ABSTRACT
In the title sequence of Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, the camera tracks Prospero walking through a set described in the screenplay as 'The bath-halls', which links the bath-house where the film opens to the library where Prospero lives. In many ways, Prospero's Books celebrates the culture of script and print. Books and codices are everywhere. Not only does the film frame William Shakespeare's story with the twenty-four arcane volumes that Greenaway supposes Prospero took to the island, but books fill its mise-en-scene, either as texts that Prospero writes or as props for the action. At work in the Shakespeare an topos is a deep fantasy, that of returning to a state of textual purity in which texts enact their own meanings, embodying authorial intention without the need of mediation or interpretation. Greenaway's film is one of the most radical Shakespeare adaptations of the 1990s, from this perspective it seems rather nostalgic.
