ABSTRACT
The West Side Story research in the Jerome Robbins archive and the study of Michael Powell's Tempest scripts would not have been possible without the assistance of the specialist librarians at the New York Public Library and the British Film Institute, and support for this archival research and its associated Shakespeare texts came from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the American Philosophical Society. Nearing the end of his career, and confident of his ability to deploy the most avant-garde of Italian music-dramatic practices, Shakespeare contrived in The Tempest to effect an unprecedented compression of time-scales into the play's brief duration. Jennifer Homans suggests a double allegory in that both the Broadway musical and the film appeared as part of a Cold War Shakespeare cycle. emphasizing sound and musical interludes, Bernstein and Zeffirelli demonstrate an awareness that Shakespeare's concern is not only with the dramatic organization of space but with the sound-space his characters occupy.
