sibly_esposito becoming-ariel_ viewing julie taymor’s the tempest through an ecocritical lens 2011

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24 | 2011 :Littérature et cinémaDes limites de l’adaptation

Becoming-Ariel: Viewing JulieTaymor’s The Tempest throughan Ecocritical LensCLARE SIBLEY-ESPOSITO

p. 121-134

Résumé

The burgeoning field of ecocriticism takes what Cheryll Glotfelty has referred to as an “earth-centered approach” to cultural productions, with ecocritics sharing a concern with theinterconnectedness of human and non-human spheres. This article presents a brief overviewof some ecocritical readings of The Tempest, before interpreting Julie Taymor’scinematographic adaptation in the light of such considerations. Taymor attributes a ratherunproblematic power of manipulation of the natural world to her Prospera, yet some of herdirectorial choices, operating within the specificity of the film medium, tend nonetheless tohighlight certain ecocritically-relevant dimensions of Shakespeare’s text. By viewing the filmthrough an ecocritical lens, whilst borrowing terminology from Gilles Deleuze and FélixGuattari, the figure of Ariel can be seen as operating on a “molecular plane” of ontologicalinterconnectivity, in contrast to the “molar mode” of binary oppositions inherent in Prospera’sdesire to dominate natural forces.

Entrées d’index

Keywords : The Tempest, Ariel, ecocriticismPersonnes citées : Shakespeare (William), Taymor (Julie), Deleuze (Gilles), Guattari (Félix)

Texte intégral

It is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside, by tracing the line of flight

Becoming-Ariel: Viewing Julie Taymor’s The Tempest through an ... http://babel.revues.org/156

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which passes between the two terms or the two sets, the narrow stream whichbelongs neither to the one nor to the other, but draws both into a non-parallel

evolution, into a heterochronous becoming.Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues II.1

Ariel: […] And sweet sprites bear/The burden.William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.381-2.2

Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature andthe physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language andliterature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings anawareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts,ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies. […] allecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture isconnected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it.6

For the more reactionary variety of bardolater, there is much to take issue with inJulie Taymor’s cinematic translation of The Tempest3. Prospero bows out toProspera, in a gender-switch which necessitates a re-working of the backstorythrough the insertion of several lines of ‘faux-Shakespearean’ verse4; considerableportions of the textual source are cut; Ariel’s song as sea-nymph invites Ferdinand,and the audience, to take hands on “darkened sands” (Taymor, 62) rather than to betransported to the more enticing “yellow sands” (1.2.376) which linger in the memoryof our school-room recitals. On the other hand, those who willingly embrace the“adapted from” of the film’s subtitle, having long shrugged off any “anxiety ofauthenticity”5, may worry that Taymor’s vision does not go far enough to release anyradically new potentialities in the play, despite the power of Helen Mirren’sperformance as Prospera. Yet by exploring the collaborative engagement of the filmand its source with ecocritical considerations in mind, it is possible to glimpsedimensions of ecological resonance both in the specificity of the film medium and inShakespeare’s dramatic art. Whilst Taymor cannot be classed as an ‘eco-auteur’,certain aspects of the textual source relevant to an ecocritical reading seep throughand are in some cases heightened by her artistic vision.

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It is first important to underline the fact that the ecocritical lens is a wide one,offering many interpretative possibilities, and that what follows is an attempt tozoom in on a small number of the issues coming into view as the field of ecocriticismcontinues to expand. As many commentators have remarked, approaching a culturalproduction from an ecocritical perspective does not involve adopting any particularmethodological apparatus, but is rather a question of focus of interest. One of themost commonly cited attempts to capture the essence of ecocriticism remains one ofthe earliest and most wide-ranging definitions of the movement, put forward byCheryll Glotfelty in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader in 1996:

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The field has burgeoned beyond the confines of literary studies in recent years,with outcrops in a range of disciplines, including film studies, but ecocritics continueto share a common concern with the question of how cultural productions may bothreflect and mould human perceptions of the biophysical world7. This conception ofthe imbrication of culture and nature posits the ontological interconnectedness ofwhat ecological scientists refer to as the “ecosphere”8, in opposition to the dualistic,mechanistic worldview which ecocritics (amongst others) argue has dominatedwestern thinking at least since the seventeenth century. Yet the question of whatexactly is implied by taking an “earth-centered approach” to cultural productions

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[…] as an allegorical anticipation of the project of mastery which came to becalled Baconian method and then Enlightenment. Prospero’s magic is a form oftechnology, used to harness the powers of nature, which are dramatised in thefigures of Ariel and fellow spirits. Prospero’s explicit programme is enlightenedand humanistic: he wishes to free his antagonists into self-knowledge. But hismethod is the exploitation of the work of others, Ariel and Caliban.11

remains highly problematic, leading as it has in some cases to a rejection of thelessons of the linguistic turn and thereby to the resurgence of over-simplisticapproaches to referentiality. Meanwhile, the absence of a common theoreticalframework is seen as a limitation by some ecocritics, and as a stimulus to rhizomatic,open-ended discussion by others.9

The variety of ecocritical approaches to film productions matches theheterogeneity of the movement as a whole but also raises its own subset of points fordebate. An initial focus on films with explicitly ‘environmental’ subject matter and onthe techniques of what has come to be referred to as ‘eco-cinema’ has widened toinclude a consideration of how more mainstream productions potentially engage andinfluence viewers’ attitudes to relations between the human and the nonhuman10.Ecocritical perspectives on film now occupy a wide spectrum, ranging fromHeideggerian distrust of technological ‘enframing’ of the biophysical world—focusingon the potentially alienating participation of cinema in processes by which thenatural world may be “objectified, measured, dominated and parcelled out forhuman uses” (Ivakhiv, 17)—through to an interest in the expressive and affectivepotential of the film medium as a possible means of opening up areas of empatheticconnection across the human/nonhuman dichotomy, conducive to the promotion ofmore ‘ecocentric’ cultural attitudes.

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Before turning to Taymor’s film with these issues in mind, it is necessary toprepare the ground a little further by briefly surveying the type of ecocriticalattention which the textual source and Peter Greenaway’s cinematic version,Prospero’s Books, have already inspired. In one of the first ecocritical readings of anyShakespeare play, Jonathan Bate argued that The Tempest could be interpreted:

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Bate focuses particularly on the figure of Ariel, whom he argues is emblematic offorces inherent in poetic art which have the potential to revive a sense ofenchantment with life itself, in dialectical opposition to the “disenchantment”(78)prompted by the instrumentalist thrust of modernity’s technical art.12

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For Gabriel Egan, “the play is utterly ambiguous about the kind of control over thephysical world that Prospero’s knowledge gives him, and by probing this question(what is his ‘art’?), we can begin to see the ecological significance of The Tempest.” 13

Egan insists on the extent to which Prospero’s apparent magic is “almost entirelymediated through Ariel” (Egan, 157), whilst drawing attention both to the blurring ofthe categories of the natural and supernatural which occurs throughout the play andto aspects which might encourage the audience to doubt the extent of Prospero’spowers. This leads to the claim that, through Prospero’s “exploitation of theatricalpower” and dependence on Ariel, “the play shows an unmistakable concern withnatural phenomena being taken for magic” (Egan, 167). Egan joins Bate in equatingProspero’s particular form of art with a quest for technological control of naturalforces,14 as part of a rather more thematic focus on how the play can be seen asengaging with such issues as that of deforestation, already topical in Shakespeare’sday.15

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Both Egan and Bate emphasize how Caliban is characterized in ways which serve8


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an exploration and a critique of modernity’s intention to “author” the world asa human artifact, and its misguided faith in the quest for absoluteunderstanding and control of human and nonhuman nature (Willoquet-Maricondi, 210).

to resist rather than to reinforce a dichotomous opposition of nature and culture,how Prospero and Miranda depend on him for physical survival, and how histreatment by Prospero may be read as indicative of links between colonial andenvironmental exploitation. Meanwhile, Dan Brayton also explores Caliban’sliminality, his “ontologogical hybridity that encompasses man and fish”16 in areading which focuses on the sea imagery in the play. Brayton argues that the playexplores in part the dialectical relation between humanity and the sea, confoundingany strict separation of the human and the inhuman. The marine environmentremains nonetheless represented as “a space of invisibility and unknowing, wherethe limitations of sight undermine epistemological certainty” (Brayton, 178),evocations of which serve both to underline many of the play’s fundamentalambiguities and to bring into (ecocritically correct) question “our ability to sound thenatural world” (Brayton, 190).

In twentieth-century film versions of The Tempest, the island was generallyinterpreted as a psychological rather than a geographical space, a trend which somecommentators attribute to the notion that the sea or far-flung lands no longerfunction imaginatively as the mysterious unknown17. From an ecocritical perspective,such a contention is itself symptomatic of modernity’s self-limiting belief to havedemarcated and conquered the domain of the natural, to have shorn it of its mystery.For Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991)comments self-consciously on the illusory nature of such a sense of hegemony, andon the projected severance of self and place that is arguably one of the effects ofdualistic Western thinking18. From this point of view, John Gielgud’s Prospero“evokes the modernist self who lives in isolation from the world” (Willoquet-Maricondi, 218), whilst the film’s metacinematographic devices draw attention tohow this “disembodied intellect” (222) manipulates language as a means of controland abstraction. Prospero’s separation from the world is a “method for mastery”(217), operating in oppressive contrast to Caliban’s “symbiotic relationship with theenvironment” (220). Hence the anti-realism of Greenaway’s approach is interpretedas a means to comment on its own inherent limits, the film as a whole constituting:

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In contrast to the anti-realist aesthetics of Peter Greenaway’s treatment of the play,Julie Taymor’s adaptation makes a return to apparently untroubled illusionism. Shotmainly on location on volcanic islands in Hawaii,19 the action is set in a naturalisticenvironment of varied topography, ranging from barren landscapes of lava rock tosandy coves, from dense forest to sunlit canyons. Taymor retains much of the textualsource, with few alterations in scenic order, thereby adhering to the play’soft-commented relative unity of time and space. In her introduction to the publishedscreenplay, Taymor implies that she saw few inherent difficulties in translating theplay from page to film (and, as she had previously directed the play in the theatre,from stage to film20), arguing that “Shakespeare was the ultimate screenwriter”(Taymor, 13). The Tempest seems particularly supportive of such a claim, given that,as Jonathan Bate points out, mechanised special effects were employed for it’sstaging in Shakespeare’s time and considerable portions of the play involve intimatedialogue, making it the Bard’s “great drama of close up”21.

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Yet, whilst it is not uncommon to argue that Shakespeare’s dramatic art is11


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fundamentally cinematographic, several critics have pointed out that the technicalmeans available to contemporary filmmakers (and, in some cases, to modern stagedirectors) may be employed in ways which prove to be reductive of the inherentplurality of perspectives opened up by the plays.22 Such is the case, I feel, in Taymor’sover-specification of Prospera’s magic, which leaves little room for the ambiguities ofthe textual source concerning the nature and extent of this “art.” In the openingsequence, Prospera is shown in a rigid pose on a promontory overlooking the sea inwhich the Neapolitan ship flounders in the storm, her staff extended horizontallyabove her head; at Miranda’s entreaty she gestures at the sky and the clouds areseemingly wiped aside by the arc of the movement. A similar gesture later in the filmaccompanies the darkening of the sky and commencement of an overhead spectacle(replacing the masque of the textual source), whilst shots of the sorceress aligningrotating lenses in her alchemical laboratory are intercut with those of an eclipse ofthe sun and the appearance of the banquet table in front of the court party. Towardsthe end of the film, having traced a circle in the sand and set it alight, Prosperastands stock still for the opening lines of the famous abjuration speech, whilst thelandscape seems to spin dizzyingly around her. Hence she is placed as a dominantcentre of reference, seemingly separated from and in control of her surroundings.

Whereas the film opens up certain areas of debate around gender issues inre-casting Prospero as a woman, it nonetheless therefore tends to close off a numberof ecocritically relevant questions by attributing the female magus with a relativelyunproblematic power to manipulate the natural world. Admittedly, Prospera stillcalls on Ariel to carry out much of her business, but the shot selection andcomposition repeatedly suggests that she is in overall control of events. Some of thetextual cuts which Taymor makes reflect this tendency to disambiguate Prospera’spowers. For example, following Ariel’s reprimanding of the court party, Taymorretains “Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou/Performed, my Ariel” but cuts thedevelopment which serves to highlight the fundamentally rhetorical nature of thepower which Ariel has exerted on her behalf (“Of my instruction hast thou nothingbated in what thou hadst to say”; 3.3.83-86.) Similarly, lines are cut which in thetextual source underline the performative aspect and ambiguous status of Ariel’s rolein that mise-en-scène, “Thou and thy meaner fellows your last service/Did worthilyperform, and I must use you/In such another trick”( 4.1.35-37).

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The implied subservience of the realm of the natural to Prospera’s apparentlyunmitigated control forms part of the dualistic opposition of “Nature versusNurture”, which Taymor posits as being one of the film’s major themes (Taymor, 14).Such an opposition is supported by the production design for Prospera andMiranda’s subterranean cell. Accessed by two steep flights of steps resembling theleaves of an open book, this habitation is described by Taymor as contrasting with“the starkness of the exterior locations,”23 filled as it is with objects associated withthe “nurture […] retained from civilisation.” The potential force of that civilisation issuggested by the open furnace in the centre of the cell, equipped with large bellows“harnessing the underground energy of the volcano” and by the trees laden withunfamiliar fruits in the courtyard to the cell, intended to be interpreted as Prospera’s“botanical creations” (Taymor, 19).

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In line with the dichotomy she adopts as a structuring device, Taymor’sassessment of Caliban as “the ‘natural’ that Prospera tries and fails to reform in hernurturing” (Taymor, 18) seems perilously close to the rigidly dualistic view expressedby Prospera/Prospero: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature/Nurture can neverstick” (Taymor, 145; 4.1.188-189). However, Taymor qualifies her interpretation by

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emphasising that the clashes between Caliban and his ‘master’ are intended to “leavethe audience discomforted, unsure as to whom to root for”, on the basis that“Shakespeare never chooses sides” (Taymor, 18).

And, ultimately, no side is chosen. The actors’ performances and Taymor’s overallartistic design are sufficiently Shakespearean for the Nature/Nurture dichotomy todismantle itself into more intriguing dialectical relations. In the case of Caliban, thecharacter’s skin is made to resemble the island’s black lava rock and cracked redearth, in accordance with Taymor’s contention that he is “Nature personified”(Taymor, 25). The details which are added to his make-up do not contradict thisinterpretation but they nonetheless tend, on another level, to disturb rather than toreinforce dualistic thinking. Contrasting elements are yoked together: one of his eyesis brown, the other blue, inspired by the textual reference to his mother Sycorax as a“blue-eyed hag”; the white circular moon which frames the blue eye and the whitepatches on his otherwise dark skin tie-in with the nickname of “Mooncalf” attributedto him by Stephano; his webbed fingers link to Trinculo’s characterisation of him as a“strange fish.” The overall effect is one of unexpectedly integrated juxtapositionswhich act as the visual equivalent of the text’s abundant recourse to strikingcompounds, by which conventional dichotomous categorisations are confounded.24

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Another example of an artistic choice through which Shakespeare’s verbal imageryis indirectly rendered visual and extended occurs in the scene in which Prospera isdepicted as preparing Ariel’s intimidation of the court party. Once again, the effecttends to generate complexities which exceed surface oppositions. Surrounded by heralchemical apparatus, Prospera carefully drops a raven’s feather into a vial of liquid.The vial explodes, the shattered pieces transforming into a multiplicity of feathersbefore revealing Ariel in the guise of gigantic harpy “its breasts, face and talonscovered in black, oozing oil” (Taymor, 124), a myriad of smaller harpies multiplyingaround it. The raven’s feather operates as a visual echo of Caliban’s earlier curse onProspera and Miranda: “As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed/With raven’sfeather from unwholesome fen/Drop on you both!” (Taymor, 58; 1.2.322-324),serving to reinforce parallels between Prospera and Sycorax and confound anytemptation to consider them in simplistically oppositional terms.

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Furthermore, the “unwholesome fen” of Caliban’s curse links implicitly to thepollution motif which is developed in this scene. Tar drips from Ariel’s teeth as herebukes the terrified group; following his disappearance, Alonso is left staring into apuddle of oil. The latter shot serves not only as a visual reinforcement of Alonso’smental state at this point, as he concludes that his son “i’th’ooze is bedded” (Taymor,130; 3.3.100), but also generates a contrastive parallel with Prospera staring into theclear pool in her courtyard from which she summons Ariel earlier in the film, andanticipates the later transformation of that same pool when black molten lava dogssurge from its depths, accompanied by Ariel, to chase Trinculo, Stephano andCaliban. The employment of Prospera’s powers to terrify her enemies is thereforeassociated with a revenge motif which links her not only to Caliban and Sycorax butalso to the Neapolitan and Milanese courts, and by which natural fens and volcaniclava are interchanged with the civilisation-infused connotations of oily pollution.Whereas Taymor does not encourage her audience to question Prospero’s apparentability to dominate her environment and the forces of nature, her artistic choicestherefore nonetheless result in a problematisation of the source and potential effectsof that power.

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Meanwhile, the textual emphasis on the intimate bond between Prospera andAriel, enhanced by the gestural subtleties of Helen Mirren and Ben Whishaw’s

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The great project of English and American literature was to get close to suchmultiplicities: it is in this literature that the question ‘What is it to write?’ hasundoubtedly received the answer which is closest to life itself, to vegetable andanimal life.29

So much caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming apure plane of abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into aregression to the undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum ofstrata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which toextract materials, affects and assemblages? (Deleuze and Guattari, 298).

performances, is further reinforced by filmic devices which operate a decidedlyShakespearean blurring of distinctions between the spheres of the natural, thehuman and the supernatural. Ariel’s first appearance is made from the pool in thesubterranean cell, his translucent form swirling out of cloudy depths to replaceProspera’s reflection. Similarly, the two characters are briefly but strikinglysuperposed towards the end of the film: when Prospera commands Ariel to fetch herMilanese apparel, the camera pans 180 degrees to the left as if to follow Ariel’smovement, but instead reveals Prospera already in her courtly dress, where theviewer would be likely to ‘anticipate’ Ariel’s reappearance in the frame.

Such composition choices also reinforce one of Ariel’s fundamental characteristics—his/her fluid capacity for Protean transformation. Whishaw’s Ariel is anandrogynous, semi-transparent figure in most of his scenes with Prospera butappears in a plethora of computer-generated forms in the course of the film, seemingto meld with the winds, the sea and the greenery, often separating into multipleAriels. He/she also appears in the celestial spectacle which replaces the textualmasque, a projection of evolving geometrical patterns, drawings of sea creatures andstar constellations, culminating in “an androgynous image of Vitruvian man/womanas one being”25. Similarly, Ariel’s long-desired release from servitude is depicted bymeans of multiplications of his form, making up geometrical patterns which give wayto a myriad of particles, dissolving into a shot of the sea crashing around the rocksonto which Prospera throws her staff.

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The film’s visual imagery thereby gestures towards the imperceptible multiplicitieswith which Shakespeare’s verbal imagery associates Ariel: “Where the bee sucks,there suck I, / In a cowslip’s bell I lie […]”26. Such multiplicities resist fixed dualisms,by definition; by implying the porosity of boundaries between entities, they resist thenotion of any rigid separation between individuals and open up possibilities ofontological interconnectivity. To borrow Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’sterminology, they operate on a “molecular” plane,27 the “plane of consistency” whichcan be assimilated to the ecosphere of ecological science28. In his introduction toDialogues II, Deleuze explains how to him and Guattari it seemed that:

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From this perspective, Ariel can be seen as emblematic of the gesturing beyondunified subjectivity, of the imaginative possibility of “becoming-other, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible”, which Deleuze and Guattari suggest is inherent inartistic endeavour.30 Yet such a decentered imaginative engagement with“coexistence,”31 with the multiplicities beyond subjectivity, implies an ecocentrichumility which may only be striven after, as it is necessarily in tension with theseparatist assertions of language, with the subjectifying ‘I’. Deleuze and Guattarianticipate such a problem and turn it to account:

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Hence, the fluid “becomings” of the “molecular” mode, of ecocentric sensibility,22


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Ariel: […]Your charm so strongly works ’emThat, if you now beheld them, your affectionsWould become tender.

Prospero/a: Dost thou think so, spirit?

Ariel: Mine would, […] were I human.

Prospero/a:

And mine shall.Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feelingOf their afflictions, and shall not myself(One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,Passion as they) be kindlier moved than thou art?32

Notes

operate in tandem and in tension with the more separatist tendencies of the “plane oforganization or development” (Deleuze and Guattari, 297), the “molar” mode ofconscious “being.”

It seems to me that this interdependence of the molecular and molar modes isparticularly apparent in The Tempest—both in the play and in Taymor’s film—in thecontrasts and connections established between Prospero/Prospera and Ariel. Themolar mode is the mode of binary oppositions, associated with the enforcement andmaintenance of control; it is Prospero/Prospera’s dominant mode, and one which thetextual source, more clearly than the film, suggests is bound up with the exercise ofrhetorical power. In contrast, as we have seen, Ariel’s protean forms and language ofmultiplicity can be assimilated to the fluid becomings associated with the molecularmode, an aspect of his/her characterisation which the visual imagery of the filmtends to draw out. The molecular has the potential to destabilise the propensity ofthe molar to operate along dualistic and hierarchical lines—bringing to mind thefamous exchange between Ariel and Prospero/Prospera in which the spriteencourages the power-wielding magus to engage empathetically with his/herenemies:

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Ariel’s intervention may therefore be interpreted as promoting a capacity formolecular “becoming-other”, leading to the abjuration of the pretension tohegemonic power which Prospero/Prospera makes shortly after. Meanwhile, Ariel’sclamouring for liberty could be seen as expressive of the molecular mode’s tendencyto attempt to “extricate itself” from the molar “plane of organisation” (Deleuze andGuattari, 298). With these considerations in mind, Taymor’s depiction of Ariel’srelease in the form of images associated with the rhizomatic multiplicities of chaostheory seems particularly apt, in that Ariel’s final on-screen metamorphosis can beconceived of as that of a “becoming-imperceptible” (Deleuze and Guattari, 278;308-9)—a process without a determinable telos, by which the film gestures awayfrom itself. Whilst, as we have seen, certain aspects of Taymor’s approach to the playtend to undermine the problematisation of human control of the non-human whichShakespeare’s fuller text invites, her Ariel’s line of flight soars far beyond the boundsof the nature/culture dichotomy.

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1 Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (originally published as Dialogues. Paris:Flammarion, 1977). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, with the additionof ‘The Actual and the Virtual’, translated by Eliot Ross Albert. (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2007), p.35.

2 All line references for the textual source relate to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, revisededition, eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare, thirdseries. (London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011).

3 The Tempest. Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films, 2010. Direction and screenplay byJulie Taymor. Starring Helen Mirren as Prospera, Ben Whishaw as Ariel, Djimon Hounsou asCaliban, Felicity Jones as Miranda and Reeve Carney as Ferdinand. For a full cast-list andproduction details see the published screenplay: Taymor, Julie, The Tempest: Adapted fromthe Play by William Shakespeare (New York: Abrams, 2010).

4 Taymor reshaped the backstory, inserting lines of verse by Glen Berger before reverting toShakespeare’s text. Prospera is depicted as the deceased Duke of Milan’s widow and heir,exiled following Antonio’s accusations of witchcraft. (Taymor, 14-15).

5 Kenneth S. Rothwell explores the “anxiety of inauthenticity” provoked by “a text-centricpreoccupation with literal translation of Shakespeare’s language into film language”, as part ofhis survey of changing attitudes to cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, entitled ‘Howthe Twentieth Century Saw the Shakespeare film: “is it Shakespeare?”’, Literature/FilmQuarterly. Volume: 29. Issue: 2, 2001, p.82.

6 Glotfelty, Cheryll. ‘Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.’ TheEcocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryl Glotfelty and HaroldFromm. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. xviii-xix).

7 For a detailed examination of ecocritical issues and approaches see, for example, GregGarrard, Ecocriticism, (London; New York: Routledge, 2004).

8 A point Glotfelty emphasises in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, p.xix. For thescientific background to the concept of the ‘ecosphere’ see, for example, ‘Ecology as a Scienceof Synthesis’, introduction to The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis, edited byDavid R. Keller and Frank B. Golley (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 2.

9 Timothy Morton explores the limits of certain ecocritical approaches in Ecology WithoutNature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London:Harvard University Press, 2007). The characterisation of the movement as rhizomatic, in theDeleuzean sense of the term, is made by Serpil Opperman, in ‘The Rhizomatic trajectory ofEcocriticism’, European Journal on Literature and Environment, 1.1 (Spring 2010).

10 For an indication of the variety of questions this field of study raises, see Ivakhiv, Adrian,‘Green Film Criticism and its Futures’ in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature andEnvironment 15.2 (Summer 2008); see also Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula ‘Introduction: fromLiterary to Cinematic Ecocriticism’ in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism andFilm, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010),pp.1-22.

11 Bate, Jonathan, The Song of the Earth, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress, 2000), pp.77-8.

12 Bate (79-93) goes on to offer readings of a number of works inspired by The Tempest,including Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête and Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poem entitled‘Caliban’.

13 Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London; New York:Routledge, 2006), p.153.

14 It should be noted that Egan’s reading explicitly differs from Bate’s in relation to a numberof textual details, in its approach to the question of transmutation and in its main focus.

15 Egan (155-171) explores the abundant references to wood in the play and links issues ofcolonialism with those of deforestation.

16 Brayton, Dan, ‘Shakespeare and the Global Ocean’, Ecocritical Shakespeare, eds. LynneBruckner and Dan Brayton (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2011), p.184.

17 For example, Judith Buchanan argues that “the physical world, unlike its materialcounterpart, still offers spaces to be explored and in which to be awed and bemused. Thefrontier, that is, has moved inwards.” Shakespeare on Film, (Harlow; New York: PearsonLongman, 2005), p.178.


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18 Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’sBooks as Ecological Rereading and Rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” in Reading theEarth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, eds. Michael P. Branch,Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson and Scott Slovic, (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press,1998) pp.209-224.

19 For details concerning the location choices and filming techniques, see Stasukevich, Iain,‘The Tempest Hits Hawaii’, American Cinematographer. Volume: 92. Issue: 1, January 2011.

20 For an analysis of the connections between Taymor’s various stage productions of TheTempest and her choices as film director, see Quarmby, Kevin A., ‘Behind the Scenes: Penn &Teller, Taymor and The Tempest Divide Shakespeare’s Globe, London’, Shakespeare Bulletin,29.3 (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp.383-397.

21 Jonathan Bate makes this observation in his Foreword to the published screenplay(Taymor, 8).

22 See Lanier, Douglas, ‘William Shakespeare, Filmmaker’ in The Cambridge Companion toLiterature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) for an examination ofthe “reinvention of Shakespeare as filmmaker” and a consideration of the potential limits andmore negative aspects of such a trend.

23 Taymor (18-19) also explains that her choice of exterior locations was intended asmetaphorical reinforcement of the extent of Prospera’s art: “black volcanic rock, red earthcanyons, white coral bones, and a deep blue sea. The alchemist’s sandbox – a tabular rasa forProspera’s powers.”

24 For a discussion of these compounds in the textual source, see Anne Righter’s introductionto the New Penguin edition of the play, ed. Anne Righter (London; New York: Penguin Books,1968) pp.13-14.

25 Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan make this observation in their appraisal ofthe film, included in the ‘Additions and Reconsiderations’ in the 2011 revised edition of theplay, p. 159.

26 5.1.88-9. Taymor (171) places this song to coincide with Ariel’s release.

27 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris,Éditions de Minuit, 1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translatedby Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 2004), p. 298.

28 For a discussion of the compatibility between Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘machinics’ and thepostulates of ecological science, see Bernd Herzogenrath, ‘Nature/Geophilosophy/Machinics/Ecosophy’ in Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Basingstoke; NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1-22.

29 Gilles Deleuze in his Preface to Dialogues II, p. ix.

30 “Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim: to unleash these becomings.”(Deleuze and Guattari, 300).

31 “Every becoming is a block of coexistence.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 322).

32 5.1.17-24; Taymor cuts “that relish all as sharply, Passion as they”, p.151.

Pour citer cet article

Référence papierClare Sibley-Esposito, « Becoming-Ariel: Viewing Julie Taymor’s The Tempest through anEcocritical Lens », Babel, 24 | 2011, 121-134.

Référence électroniqueClare Sibley-Esposito, « Becoming-Ariel: Viewing Julie Taymor’s The Tempest through anEcocritical Lens », Babel [En ligne], 24 | 2011, mis en ligne le 11 octobre 2012, consulté le 08janvier 2013. URL : http://babel.revues.org/156

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10 of 11 1/8/13 6:50 AM

Clare Sibley-EspositoUniversité du Sud Toulon-VarLaboratoire Babel (EA 2649)

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11 of 11 1/8/13 6:50 AM

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