ABSTRACT
The poster for the 2018 French Shakespeare Society meeting suggests humorously that unbinding the bard is a very good thing. In House of Leaves, the dominance of images and fanciful typography means that the material page often overwhelms information. As a novel built on words, House of Leaves proves to be as fragile as Dale’s textual tree in Sequel. While the palimpsest is a repeated trope in House of Leaves, the image of the novel as a tree makes a last-minute appearance on the novel’s final page, appearing, unexpectedly, after the index. Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation of William Shakespeare is, among many other things, a reflection on the use and abuse of books. At the end of Greenaway’s film, Prospero drowns all of his books, including the incomplete First Folio and his manuscript of The Tempest. After the book drowning, Caliban slips in to rescue the two latter volumes, taking them down beneath the water’s surface to his hidden lair.
