Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

dialogue, suddenly, when he wants to show her how she was when they were all still in Milan, he brings out a mirror with a long pole attached, eerily like a selfie-stick (though they were some years in the future). Miranda looks into it, and immediately the screen is filled with what she sees. It is her past as a child, and we see it as she does.³⁶ It is a brightly colored memory of childhood, but she is present and indeed central to the series of images, so it is not intended as a dream sequence. This is the magic mirror of filmed fairy tale. It is also a mise-en-abyme of the film process, which gets a thorough revision: images from documentaries are mixed with those of the plot. As we move from room to room in the interior of the large house that replaces the play’s island, we are likely to lose our bearings. Visual tableaux are filmed in front of a largely unmoving camera in an echo of the way cinema got started.

      Near the end, at the moment when Prospero sends Ariel (Karl Johnson) off to fetch the sleeping crew from the ship, we have a joke about the film magic. Ariel goes to the door, indicating he will do it in a trice, but finds he cannot open the big heavy door. He turns, opens his arms as for a demonstration, and disappears in a Méliès-like stop-camera moment. The next scene is the memorable dance of the sailors (with obvious reference to the homosexual “Hello, sailor” tradition). The film suddenly turns into Derek Jarman’s version of Kiss Me Kate (itself a gay icon), or West Side Story—and so it becomes The Tempest, the Musical. And there follows what has become a famous piece of cinematic camp, Elisabeth Welch leading the sailors’ chorus in “Stormy Weather.”

      At the end of the film, while Prospero snoozes in a chair (perhaps it was all just his dream), Ariel briefly sits on Prospero’s “throne,” triumphant finally in the struggle with his master. He then obtains his freedom by sneaking out past the dreaming figure. He tiptoes past, climbs the stair, and vanishes, while on the soundtrack we hear the beating of wings flying off. The scene, as in much of the film, takes place in a grandly furnished interior (Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, dilapidated at the time but since restored) that contrasts markedly with this sudden intrusion of screen magic. Prospero continues to sleep, now in close-up, as “Our revels now are ended” plays on the soundtrack. But does this final speech (moved, as often occurs, from the conclusion of the masque to the end of the play) confirm Prospero’s lingering control over the magic or return it to the film director? In any case, the main message continues to be the closet relation of gay sexuality and magic, since Ariel is signaled very clearly to the audience as an attractive young male, mischievous, even giggly. He delights in being able to creep away unnoticed by authority and finally to use his own magic abilities, no longer in the service of Prospero.

      THE TAYMOR TEMPEST

      Julie Taymor’s wild The Tempest has gone as far as one could wish into the possibilities of doing Shakespearean magic on film.³⁷ Released in the summer of 2010, it became the centerpiece of the Venice and New York Film Festivals. Helen Mirren apparently had little trouble convincing Taymor that the magician could be played by a woman. A few interpolations in the backstory explain that Prospera’s exile with her daughter was forced upon her through accusations of witchcraft arising from her intense study of alchemy, which enables her “rough magic” on the isle. Her anger at her enemies is maternal, stemming as much from a desire to protect Miranda as from her need for revenge. The result is Prospera. Taymor had done a minimalist stage Tempest in 1986, but a visit to Hawaii convinced her to make a film: in the supplementary material on the DVD she says that the combination of volcanic black and red rock, strikingly visual cliffs, and wild weather made it seem to her “as if some supernatural events had taken place there.” The film opens on a close-up—within a background of land, sea, and sky—of a castle made from black sand. As the shot widens, we see that the building is dissolving in the rain and in fact is a miniature castle held in Miranda’s hand. Thunder and lightning crackle out over the immense sea, and we/she hear the frightened shouting of the crew of the ship that seems to be foundering in the bay below. The scene is brilliantly beautiful, the product of Prospera’s magic, as she soon explains, but also of CGI. Computer-generated images allow these two women, magician and film director, to make rich and densely powerful versions of their illusions.

      The purpose of the masque, which is to show “some vanity” of Prospero’s art (4.1.41), can now be gloriously fulfilled: as Antonio Sanna puts it in the online Kinema article, “[S]tar maps are drawn, various geometrical shapes and the symbols of the zodiac signs are continually superimposed over real stars and nebulae in a sort of representation of a cartographer’s reverie.” The masque is, nonetheless, a vain demonstration of Prospera’s power. Ben Whishaw’s Ariel alternately appears from a white dove and an orchid, and as Sanna puts it “is symmetrically duplicated or exponentially replicated”; Whishaw does not simply evoke the spirits but participates in the magic vision him/herself.

      Prospero’s long speech telling Miranda of their history always poses a problem on stage, but it can now be done with remarkable visual force. It can even be extended (actually to some thirty minutes) while the girl, plus Caliban and Ferdinand and the spirit who conjures it all into being, Ariel, can watch and enjoy the sequence. Ben Whishaw makes a suitably ethereal and gender-free Ariel who bursts upward as in a fountain into Prospera’s cavern and our delighted presence. His/her shape-changing is cleverly mirrored in watery images that rise up to ride Ariel’s native element, the air, and s/he also bounds magically over the earth. Whereas Shakespeare’s Ariel is under the power of the magician until Prospero chooses to release him, in Taymor’s film s/he is more of a junior companion to Prospera, or at least not exactly a slave. S/He flies and swoops around the Hawaiian island, Lana‘i, carrying out Prospera’s bidding and performing amazing tricks. Perhaps the most spectacular is when s/he becomes a giant black-winged “minister of Fate” to inform the villains of their punishment. By contrast, Caliban—earth to Ariel’s fire in the play—is here simply a rebellious African in Prospera’s service, using his acting skills (Djimon Hounsou) but no magic. The scenes between Ariel and Prospera lead toward an understanding of what human forgiveness requires. Ariel tells Prospera how Alonso and Gonzalo are suffering and suggests that if she could see them, she would become tender toward them. “Dost think so, spirit?” asks Helen Mirren with shocked surprise. “Mine would, master, were I human,” says Whishaw; she replies, “And mine shall.” The faces and voices carry the message delivered near the end: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.18–23).

      OTHER TEMPESTS

      The “sounds and sweet airs” of Prospero’s island are transformed in Forbidden Planet (1956)—the most expensive sci-fi movie made up to that point—into the haunting beeps, whirs, and occasional screeches of the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron. The enormous space constructed to represent the two-hundred-centuries-old Krell laboratories are still impressive, as we look down on tiny people moving along immense concrete walkways. The special effects indeed were nominated for an Oscar, but the blaster guns and the way they zap against electronic screens now merely look primitive. Far from expanding the possibilities for Shakespearean magic, the technology replaces it. The captive spirit Ariel becomes the remarkable robot called Robbie, an electronic Jeeves who can replicate the cook’s bourbon once he has poured a good swig through the little door into his innards, who informs the visiting spaceship crew that if they do not understand English he can offer 187 alternative languages, and who does all the cooking (“a housewife’s dream”). He conforms exactly to the robot stereotype—indeed, he probably had a lot to do with starting it off, in that he twice goes into electrically overcharged fizzing and flashing when he is given a command that contradicts his programming not to harm humans.