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 onethat The Tempest endures not as a monument,
but as weather–restless, recurring, and perpetually rewriting itself.