ABSTRACT
Prospero used to be Duke of Milan, but got chucked out and marooned on a distant island by his naughty brother. Since getting stuck on the island old Prospero has spent the years studying and is now a powerful magician. When his naughty brother sails near the island, Prospero plays weatherman and sends a big storm to shipwreck him. Now that naughty bro is also trapped on the same island as Prospero, will the magician take his revenge on his dirty Dukedom-nicking brother or will he forgive him? (Donkin 154)
This vernacular retelling of The Tempest’s exemplifi es recent adaptations of the play for children in that it focuses almost exclusively on Prospero, his past, his intentions, and his methods, and mentions no other inhabitant of the island. Adaptations of the play for young readers (Lamb, Nesbit etc.) tend to focus on Prospero as protagonist, perhaps unsurprisingly, as he is arguably the creator of the play’s events, and thus can be rendered analogously with Shakespeare himself. Appropriations of the play for older readers tend to focus more on child fi gures within the text, offering them as fi gures of identifi cation for the implied reader; thus the texts I am reading in this chapter deploy Miranda or Caliban as model for their protagonists. Such appropriative focus on the child characters seems to entail effacing Prospero, who becomes the spoken-about rather than the speaking. Like Shakespeare, Prospero is fi gured as an origin at once venerated and oppositional. In his place the child fi gures of the play either fi nd Shakespeare (cultural authority) without or despite a Prospero (father fi gure) and in doing so either become ‘Prosperos’ themselves or accept cultural subordination.
