Greenaway’s Mirror Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s The Tempest Recreated

A thesis by
Imre Radnai
2010

1
 Introduction

The paper aims at studying the relationship between the ways, and different modes of
artistic articulation, imagery and the making of images could be presented on the late
Renaissance Shakespearean stage and in postmodern cinema.
In the first part of the thesis, the author attempts to take into consideration those studies in
criticism that converge to show how Shakespeare in his romances, and particularly in The
Tempest, experimented to give an overwhelming /all encompassing presentation through a
harmonious synthesis of dramatic forms, theatrical modes and the utilisation of new theatre
technology in his performances, exceeding the limitations of his contemporary stage. In the
late romances -by consciously thematising the nature of illusion by and within creating
illusions-, Shakespeare directs attention to artistic mediation as a reflection of our human
capacity to perceive different spheres of reality and our human stance. Through his blending
of different theatrical modes with their matching analogous allegoric themes in action -with
an underlying approach to self-reflexivity and complex handling of time as common
denominators- Shakespeare could lead his audiences to a unique perception of what we could
describe as the staged images of time and thought. The result, according to Lucking, is the
experience of The Tempest’s island as a place -that is out of space and time-, is an experience
that entirely becomes “the country of the mind”1. This mode of articulation could peel off
place and time from the plot resulting in a transcended, abstracted spatial-temporal
phenomenon.
I propose, Shakespeare’s fascination with visuality and developing a freer dramatic
form, suggested by his poesis in the play, could be analysed relying on Henri Bergson’s term
of the image and Gilles Deleuze’s notions of the crystalline structure, time-image and any-
space-whatever. These ideas motivated the author to consider these properties of the drama
the forerunner of modern and postmodern cinematic phenomena, and modes of expression in
some respects. The unique temporal properties - the sequencing of the play with the
condensation and unfolding of its imagery in the rigid dramaturgical framework - the first
scene, the inserted show elements of the banquet and the masque scenes, could all be
interpreted as the embryonic expressions of modern and postmodern cinematic
representations articulated in Prospero’s Books via: sequential montage, framing and picture
in picture techniques, superimposed images. Also, the unfolding of the emblematic imagery

1
Lucking, p.21.

2
on stage, applying Jacobian theatre technology, could result in an analogous impact on its
audiences as a cinematic or multimedia performance of today, focusing on audio-visual
perception while calling for reflection. The pre-modern stage of the play functions much like
the screen of postmodern cinema, as a place of problematization and thinking through
representations.

The second part of the thesis tries to seek -through formal indicators in both works of
art- the spirit joining their authors in their visions. Self-reflexive imagination, using allegories
and the experimentation with different media have always played an important part in the
postmodern film director and painter, Peter Greenaway’s works -making him a however
crucial though controversial, crucial author for several theorists of film studies- urge his
audiences to realize that a film is, first of all, a construct –a created illusion, an artifice- and
should be dealt with as a unique mechanism that helps our comprehension of the nature of
illusion and reality. By deliberately blurring the borderline between different media whether
presented on film or in live “staged” performances, he also takes inspiration from
deconstructivism, experimenting with all possible visual methods to reveal the “thin air” on
which a piece of art is grounded. In this respect, his adaptation of The Tempest, Propsero’s
Books, is an audio-visual journey of exploration and experiment to recreate Shakespeare’s text
on celluloid. The director is faithful to the original body of the text by incorporating almost all
the lines of the drama –the fact further emphasized by the performance of the re-known
classic actor of Prospero, Sir John Gielgud in the movie -, thus paying tribute to the Bard and
the Shakespearean tradition. GreenawayThe director also shows his joining spirit to the drama
in his inserted extra narrative. By his method of translating and structuring the imagery of the
text as well as the imagery of the epoch, he Greenaway leads his spectators to perceive time
as “out of joint” via the digital technology providing him with vast possibilities to propel
pictures on the screen to convey the images of memory and thought, rendered through
according to an extravagant and complex design. By the dramatized reflections on ng the
creative process and the different modes of representations within the piece, the viewer could
receive a cinema of ideas. The production on celluloid also turns back upon itself following
Shakespeare’s attitude, to overcome its own formal limitations by utilising new techniques
and state-of-art digital technology. His productions are also apostrophized as “the cinema of
excess” demonstrating his interest in the relationship between filmmaking, the making of art
and the history of visual culture2.

2
Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema p.38.

3
 The author of the film provides direct instances for the mode of articulation evolved
by the filmic medium of modern and postmodern cinema, defined as the time image, crystal
image and the image of thinking, and raises awareness in its audiences. The film could be
realised to be conscious of itself as an artifice, a zone that is open, leading the writer of the
thesis to call the production an emulation of “The Tempest experience”.

4
 Being Caught to Be Released

Throughout the first part of the thesis I make an attempt to explore whether
Shakespeare’s complex poesis unfolded by The Tempest through particular depictions could
not be interpreted as embryonic expressions of phenomena later deployed in the modern and
postmodern “cinema of thinking”. The chapters summarise the theatrical modes in
Shakespeare’s epoch, his attraction to visuality and his problematization of theatricality
suggested by his latest masterpiece. The analysis relies on some of Henri Bergson’s key
terms: image, body, artifice and Gille Deleuze’s notions of the crystalline structure, time-
image and any-space-whatever. I would propose, Jacobian theatre technology in the rigid
dramaturgical framework, the unique temporal experience, the sequencing of the drama with
the compression and unfolding of its imagery by the first scene and the inserted show
elements of the banquet and the masque scenes, could all be interpreted as the embryonic
expressions later unfolded by modern and postmodern cinematic articulations via: framings,
different montage- and picture in picture- techniques as well as the application of different
camera movements. Shakespeare’s unique dramatic mode and his imagery in performance of
The Tempest –mostly through its inserted scenes and visionary descriptions- turns the stage
with its events into a borderline, over-bridging interiority and exteriority, and coinciding
actuality and virtuality. While the stage is also a space of reflections --by differentiating
between dreams, visions, and reality – it is the place of differentiation and merger. Such
scenes translate the subordination of movement to time, resulting in a temporal experience
Bergson termed as duration. These qualities represent the Deleuzian phenomena of the time-
image and the image of thinking in modern cinema that lead audiences to gain the experience
of the vital impetus as well as different qualities of time by the artifice.
The second part of the paper finds the practices of postmodern cinema unfolded in
Greenaway’s adaptation of the play, Prospero’s Books, relying on the Cinema volumes by
Deleuze. The director follows Shakespeare by providing an insight to the creative process of
his artifice, the making of his devised illusion, through self-reflection. He accords Deleuze’s
claim about the medium that has become thinking by its own means, an art that could be a
“philosophical programme” and become “the friend of the thinker”. The analysis of the first
sequence of the film tries to outline Greenaway’s approach to the filmic image with its “pre-
verbal” properties, the primary element in the construction of meanings, while he deliberately
unfolds his process of creating his filmic universe in front of us. Also we can trace his
references to different literary and dramatic structures (pre-modern, postmodern references to

5
Jacobean and baroque modes as well as the French new novel) contributing to the genesis of
film conveyed by his complex extra discourse and extravagant imagery. By means of his
strategy of representation, he demonstrates how different meanings are constructed and
provokes the audiences to participate in the construction and reconstruction of meanings, thus
the interpretation of the film itself. He provides his spectators with a pluralistic vision to
allude to the creative impetus in his strategy. He demonstrates a fluid view of art in a
paradoxically rigid framework, analogously to the drama. Prospero’s Books by enumerating
meta-theatrical elements reflects Shakespeare’s attitude to his medium and emulates the
original play by displaying meta-theatrical and meta-cinematic devices of expression. In the
final sequence of the film, having deconstructed its own universe built up by the first
sequence, the director metaphorically releases Ariel in the last frames of his work. The “airy
spirit” leaves not only the narrative framework but the screen as well by running from the
background towards the foreground, jumping out of the frame and off the screen into the
auditorium, virtually, leaving the mere moving film image behind. Thus we can find the vital
analogies of art and life and the making of reality by illusion through the joint multifocal
vision of Greenaway, Bergson and, Deleuze. Greenaway in his equivocating adaptation joins
the releasing spirit of Prospero/Shakespeare to call for participation and emphasises the
capacity of his medium and art for “free play”, while reminding us with Shakespeare of the
finite and illusory qualities of representations and the infinity of the whole of reality.

6
We are tossing on what illusions?

In the following chapters, I try to shed light on the role of image - relying on
Bergson’s definition of the term as a key phenomenon by which human reality is constituted
an intermediary between perception and memory - in Shakespeare’s late masterpiece to
explicate the idea of his stage as a site for problematising epistemological issues of his age by
representing his imagery, aiming at audio-visual perception, for which he applied Jacobian
theatrical technology. The notion of the body according to Bergson - as a special new image
we know by affections “from the inside” and find inserted in the universe - may also help our
understanding of theatrical representation and the meta-theatrical property of the play,
following the Bard’s lines to explore his approach to the body and human existence. The
power of the word is emphatic, based on its Biblical sense by which the world was created, is
apparent throughout Prospero’s magic; the “overcoded” verbal instances, typical of the
emblematic theatrical mode, are obvious in the play. The word, as the source of power to
create, and overcoding, are both reflected and used respectively by Greenaway’s adaptation as
well. In the analysis of the complex opening sequence of the film in the second major part of
the thesis, we experience how Greenaway creates his filmic universe.

In The Tempest all the possible theatrical devices, techniques and forms of
presentation available in the late Renaissance are enumerated and submitted, to display the
nature of illusion and art, to elicit catharsis during its reception. Shakespeare provides an
extensive view of the human stance and capacity in his final opus by revealing the
creative/magical process behind a devised illusion with the systematic reflection on the same
illusion. By incorporating all the key genes, the themes of his major plays from the ouvre, the
DNA map of Shakespeare’s poïesis3, seem to be unfolded in this final masterpiece.
The teatrum mundi topos common to Renaissance audiences had been thoroughly
explored and developed by Shakespeare throughout his career, and it could be his last play
with all its encompassing effect that elevated its spectators to enter and experience, the
meaning of the metaphor. “All the world is a stage, And all the men and women are merely players;”
the topos is phrased in As You Like It. The induction of The Taming of the Shrew with its jest
on the poor beggar is not only a framework, a condensed five-act play which has not too
3
I use the term ποίησις, deriving from ποιέω: a kind of “making/creating …in the soul through the cultivation of
virtue and knowledge” defined by Plato in the Symposium. In this genesis there is a movement beyond the
temporal cycle of birth and decay. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis), also referring to its derivation ποίησις:
‘magical procedure’ regarding the theme of magic in the drama.

7
much to do with the very plot, but an induction to the idea of theatre itself, a direct analogy
and proclamation for off-stage spectators. This upbeat directs attention to the problem of
transforming men into spectators and actors. The opening scene of The Tempest is rich in this
respect in verbal allusions and images launching the play’s allegorical mode, and is
suggestive from a structural point of view as well. The episode on the “brave ship” with its
passengers could function as such a compositionally and dramaturgically organic introduction
to the rest of the story and induction to the play itself. The perspective of the sequence
underlies the notion: we are not yet in the spatial realm of the plot, on the island, we are at
sea. The classical unities of the play, are gradually made evident to the audience throughout
the course of dramatic events, and are reflected upon by recurring references in dialogues.
However, the very scene at the beginning is the only action in progress that does not take
place on the magical island of Prospero4. The emphatic function of the first moments is also
relevant if we take into account the staged objects of the show, the props enchanting the
people of the pit or the spectators of the court, by state-of-art theatre technology typical of
Jacobean masques. This unique feature, different from all the previous plays, the direct audio-
visual effect resulting in an affect, diverges from the conventional Elizabethan dramaturgy
and theatrical fashion of introducing the dramatic space and evoking the atmosphere via
verbal communication, performed in dialogues or detailed descriptions by the characters. On
the contrary, everything in the opening scene is for the eyes and ears - depicted by the first
lines of the drama through stage directions:

“SCENE 1
On a ship at sea; a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning
heard.
[Enter a Master and a Boatswain]”5

Later not only the spectators, but most of the characters on stage, are further captivated by
delicately devised illusions, the fine show of the banquet scene and the inserted masque itself.
As the audience is first shocked through a pure audio-visual perception, sympathy could be
more effectively evoked between performers and spectators during the first minutes. The
initial event is a vehicle regarding the mimetic aspect of the play whose function is to
introduce sympathetic engagements, compassion, as well as it is the basis for revealing the

4
The awareness of the relentless quality of time is evoked –the clock-time of the plot is synchronized to the time
of presentation experienced during the performance- as well as the references by different characters actually
roaming on the isle, are all demonstrative of the strict dramaturgy.
5
Throughout the thesis I use the Shakespeare Navigator on-line edition of The Tempest available at
http://clicknotes.com/tempest/TempestTextIndex.html

8
nature of illusion within the drama. But neither the characters aboard nor the audience of the
performance have found safe ground, we are thrown in a tempesta, we are in violent
commotion and disturbance, as we are thrown into relentless tempus6another theme
characteristic of the late masterpieces.

"The hour`s now come; / The very minute bids thee open thine ear. / Obey and be attentive."
These lines demonstrate, at the beginning, how thematic and theatrical meanings spring up
from the words of the play. The “minute bids” us, spectators, too. Miranda is addressed by
Prospero right after his daughter recounted her visionary perception about the shipwreck that
we reckon to be real within the narrative, according to the first scene. Thus, both temporal
axes -the time of the narrative and that of the performance- get synchronized. The unities are
so rigorously kept throughout the story that in the final act Alonso remarks that it has been
just three hours he and his son got shipwrecked.
Prospero lays down his magic garment:

Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.

The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch’d
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul-
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink. Sit down;
For thou must now know farther
I.ii.30-38

Moreover, he confirms the visionary aspect of reality, the storm has just abated; however,
while giving comfort to her daughter, he immediately corrects her. The tempest was raised by
magic, we are informed it was held under the control of Prospero and no passengers of the
vessel were hurt. The “potent art” of the father created the events by foreseeing the
conjunction “the most auspicious star” of “bountiful fortune” signalled him to summon his
enemies ashore. The theme of the controlling figure of his created reality has already appeared
in As You Like It and in Measure for Measure. Gradually, instead of holding up the mirror to
nature, the emphasis is on the visionary with creative capacity, finally taking the figure of the

6
The title is most suggestive as Northrop Frye pointed out, the etymology roots in Latin tempus.
“The sense evolution is from “period of time”, to “period of weather”, to “bad weather”, to “storm”. The
figurative sense is from the early 14th century “violent commotion”.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=tempest&searchmode=none

9
mage who raises the storm, but we must “know farther”. We also learn the controller figure
cannot avoid the effect of his created reality on himself, since it works upon himself as well,
and he should meet it as the unexpected. In The Winter’s Tale, the other late romance centred
on the theme, time is presented as an artificer and as the force of nature speaking of “his7
scene” and “his8 play” shifting the focus on the relationship between nature and art in
harmony. The authorship in the piece is addressed to “great creating nature” suggesting there
is no distinction between art and life, celebrating the triumph of art.
Throughout The Tempest, the theme of art is further developed by Shakespeare
merging with the quantized, mechanic aspect of time to draw upon the limitations of art.
Many in the 17th century began to see the formerly animal Platonic universe as mechanical,
and mind was still placed apart, a designer after the divine creator, the primum movens.
Restraint, strictness, discipline are some of the key values leading to freedom, enumerated in
the plot, woven into the relentless shape of temporality as condition. These characteristics are
also reflected in the composition of the play. The design is extremely conscious of itself.
Scenes are paired into mirror scenes and there are only nine of them, the fewest in number,
since A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rose claims. His study outlines the idea as follows9:

SCENE2 SC3 SC4 SCENE5 SC6 SC7 SC8

PROSP. ALONS. CALIB. FERD CALIB. ALONS PROSP..
FERD. SEBAS. STEPH. STEPH. SEBAS. FERD.
MIR. ANTON. TRINC. MIR TRINC. TRINC. MIR.

He pairs the following scenes thematically pointing out the 5th scene as the axis.
[S1-The Epilogue], S2-S8; S3-S7; S4-S6.
I would suggest that we should add the first scene and the epilogue to the arches. Rose does
not comment on them when discussing the symmetry of scenes however the balance is still
kept with the thematically relevant 5th scene in the middle, marking a turning point where
with the young couple alone by vowing their love seal as a potential regenerative power the
pure beginning of the “brave new world” to come is anticipated. The opening scene, matched
to the epilogue, could create the framework for the plot since they both address the audience
directly though in different ways. They are binary opposites, considering the fact, the harsh
induction utilises and presents the spectacular side of the theatre experience on the greatest
scale -drawing the audience by affect and technology into its illusion-, while the Epilogue is a

7
Italics by me
8
Italics by me
9
Rose: p. 173.

10
fine passage recited concluding the deconstruction10 of all such visionary illusions and thus of
release.
The first scene could be interpreted as the submersion in the late Renaissance show
par-excellence also typical and favourite scenery that time –the equivalent of present time
mega-cinema productions applying the latest technologies available, from computer
animation to 3D imaging to convey favourite action scenes- and the storm image analogous to
a disturbed and enticed consciousness. The experience, of being enticed by the spectacle –
either the spectators of the experience are off the stage, or on the stage within the plot-, is
evoked in the first scene and developed to be reflected upon by the characters’ comments. The
phenomenon further echoed in similarly eye-catching scenes leads towards the recognition of
such instances by both on- and off-stage spectators, showing an interest in the “magic”power
that makes something visible by allying with the forces of technology to gain control. The
magic, the enchantment is generated through scenic emblematic fiction. As Stephen Orgel
thinks, the court audience saw the models of the universe devised by the sophisticated
machinery of masques, as science, as the demonstrations of the divinity of the human mind.11
The technical and artistic instruments organize knowledge to imprint the world with the
models of thought that has its source in reason. It well reflects the change of attitude towards
an ocular vision that becomes the power of Jacobean theatre, a shift to the modern epoch.
Also, Descartes’ cogito, the “mind’s eye”, produces fictions to become reality. Prospero, for
the “bettering” of his mind, practically escapes to his studies in Milan, neglecting “worldly
ends” that provokes his exile –the result of violating the natural order, his alienation from the
whole of reality and his indebtedness to his modelled world of thought - that occurs to him as
unexpected. On the island he devices his prescience he probably learnt from his books in his
study to take revenge. Still, he has to face the unfathomable again, the process of regeneration
he commenced, has its impact on him as well. Ariel, the spirit of nature enslaved by Prospero
draws the magician’s attention from the abstractions of his plotting, his models in thought, to
the human and natural domain of compassion. There is a process of differentiation as well as a
process of integration throughout the drama, one of the properties of dynamism. However,
Prospero applies the hegemonistic mode of exercising power, the magic that belongs to the
revenge cycle of the romance is finally “abjured” as “rough”. The redemptive cycle of the
play is not governed by the cogito of the mind, but by the spirit of love and the power of

10
“Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already
dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air." (J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens’ Rock and
Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review 30 (1976), p. 34)
11
Stephen Orgel: The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre int he English Renaissance p. 67. [University of
California Press, 1975.

11
compassion. It is not the diminution of the human mind, rather the opposite, through
reflections and inspection, it is suggested, the divinity of the mind could be revealed as
wisdom --an awareness of the balance regarding the relations between nature, science and art
- to realise the human Self. Moreover, true Self-realization and regeneration is a communal
event and requires participation, as it not only turns out from the narrative, but also from the
centre of reflections regarding the sequence of the play, from the Epilogue, that also interprets
the idea to the theatre.
The drama suggests a release from theatre, and in the final analysis, by the Epilogue,
from the world of illusions. To complete his project, Shakespeare consciously reflects upon
his art and achieves a freer dramatic mode within a disciplined dramatic structure. The play
conveys the creative powers through the figure of Prospero with the limitations of art by
deconstructing the speculum mundi phenomenon as another facet of the teatrum mundi topos.
We could say the creative process embeds deconstruction to bring the releasing quality of art
to fruition. We could realise how Shakespeare finds and frees the creative impetus of art, the
motor of the enchanting magic that liberates, the power of regeneration, the force of life and
parts it from “rough magic” he finally abjures –the application that imposes models-in-
thought on the world, Prospero’s science “art”- from the “logic of causation”12. Prospero
knows how to set Ariel free and knows how to enslave him, but finally he is turned to realise
his true Self by the help of the “airy spirit” to release him “back to the elements” and among
us. Thus, we could realise his holistic attitude to find his artifice turning towards the whole of
reality, providing a harmony between Art and Nature. In this sense, the Bard reflects upon the
limitations of seeing, practiced knowledge and representations,13some other probable qualities
of an artifice the paper revisits relying on Bergson’s approach.

12
Peter Hallward explicates the differentiation between the „logic of creation” and „logic of causation” claiming
with Deleuze, art as self-sufficient and conforming to the „logic of creation”.
13
These issues and attitudes taken in the play suggest a convergence of the pre-modern and the postmodern
epochs, both sharing the quality of transition. László Kovács sheds light upon this question in his essay: Írás,
kép,test in Apertúra: http://apertura.hu/2007/nyar/kovacs

12
What music can we hear?

The finding of Shakespeare criticism to entitle the play to be the most musical piece of
the ouvre could be easily realised through the design regarding the performance -most
characteristically the inserted Masque- accompanied by “soft” music, as well as through
different references to music by the characters. The “sweet music” and cacophonous noise,
inescapable for the audience at performance, are part of the symbolic nature of the piece. The
air is full of music, sounds and noises. The simple ditties of Ariel, guiding all the shipwrecked
during their wanderings on the wondrous island, could be interpreted as a direct
representation of the interwoven nature of the play as performance text14, demonstrative of
Shakespeare’s mode of articulation exploiting the auditory faculty of perception.
The songs of the airy spirit also function as a chord of colourful threads in the symbolic-
metaphoric fabric of the play as a complex artistic composition. They propel symbols,
regarded as core elements in the semiotics of the play, to shift the focus to an intuitive mode
of perception towards “heavenly music”.

“[ARIEL'S SONG]
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
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
[Burden: Ding-dong.]
Hark! now I hear them-Ding-dong bell.”
I.ii.461-467

Metaphors build up allegories to embody the development of themes conveying major issues
as:

14
The idea of ‘performance text’ refers to the term textus : "An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the
raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and
audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible
texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth." (Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of
Typographic Style")
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=text

13
time - as relentless clock-time, physical time, with its sphere of actions and psychic time,
with its sphere of altering consciousness;
the qualities of love and compassion - realised by men as regenerative cosmic powers;
art, the artist and creative capacity - the application of illusions to conduct towards
awareness and freedom;
release –through questioning fixed schemes of thinking enabling characters to gain different
experiences, triggering change, they can realize certain experiences of release accordingly; to
finally arrive at the conclusion articulated in the Epilogue: the release from illusion.
Ferdinand is the first character in the dramatic sequence realising the very quality of the song,
commenting it as follows:

“The ditty does remember my drown’d father.

This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.”
I.ii.469-471
The words are most essential to these songs to devise imagery, while the tunes, the auditory
aspect, empower the metaphoric feature of the presentation. Prospero at a later stage of events
requires “heavenly music” to quiet his mind. What music is referred to? What imagery is
evoked?
At the dawn of the Renaissance, nature’s beauty and its imitation by arts, the cosmic
order and harmony revealed by this beauty affecting the soul and the mind, were the major
issues for artists and thinkers -influenced by medieval theology imposing distinctions between
arts and nature, regarding both its kind and degree. Aristotle’s view of arts as the pure
relations of nature could be easily mingled with Plato’s view, as representing shadows of
reflections. The direct representation of harmony was not easily conceivable through the
framework of the medieval period. Originally, based on Pythagorean ideas, geometry and
music were arts containing information about nature’s harmony as direct imitations. The
history of Francis of Assisi was also a great example in Christian mysticism for the
phenomenon of experiencing nature, the harmony within the sensible world, as the ecstatic
manifestation of God. Ancient Neoplatonists designated the sensible world as the first object
15
of knowledge, a stepping stone towards wisdom. The ability to listen to the music of the
spheres was of philosophers and investigators persuading divine ideas being pure in their
intentions; an approach underscored by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Francis Bacon in his

15
“First, the perceived world is analogous to an eternal world that is intelligible, or, in the Christian version, is
God. Then, beginning with the sensible world, one can achieve a sympathetic recognition of the qualities that are
analogous to first principles or divine ideas.” (Koenigsberger p. 216)

14
Advancement, Book II, VII, claiming the ethical goodness prerequisite of the investigator of
wisdom:
“He must be holy in the description of His works, holy in the connection of them, and holy in the union
of them in a perpetual and uniform law.”
Milton in his essay on the music of the spheres reads as follows:
“only if human nature were to be reformed would all things turn back to the Age of Gold, and we
ourselves, free from grief, would pass our lives in blessed peace which even the gods might envy.”16
In Shakespeare’s time the identification of music, love and social harmony was a
commonplace rooted in medieval thoughts. This idea is also expressed in the fourth act of The
Tempest, by the betrothal Masque, where Juno and Ceres descend to sing of peace and
fecundity to the young couple. The Neoplatonic belief in arts with their capacity to
rehabilitate the fallen state of human existence17 was widely accepted: by purifying our hearts,
we are again able to hear the music of the spheres. Having been tested by Prospero and
purified through the toils that were put on him and conducted by the mage, Ferdinand could
endure all the challenges -as he was empowered by his passionate love to Miranda, her beauty
evoked in him- and he is entitled to perceive the “solemn” music and show. The word beauty
is another repository of the tenet in the Renaissance to indicate a proper relationship between
parts and the whole, or between wholes on different planes of existence in Plotinus:

“But is there any similarity between loveliness here below and that of the intelligible realm? If there is,
then the two orders will be in this alike. What can they have in common beauty here and beauty there?
They have we suggest this in common: they are sharers of the same Idea.”
(Eneads, I, 6, 1)18

The play may be said to belong to the discursive fields of Neoplatonism, based on its
symbolism, the enlisted mythological narratives, and its articulated view of reality.19
Inevitably the pastoral peace of the Masque is not of social realism, but of symbols, emblems,
an allegory presented by Prospero to the new generation reminding them of the ephemerality
of the sensible world. It is structurally further emphasized by the disruption of narrative to
bring the effect of breaking the spell that theatre produces on its audiences.
Milton also inserted a visionary masque in his hymn On the Morning of Christ`s Nativity
merging the Christian lore and Neoplatonic tradition in the appearing allegorical figures of

16
Wells: p. 2
17
Henri Bergson in his philosophy suggests an analogous quality by his concept of the artifice, explicating it as a
„zone” of existence that has the capacity to restore/recompose the experience of continuity. From the
experiencing of representations as parts carved out from the whole, we are turned to the experience of the whole,
towards „direct experience”. (See below p. 12.)
18
Koenigsberger p. 231
19
Wells p. 65

15
Truth and Justice returning to earth. Prospero’s show would probably be recognized by
Milton as the expression of human potentialities, regarding it as historians, a fine example for
the shift the Renaissance meant by the estimation of men and the values of their works.20
Unlike the mimetic artist, the Neoplatonic visionary does not pretend. He can conjure up
whatever worlds he likes instead of producing a copy of the phenomenal universe. Thus, the
“heavenly music” suggested by the end of the fourth act probably belongs to the sphere of
mind, experiencing the proportions, rhythm and pattern of thoughts.
There is a tendency in the drama to move from sounds –the affective sound effects,
onomatopoetic expressions with tunes and music performed-, through words –the repository
of power used by Caliban to give form to his temper, or by the three men of sin during their
unconscious rambling of human wit, and last but not least, by Prospero to call events forth-, to
silence –that urges on- and off-stage spectators to be alert to intuit the music of the spheres.
Shakespeare seems to shift the focus from story to meaning. The characteristic of the play to
repeatedly expose visions for the illusion deconstructs the theatre of spectacle and self-
consciously proposes a more fluid and dynamic view of art in which meaning is generated
between play and audience.21

The fine dramaturgy, based upon the classical unities as its framework, reflects the
themes, rooted in allegories and metaphors – transforming into each other- to develop the
imagery of the play once nested in Jacobian theatre technology. In his masterpiece,
Shakespeare’s art seems to unfold itself. The Tempest could be described as a crystal of the
Bard’s poïesis, revealing the qualities of his spirit, functioning as a prism set in motion.

20
“When men saw fit not only to evoke geometry and music as arts that actually contained direct information
about nature`s harmony, but also to embody the information in their works, then the hierarchical aspects of the
traditional idea of the harmony of nature could give way to more fluid views.” (Koenigsberger p.35)
21
Wells p. 72

16
What “stuff” are we “made on”?

The inserted Masque, as a private and elite entertainment amiable to James, is an

allegory of harmonious, ideal existence, depicted in the era that transmits the teatrum mundi
metaphor in its most elevated fashion. The intentions of the show could be double folded. It
embodies the Classical ideal of cosmic order in a concentrated form –providing a fine show in
the public theatre to please the eye and to educate-, while transcending theatrical perception –
to fulfil the intellectual demands of more sophisticated audiences. Nevertheless, in both cases
the imagery fuels the entertainment that is based on the underlying notion of image.
Prospero’s end of the revels speech sheds light upon the complexity of the idea:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are 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,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
IV.i.148-158

What “stuff” are we, and our dreams, “made on”? Is the stuff similar to that of vision in both
senses of the word referring to both the faculty of perception, and the mental faculties of
dreaming and imaging? Furthermore, how could the “we” of the monologue be characterised?
The “baseless fabric” of the vision and the “stuff” we are “made on” according to the text and
its context, are synonymous and imply a common nature. We definitely perceive ourselves as
bodies and other bodies, other objects, surrounding us. We also perceive visions and dreams.
Is it possible to find these perceptions and faculties a common denominator suggested by the
monologue? To articulate answers I would rely on Henri Bergson’s philosophy. In Matter and
Memory, by image, his central concept, he articulates an approach that avoids dualism and the
traps of materialist and idealist extremes. He finds an existence that defines the whole of
reality. He addresses the issue in his opening hypothesis in the following manner approaching
the interrelationship between matter and image:

17
“Here I am, therefore, in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images
perceived when I open my senses, unperceived when I close them.”22 We must characterize
the term through differentiation for better understanding. The French philosopher also tells us
that matter is images.23 As matter is defined in terms of extension, images could be
characterized by extension, thus they mean objectivity. “Things that are external have an
order that does not depend on our perceptions; in fact, the order of our perceptions depends on
extension.”24 Bergson goes on to say: “an image may be without being perceived.”25 But, as
far as it is external and objective and not internal, it is not affection. An image is not a thing
either, Bergson claims, by pointing out that matter is no thing (form) “that produces
representations in us, but would be of a nature different from these representations”26, and it
is: “precisely what it appears to be. Thereby we eliminate all virtuality, all hidden power,
from matter”.27 But matter is based on images.28 And he adds, the image is presence, but this
notion is not idealism for him. Presence according to him means, that the image only appears
to be. He both criticises materialism as extreme differentiation and idealism as extreme non-
differentiation. Bergson claims, the image differs from representation, while matter does not
differ from representation, and implies, that in nature, representation and image cannot
differ29. His comment on the problem reads:
“…by “image” we mean a certain existence that is more than what an idealist calls a representation,
but less than what a realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the “thing” and the
30
“representation”” .

Thus, there are two characteristics for the image at this stage of the discussion: extension and
presence (the appearing quality of image). It is also connected to other images in the whole,
and there is a special kind of image: “Yet there is one image that contrasts with all the others
in that I know it not only from the outside by perceptions, but also from the inside by
affections: it is my body.”31 “The body inserts itself as something new in the universe.”32
These thoughts lead to the notion of the body as an image known from the inside by affection,

22
Mater and Memory 169/17
23
MM p.161/9.
24
Lawlor p.4.
25
MM p.185/35.
26
MM p. 161/9.
27
MM p. 219/72.
28
If one tries to explore matter by reduction still finds images, according to Bergson in Matter and Memory p.
185: „Condense atoms into centres of force, dissolve them into vortices revolving in a continuous fluid, this
fluid, these movements, these centres, can themselves be determined only in relation to an impotent touch, an
ineffectual impulsion, a colourless light; they are all images.”
29
Lawlor p. 9.
30
MM p. 161/9. Also, in the very section of Matter and Memory, Bergson approaches image by using degrees to
differentiate, and escape the traps of materialism/realism and idealism.
31
MM p. 169/17.
32
Lawlor p. 11.

18
and from the outside as object –where this outside does not radically differ from matter, that
is, a continuity of images. Thus, we are special images “made on” the “stuff” -that is also the
“baseless fabric of this vision”- other images surrounding us share. Images connected to other
images make up “the fabric” attributed with “baseless” emphasizing its quality33.
Nevertheless, The Tempest explores human consciousness, the language and the texture of the
play echoes Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the body.34

We could now ask: is image “baseless”? Is it without any foundation? Here we cannot
go further by the help of the monologue itself; but could follow Bergson in his explanation of
image, via the notions of quality and act as important milestones in the discussion.

“Indeed we have no choice: if our belief in a more or less homogeneous substratum of sensible
qualities has any ground, this can only be found in an act that would make us seize or guess, in quality
itself, something that goes beyond our sensation, as if this sensation itself were pregnant with details
suspected yet unperceived. Its objectivity – that is, what it contains over and above what it yields up –
must then consist … precisely in the immense multiplicity of movements which it executes, somehow,
within its chrysalis. Motionless on the surface, in its very depth it lives and vibrates.”35

The image is a virtual surface, it is such, that has depth; and in depth it is of vibrations,
movements, it is alive36. The notion of movement is all important in his philosophy, providing
a turn: movement does not depend on things, it is real. The philosopher insists on his choice
of the word image because of its referential charge. First, it suggests the unity of complex
colours and shades through visual perception, as well as continuity - when we open our eyes
the flow of light is experienced immediately. Secondly, it suggests a surface with depth, a
depth that moves37. Thirdly, and most importantly, it refers to art. His essay on laughter

33
The expression means: “’substance without foundation’, which poetically translates in this context to an artifice
or contrivance. Combined with the word vision (here in its denotation as "supernatural or imaginary
appearance"), referring to the pageant, it continues the theme of theatrical magic.” In:
http://www.bardweb.net/content/readings/tempest/lines.html
34
László Kovács argues for this notion in his essay: Írás, kép, test. Shakespeare és Greenaway találkozása a
boncasztalon in http://apertura.hu/2007/nyar/kovacs
35
MM p. 339
36
„The impression that the image copies a thing comes from the fact it is a surface and a surface has depth.” as
Lawlor reads. p. 6.
37
Bergson articulates his ideas based on the example of the chrysalis to point out that there is an aspect that goes
beyond quality, however, not essentially distinct, the vibrations. It reads in Lawlor as follows:
„Deep within the chrysalis there are vibrations of the larva that make the chrysalis gleam. Deep within the light
of qualitatively different colours, which are given to con-science, there are the quantitatively continuous
vibrations of science. The concept of vibrations …means that consciously seen colours are neither the mere
translations of a hidden original text nor the ‘duplicata’ of a non-present object; the colour is not even the
duplicata of a diminutive object like an atom or a corpuscule… The vibrations are there in the qualities.

19
defines art as the picture of the vibrations of nature38, and discusses the distinction between
the artistic picture created by spiritual energy and the natural picture created by material
energy, however claiming their virtual identity.39
The issue of art raises the question of representation again. We have learnt that the
image differs from representation by degrees. Representation is less than the image, because
the image is connected to other images in the whole, while representation is cut out from the
whole. It is the first decomposition of the whole. We get the first interval by representations,
via breaking up the continuity of images -the natural continuity-, but it can be recomposed.40
The recomposition is artifice. Bergson calls it a “zone”, that of schemas, symbols, language
and sense; where imagination only constructs its relations. It is a zone between matter and
spirit, natural and unnatural, life and death. If it reverses the “natural order of things” by
prioritizing things to movement because of utility, it turns into unnatural, and results in
fakery, artificial obscurity. Everything becomes “inert”. We only get indifferent abstractions,
the parts of the whole, representations. Provided the artifice turns towards the “moving
images”, it remains open and returns41 us to “immediate experience”, or “immediate
consciousness”, that is above the decisive turn where experience bends in the direction of
utility. Taking the direction of leaving action to intuition, we turn towards dreaming, memory
and spirit, a direction from the particular to the whole. It is a sort of experience of death, a
turning away from social life and practicality, a turning away from the external in order to pay
attention to the internal, to spirit. Nevertheless, Bergson claims there is no pure memory, nor
pure perception in actuality. The experience, defined as “good sense”, is given by the
realisation of the interpenetration of the two extremes, mutually reaffirming one another. One
can find examples for these turns and their motivations in The Tempest, as characters of the

38
„What is the object of art? If it were the case that reality strikes our senses and our consciousness directly, if
we could enter into immediate communication with things and with ourselves, I really believe that art would be
useless, or rather that all of us would be artists, for our soul would vibrate then continually in unison with nature.
Our eyes, helped by memory, would carve out in space and fix in time inimitable pictures.” L: p. 135. Laughter:
An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, L. A. Green Integer, 1999.
39
Lawlor writes: „Art and image are… virtually identical in Bergson. Nevertheless, we must keep them
distinguished: the artistic picture is art, while the imagistic picture is nature. p.8.
I would suggest this virtual identity realised by Shakespeare, when giving „great creating nature” the authorship
in The Winter’s Tale with a triumphant aspect of art (see above, page 3). However, revisiting the theme again in
The Tempest, he suggests an even more balanced approach to the issue, by finally putting aside the emphasis on
the triumphant character of art.
40
Lawlor p. 68.
41
This is a turning away from the literal human experience, from matter and action:
“Renouncing certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is the negative part of
the work to be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we were calling the return of
experience, when we have taken advantage of the nascent light with which, illuminating the passage from the
immediate to the useful, the dawn of our human experience begins, we still have to reconstitute, with the
infinitely small elements of the real curve which we in this way see, the form of the curve itself which extends
itself into the darkness behind them.” – reads Bergson in MM. p. 321.

20
plot are described -thus could be also grouped- according to their attitudes towards the
“worldly” or spiritual ends of life.
When Prospero accounts his past as the duke of Milan to his daughter, first he
mentions his turn toward the spiritual realms of life, neglecting his social role by leaving the
art of governance behind:

“And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed

In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel, those being all my study-
The government I cast upon my brother
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle-
Dost thou attend me?”
I.ii. 86-93

Next, he tells about how his brother ended up in total fakery, enticed by worldly, material
power:
“As my trust was; which had indeed no limit,
A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded,
Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact, like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie-he did believe
He was indeed the Duke; out o' th' substitution,
And executing th' outward face of royalty
With all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing-
Dost thou hear?”
I.ii.96-106
Both of the encounters are interrupted by Prospero’s warning to Miranda to pay attention. His
intention is later revealed for us. Prospero and Antonio were drawn by extremes and –
although we feel sympathy to the duke- both characters diverted and had/has to face all the
consequences of their decisions, actions and non-actions- that is, to return to “good sense”.
The dialogues between characters are also demonstrative about their attitudes, their
consciousness, define their scope of perception, too. It is the most apparent in case of
exchanges between the shipwrecked. First inevitably, the social hierarchy is questioned
immediately in the first scene aboard the ship, focusing on authority:
“ALONSO. Good boatswain, have care. Where's the master?
Play the men.

21
 BOATSWAIN. I pray now, keep below.
ANTONIO. Where is the master, boson?
BOATSWAIN. Do you not hear him? You mar our labour;
keep your cabins; you do assist the storm.
GONZALO. Nay, good, be patient.
BOATSWAIN. When the sea is. Hence! What cares these
roarers for the name of king? To cabin! silence! Trouble
us not.
GONZALO. Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
BOATSWAIN. None that I more love than myself. You are
counsellor; if you can command these elements to
silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not
hand a rope more. Use your authority; if you cannot, give
thanks you have liv'd so long, and make yourself ready
in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so
hap.-Cheerly, good hearts!-Out of our way, I say.”
I.i.9-27

The interwoven property of Shakespeare’s imagery is overwhelming again. The harsh

circumstances of natural forces endangering the mere human existence immediately outdate
social hierarchy. Also, the raging of the sea as an analogy colours forthcoming parts coined
with Prospero’s anger against those who “wrong’d” him. We get informed not only about the
mage’s disappointment and his quest for vengeance, but the fact he had raised the storm. The
disturbance in nature is an extension of his affective disturbance put in effect at great
intensity, put in action; and this disturbance is further extended to affect the souls brought
ashore on the island. We are in a storm in all respects, evoking all connotations of the word.
So, as the characters’, the audience’s common sense immediately gets twisted, providing a
turn to a different scheme of thinking. Later, the different attitudes of the shipwrecked are
revealed by their accounts and opinion of their escape:

“GONZALO. Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause,

So have we all, of joy; for our escape
Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe
Is common; every day, some sailor's wife,
The masters of some merchant, and the merchant,
Have just our theme of woe; but for the miracle,
I mean our preservation, few in millions
Can speak like us. Then wisely, good sir, weigh
Our sorrow with our comfort.
ALONSO. Prithee, peace.

22
 SEBASTIAN. He receives comfort like cold porridge.
ANTONIO. The visitor will not give him o'er so.
SEBASTIAN. Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by
and by it will strike.
GONZALO. Sir-
SEBASTIAN. One-Tell.
GONZALO. When every grief is entertain'd that's offer'd,
Comes to th' entertainer-
SEBASTIAN. A dollar.
GONZALO. Dolour comes to him, indeed; you have spoken
truer than you purpos'd.
SEBASTIAN. You have taken it wiselier than I meant you
should.
GONZALO. Therefore, my lord-
ANTONIO. Fie, what a spendthrift is he of his tongue!
ALONSO. I prithee, spare.”
II.i.1-25

The exchanges between the members of the courtly party suggest, not only the relations of
facts generate the laws of their thought, but also the form, the qualities of their thoughts
determine the quality of the facts they perceive42, as the forthcoming passage suggests. Their
perceptions of the island differ, reflecting their different levels of consciousness43, when they
are contrasted:

“ADRIAN. Though this island seem to be desert-

ANTONIO. Ha, ha, ha!
SEBASTIAN. So, you're paid.
ADRIAN. Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible-
SEBASTIAN. Yet-
ADRIAN. Yet-
ANTONIO. He could not miss't.
ADRIAN. It must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate
temperance.
ANTONIO. Temperance was a delicate wench.
SEBASTIAN. Ay, and a subtle; as he most learnedly
deliver'd.
ADRIAN. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.

42
Bergson in Creative Evolution expounds the idea to find the very mode of this generation, evolution. (CE.
p.368.)
43
Consciousness is a selection from the whole of images called matter infused with our unconscious psychical
states, memory, as this selection takes place in our body.

23
 SEBASTIAN. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones.
ANTONIO. Or, as 'twere perfum'd by a fen.
GONZALO. Here is everything advantageous to life.
ANTONIO. True; save means to live.
SEBASTIAN. Of that there's none, or little.
GONZALO. How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!
ANTONIO. The ground indeed is tawny.
SEBASTIAN. With an eye of green in't.
ANTONIO. He misses not much.
SEBASTIAN. No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.”
II.i.35-58
These aspects of consciousness complement and interpenetrate one another –as it turns out
form the working of the plot, and analogously enlarged, in the operations of the drama, in
dramaturgy -, they develop simultaneously. With Bergson, we could realise the dynamics in
consciousness, and talk about how the colours and shades in their intensities we find
articulated; instead of being reffered to them as discrete units.
The astonishing quality of the play lies in its metaphorical operations on all
interpretative levels. The issues within the plot become more complex. The drama attracts
attention to a balanced experience of life by simultaneously contrasting the priority of
sensuality - through perceptions - over the dream and vision-oriented aspect of reality –
unconscious visionary capacity - and the other way round. By doing so, it focuses our
attention on the interplay between the two, how they colour or over-dominate one another.
The process leads through deconstructing former modes of thought and perceptions, to
transform them and gain another one, regarding both its characters and the spectators of the
performance. The play introduces us to a perception- and effect-oriented theatrical experience
in the opening scene, then through reflections, leads us to the theatre of thought and meaning
–reflected upon the ephemerality of our life in “the end of revels speech”, serving as another
milestone to the theme of release- to take another turn back through the consolation scene to
its Archimedean point, the Epilogue. In a condensed manner, Propsero revisits the turns in the
play, from the reality of charm and dreams, to the reality of the island perceived as bare, to
turn back again - characteristic of the vibration experienced throughout the dramatic sequence
and by all the particularities of the imagery - and asks for release:

“Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint. Now 'tis true,
I must be here confin'd by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

24
 Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.”
Epilogue 1-20

The island itself becomes an extended metaphor. It is an image that is vibrating, moving.
For the sake of the analysis here, we have talked about different levels of
consciousness and different stages of the dramatic process. These notions evoke immobility.
And really, through our analytic approach they only provide different parts for comparison, or
different unities to be decomposed or recomposed. We face frozen unities - we find the whole
of experience fading. What we can intuit by the drama - having cogitated its dramaturgy as
the network of action-relations and the direct verbal reflections on key issues and themes - is
change and progress. When we approach analytically we find that change has a haunting
character. We can only deduce the phenomenon through time and with the aid of our memory.
We can realize it then as a movement of differentiation between states and respectively taken
their instants in time. It is the merger between two instant states. This merger, the
transformation from one state to the other one, is discernable. It is a flow of continuity our
consciousness interprets as an undivided whole, wherein states melt into each other44 Bergson
termed it as duration, or “real time”. It is a conception of time in which we find generation
and is in the realm of life and consciousness as the philosopher articulated in Time and Free
Will45
Shakespeare suggests by his magical theatre of The Tempest a concept of image that is
not a copy of a hidden thing, but a dynamic existence. It is a result and locus of creative
processes -an intermediary, relating matter and spirit as suggested through the analogue of the
chrysalis explicated by Bergson in Matter and Memory – that is based on duration. The
insensible, “monistic substance”, probably we could intuit as the attribute in Shakespeare’s

44
MM:
45
Bergson reads in Time and Free Will: „ …

25
“baseless fabric”. The Bard’s masterpiece suggests a world as image in its Bergsonian sense,
since “the image can expand to encompass any world with all the subjects and objects in it.”46
We, through perception and our memories, as bodies – special images - in the universe
constitute a selection of images and live to explore the whole of reality. Thus, we could
experience the world with Miranda as “brave new” as well as with the old sage we could ask
for release. In the final analysis we could also realize, Shakespeare in his latest play
articulates an approach to existence according to which the world is not of independent
subjects and objects and there are no sheer divides between the human and nonhuman realms
of reality, but we find entities constituted by their relationships. The Bergsonian image
providing the intermediary between physical and spiritual spheres of existence, with his
notion of matter as the aggregate of images, we could find an analogy to the “stuff” of the end
of revels speech. We could reconcile with illusions realising them as the part of the whole of
reality, paradoxically raising our awareness to delegate us to the problem of actuality and
virtuality, one of the key issues in the forthcoming chapter.

46
Rodowick: p. 195.

26
The aspects of time and the “time-image” in The Tempest

Throughout the scenic sequence of the play, rendered according to sever unity -
regarding its property to meet the classical unities - the audience perceive “framed” instances,
moving tableaux by scenes that are the audio-visually most entertaining parts of the play, that
also emphasize its visionary aspect: the first scene as an induction, or the inserted sequences
of the banquet and the masque. Different points of view are delivered, a phenomenon later
devised in the modern cinema by montage and picture in picture techniques, different camera
angles. In such cases, the perception evokes a “chora”, immersing the audience in a particular
experience. In this way, instead of story-telling, the audience gains a description/depiction and
finds itself in a particular situation. Place is springing up from time. In these sequences,
during the process of transmission, movement is subordinated to time to provide a given
milieu, where affection and cognition appear in interaction. The emblematic mode of
Renaissance theatre, where the setting of a scene was evoked by overcoded verbal
communication that was ekphrastic in character; Shakespeare, beside applying the former
dramatic mode, provides his audiences with the technology of the Masques - music and
highly elaborated props - to enhance the performance he uses both modes. This peculiar
experience is based on imagery and staged images extending both towards the direction of
perception and actuality in performance, as well as, through reflection and cognition, towards
virtuality; remaining open for further interpretations with its relations to our memory, that is
simultaneously getting accumulated by the perceived and cogitated instances. We could find
the unfolding situations traversing the borderline between actuality and virtuality turning the
stage into a space of such liminal situations. On one hand, the accumulated power of the
imagery is transformed into an audio-visual perception, through Jacobian technology, on the
other, characters comment their perceptions and experiences reflecting upon situations. The
island of the plot turns out to be a “conceptual persona”, a place that functions to provide
infinite relations for the characters. The drama urges a turn in the audience’s experience, not
only towards reflection, but to focus on the interaction between perception and memory; on
the very process at work. We can gain an insight to the interaction between actuality &
perception and virtuality & memory, forming our experience of reality that indirectly
emphasises the meta-theatrical nature of the drama. The entertainment is overwhelming, as it

27
could meet both the demands of the sophisticated audience at the court, as well as the
audience of the playhouses.

The Tempest is abundant in references to different qualities of time and memory,

exploring their relationship through the theme of change and regeneration.
From the first act the attention is drawn to the notion of time. Prospero first mentions time to
Miranda -with its relentless character that “bids”- to reveal their common past in Milan, as the
basis of the present situation and to outline his plot. Next, he asks Ariel for a time check and
we are made aware of the fact that the mage himself is also timed, he has to conclude his
project on time.

“PROSPERO. Ariel, thy charge

Exactly is perform'd; but there's more work.
What is the time o' th' day?
ARIEL. Past the mid season.
PROSPERO. At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six and now
Must by us both be spent most preciously.”
I.ii.276-281

This is a key moment, regarding the dramaturgical framework of the play, as we realise, the
events of the plot are contemporaneous with the time of the performance conforming to the
classical notion of temporal unity. Moreover, throughout the story we meet further references,
proportionally rendered, functioning as chronothetics, an internal clock, to underscore the
strict beat of the sequence:

“PROSPERO. (…)
For yet ere supper time must I perform
Much business appertaining. [Exit]”
II.i.113-114

“ALONSO. If thou beest Prospero,

Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, whom three hours since
Were wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost-
How sharp the point of this remembrance is!-
My dear son Ferdinand.”
V.i.147-152

28
Thus, the chronological time of the plot and the time in which the play is transmitted are
synchronized, firmly related to the spatial dimension of the play. Time is subordinated to
movement. We could gain the analogy of the cinematic movement-image. There is another
aspect of time with different quality. It governs the internal events of the sequence the
unfolding of different themes, and it is the time of assimilation by the audience. It is the
psychological aspect of time, encompassing the interrelationship between memory and
perception, including the magical - dream-like, visionary – quality of experience the
characters go through within the drama, while reflecting upon it. The “sea change” as a key
symbol, articulated in the song “Full fathom five” performed by Ariel, conveys such peculiar
qualities. It is through this song that certain meaning submerge and in a rich connotative field
begin to expand through metaphors and allegories to colour both Ferdinand’s and our
observation of the past events and the forthcoming actions in the play. So, this is a period of
revelation both for the characters in the plot, and analogously for the audience. The song
provides Ferdinand and us with a description of a vision, gradually turning from the spatial-
temporal actuality of the wilderness, from exteriority, towards an imaginary present that
relates with the recollections; transmitting between the realm of virtuality and actuality. We
gain a peculiar experience with qualities, Gilles Deleuze – who thought of Bergson as his
forefather, relying on his philosophy in several respects - found specific features of expression
in post-war cinema and defined them as crystalline structure47 - a means of filmic articulation
generating the time-image of modern cinema.48 For Deleuze a crystal is a phenomenon that
explores relations in an audio-visual situation as: the actual-virtual, the limpid or opaque, the
seed and the environment – providing its axis. Deleuze introduces his notion of the crystal
“co-joining existing scientific and artistic conceptions of the formal properties and concepts
of a crystal to work through the Platonic conception of a real image and its counterpoint:
virtual image. The crystal then becomes a concept that Deleuze methodologically uses in his
consideration of thought, time and differences in becoming.”49 He explicates the notions of
the crystal-image, crystalline- narration in relation to his concept of the time-image in his
Cinema 2 volume and “equates the crystalline structure of the cinema with the nature of its
self-reflexivity and the temporal medium…. The crystal is thus a philosophical mechanism
that is illustrative of concept production, and in relation to the image, the crystal concept is
the production and apprehension of time.”50 A crystal of time is formulated in films, when the

47
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 67.
48
As Rodowick reads: the time image “neither presents an imaginary world complete unto itself in which we are
asked to believe, nor does it give us a transcendent perspective from which the world should be judged as false
or true, lacking or full”. (p. 195)
49
Deleuze Dictionary p. 59.
50
Deleuze Dictionary p. 60.

29
image absorbs the real into a general theatre, putting into circuit an actual image and a virtual
image.51 Certainly, in case of the drama we cannot speak about filmic images, but what
appears to us during the reception of Ariel’s song and the Masque scene is analogous. The
actual image is the stage with its props, and for the reader the wilderness as it pops up in his
imagination, with Ferdinand and the airy spirit. Ariel’s song, the auditory expression is
presented to us with its visuals. The song evokes a virtual image in our mind, a “picture” that
is also dynamic; whether we are in the theatre, or over the text at home. These images are
forming a circuit during in our perception. The actual image is moving towards the virtual,
and the virtual is turning to the actual. There is the possibility of the “real” to become
absorbed and the virtual to become actual. Considering Ariel’s song, we get an audio-visual
situation that is floating. It is moving in “itself”, moreover, both its “force”, as well as its
reference, is change52. It is a moving reflection, resulting in a shift from perception to thought.
This very occurrence is the property of crystalline structures. It is a movement in the crystal
on its “seed-milieu” axis. A similar experience is provided by the inserted Masque surrounded
by Prospero’s remark at the beginning of the show:

“PROSPERO. (…)
No tongue! all eyes! Be silent… “
IV.i. 66
Soft music
Enter Iris

– and in the concluding monologue. The theatre turns to itself, its representations, and mirrors
theatrical articulation. The quality of the inserted show differs from Ariel’s song in its scale. It
is the enlarged variant of the vision evoked by the Ariel songs throughout the sequence, it is a
moving tableaux, and the lines delivered by Prospero framing the event, provokes attention on
the reflective mode, we should perceive it. However, the par excellence crystalline expression
of the drama is the Epilogue, when Prospero directly addresses the audience. It is the
retrospective poetical focal point in all respects (considering poetry in language, thematic
references). It gains its astonishing power from the directness in its reflexive property and the
mode by which it extends the drama’s metaphoric capacity through ultimately merging the
virtual levels -the recollections of the experience- and the actual experience so fully that the
accord of the two domains results in their indiscernibility. Prospero’s final monologue is an

51
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 81.
52
According to Deleuze relying on Bergson’s philosophy, interpreted by Rodowick, the time-image: “derives
from an intuition of the Whole, of universal becoming, change or creative evolution.” (p. 80.)

30
analogy to the crystal-image53 in post-war cinematic expressions, demonstrating how the
present is continuously splitting into the past; when the recording of the scene is put into
circuit with itself, the camera is watching the very scene it is recording. The circuit is a direct
reflection extending itself. Prospero, by addressing the audience, first embeds them in his
presence. Then, he draws attention to himself, to his own condition; next he opens our scope
by reflecting upon the plot having experienced as a unity, a recollection, to finally address his
spectators to cooperate and reflect on the very moment, to take part in the action that is still
going on. The scene provides a surveillance of surveillance, the investigation of the on-going
process that has also been an investigation, taking into consideration the self-reflexive
moments and scenes in the play that also form crystalline structures. Through this complex
phenomenon we face the foundation of time at the end of The Tempest. It is a moment of
presenting and experiencing time directly. Nevertheless, the drama, after this special moment,
not only reflects and evokes, but provokes and makes participation inevitable.
The interplay between the virtual and actual aspects of life is relevant in the
drama through the references to the importance of memory and recognition regarding their
role in reconstituting reality by different modes. Both the recognition of situations and
characters of the plot differ according to characters respectively, focusing on their altered
mode of consciousness and/or on their different schemes of reality. In the previous chapter we
observed how differently the shipwrecked people of the court perceived the island. Below,
there is another example through the dialogues between Miranda and Ferdinand when they
first meet, commented by Prospero:

“MIRANDA. What is't? a spirit?

Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir,
It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit.
PROSPERO. No, wench; it eats and sleeps and hath such senses
As we have, such. This gallant which thou seest
Was in the wreck; and but he's something stain'd
With grief, that's beauty's canker, thou mightst call him
A goodly person. He hath lost his fellows,

53
Regarding this special image I quote Deleuze’s Cinema 2 volume: “What constitutes the crystal-image is the
most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same
time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past….Time has to split at the same time as it
sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on,
while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time that we see in the crystal.
The crystal-image was not time, but we see time in the crystal. We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of
time, non-chronological time, Cronos and not Chronos. This is the powerful non-organic Life that grips the
world…..(the crystal is the) mobile mirror that endlessly reflects perception in recollection, ….an internal
mirroring.” p. 79.

31
 And strays about to find 'em.”
I.ii.535-543

“FERDINAND. Most sure, the goddess

On whom these airs attend! Vouchsafe my pray'r
May know if you remain upon this island;
And that you will some good instruction give
How I may bear me here. 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.”
I.ii.489-497

The nature of illusion is a major issue unfolded by the piece. One of its passive
facet, dreaming and its dynamic, creative aspect, imagining, recur throughout the sequence54.
Here is an instance for the metaphoric capacity of the dialogues through “sleepy language”.
Sebastian and Antonio are plotting against Gonzalo who is fast asleep:

“ANTONIO. Nor I; my spirits are nimble.

They fell together all, as by consent;
They dropp'd, as by a thunder-stroke. What might,
Worthy Sebastian? O, what might! No more!
And yet methinks I see it in thy face,
What thou shouldst be; th' occasion speaks thee; and
My strong imagination sees a crown
Dropping upon thy head.
SEBASTIAN. What, art thou waking?
ANTONIO. Do you not hear me speak?
SEBASTIAN. I do; and surely
It is a sleepy language, and thou speak'st
Out of thy sleep. What is it thou didst say?
This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving,
And yet so fast asleep.
ANTONIO. Noble Sebastian,

54
Deleuze claims in Cinema 2, the equivalent for the cinematic time-image is "the disturbances of memory and
the failures of recognition" ( p. 55.) – that interested European post-war cinema, dealing with dreams,
hallucinations and visions.

32
 Thou let'st thy fortune sleep-die rather; wink'st
Whiles thou art waking.”
II.i.213-231

In the visionary Banquet scene, Alonso cannot respond in an immediate way to the very
situation he is in; leading to a breakdown in his sensory-motor reactions. With the people on
the island, we shift towards the virtual aspect of the situation, as it is reflected upon as an
illusion:

“GONZALO. I' th' name of something holy, sir, why stand you
In this strange stare?
ALONSO. O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded. [Exit]
SEBASTIAN. But one fiend at a time,
I'll fight their legions o'er.
III.iii.109-118

As a result of the broken sensory-motor reactions of the characters; the action seems to peel
off, providing a mental depth to the situation through verbal descriptions, while clock-time is
ticking by unnoticed we find the aspect of time Bergson called “real time”, duration.55 The
interplay and dynamism of virtual and actual are conveyed, characteristic of the time-image in
Deleuze. “Shakespeare can afford, to even play with, the unity of time, because what he is
fundamentally interested in is mental and not sequential temporality, duree and not temps.”56
The outlined modes of time not only overlap each other as Lucking points out, but also fuse,
to provide the extraordinary quality of reception. The breaks and pauses within the narrative
of the dramatic sequence are also peculiar. They could be interpreted as junctions in the
network/ textus of the drama by underscoring the alterations and the penetration between the
magical experiences – turbulences, dream visions raised by Prospero – and the characters’

55
“ In the time-image, which finds its archetype in the European modernist or art film, characters find themselves
in situations where they are unable to act and react in a direct, immediate way, leading to what Deleuze calls a
breakdown in the sensor-motor system.”
56
Lucking: p. 21.

33
non-visionary, standard schemes of perception and memory; while they also function as
indicators of “spatial time”, both the clock-time of the plot and the theatrical performance.
Instead of the mere contrasting of exteriority – conveyed through spatial orientations,
considered as the field of actuality, given to perception as clock-time with its pertinent locus –
with interiority - the field of virtuality, that of, dream visions and memories with duration –
the focus seems to shift on their relation and their dynamism, providing an image, traversing
both, a borderline that is reflecting and finds its place on the stage. Lucking also emphasises
the revelatory property of the drama as: “Since process within the play is ultimately
determined by the dynamics of revelation, the time in which it unfolds is psychological rather
than strictly chronological in character.” – and continues to remark that this property of the
drama “lies at the basis of the seeming paradox, that The Tempest, while remarkable for its
scrupulous adherence to the classical unities, yet achieves a universality that is as unlocalized
in time as in space”. Thus, also relying on Lucking’s observation I would propose, the
revelatory capacity of the play gains its power from the above outlined aspects of temporality
working not only in the relations between scenes, but also in each discrete scene and event,
moreover, in each discrete element building up those events, according to an analytic
approach. I would suggest these qualities of the sequence show an analogy with the
conception of the time-image by Deleuze.
Shakespeare through the figure of Prospero, expanding the perception of the
inserted Masque and its interpretation in the “end of revels” speech, presents us with an
awareness of the qualities of reception in theatre. The audience could gain an insight to, or
intuit, the qualities of the generative process in the work of art. The qualities of universal
becoming, within illusions that metaphorically Alonso and Prospero in their exchange
articulate in the final act:
“ALONSO. This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod;
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of. Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
PROSPERO. Sir, my liege,
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business; at pick'd leisure,
Which shall be shortly, single I'll resolve you,
Which to you shall seem probable, of every
These happen'd accidents; till when, be cheerful
And think of each thing well. [Aside to ARIEL] Come
hither, spirit;”
V. i 275-285

34
The theatre and the island of The Tempest as an “any-space-whatever”

I would raise a minor issue rooting in Lucking’s last quoted remark on the play
and Deleuze’s term of the any-space-whatever. To articulate it, we should find out about the
term in the postmodern philosopher:
“Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a
perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle
of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be
made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as
pure locus of the possible"57
I would refer back to the different experiences of the island through the eyes of the characters,
adding Prospero’s words from the Epilogue:

“(…)Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands”
Epilogue. 5-10

We arrive at the notion of the “any-space-whatever”, and can understand the island as the
metaphor of the theatre. Donato Totaro, in the first part of his analysis Gilles Deleuze's
Bergsonian Film Project, refers to Reda Bensmaia to propose; Deleuze uses the term as a
form of “conceptual persona”, as used by artists and philosophers to establish a sense of order
to a chaotic and changing world.58 He emphasizes with Bensmaia, the term implies “a
condition for the emergence of uniqueness and singularities”59. Relying on the perceptions of
the characters, we could find the island as a “singular space” that “merely lost its
homogeneity”. Moreover, that is the space of “virtual conjunctions” and the locus of the
possible by providing the possibility to “make linkages in an infinite way”. Also, we cannot
escape the island experience as an entity, a “conceptual persona”, and find: however, the

57
Deleuze: Cinema 1 p. 109.

58
Totaro, Donato: Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project Part 1 <http://www.international-
festival.org/node/28661>

59
Totaro, Donato: Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project Part 1 (http://www.international-
festival.org/node/28661

35
drama asks for transcendence, still it is vibrating somewhere in-between its immanent and
transcendent qualities. We find the island, however “bare” it can be, is not a mere space of
geometry, but a space that is “anthropological” as determined by the human elements of time,
speeds and directions. It is perceived and practiced according to these human experiences. We
find our mind and body and the world interpenetrate one another; a phenomenon Merlau-
Ponty arrives at in his term “incarnate Cogito”, reworking Descates’s split between the body
and the mind. Thus, the play of the pre-modern, an era of transition between the renaissance
and modern, suggests an approach to reality analogous to the postmodern times by realizing
interrelationships important. Shakespeare’s drama suggests a logic that displays the
medieval analogous thinking while through reflections and differentiation uses rationalistic
logic as well, to reveal relations in existence. It draws our attention to an integrity that is
instead of totalizing provides an openness, that is the quality of the whole as we found in
Bergson and later in Deleuze. In the final analysis, from a historical aspect, we could find The
Tempest a late renaissance emblematic drama with its medieval roots becoming a modern
piece of dramatized illusion. While the self-reflective capacity and the final stance achieved at
the end of the sequence by abjuring totalistic practices, the “rough” magic, foreshadows the
criticism of the modern era, deployed and brought to extreme in the postmodern epoch.
By taking the phenomenological and aesthetic points mentioned throughout the
previous chapters, we could find those peculiarities of the play that explore themes and fields
like the power of illusion, temporality, awareness that is brought by reflection on its own
medium, and the creative process. These issues and the play’s complex allegorical and
metaphorical property attracted the director, Peter Greenaway, to create his adaptation
Prospero’s Books to the screen. As we later will see, the film shows direct examples for the
concepts of “crystalline structures”, “time-image” and “any-space-whatever”, counter-marks
of the “cinema of thinking” according to Deleuze.

36
 “Repetition and Difference”

In the forthcoming chapters I try to outline the joining spirit of Shakespeare’s

masterpiece and Prospero’s Books on film aesthetic grounds. Throughout the analysis of the
first sequence of the film I try to shed light on the self-reflexive mode by which Greenaway
provides an insight to the creation of the universe of his artifice, referring to some aesthetic
phenomena -mentioned in the previous part of the paper - the film unfolds finding its roots in
the drama in embryonic state. I ground my argumentation on Gilles Deleuze’s notions of the
film image –with its “pre-verbal” property-, time-image and crystalline structure. However,
the director’s art having been mostly interpreted as pure intellectualism, demonstrates the
author’s demand for a holistic attitude with the participation of the audiences realising the
creative process and possibility, an evolvement, the medium provides and Deleuze forecasted
at the dawn of the digital era. This idea has been realised by the artist in his live multimedia
and VJ projects of recent years. I suggest his very demand is palpable in Prospero’s Books, a
production of the early 1990s as well. By the investigation of the last sequence of the
production, we can realise deconstruction being the part of the creative process. Ariel’s run
towards the foreground, rejuvenating during the shot, and his jump in slow motion help the
audience realise the impulsive activity that belongs neither to the world and space of the
author – whether it is Prospero’s/ Shakespeare’s / Greenaway’s regarding the narrative
structure and the discourses of the film – nor to the world and space of the subject who
perceives, but to the field between them, to the artifice, Bergson termed as a zone, the zone of
different powers and directions. Thus, the sequence could be interpreted as the final reflection
on representation and the nature of illusion - to raise the audience’s awareness and provide
them a possibility to find, instead of a framed totality, the open aspect of the work of art --
among many other aspects previously presented- the Bergsonian “zone”, turning to the
infinity of reality. On these grounds I would propose that the film emulates “The Tempest
experience” in a postmodern fashion.

37
An outline of the environment to Greenaway’s crystalline structure

I would first highlight some of the major cultural and aesthetic issues from
Greenaway’s network of his artistic interest and attitude in which Prospero’s Books was
created and are apparent in the adaptation to introduce my discussion and revisit the field of
scenic phenomena we found present in The Tempest with the purpose to prove that the
modern cinema unfolded the same devices with its own means. These are the peculiar features
of the play that with Deleuze we could define as analogous examples of the crystalline
structure and the time-image on the basis of the film adaptation.
The director could realize analogous phenomena to his artisitic attitude regarding his creations
in general and the play; qualities he not only deploys but also analyses in his adaptation,
becoming a “film essay”, as Paula Willoquet-Maricondi finds the production in her study. The
opinion is not surprising, since the director is well-known to make a cinema of ideas instead
of emotions and character identification. In a lecture explicating his approach he said, the film
is a “philosophical medium” that is used by him to “read” culture60. He seems to accord
Deleuze, who claimed modern film to be “the friend of the thinker”. To follow the director’s
fancy of taxonomy and making up catalogues, we should allude to those phenomena and ideas
Shakespeare demonstrates in The Tempest and Greenaway unfolds in Prospero’s Books:

-The stage/screen as the place of problematization regarding epistemological issues.

- Stage on stage, play in play and picture in picture, film in film: meta-theatricality / meta-
cinematic mode by self-reflexivity. The representations of reality becoming the models for
reality, the man-made reality, foreshadowing postmodern hyperspace
-Exploring new technologies: spectacular mode of expressions in media, the uses and abuses
of media61

60
Maricondi: p. 177.
61
James Andreas claims, Shakespeare anatomizes “ancient, rediscovered, and current media and the powers for
stasis and change that are implicit in and generated by them. The play itself is a multimedia spectacle and
extravaganza that serves as an illustration of its own speculations about technological power and its uses and
abuses. The medium is the message in The Tempest.” p.190
James Andreas, “Where’s the Master?”:The Technologies of the Stage, Book, and Screen in: Shakespeare
without Class: Misappropriations of cultural capital
Edited by Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds
PALGRAVE 2000

38
-The uses of knowledge and the known as the “logic of causation” and art as the “logic of
creation” turning towards the unknown.62
-The creative impetus in focus: realising it as the common denominator of Nature and Art,
the power of life and existence.

Regarding The Tempest and other Greenaway’s films in general we should also consider the
following problems:

-Building rigid structures to be overcome

-Foregrounding visuality
-Providing peculiar experiences of time and space to the audiences

We also find some aspects the director deliberately emphasises in his productions referring to
his inspirations by late Renaissance and 17th century art as:

-Thematizing things and people in the analogous fashion of the ancient art of memory.
-Focus on movement, change and metamorphoses.

I should add here that beside the filmic medium, the artist deals with these issues and the
experience of peculiar spatial-temporal experiences in other media, different from film, and
utilise multimedia to extend his artistic endeavour. His installations, exhibitions and operatic-
productions are “meta-and-mega-cinematic “events” that cross-fertilize one another and
intricate ways and exist in multiple versions”.63 Some of his installations and performances
translate or reflect the filmic experience or basic elements of the medium by their respective
means. His paintings e.g. the one titled In the Dark, however, seem to refer to themselves in a
scrutiny, turn out to be speculations on text, actors, audience, components of the cinema he
later explored in city installations. By his public art-project The Stairs that consisted of ten
installations in various cities exhibited for 100 days respectively, the director elaborated on
some basic elements of filmic expression titled as: Location, Audience, Frame, Acting,
Properties, Light, Text, Time, Scale and Illusion. The project can be considered a unifying
work by the artist that responded to his concerns with multiple viewpoints and his desire to
activate his audience.64

62
Hallward p. 104.
63
Willoquet-Maricondi p. 25.
64
Willoquet-Maricondi p. 47.

39
 Despite approaches in film theory explicating the art of Peter Greenaway as extremely
intellectual, I would argue, the multimedia artist shows a rather holistic attitude to experiment
with different media to liberate his audiences by provoking an awareness of his works as an
artifice, a “zone” of “free play” that may lead them back to the impetus of life. The director
“practices” cultural memory – on theses grounds some critics could find him to be elitist - and
tries to overcome set regimes of past and present modes of representations/expressions by
utilising current technology. In his expressions the audience can realise his approach to art
with its inherent capacity to repetition65 -in the Deleuzian sense of the notion- instead of
imitation. Regarding the filmic medium, he explores all the possibilities immanent in this
form of art, inevitably diverting from the Hollywood and Bollywood regimes that focus on
industrial and economical concerns and find their major goal in fulfilling public demands
centred on the mimetic mode of the cinema. Still, it does not mean an absolute refusal of the
property of the medium to affect at Greenaway. As an example, in Prospero’s Books, the
director pays particular attention to music to set it free from its standard accompanying
function, that of pictures on screen, to elevate its conceptual and dramaturgical role in the
constitution of meanings. By the very inversion of the standard hierarchy and interpretation,
regarding the relationship between the score and pictures, we find a peculiar experience
enhancing the performance springing up from the emotive spheres of reception. Moreover, as
a painter, besides developing conceptual strategies with different uses of lightning or colour-
coding, he deliberately designs eye-catching scenes, camera plans, meticulously wrought
props to achieve greater impact on his audiences, further enhancing the visual properties of
his productions not only to call attention to his conceptualizations, but to please the eye and
affect. In his adaptation he used paint box technology that widened the director’s possibilities
of expressions. Some references are made to the mode of video installations of the late 1980s
and early 1990s, evoking the works of Bill Viola, mostly apparent in the first scenes of
Prospero’s Books66. These peculiar images as well as the props of the studio absorb and

65
As Deleuze explicated the very aspect of art in his volume Repetition and Difference
András Bálint Kovács:
Notes to a Footnote: The Open Work according to Eco and Deleuze in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film
Philosophy edited by D. N. Rodowick
Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2010
66
I provide active internet links to websites that include short clips to demonstrate discussed filmic issues,
scenes in the thesis. The following link is a reference to one of Bill Viola’s video installations, a meditation on
time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBYWVY-R9RU&feature=related

which work has extreme relevance to the very first pictures in the first sequence of Prospero’s Books. At this
stage of my discussion, I would call attention to the very first images of dropping water as well as to the charged
quality of the sequence with evokative power by its allusions to Renaissance alchemical emblems and universal
symbols displayed in the manner of video installations:

40
display traditional forms of fine and plastic arts. Greenaway has always underlined to make
bookish films and as the title suggests his “film essay” focuses on the volumes Gonzalo
provided him in his exile. The bookish knowledge to control people is the ground for the
director to set his discourse on when he says: “We are all so knowledgeable now there’s so
much knowledge available, that in some sense, we, too, have become magicians”.67 The film
becomes a critical reading of the dawning as well as the end of modernity. By his discourse
and inserted extra narrative woven into the drama, he can articulate his encyclopaedic
demands, while directing our attention to the transformations in our culture and the cinematic
medium as well. From an aesthetic point of view, his creations are so much overloaded with
audio-visual information that it is almost impossible to receive and explore the artifice in one
encounter. The director consciously urges us to realise and apply the possibilities inherent in
our video and digital culture to reset our mode of receiving moving images. Via his approach,
the Guttenberg-galaxy of the modern era is translated into the “image propelling” postmodern
epoch. The director pushes the limits of abilities to perceive information to an extreme by the
“density” and the speed of transmitting images. He shows a paradoxical and maybe
provocative attitude to meet the current fashion of media culture: by increasing the tempo of
transmission the artifice invites us to revisit it again and again, resulting in another facet of
repetition, in readings and re-readings. By his strategies in presentation, he once distances his
audience from the perceived instances and differentiates to hinder a “bromic” effect of movies
to draw us back to his devised illusions again, shedding light on their created and constructed
quality – whether relying on the audiences’ emotions or cogitations – to make them
participate and reflect, to generate meanings.

To depart my analysis how Prospero’s Books unfolds the play’s properties to provide
a unique spatial-temporal experience and its self-reflexive quality to problematize illusion -
through metaphors of dreaming and memory and the relationship between virtuality and
actuality, the embryonic states of the Deleuzian notions of the time-image and crystalline
structure- I outline the modes Greenaway explores these concepts in his early etudes and
films. During his career working as a film editor and director at COI (Central Office of
Information) from 1965, he experimented with the medium. These works display his interest
in the techniques that were developing in the decade and are countermarks of the neo-realist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsxauCwOb0&feature=related
67
Willoquet-Maricondi: p. 178.

41
Italian cinema in film theory. One of these experiments titled Intervals68 sheds light on the
different modalities of time. Through the rhythm of the sequence provided by montage
technique and the alteration of the clicking metronome sound effect -sometimes
accompanying, other times setting apart from movement appearing in the images and the
movement established by the arrangement of the images in the sequence- Greenaway explores
time by drawing attention to the gaps in the sequence. We experience shuffles during the
perception of the images, once by their audio aspect –when the clicking of the metronome is
paused and then restarted- on the other hand by the breaking of the flow via sudden cuts.
Moreover, some of the shots present internal montages themselves conveyed by the rhythm of
the people walking into and leaving the plan from the right or the left side. Gaps pop up at
different registers of the sequence, the disruption of movement is achieved. Instead of the
events and the narrative of the images, the people passing by in streets, our attention is
focused on the peculiar experience of tempos and periods of movement. The clicking of the
metronome evokes the quantized, discrete temporal aspect, measured, while due to the pauses
and the abnormal movement the sequence provides, the psychological, subjective character of
time seeps through these gaps into the sequence, the Bergsonian duration. The sensory-motor
scheme gets disrupted by these images, as a result of the shuffle and montage technique. It is
interesting to see how through the depiction of movement the director overcomes the
movement-image to make the different qualities of time accessible for the spectator.
The filmic concept of crystalline narration appears in The Falls, another short film of his
early career made up of fictional mini-narratives rendered in taxonomy accompanied with a
voice-over of documentaries. One of the episodes shows a woman talking on a public phone
in French. Her part of the conversation –an indirect monologue of memories- is translated by
the narrator into English, while images evoked by the talk-translation-narration are inserted
into the shot depicting the woman talking.69
These experiments well demonstrate the direction the film maker takes from the late 1960s
and his exploration of different temporal and reflexive modes Gilles Deleuze terms as the
major tenets of modern and postmodern cinema.

Throughout the course of his works the director quotes, refers to and reflects upon his
own previous creations regardless of media sometimes reworking and renewing them. A
phenomenon we could interpret as a mode of repetition: the present embedded in the past, still
different, thus able to forecast he future of his articulations. In his feature films we can find

68
The film etude is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT0ELNvNxIA&feature=related
69
The episode is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AfqqDbWYxA&feature=related

42
expressions and techniques as well as ideas reappearing based on his etudes and short
experimentations with the celluloid In his movie Zed and Two Noughts the director extends
his time-images when he expounds on the themes of decay and evolution in the final scene
reflecting the present turning into past resulting in a crystal-image.70 Or another example is
how he crystalizes memories and reflects on the displayed past moments of the main character
to leak them into a present situation and force his spectators to extend their scope of attention
to the past, the present and by generating expectations, to the future. Through reflection on
recollection and memory Greenaway turns the present into a tense moment by extending it
and urging expectations. The architect of The Belly of an Architect enters a room full of
devices of photography and slowly walks past a wall packed with black and white
photographs of his past, mostly portraying private moments and emotionally charged
situations from his life71. During his walk the camera in a slow tracking shot scans the
pictures on the wall, different plans altering according to each photograph, self-reflexive of
the cinematic mode of expression. Finally the man reaches the end of the line of photos and
faces the blank white wall against which he pushes his face. The gesture could be interpreted
as the print of the present on a surface, a white sheet. Actuality is foregrounded by the director
while referring to the virtuality of pasts and opening up an expectation concerning the very
next event to take place, the future. Metaphorically speaking, when the photo made of flesh is
“taken” and the character is facing the white wall in a tense moment, waiting; we can see
time, splitting. We get a crystal made up of circuits of pasts and the powerful present. The
whole scene reflects the notion, “sheets of past” and “peak of present” in Deleuze and goes
back to the idea by Bergson, that “memory is not in us; but it is we who move in a Being-
memory, a world-memory.”72 In short, the past could be described as circles that are
contracted, each one of them containing everything at the same time; present is the extreme
limit, the “smallest circuit that contains all the past”73, the peak of past, an infinitely
contracted past. The past constitute shrunk or extended strata, sheets, the circles, each one
with its characteristics, its aspects and themes. When we try to remember, in recollection, we
enter these regions, the circles. From the point of former presents they seem to succeed each
other. On the other hand, they coexist from the point of view of the actual present. Fellini
articulates this Bergsonian approach as: “We are constructed in memory; we are
simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity.”74 These are the paradoxical
features of non-chronological time, a conception films depict and its first great example is
70
The scene from the film is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFO2vqOBtl0
71
The scene from the film is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIDMSPlLFWc&feature=related
72
. Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 96.
73
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 96.
74
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 96.

43
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane according to Deleuze. Moreover, in the tense pre-longed
moment of waiting regarding the scene, the audience’s imagination propels the probable
virtual solutions “the peak of the present” could enter, as probable events to take place, other
virtualities, as future.
According to the philosopher we can approach present in a different way, as well, as
the whole of time, by separating it from its actuality and adopting St Augustine’s “fine
formulation, there is a present of past, a present of present and a present of future, all
implicated in the event, all rolled up in the event, and thus simultaneous and inexplicable.” On
these grounds he continues: “a time is revealed inside the event, which is made from the
simultaneity of these three implicated presents, from these de-actualized peaks of presents. It
is the possibility of treating the world of life, or simply a life or an episode, as one single
event which provides the basis for the implication of presents.”75 The idea leading to a time-
image to be found in Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad, in which there is no succession
of the presents, but a simultaneity of the peaks of presents, making the temporal experience of
the work schocking.76We can realise in Prospero’s Books how Greenaway, being aware of
these modes of cinematic expression, articulates his special crystals and constructs a network
of the different crystalline structures, mostly based on different time-images -memory and
dream images- to unfold his filmic universe.

The formation of a complex crystal in the first sequence of Prospero’s Books

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
(Peter Greenaway in an interview in Zoom, 16 Nov 1988)77

The director is generally fond of the aesthetic figurae of scopic regimes used by the
late renaissance and the baroque epochs all presented in his adaptation as veduta painting, the
manippea, tromp l’oeil, mirroring, the morphing of forms, detail and fragment, and he
demonstrates his admiration of Dutch painting. His fascination with the Renaissance world-
view is echoed in his writings as well, and applies an “opticality that becomes a form of
memory, relying on the old but striving for the new.” His scopic regime weaves the narrative
aspect of the texts he uses and different forms of the past to work out the texts and forms of
the future. In this manner he re-writes images with respect to art history. Regarding

75
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 97.
76
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 98.
77
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Greenaway#Prospero.27s_Books

44
Prospero’s Books we find writing and re-writing the key processes that are supported by the
visual design of the complete film based on paint-box video technology to provide the author
with a wide-range of cyrographic techniques to create images and imagery to form crystalline
structures conveying complex ideas and providing peculiar experiences in reception. He
conceptualizes the original text of the drama in a fascinating manner. Hardly a few segments
of the play were omitted –mostly the lines of the Masque scene- and only at the beginning of
the film do we find a sort of rearrangement regarding the body of the text. In the opening
scene, when the focal point of Greenaway’s interpretation is set by Prospero, his hand writing
in a close up and Gielgud’s voice sounding the sentence, “Knowing I loved my books…”
Immediately reflective of the title, the beginning of the film suggests the director’s reading of
the play through books and knowledge enhancing his emphasis on the act of writing by the
fine calligraphy the hand is scribing the lines in the images. Thus, from the outset we are
informed, Greenaway authors the dramatic text through the character of Prospero, taking a
canonical position regarding literary criticism by interpreting Prospero’s figure as the
metaphor of Shakespeare who bids farewell to the stage. Via depicting the production of lines,
we gain a reflection on the creative process of writing. Through Gielgud’s sounding the
written lines, Greenaway translates the process of creation into the theatrical mode and
through the filmic images popping up the imagery of the first scene of the drama further
extends the creative process, applying it to the cinema. It is important to mention here, after
the very first period of the opening sequence, I analyse in detail in the next chapter of the
paper, that the extra discourse is set by Greenaway, as a kind of frame, expanding on the
fictional tomes Prospero brought to the island, and gradually gets woven into the original text
to develop the peculiar narrative strategy of the film. I reflect upon the images of the sequence
at a later stage in the chapter when explicating Greenaway’s crystalline structures in detail,
but I should remark here that by special framings via picture-in-picture technique, a flow of
information floods the screen and the audience’s perception. We find ourselves in the raging
sea of images and meanings evoked by the cinematic imagery, in the representation of the
first scene of the play, analogous to the original play, regarding the first scene as an induction,
while we get the reversal of the dramatic experience, as the film immediately burdens our
reflective capacity to follow and interpret the displayed instances. Instead of drawing us into
the dramatic events we find a gap, set up by Greenaway’s extra diegesis of the books, that in
effect from the very first moment creates a distance, a virtual, mental borderline between the
dramatic events of the play and the event of the film; a peculiar experience sustained
throughout the cinematic performance until the very last moment when they seem to merge.
At this early stage of the film sequence we can also immediately realise how the director

45
indirectly urges his spectators to “read” the opening scene, to be actively involved in the
construction of meanings, integrating them to the creative process, or in other words
extending the process to urge contribution. However we could call this contribution, regarding
its quality, an involvement by reflection and cogitation, a mental involvement.
Via the opening sequence78 of the film, we are provided with an insight by the director
to the creation of his cinematic universe. He initiates a second genesis, that of Shakespeare’s
play; a fictional process and pseudo genesis of the original dramatic text adopting the first
scene of the play. In the analysis we find different modalities of the crystalline structure
developed by Greenaway that finally results in his complex expanding film crystal. I rely on
the classification of crystals by Deleuze to explore this construction. The director explicated
the importance of the opening scene in a film as: “The start of a film is like a gateway, a
formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's
patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude,
character and intent and ambition.”79
He opens his production with images of dripping water with their blops. These seconds are
evocative in several respects. The appearance of the black blank image once presents the par
excellence, pure cinematic image; the zero degree of the moving image, the empty image. It
translates the void, even in a Biblical sense as well, with the first drop suddenly arriving from
the top of the frame and falling to the bottom, revealing light; a most symbolic expression of a
moving image. From a film theoretical point of view it is also allusive of Tarkovsky’s
metaphor of the cinema, as a medium providing the image of the universe in one drop.
Moreover, according to the scene in his Nosthalgia, the protagonist pours olive oil onto his
palm and says: “One drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two.” 80
His comment evokes the aspects of time in Bergson: the past, present, and future are
indivisible and they co-exist. Duration, like the olive oil changes incessantly and cannot be
divided. Regarding our investigation of crystalline states and modalities, according to Deleuze
in the French school of modern cinema, Renoir presents images of water in two modes when
forming crystals. The first state is characterised by standing water or frozen water surfaces as
equivalents of the flat mirror. The second state features water in motion, in flow and its
equivalent pair of image is of the wind in Renoir81. The first crystal type according to the

78
The sequence is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsxauCwOb0&feature=related
79
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Greenaway#Prospero.27s_Books

80
Michael Vesia: Transcendental Images of Time and Memory in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nosthalgia
http://www.synoptique.ca/core/en/articles/nostalghia/

81
Deleuze: Cinema2 p. 84.

46
French thinker is the perfect crystal. It is the image dividing in two, into an actual and virtual
facet and they oscillate; a process that does not go to its limit, when objects, living beings and
reflections enter into the circuit of coexistence exchanging and constituting a vision of the
world as spectacle and theatre. I propose, Greenaway generates from the essential cinematic
moving image - that of the dripping water - a pure audio-visual situation, a minimal crystal
image in an inventive mode. We can only perceive the drop falling then splashing and
blopping. The auditory facet of the cinematic image, the blop, completes the visual facet of
the event and at the same time reflects the whole of the event, the phenomenon of dripping
water. However simple the very first image is, it provides an anatomy of the cinematic image
by reflecting upon its capacity of movement and turning the focus on time as well. By the
drop -moving in out of the frame of the screen, from above, and splashing into the void,
generating the surface to move and form a tail and falling back to blop - time begins to split.
We face the present of the drop and its immediate past, or regarding the void, we experience
the falling of the drop and the sum of these drops, their pasts; but these pasts make up an
abyss instead of distinguishable sheets of pasts. Such modes of minimalist images, by their
economy, stimulate our imagination and become symbolic. Picturing a natural phenomenon in
such manner suggests the indiscernibility of presentation and representation here. The process
of creation has just started in front of our eyes and the audience’s attention has been drawn to
this aspect. It could be considered as a point of reference to the interpretation of the filmic
universe. The basic element designating the core in the director’s creation of the artwork, is
construction itself that reappears in the final sequence of the production, marking the last
point of deconstruction. The basis that reveals and melts everything into itself is the moving
image in the Bergsonian sense that becomes the fibre of all the texts appearing in the work,
evoking through the void association: the whole of time and its movement, memory, the
hovering spirit. It is a condensed image of Being. Here the pure optical and sound scenario
crystallize, and as Deleuze remarks: “In fact there is never a completed crystal; each crystal is
infinite by right, in the process of being made, and is made with a seed which incorporates the
environment and forces it to crystallize”82 And really, the second movement at the stage of
crystallization is the introduction of the narrative, in form of writing text, by an image of a
hand writing in calligraphy the lines “Knowing I loved my books”, alternating the blackish
background with the white sheet of paper. The oscillation of the first image of dripping water
is oscillating with the image of the sheet and the writing hand. The image of writing protrudes
in the intervals between the blops. The period translates each drop of water as an expansion of
the spirit into thought. This way, the process of formation begins and evokes the idea of

82
Deleuze: Cinema 2: p. 85-86.

47
thought in articulation, an internal monologue and life. The act of writing precedes the act of
wording; Gielgud’s voice enters a few seconds later. Thus, Greenaway underscores the
written text, alluding to the script of the play and in general the scriptures. Then Greenaway’s
extra discourse is introduced, the first of the fictional tomes Prospero brought to his exile, The
Book of Water. It is displayed in a smaller framed picture, thus the director provides his first
picture-in-picture image at this stage of the process. Interestingly, the embedded image is over
imposed by the dripping images of water suggestive of the idea, these imagery books belong
to the diegesis of the film. The idea gathers even further force if we take into consideration
the narrator’s voice, who is informing us about the qualities and contents of the volumes in
the tone similar to educational films and children’s tales. The number of the tomes appearing
throughout the film is 24, referring to the number of film-frames within a second on celluloid,
underscoring their relationship to the medium. They are curious volumes, as they move, bleed
and smell; or in their mirrors actions take place, or from their pages models pop up. The
strange and lively character of these books, smudge the borderline between virtuality and
actuality, between presentation and representation. The most interesting of all are the last two
books. The 24th is The Thirty-six Plays and the last one that Prospero is writing during the
sequence he titles, The Tempest being the 25th in order. The strategy by Greenaway to depict
the authoring of the dramatic text as a fictitious thread interwoven into the images bringing
the text to movement and life is peculiar to emphasise the Prospero-Shakespeare
interrelationship and to position himself in this magician-artist dichotomy. The director sees
Prospero “not just as the master manipulator of people and events but as their prime
originator. On his island he plans a drama to right the wrongs done on him.”83 To support this
suggestion we should know that television and video technology widely used the 25 frame per
second ratio in the 1990s to transmit images on screens. Thus, we could interpret the film as
one of these curious books, the intermediary phenomenon between the Guttenberg galaxy and
our digital age, the age of hyper-reality. I would suggest in the original play Shakespeare
foreshadows the postmodern notion of this hyper-reality if we take into account the Utopia of
Gonzalo, or the scene when the shipwrecked courtly party is wondering and discuss the
strangeness of the island. At these moments, the representations and fantasies become the
models of reality. This phenomenon could be realised and extended by Greenaway in his re-
work. Also the film could be interpreted as a repetition in a Deleuzian sense, a reconstitution
of the known to reveal difference, pushing towards the new, echoing Lyotard’s answer to the
question what postmodern is, saying: “Finally it must be clear that it is our business not to
supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be represented . . . The

83
Greenaway: Prospero’s Books: p. 9.

48
answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us
activate differences…”84 For him the way to the unpresentable, or in other words, to his
'postmodern sublime', could be found in mini-narratives and small strategies applied
according to the given context of the moment that should be left behind being conscious of
their constructed nature. Greenaway seems to reach towards this unpresentable by making
holes in totality throughout his representational strategy in the film and arriving at the
Deleuzian fourth type of crystal state, in which the problem is of taking and deserting and
tearing off roles.85

The next movement in crystallization and in the genesis of the film’s discourse is when
Prospero utters the first word of the play: “Boatswain!” in the Renaissance pool and interior,
playing with a model ship reading out the script. Soon we can see Prospero depicted in the
fashion of Antonello de Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study86 writing in front of a mirror.
According to the second type of crystal in Deleuze, through the crack of a perfect crystal, life
must come out, and the word triggering the dramatic action of the play introducing the
representations of the ship at sea. The extra diegetic volume, The Book of Mirrors87, appear in
a framed smaller picture in which we can see the passengers of the ship conjured up. The third
type of crystalline state is provided by these images. The most important characteristic of this
state is that from this stage “the question is not what comes out of the crystal and how, but, on
the contrary, how to get into it.”88 The crystal provides multiple entrances. The phenomenon
is directly referred to by the fictional tome and their pages functioning as extraordinary
mirrors, and by the presentation of prop mirrors emerging from the pool, instead of reflecting
directly what they are facing, displaying moving images, the virtual events on the ship.
Greenaway sets Prospero’s wording of the script to be the actuality of the image, distancing
us, spectators from the plot of the drama. Still we are perceiving spectacle after spectacle, a
constellation with Deleuze we could describe as: “The spectacle becomes universal and keeps
on growing, precisely because it has no object other than entrances into the spectacle….less a
theatre than a giant Luna park”89 The metacinematic quality of the universe is raised.

So, finally we enter the complex crystal when the lines are uttered by Prospero/Shakespeare
wording the lines of the boatswain: “Out of the way, I say” and the repetitive music of the
84
Trevor G. Elkington: Between Order and Chaos in: Film-Philosophy vol. 8/2
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n2elkington
85
See Trevor G. Elkington: Between Order and Chaos in: Film-Philosophy vol. 8/2
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n2elkington
86
See Tables i.
87
See Tables ii.
88
Deleuze, Cinema 2: p. 86.
89
Deleuze, Cinema 2: p. 86.

49
film starts, propelling various images onto the screen via picture-in-picture technique. In the
tune the lines of the first scene are mixed intensifying the reflection on the musical quality of
the text. Prospero is putting on his clothes having emerged from his pool, analogous to
wrapping into culture and civilization. He spreads his magic cloak and all the mythical figures
and spirits, with animals of the island spring up from behind. To the final period of the first
sequence of the production a long tracking shot is attached. Diverting from conventional
practice, in Greenaway, long shots function to explicate change in plot, movement in the
narrative, rather than describing situations in detail.90 In the long tracking shot when Prospero
is walking through the Renaissance prop colonnade, escorted by his spirit servants dancing
according to a mechanical choreography, both the conventional and peculiar aspect of the
long take is presented. Gielgud is walking from left to right, another strategic direction of
movement in the film evoking the process of reading, while allusions by props are made to
mythologies and arcane knowledge, enhancing the atmosphere, while with Prospero we are
approaching the second scene of the drama, spatially indicated by an archway through which
the magician enters. The filmic movement reveals space to accumulate layers of meaning over
layers of images, and does it in a multiple manner, by using not only conventional
cinematographic techniques, but state of art video technology merging with traditional works
of fine art to translate hypertexts into hyperspace. The sea-change of the original text
transcending the processes of the drama seems to be alluded to through the crystallization
process in the film. As the overinterpretation of the drama takes place through the
metaphorical and allegorical mode, the film analogously moves towards possible relationships
to convey the quiddity of things, regarding the strategy of representation taking the process to
its extreme. By digital technology the director meticulously articulates metamorphoses in a
Neo-Baroque design. He provides us with a carnivalisation, when rules of life undergo a
series of metamorphoses, according to Bakhtin91. Greenaway, by pushing the morphing of
forms to a borderline, by overloading us with his unfathomable imagery, urges us to
overcome the seen and look for the whole behind the fragments to understand the playful
game. If we could find the island of the play an any-space-whatever, the island of the film
becomes a hyper-space-whatever. We find a multitude of singular surfaces opening into
spaces linked into a network.

90
Totaro, Donato. “Muriel:Thinking with Cinema about Cinema”. Off Screen. 01 May 2009.
<http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/muriel.html>
91
Willoquet-Maricondi: p. 72.

50
 Finally, I would highlight some other key modes of expression that unfold the focus of
the play on time and develop into time-images. There are three temporal modes made
apparent by lightning technique within the narration of the film, according to past, present and
future tenses. Pictures of past tense are dark and richly coloured with artificial, interior
lighting. The storytelling is quick moving and episodic with deliberate confusion of memory
and fantasy, illusive framing is used influenced by late 17th century Italian and Dutch painters.
Pictures of present tense are characterized by a lighting of noon light, natural daylight, top-
light, bright and white, panoramic, wide pictures are used in compositions. Pictures of future
tense are characterized by starry darkness, soft, calm night with filtered, bluish, and warm
lights.92 Furthermore, these tenses are presented simultaneously on screen by picture-in-
picture technique, conveying the whole of time as the past, the present and the future are all
present on the screen depicted in different frames.

In the opening sequence metronomic timers, chronothetics occur to enhance the discrete
aspect of time:

1, water dripping: that is acoustic and visual

2, fire flames: acoustic and visual
3, wind blows: acoustic and visual
4, wing effects, only acoustic, the mystic airy noise belonging to Ariel

Expressions developing into time-images:

a. regarding the optical facet of images:

1, broken sensory-motor connections/reactions
2, the camera view is static, the unfolding of movements.
3, long.takes
4, memory-images referred to by in-depth camera movements
5,the movement of characters enter or leave frames or between frames. Sometimes in case
of picture-in-picture scenes, their figure show at the edges.

b. regarding acoustics:
1, the voice-over
2, the split between the action and the voice of character

92
Greenaway: p. 13.

51
 3, effects are “out of space”, evoking other threads of actions, images by acoustic spaces.

The fourth state of the crystal, decomposition in the last sequence of Prospero’s Books

The final sequence of the movie depicts the abjuration of Prospero’s magic. The
magician is throwing all his books into a canal. The volumes shriek and burn. When the 24th
book, The Thirty-six Plays is in Prospero’s hands, the narrator informs us, the volume was
written by William Shakespeare and one play is missing and has its space in the volume. We
see both books sinking, when suddenly Caliban fishes them. A moment of the film
emphasizing the central role of Caliban in Greenaway’s adaptation, interpreting him as the
sensous intellect, whose character conveys the “undividedness of the sensing and the
sensed”93, according to Merlau-Ponty. Prospero’s monologue is initiated in a close up, in a
close-up with light reflected on water. His image in a framed screen is distancing while the
camera toggles backwards opening the environment of the pool from the first sequence. Thus,
the narrative space is being decomposed gradually. Ariel appears as a young man from the
colonnade and starts running towards the foreground, while the sound effect of the
chronothetic dripping of water recurs. From another archway, the adolescent Ariel character
continues the run on, now in slower motion and finally the child Ariel figure in slow motion
appears and jumps up and in frozen frame by frame movement and flies out of the framework
of the screen. Water splashes and blops the screen turns into the dark void. We can follow up
the final deconstruction of the filmic universe, returning to the basic image of water and dark
void. However, we could interpret Ariel’s flight, symbolic of the change, and Ariel the
elemental spirit, as the representations of the creative impetus of processes and change
virtually jumping into our space. With Prospero, Greenaway demonstrates art’s and the
artifice’s property for a free-play and provides us with the possibility of a Bergsonian turn by
his artifice, by his zone, towards life by decomposing his abstractions to return us to the
natural image of the dripping water. The symbol sheds light on the fact: nature is always more
than our representations and urges us to get involved.
We should bare in mind the dynamics of interactivity, the lively quality of the
theatrical performance, as an engagement of community - developed into actual interplay in
case of courtly masques, i.e. its ritualistic aspect. The audience is invited to participate in the
interplay between body, soul and spirit, while the creative process is being presented to them

93
Willoquet- Maricondi: p. 193.

52
by reflections, through direct and indirect references. It should be noted, in the past few years,
Greenaway through his VJ performances - using state of art digital technologies, turning the
auditorium into a special place equipped with several screens and audio devices – has
extended the cinematic modes of expression towards demonstrating the creative process in
and by pictures, raising a livelier atmosphere for reception. During a VJ performance, on
several screens, surrounding the audience, we find sequences or stills projected by the director
mixing and rendering at the scene into a larger sequence, presenting a flow of carefully
selected images. He provides his spectators with a guided flow of pictures, evoking different
milieus and interrelations, on which the audience can create his/her narrative. They are forced,
urged to participate in the creative process, without which the show is lost for them. Both
performances are live, dynamic and open, despite they are still different. The director’s mode
of performance focuses on a creative process that tends to propel representations, shedding
light on illusion. It suggests the automaton of random processes and artificiality. However, he
offers his audiences great freedom, a space of playing with images. We ourselves face
pictures and are invited to cooperate and share the spirit of creation. The more rigorous
theatrical performance is constructing its representations to direct us to an experience of the
organic whole. On these grounds we could suggest that the audience, instead of a totalistic
reflection of reality, could gain a holistic experience of reality by and within illusion.

53
 Conclusion

Through the foregoing chapters I have made an attempt to shed light on how
Shakepeare’s The Tempest evokes a peculiar spatial-temporal experience in its audiences that
suggest cinematic phenomena in their embryonic form Deleuze terms the time-image and
crystals deployed by post-war and postmodern cinema, and outline the analogous direction of
self-reflectivity realized by Greenaway to repeat Shakespeare at difference in his adaptation,
Prospero’s Books.

As we could realise in the first part of the thesis, the dramatist found a freer dramatic
form by fusing the emblematic theatrical tradition – where images were transmitted by
overcoded verbal communication - and the Jacobean spectacular theatrical mode – with
sophisticated props and extravaganza - to explore epistemological issues of his age and his
medium and mediation, the problem of creating illusions. An analogous problematization
appears in Greenaway’s film essay by merging all sorts of media by state of art video and
computer technology to read the aesthetic practices of the premodern, modern and
postmodern ages by the play. In the sequence of the play rendered according to rigorous
continuity, regarding the play’s property to meet the classical unities, the audience finds
framed instances through scenes that convey the visually entertaining and visionary aspects of
the play – the first scene as an induction, or the inserted sequences of the banquet and the
masque – in which different points of view are articulated, a phenomenon later unfolded and
devised in the modern cinema by different montage and editing techniques, applying different
camera angles. Instead of story-telling, the audience experiences a description by the
emblematic mode of Renaissance theatre, where the setting of a scene was evoked by verbal
communication that was ekphrastic. Shakespeare, besides the application of the former
dramatic mode, also provides his audiences with the technology of Masques - music and
highly elaborated props - to enhance the performance, merging the two modes. In such
sequences, during the process of transmission, movement is subordinated to time to provide
an articulation of a milieu, where affection and cognition interplay. A special place is
springing up from time, a chora. This peculiar experience is based on imagery and staged
images extending both towards the direction of perception and actuality in performance, as
well as, through reflection and cognition, towards virtuality, remaining open for further
interpretations with their relations to our memory. On the one hand, the accumulated power of
the imagery affects and determines perception itself, auditory and visual alike while the

54
imagery unfolds in front of us by the audio-visual mode. On the other hand, characters
comment their perceptions and experiences reflecting upon situations, by which they urge a
turn in the audience’s experience of the play towards reflection and cogitation and draw the
attention to the interplay between perception and reflective cognition on the real process at
work. Thus we can gain creative insight into the interaction between actuality and virtuality
forming our experience of reality, and recognize the meta-theatrical nature of the drama.
Regarding these qualities of the interplay of actuality and virtuality in the play, the
postmodern notion of hyper-reality is foreshadowed by the magical island of the play, the
characteristics unfolded by Greenaway’s digital interpretation. The whole of the play finds its
sound base in dramaturgy that relates each “frame”, “sequence” and “view” in the space-time
continuum of the performance rigorously. The entertainment is overwhelming, meeting both
the demands of the sophisticated audience at the court, as well as the audience of the
playhouses. According to the findings in the first part of the paper, based on Bergson’s notion
of the image and Deleuze’s crystalline structure, I proposed, both creations convey a more
fluid view of art and urge awareness of a more holisitc sense and notion of reality in
accordance with Shakespeare’s synchretic view of his global medium, the theatre itself.
Through reflections, they emphasize the capacity of the artifice, as set of images with their
dynamic interrelations – a zone, as we found in Bergson - to mediate between fields of
perception and memory, the actual and the virtual - to give direction towards the experience
of the whole, or to result in mere representations without any actual relations, in an abstract
set of data and parts. However, though through different proportions, both works of art
provide the notional representations of picture / image, body, word / writing; and find the
limitations of their representations and reflect upon change and the impetus in the creative
process they explore in front of our eyes - a quality that brings the meta-theatrical and meta-
cinematic characteristics to a mutual fruition.
Instead of a totalistic reflection of reality, both works of art attempt to provide us with a
holistic view of existence.

55
 Pedagogical Review

Regarding secondary school classroom work in the third and the fourth year, students
could be provided with a complex overview on the convergence of the pre-modern and
postmodern epochs throughout Greenaway’s film - abundant in references and quotations
considering culture and civilization - in a comparative mini-course that finds its ground in
visuality and the notion of the image in the broadest meaning of the word.

As our multimedia culture usually excites/motivates adolescents, the peculiar film

could be the basis on which an interpretation is founded. The students’ everyday experience
of current media practice would help them to open discussions on different issues and fields
of art. A syllabus of a mini course could be developed and conducted according to
cooperative teaching methods. The wide range of disciplines, the various artistic forms
embedded by the production calls for a course that involves: literature, history, the history of
art and philosophy. Thus, the teachers of these subjects can find a way to explain and
demonstrate the interrelations not only between different disciplines, but also the issues in the
course of history.
The film, as a network of information can help teachers and students integrate their
knowledge and reflections based on a contrastive attitude to explore different possible focuses
for their analysis. As an example for a possible arrangement of information as an example, see
below is a taxonomy of major issues of the pre-modern, modern and postmodern ages
contrasted94. From each of these pairs the discussion could proceed in the class, within a
course of five sessions:

Session One and Two:

Discussion in class could spring up from the first sequence of the film, on Prospero’s figure
writing and wording the text:

94
I consulted Len Masterman’s volume Teaching Media to the contrasted points of modernism and
postmodernism
<http://books.google.com/books?id=vvJ5jWi5WNIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=hu&source=gbs_slider_thumb#v
=onepage&q&f=false>
and Emery Lee’s Teaching Art in a Postmodern World
<http://books.google.com/books?id=xo5EgsGjoyUC&printsec=frontcover&hl=hu&source=gbs_slider_thumb#v
=onepage&q&f=false>

56
The network of relevant ideas, other focuses of discussion:
- The Shakespeare-Prospero-(Greenaway-Gielgud) axis and relationships conveyed by the
film; the problem of authoring texts, the role of the author in different eras and contexts.
- Artists as prominent members of society, individualism and self-expression in focus during
the Renaissance, the Renaissance; humanist ideals.
- The modern artists as odd individuals: self-expression at its extremes.
- The artists and their works appear in the postmodern age as individuals in their contexts,
as products of their time and space.
- World evokes the use of language and language articulates the world.

Session Three:
The quoted and re-written alchemical images of the film with the narrator’s voice-over
expaining the tomes

The network of ideas:

- The emergence of sciences and different disciplines from alchemy in the Renaissance
- The modern approach towards and claims for abstractions: turning art into science, the avant
garde ideal of progression in aesthetics
- The aesthetic pluralism of the postmodern

Session Four:
Prospero’s renaissance palace on the island conjured by Greenaway and the epilogue to
discuss the relationship of arts and society.

Network of ideas:
- The Renaissance preserving sacrality by the elevated stance of art
- The Modern’s art for art’s sake approach: the alienation from social functions
- Postmodern artists’ approach to emphasize the construction of meanings.
- Art for art’s sake: alienation from social function – Art for meaning

Session Five:
The Neo-Baroque design of the film

Network of ideas:

57
- Art history as linear progress or repetition in Deleuze’s system.
- Universality through singularities.

58
 Bibliography

Books Cited:

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. Harper Torchbooks, 1960.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, L. A.: Green Integer,
1999.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. London: Continuum, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2.London: Continuum, 2005.

Grenaway, Peter. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Four Walls Eight
Windows, 1991.

Koenigsberger, Dorothy. Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Concepts of

Harmony 1400-1700 . Hassocks: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1979.

Lucking, David: The Artifice of Eternity: An Essay on The Tempest. Salentina, Lecce:
Adrietica ed., 1983.

Orgel, Stephen: The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance.
University of California Press, 1975.

Rose, Mark: Shakespearean Design. Cambridge-Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

1972.

Wells, Robin Headlam: Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in poetry, drama and music.
Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, and Mary Alemany-Galway: Peter Greenaway’s

Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2001.

Books Cited from the Internet:

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004. 04 Oct. 2009.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=G9XAeb1mx6gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=matter+and
+memory&hl=hu&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Parr, Adrian: Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 12 Sept. 2009.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=OsVOy4s1QLMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=deleuze+di
ctionary&hl=hu&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Hallward, Peter: Out of This World, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, Verso 2006. 06
Feb. 2010.

59
<http://books.google.com/books?id=POIwCYbaoQcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=peter+hallw
ard&lr=&ei=ukTKS8fgNIqQywSJ_YH7Bw&hl=hu&cd=6#v=onepage&q&f=false >

Hedrick, Donald and Bryan Reynolds. Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of

cultural capital. PALGRAVE, 2000. 10 Jan 2010.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=lFWHrrY00IUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=shakespeare+
without+class&ei=J0fKS_GNJ4qQywSJ_YH7Bw&hl=hu&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Lawlor, Leonard: The Challenge of Bergsonism, Continuum 2003. 22 Dec. 2009.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=H0Mxlqc5W6wC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lawlor+ber
gson&lr=&ei=4EXKS42MLaeeygSSr8iYCA&hl=hu&cd=2#v=onepage&q=lawlor%20bergs
on&f=false>

Lee, Emery: Teaching Art in a Postmodern World, Common Ground Publishing Pty, 2002. 11
March 2010.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=xo5EgsGjoyUC&printsec=frontcover&hl=hu&source=g
bs_slider_thumb#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Masterman, Len: Teaching Media, New York: Routledge, 1985. 11 March 2010.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=vvJ5jWi5WNIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=hu&source=g
bs_slider_thumb#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Rodowick, D. N.: Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, University of Minnesota

2010. 23 July 2009.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=_BsxHO4OEBQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=rodowick&
ei=Y0bKS7rOLqOGygTc5JHRBw&hl=hu&cd=2#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Shakespeare Navigator 04 Jan 2009.

< http://clicknotes.com/tempest/TempestTextIndex.html>

Articles Cited from the Internet:

Elkington, Trevor G. “Between Order and Chaos”. Film-Philosophy vol. 8/2. 13 Feb 2010.
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n2elkington>

Kovács, László. “Írás, kép, test: Shakespeare és Greenaway találkozása a boncasztalon”.

Apertúra 2007/nyár
<http://apertura.hu/2007/nyar/kovacs>

Totaro, Donato. “Muriel:Thinking with Cinema about Cinema”. Off Screen. 01 May 2009.
<http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/muriel.html>

Totaro, Donato. “Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project Part 1.” 14 Feb 2009.
<http://www.international-festival.org/node/28661>

Vesia, Michael. “Transcendental Images of Time and Memory in Andrei Tarkovsky’s

Nosthalgia”. Synoptique 5. 22 July 2009.
<http://www.synoptique.ca/core/en/articles/nostalghia/>

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On-line Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Cited from the Internet:

“baseless fabric”. <http://www.bardweb.net/content/readings/tempest/lines.html>

“poesis”. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis>

“tempest”. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=tempest&searchmode=none>

“textus”. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=text>

“Peter Greenaway Quotes”

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Greenaway#Prospero.27s_Books>

Videos Cited from the Internet:

Falls. Dir. Peter Greenaway

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AfqqDbWYxA&feature=related>

Intervals. Dir. Peter Greenaway

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT0ELNvNxIA&feature=related>

Prospero’s Books. Dir. Greenaway, Peter:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsxauCwOb0&feature=related>

The Belly of an Architect . Dir. Peter Greenaway

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIDMSPlLFWc&feature=related>

Video Installation by Bill Viola

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBYWVY-R9RU&feature=related>

ZOO. Dir. Greenaway, Peter:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFO2vqOBtl0>

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 Tables
i,

Saint Jerome in his Study by Antonello de Messina (1474-1475)95

95
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antonello_da_Messina_012.jpg

62
 Saint Augustine in his Study by Sandro Botticelli (1480)96

ii,

The Book of Mirrors, the original prop by Peter Greenaway

96
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2009/mar/12/galileo-exhibition-florence-strozzi

63
Other props used in the film

64