ABSTRACT
This chapter draws from two theorists who engage adaptation—and particularly film adaptation—as a kind of lived experience. Perhaps without intent, adaptation scholarship has historically accepted an opposition between the (sensory) pleasures of receiving adaptation and the scholarly pleasures of making adaptation signify. More importantly, as Christa Albrecht-Crane has noted, allowing adaptation scholarship to remain a debate over narrative competence and adaptations' power to signify risks essentializing the media that adaptations employ, effectively treating them all as narrative machines. From the birth of the moving image to the possibility of immersive alternative realities, new media developments have dramatically altered the sensory experiences open to adaptors and their audiences. The Tempest, makes it possible to experience the question of how the spectator ought to engage visual media in the brave new world of moving pictures. Viewed as experience expressing experience, The Tempest offers Shakespeare's play in the middle of a media transformation, caught between theatrical and filmic structures of visual pleasure.
