ABSTRACT
Prospero’s Books offers a striking interpretation of The Tempest, similar to recent feminist and psychoanalytic accounts, in which Prospero attempts to to control female sexuality and “appropriate” the birth-giving powers of the maternal body. Greenaway gives such a reading of The Tempest a technological inflection. By associating Prospero’s “magic” with the ability of the new medium of digital cinema to create enhanced illusions of life, Greenaway recasts central questions of the play in contemporary terms. And by associating his own electronic medium with earlier wonder-working technologies-the voice of the magus, the printed pages of the Renaissance book-the film suggests that we are still living in the era of Renaissance magic, perhaps at a time toward the end of that era when, to quote Donna Haraway, “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (Haraway 1985:68).
