless iteration. Among these, the characters from The Tempest (1610) have lent themselves most often to unexpected and profound revisions rather than the more conventional direct adaptations. From Robert Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864) to Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), the play seems to bend and twist to fit our needs. In this article, I consider how the resulting cultural history of repeated re-visioning has itself inspired an increasing fragmentation that simultaneously binds the play’s characters to the island and each other. I focus on several adaptations and appropriations of The Tempest and its characters to demonstrate how the play’s engagement with utopia and utopic themes generates this malleable fluidity. I argue that, on film, this fluidity is critically dependent on the shifting presence of the play’s women as demonstrated by Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979) and Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, but most vividly in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010). To add further context, I also consider the critical echoes of The Tempest in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1996), John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), and the poignant appearance of The Tempest, its characters, and Shakespeare himself in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman (1989-1996). Gaiman’s series masterfully informs our understanding of Shakespeare’s influence, and how The Tempest, in particular, offers the flexibility through which each author and filmmaker could realize their utopic visions via the original play’s fluid and fragmented visions of utopia. Ultimately, though The Tempest’s characters may wander and change, they remain definitively connected with each other and the play’s alternating visions of utopia.
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