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- Title
Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and the End of Books.
- Authors
Donaldson, Peter S.
- Abstract
This multimedia essay traces how Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books reads The Tempest, anachronistically, as a play about the end of books and the advent of electronic forms. Greenaway finds The Tempest relevant to this shift because, as he puts it we are living in the early years of a new "Gutenberg Revolution," in which the ambitions of the Renaissance magus with his magic books are being realized, in part, through digital technologies. Prospero's Books is an anticipatory or proleptic allegory of the digital future, figuring the figuring the destruction of libraries and their rebirth as "magically" enhanced electronic books. It is set in the past, and extrapolates from the several passages in the play in which Prospero's books are mentioned the story of twenty-four wonderworking books through which Prospero achieves his magic; yet, by calling attention to the digital special effects by which these books have been created on screen--"paint" and photoprocessing applications, computer animation, multiple screen overlays--Greenaway suggests that the magically enhanced codex volume is as much a part of our future as our past. The essay also compares the "creative" magical volumes of Greenaway's film to several kinds of documentary evidence concering the fate of real books (Shakespeare's Folios) and their vicissitudes in the material world (damage, compositorial variation) and the use of specialized books such as fold-out anatomies in ways that parallel Greenaway's attempt to rival the miracle of human reproduction in digitally enhanced cinema. Like Prospero's Books, this essay itself exists in a transitional form (networked hypertext with linked images and brief video citations), and like Prospero's Books it imagines future forms and depends on them. It is relatively linear in its form, and bounded in its contours, presenting a small number of textual and visual citations. Yet it asks its readers to imagine that they are exploring a path, one particular path, through an immense networked digital archive. Such an archive would include the complete film Prospero's Books--as well as all other Shakespearean film adaptations, linked to relevant lines of text; which includes all extant copies and page fragments of the Folio text of The Tempest, and an extensive library of commentary; which is linked as well to extensive collections of anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance forward, and to texts and images that illustrate the motif of the "end of the book" in the late twentieth century.
- Publication
Postmodern Culture, 1998, Vol 8, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
1053-1920
- Publication type
Article