Rehearsing the Storm: Shakespeare’s Text, Taymor’s Tech, and Greenaway’s Ink

Abstract

This article traces my engagement with Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) through the twin prisms of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Both filmmakers, I argue, turn Shakespeare’s play into an intermedial palimpsest – less an act of replication than a gesture of creative re-inscription. In Hutcheon’s sense, adaptation becomes a living dialogue between past and present, between the ink of the page and the light of the screen. Meanwhile, Baudrillard’s vision of simulation helps reveal Prospero and Prospera as shimmering doubles – hyperreal figures adrift in a culture where copies forget their originals. Greenaway’s baroque excess unfolds like a library in flames, while Taymor’s digital tempest breathes with the pulse of rebirth and illusion. Ultimately, these films remind one that The Tempest endures not as a monument, but as weather–restless, recurring, and perpetually rewriting itself.