Screen Adaptations: The Tempest

A close study of the relationship between text and film

Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781408149652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenplays

Literature and film studies students will find plenty of material
to support their courses and essay writing on how the film versions
provide different readings of the original text.

Focussing on numerous film versions, from Percy Stow's 1908 adaptation to Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books,
the book discusses: the literary text in its historical context, key
themes and dominant readings of the text, how the text is adapted for
screen and how adaptations have changed our reading of the original
text. There are numerous excerpts from the literary text, screenplays
and shooting scripts, with suggestions for comparison. The book also
features quotations from authors, screenwriters, directors, critics and
others linked with the chosen film and text.

PART 1:
Literary contexts

the play in its time

The first recorded performance of The Tempest took place on 1 November 1611, in the presence of King James I, at court. As John G. Demaray points out, ‘The second and the only other documented performance of the play in Shakespeare’s lifetime was again before King James at Whitehall in 1613, in celebration of the marriage of the King’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to Frederick Elector ... Palatine, a Protestant prince noted for his occultist views and associations’.¹ One can easily see why The Tempest was chosen for this occasion. Not only did the Elector, as Demaray notes, have an interest in magic himself – his later capital of Prague was famous as the principal centre for magic in Europe – but the play’s central focus on the marriage of a royal and beautiful young couple makes it obviously appropriate for the event.

However, although The Tempest fitted this event well, the immediate prompt for Shakespeare to write it – probably in late 1610 or early 1611– was not the marriage of the princess but the wreck of the English ship the Sea Venture on the coast of Bermuda in 1609, while it was on its way to the fledgling Jamestown colony in Virginia. A number of verbal details in the play can be traced back to William Strachey’s pamphlet A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, which gave an account of the wreck of the Sea Venture and the subsequent experiences of those on board during their time in Bermuda. This is clearly the source for the description of Ariel flaming on the masthead at I.ii.196-201:

I boarded the King’s ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin
I flamed amazement. Sometime I’d divide
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join.

Strachey had reported that

... on the Thursday night, Sir George Summers being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling, and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the mainmast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the four shrouds.

Strachey also seems to lie behind Caliban’s reference to ‘Water with berries in’t’ (I.ii.335), since he speaks of ‘the berries whereof our men, seething, straining, and letting stand some three or four days, made a kind of pleasant drink’.²

Shakespeare’s choice of source was an interesting one. Many modern analyses have related The Tempest to the history of colonialism, but less often mentioned is the fact that Strachey’s True Reportory was not in any sense a ‘standard’ take on the subject. In fact, it had been such bad propaganda for the Virginia Company that it had effectively been suppressed:

... the Virginia Company was doing its best to discount unfavourable reports coming back from the New World and was carrying on a campaign of propaganda to convince the public that the Virginian enterprise was still potentially profitable. Strachey’s narrative was therefore too realistic in its picture of the unhappy conditions in the colony to make it publishable and it had to wait fifteen years until Purchas put it into print.³

Although Strachey does pay lip-service to the idea of future travel to Virginia, exhorting would-be colonists to ‘let no rumor of the poverty of the country … waive any man’s fair purposes hitherward’,⁴ his editor points out that ‘His narration of the shortcomings of some of the group and of the mutinies that nearly ruined their prospects of escaping from the Bermudas were not matters that the Virginia Company of London would want to publish abroad’.⁵

In particular, Strachey plays the rhetorical game of apparently dismissing something while nevertheless bringing it forcefully to his readers’ attention, when he refers to a particularly unpleasant event that had occurred in the new colony – ‘the tragical history of the man eating of his dead wife in Virginia’.⁶ Although he says that this occurred because the husband disliked the wife, not because he was driven to desperation by a shortage of food in the colony, the damage is obviously done. Moreover, though Strachey tends to speak favourably of the numerous small islands that collectively make up Bermuda, he also observes that ‘they be so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearful objects are seen and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devil’s Islands’.⁷ Finally, Strachey draws attention to the work of a notable sceptic of the benefits and justification of colonisation when he refers to ‘those small worms which Acosta writeth of’.⁸ This refers to José de Acosta, whose 1590 Historia natural y moral de las Indias questioned Spain’s right to enslave and mistreat the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.

There are, then, general issues of colonisation and exploration at stake in Strachey’s narrative as well as an account of a particular event, and The Tempest’s borrowings from Strachey mean that the play cries out to be read in the context of the growing push towards mapping and exploiting the New World. Indeed while, as Susan Bennett observes, ‘the textual body of Shakespeare’s plays has been a prevalent and enduring component of Western colonial practice’ in general, ‘No Western text has played a more visible role in the representation and reconstruction of the colonial body than Shakespeare’s The Tempest’.⁹

Colonisation was not simply a question of conquering new lands, and many of the other issues on which it touched are also relevant to The Tempest. One discourse significantly inflected by the experiences of colonisation was that of sexuality and gender; indeed Elaine Showalter remarks that ‘[d]iscovered by an anatomist appropriately named Columbus in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance clitoris was the brave new world’.¹⁰ It has often been remarked that in texts discussing the colonial enterprise, the colonised land and the female body are frequently perceived as analogous,¹¹ a parallelism which is neatly emblematised in the double use of the metaphor of ‘dis/covery’ both for voyages of exploration and for the exposure of the female body. In particular, in almost all Elizabethan and Jacobean writing on Ireland, the closest of the colonies, images of monstrous femininity figured very prominently, and it is worth noting at this point that even though it is never mentioned in The Tempest, Ireland has been suggested by some recent critics as an important context for the play. Ireland itself was often represented as a woman, as in this description by Luke Gernon:

This Nymph of Ireland is at all poynts like a yong wenche that hath the greene sicknes for want of occupying. She is very fayre of visage, and hath a smooth skinn of tender grasse ... Her breasts are round hillockes of milk-yeelding grasse, and that so fertile, that they conten[d] with the vallyes. And betwixt her leggs (for Ireland is full of havens), she hath an open harbor, but not much frequented ... It is nowe since she was drawne out of the wombe of rebellion about sixteen yeares, by’rlady nineteen, and yet she wants a husband, she is not embraced, she is not hedged and ditched, there is noo quicksett putt into her.¹²

For Gernon, then, Ireland is a helpless maiden who can never be satisfied until the English enter and possess her.

Gernon’s image of Ireland as a nubile virgin desperate for sex draws on a common Renaissance trope, which compares land to be conquered to women to be married; the English were fond of labelling Spanish colonial activity as rape while simultaneously glorifying their own as ‘husbandry’, so that one Ulster poet praising James VI and I wrote that ‘Ireland [is] due to thee, thou are her spouse by all the signs’.¹³ As Lynda Boose comments,

although the equation between land and the female body which makes rape and imperialism homologous is a metaphor of masculine ownership that is neither peculiarly English nor new to England’s enclosure period, the collocation of the two discursive fields clearly acquired new energy at precisely this historical moment of heightened land anxieties.¹⁴

The link between women and land is particularly pertinent in The Tempest. Susan Bennett argues that

Only when power is guaranteed is the colonizer prepared to evacuate the hitherto virgin territory (the island, his daughter’s body). Miranda, then, is as much a colonial territory as the island she has been brought up on, and her reproductive body ensures for her father the re-production of his own power back in Milan.¹⁵

Although postcolonial readings of The Tempest have generally paid attention principally to Caliban, Miranda too is an important character to consider in this context.

For all her status as European princess, Miranda might in some respects also remind us of the native women on whom European travellers frequently commented. In particular, The Tempest has often been discussed in the the light of the story of Pocahontas, the young Native American girl who is famously supposed to have intervened to save the life of Captain John Smith after he was threatened with execution by her father Chief Powhatan, and who later went on to marry another Englishman, John Rolfe, and to visit England a few years after Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. Pocahontas is mentioned several times by William Strachey, author of the account of the wreck of The Sea Venture, and in the light of the similarities between her story and that of Miranda, her father, and her suitor, it is not surprising that Peter Hulme, for instance, remarks that ‘The early history of the English colony of Virginia contains one story – perhaps its most famous – that has tantalizing parallels with The Tempest’.¹⁶

Both Miranda and Pocahontas show how, through her gender and her race, the woman is doubly the object of the appropriating colonial gaze – especially since her behaviour is often perceived as rendering her more remote from the norms of European femininity than the male native is from the male European.¹⁷ While the colonised male can often be regarded as effectively the mirror image of his new master,¹⁸ the female frequently appears to escape all available forms of classification and response, as witnessed in the following comments by the early Italian observer Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America was named, on native women:

They are women of pleasing person, very well proportioned, so that one does not see on their bodies any ill-formed feature or limb. And although they go about utterly naked, they are fleshy women, and that part of their privies which he has not seen them would think to see is invisible ... They showed themselves very desirous of copulating with us Christians.¹⁹

Here the female body appears actually to be biologically dissimilar from familiar norms, and the male gaze – in Vespucci’s case, obviously quite a prolonged and intense one – finds itself ultimately resisted by its own inability to assimilate the visual information it receives to the pre-existing mental sets which determine how it sees.

At first glance, Shakespeare’s Miranda appears to pose no such problem to the enquiring male eye. Her very name – to which her father’s command so pointedly draws our attention – offers her up as an object to be effortlessly decoded: she is ‘miranda’, a Latin gerundive roughly translatable as ‘she who must be admired’. To any educated male European that she might meet, her name would immediately label her in grammatical and semantic terms as passive, female, the object of the gaze. Her clearly demarcated status within both language and culture can, it seems, leave her nothing in common with the strange, non-European females whose inappropriate anatomy so determinedly resists the possessing male eye.

And yet Miranda, for all her position as princess of Milan and Prospero’s daughter, can nevertheless be read as occupying a position which, to some extent at least, overlaps with that of the colonised female native. Like female natives, she has only the most fragmentary and second-hand experience of European culture; she has never lived in civilised society, and indeed can remember almost nothing outside the environs of the island on which they live; she has almost no experience of white men or women; her upbringing and environment are clearly analogous to those of Caliban, who can stand, albeit rather problematically, as an emblem of the colonised indigenous population; and perhaps most obviously of all, she has been firmly inserted into language as the object of the male gaze.

Miranda’s situation is, in fact, extremely ambiguous. On one level she is that very rare phenomenon, a female coloniser – a fact which may strike us in the curious parallel between her own name and the name which King Ferdinand of Aragon is said to have proposed for that arch-coloniser, Christopher Columbus: ‘the king of Spain said that Columbus should be called not Almirante, the admiral, but Admirans, the one who wonders’.²⁰ (The extent to whic...