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Created in 2007, and toured through 2013, Polynesian director and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio’s striking Tempest: Without a Body marks a new phase in environmentally-focused, postcolonial discourse. Shakespeare’s The Tempest plays a central role in Ponifasio’s move in the direction of political theology, as does the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, and Isabelle Stengers. By linking the imagery of Shakespeare’s text to Samoan conceptions of temporality--how past, present and future interpenetrate--Ponifasio identifies the linearity of Western temporality as a crucial source of disempowerment for colonized people. Ponifasio’s awareness of Western philosophical and literary history arms him against this form epistemic capture, and allows him to enlist Shakespeare in his counter-assault on Enlightenment temporality. Stengers’s analysis of “capitalist sorcery” (developed with Philippe Pignarre) helps illuminate the relevance of this reconfiguration to the study of Shakespeare. Through the Deleuzian figure of the sorcerer we come to see how Shakespeare’s work connects to contemporary postdramatic theater in a new era defined by global protest politics and the shadow of the Anthropocene.

In casting a female Prospero, as Andrew James Hartley observes, the actress herself experiences "an escape from patriarchy" only to engage in "a study of oppression," as she is forced "to sympathize with the oppressed while being powerless (for the bulk of the play) to escape her own tyranny." (134). In Julie Taymor's film adaptation of The Tempest (2010), this dynamic between tyranny and oppression is a reflection of Prospera's status as a montage effect of the two figures from whom she derives her authority: Prospero, her Shakespearean namesake, and Sycorax, the disinherited female ruler who, like Prospera, was banished to the island based on accusations of witchcraft. Radical montage, first theorized by Sergei Eisenstein and the Russian Constructivists, revolves around collision rather than continuity; it is the process whereby the clash of two discrete frames produces a dramatically new concept-not a synthesis so much as a third term that cannot be reduced to its component parts. Whereas continuity montage is always potentially co-optable by totalizing schemes, collision-based montage is intended "to make manifest the contradictions of Being" (Eisenstein 46)—a process that Walter Benjamin would later term "the politicization of the aesthetic." Replacing Benjamin's concept of "the age of mechanical reproduction," W. J. T. Mitchell characterizes the Twenty First century as the age of "biocybernetic reproduction." In Taymor's film, I shall argue, Prospera's unique heritage "reproduces" her as the site of a biocybernetic struggle. White, Western, imperializing, and male, Prospero is the quintessential Shakespearean patriarch and a figure whose magic we might think of as cybernetic—operationalized through C3 I—the military paradigm known as command-control-communication-intelligence. Within this system, Ariel plays a crucial role as the literal interface between Prospero and his enemies. Sycorax, by contrast, is the profoundly "not-Shakespearean" matriarch who bequeaths to Prospera an ability to subdue the natural world, or bios , along with a keen awareness of her own place in the hierarchy as an oppressed female subject. Caliban, Sycorax's son and the island's only native, holds the key to Prospera's delicate navigation of this colonial paradigm. Whereas Caliban functions as Prospera's limbs by hauling firewood and performing other "offices that serve" the maintenance of her authority (1.2.313), Ariel functions as the sinews of her mind, purveying her thoughts to their material execution. Together, they collide to reinvent Prospera as a montage effect that epitomizes a distinctly posthuman and, indeed, biocybernetic "concept of agency . . . where actors fit oddly, at best, into previous taxa of the human, the natural, or the constructed" (Haraway 21). Ultimately, in Taymor's film, Ariel becomes more monstrous while Caliban becomes more human, as Prospera must come to identify, in the end, more with "this thing of darkness" than with her "diligent spirit." In so doing, Taymor's Tempest dramatizes the "contradictions of Being" female in the Twenty-First-Century.

This essay considers the floor of the stage or set in productions of The Tempest and The Witch of Edmonton , in order to explore the juxtaposition of post-Stanislavskian acting techniques and Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte in the production of early modern drama today. Whilst students often come to our undergraduate programs having learned a theater history that opposes Brecht and Staniskavsky aesthetically and ideologically, current performance practice draws upon both cultural heritages. Escolme explores the ways in which scenography has recently endeavored to include the audience in the playworld, on the one hand, producing emotional engagement and empathy, while on the other foregrounding the dramatic fiction as theatrical. Her final case study is a workshop exploration of The Witch of Edmonton by Chris Goode and Wendy Hubbard that took place at the National Theatre Studio, London, in 2013. Goode’s practice used little by way of “table work”: the process initiated by Stanislavsky where a theater company discusses a text in detail before “putting it on the floor” and thereby often reaches consensus about the universal meanings inherent in a historic text. Goode’s approach exposed and theatricalized the processes by which we come to “understand” historical drama by staging discussion, rehearsal materials and the processes of putting on costumes, and making up Morris dances, alongside moments from the The Witch of Edmonton . Exploring and evaluating a range of theater practices, Escolme interrogates the value judgments inherent in metaphors of depth and surface as they pertain to character psychology and subtext, scenography and theatricality.

In a special feature entitled “Raising the Tempest” included on the DVD release of her film The Tempest (2010), director Julie Taymor expresses a view of the play that aligns with the postcolonial perspective that has dominated scholarly treatments of the text since the mid-1980s: “Shakespeare is writing about the New World. And he is writing about colonialization.” 1 Like many modern theatrical performances that have portrayed Caliban as an African slave exploited by a colonialist Prospero, Taymor’s film (based on her 1986 stage production at New York’s Theatre for a New Audience) transports Shakespeare’s enchanted island from the Mediterranean Sea to the Americas and features African actor Djimon Hounsou as the enslaved Caliban. As Taymor declares in the introduction to her screenplay, “In casting an African in this role, one automatically brings to the forefront the obvious themes of colonialization and usurpation that clearly were part of Shakespeare’s worldview, derived from stories culled from explorations to Africa and the New World” (17). However, Taymor distinguishes her setting from those of her contemporary predecessors by shooting all exteriors for the film in Hawaii, primar ily on the volcanic island of Lanai. Whereas other “American” versions of the play (noting, perhaps, Shakespeare’s reference to the “still-vexed Bermoothes” [1.2.229]), 2 tend to locate the action in an Atlantic framework, Taymor cuts Shakespeare’s allusion to the Bermudas and employs her setting and her characters’ costumes to evoke a Pacific context for the play’s events. Taymor’s film thereby ahistorically re-defines Hawaii as the site where Caliban is finally set free and slavery ends, despite the fact that African slaves were never actually kept on the Hawaiian islands. By transplanting the story of African slavery on the American mainland to

The Tempest and Polish television theatre Television theatre is a hybrid medium which draws on both theatre and television, but is different from each of them. It is well established in Poland as an independent art form, and has evolved and changed, in terms of both artistry and technology. Yet, some characteristic features remain, irrespective of the changes. The representation of the storm poses a serious challenge to directors attempting to present Shakespeare’s The Tempest on the small screen. Unlike their cinema colleagues, they cannot realistically recreate the disturbance, and have to instead rely on convention. At the same time, telegenic realism, with its “live” quality, appears to be more profound than the filmic. The reportage nature of television reflects on television theatre because a production is treated as a report of a quasi-theatrical performance.1 The “quasi” aspect of the teleplay relates to the framing of the production in the space of the amorphous television studio and its shaping by the camera for the screen. Similar studio logic is employed when shooting on other locations, whether indoor or outdoor, theatrical stages, auditoriums, or foyers. Such places are treated as indistinct and shapeless, framed by the camera and the characters’ words, which turn them into concrete localities.2 However, television theatre does not hesitate to reach out for purely electronic means. Electronically pasted images appear in the productions, along with montage, though it is less dynamic. In other words, in the creation of its fictitious world, a teleplay uses means which are either unavailable on the traditional stage, or are deployed differently. The use

No one watching Alexander Morfov’s Tempest burst onto the stage of the Sofia Theatre in 1992 would have guessed that this production would become a litmus paper for the changes in the life of the nation. Nor that—by morphing—it will live on stage for ten years. Even less so, that Bulgarian theatre would acquire a passion for a text which had had a negligible stage life since it was first translated in 1883, nor that Bulgarian directors would be exporting Tempests to other countries.1 The early years after the demise of communism were raw, turbulent, exhilarating, and painful—a time of collapsing verities, shifting loyalties, lost friendships, severe deprivations and high hopes. After months of strikes, massive protests, and tumultuous elections, Bulgaria had a new President, the former dissident Zhelyu Zhelev, and though the economic situation was dire, there was hope that things could only change for the better. By the mid 1990s, exhilaration and intoxication had given way to disappointment and the bitterness of broken promises. The situation did not improve in the late 1990s and through the early years of the new century as successive governments failed to put the country on a firm economic footing, fight corruption and crime, and improve the general standard of life. Public mood has settled into bitter pessimism. The two productions of The Tempest I consider here belong to these periods, rather different in their mood and emotion.2 The first one had just one season, and a youthful verve which delighted in playing, mocking, and transforming the wrecks of material objects which littered the stage; the second, in its two versions (1996 and 1999) held the stage for a decade and was much more clearly metaphorical.

Julie Taymor's 2010 film of The Tempest offers a decidedly expression- istic representation of the storm at sea. Released in a select few cinemas in the UK in March 2011, Taymor's film graphically portrays the storm's growing intensity as waves lash and thunder cracks over the sixteenth- century galleon bearing Antonio and his co-conspirators. The vessel is tossed and torn by the relentless localized tempest. Crew and passengers jostle on deck, their fear and panic heightened by the apparent pur- posefulness of this fatal event. The theatricality of the moment is made hyper-real by filmic techniques that accentuate the actuality of shipwreck. Mariners struggle to survive in their alien element, with nature unleash- ing its full fury against them. The cinema audience become voyeuristic onlookers as the tragedy unfolds. A visceral sense of horror accompanies this visual and aural tumult. Secure and safe, they experience the vicari- ous thrill of destruction and despair as the film's fictive characters suffer their mortal peril. The directorial skill with which Taymor creates this traumatic opening episode confirms her ability to re-envision that most difficult of Shake- speare's scenes, the onstage shipwreck. It also confirms her understanding of the dramatic and narrative importance of this incident within the play as a whole, and her personal engagement with Shakespeare's playtext. In the glossy photographic book and screenplay, published to coincide with the film's release, Taymor goes some way toward explaining her particular fascination with The Tempest and its playwright. "Shakespeare was the ultimate screenwriter," she observes, with The Tempest offering "a great opportunity for a film director ( . . . ) from its wondrous and diverse parts for actors to visual dimensions and challenges that are ripe

Like many people who have at least once attended a production by Alexander Morphov, I had my misgivings when buying a ticket for his Midsummer Night's Dream, commissioned for an open-ended run beginning in the March of 2008 by the St. Petersburg Komissarzhevsky Theatre (named after a celebrated nineteenth-century Russian actress). Morphov is well known for radical, innovative approaches that often perplex and annoy theatrical professionals and the general public. His Shakespeare's Tempest and Moliere's Don Juan have been running in Komissarzhevsky's repertory for a few years, and are probably best described as variations on the plays known under these names. Taking extravagant liberties with the text has been practically de rigueur in much post-Soviet theatre, at least when dealing with non-native and therefore less familiar classics, as has been the use (and abuse) of avant-garde, heavily experimental stagecraft, much of it borrowed wholesale from the West. In many Russian Shakespearean productions of the last few years, directorial ingenuity has been going well beyond the kinds of revisionism that is practiced in typical high-profile English and American productions. One unfortunate result of such experimentation is that almost any Shakespearean production one encounters in St. Petersburg or Moscow may seem more of a commentary on a given play's critical and performance history than a self-contained theatrical event. I do not know to what extent the amount of innovation that accompanies many Russian productions of Shakespeare reflects directorial desire to re-think and re-invent specifically Shakespeare and to what extent it is a mere corollary of a director's overindulgence in contemporary theatrical fads. If it is the former, then I fear that most directorial revisionism is lost on the vast majority of the Russian public--whose median age is about thirty-five and who either has no previous acquaintance with a given play, or has made that acquaintance through another, also bewilderingly experimental, production. A seasoned student of Shakespeare may indeed be amused by something like the excessively stylized Hamlet that has been playing at the famous Moscow Arts Theatre for half a decade, in which the deployment of massive cuts and bizarre conventions--in the final duel, for example, Hamlet and Laertes sit at the table throwing up silverware, while others count hits, and then the rest is silence--cannot but prevent the majority of spectators, who don't know the play by heart, from understanding what's going on, let alone from comprehending why what they are watching is one of the greatest Western dramas. So, with Morphov's Tempest, in which Ferdinand and Prospero slap Miranda around for a good five minutes, while she mechanically repeats her name (a commentary on the evils of patriarchy?) still painfully fresh in my mind, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from and enjoyed his Dream. The curtain rose on the scene with the mechanicals. Their "Pyramus and Thisbe" was an operetta composed by Starveling. Peter Quince, provided by Morphov with a wife, Mary, played a self-absorbed director, dreaming about the accolades his play would garner. Snout was a dead-drunk electrician who kept electrocuting himself; Snug, in blackface and multi-colored bonnet, looking like a Jamaican pot-smoker, was not "slow of study," but a certifiable cretin who only mooed and blubbered. Bottom, played by the company's leading man, the charismatic Alexander Bargman (there was a touch of in-crowd humor in his willingness to take up every part) wore a butcher's apron over a fat suit that emphasized his buttocks and belly. As the distribution of roles commenced, accompanied by hilarious misunderstandings, unself-conscious puns written from scratch, gags and pratfalls, it became clear that these mechanicals came right out of the well-established Russian clownerie tradition. This performance tradition features an array of amusing characters, from regular circus clowns to endearing, silly, existentially confused and melancholy personages in the style of commedia dell' arte, or touching schlemiels reminiscent of Chaplin or early Woody Allen. …

In Rupert Goold's RSC Tempest, set in the Arctic rather than on the traditional tropical island, Julian Bleach's Ariel skulks lugubriously through the three-hour production in a long, black, clerical robe, his face made up in pale white make-up. Described by reviewers as "the most compelling feature of the production," "eerie, sonorous, and utterly original," and a "brilliant re-imagining of Ariel [that] is destined to live longest in the mind," Bleach performs an Ariel unlike any that had ever been seen, and this in a four-hundred year old play as over-performed as The Tempest (Maxwell Cooter 1 March 2007, Charles Spencer 2 March 2007, Pete Wood August 2006). In reviewer David Benedict's words, Bleach was "mercifully unrecognizable from the traditional delicate sprite" (2 March 2007). For Michael Billington, he was "the defining spirit of a remarkable production" (10 August 2006). Bleach's Ariel, so radically refigured and yet, by most accounts, so successful and illuminating of the play, prompts me to ask a number of questions about how, exactly, an actor creates the character, "Ariel," out of the textual role. Is there, as Benedict claims, a "traditional" Ariel? Because of my interest in performance, I want first to situate Bleach's performance in relation to this tradition. How is it that the particular body and voice of a specific actor is a hermeneutic site that re-wrights the character in ways that are left undefined and unspecified by Shakespeare's ambiguous text? (1) How does Shakespeare write this character of "Ariel" so that it allows for Bleach's performance to break radically with recent performance history (save perhaps Simon Russell Beale's 1993 Ariel for Sam Mendes's production)? Performed Ariels Since its earliest performance, which likely featured an adolescent male actor as Ariel, both male and female actors of all ages, races, and sizes have used their bodies and voices to create, or author, new Ariels. Ariel was a "coveted female role" from the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth century, but has been played primarily by men or sometimes boys, with notable exceptions, since the mid-twentieth century (Dymkowski 34). As W. B. Worthen points out, the bodies of these actors themselves become like a text: "drama, in the theatre, is a means of 'textualizing' the body, making the body and its actions-gesture, movement speech-readable in specific ways" (24). Actors re-author characters every time they perform, and these characters are in turn seen by audiences--audiences that include directors and actors within them--whose understanding of a role like Ariel is rewritten with every new performance. Thus, actors create a genealogy for a role which is inherited by each new actor playing that role. Theatre reviewers and critics help preserve the memories of these actors' bodies in performance, turning the bodies back into texts in their reviews and performance histories. If an audience member had seen every Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, she would have seen the fit, hyper-masculine and half naked bodies of Alan Badel (1951) and Duncan Bell (1988). (2) She also would have seen the androgynous, feminized Ariels of Ian Holm (1963), Ben Kingsley (1970), and Mark Rylance (1982). There have been plenty of female Ariels, too, including the sexpot version of Ariel, Margaret Leighton in 1952, whose costuming makes her look like a very naughty fairy indeed, but whose spirited resistance to Prospero, despite her femininity, troubled reviewers (Dymkowski 44). The bodies and costuming of each of these actors suggests an Ariel who is fit, agile, quick; the "traditional sprite" to which Benedict refers is clearly either a female, gossamer fairy or the related male, athletic, and Mercurial messenger. It seems that many recent actors have superimposed notions of fairies--who are like spirits--into their writing of a tradition of Ariel as a sprightly spirit who is light on his or her feet. …

The present article attempts to provide a comprehensive reference guide to the Shakespeare film adaptations specifically targeted at a teenage audience. The bibliography includes a section of general studies on the subject and classifies all the teen films under the title of one of Shakespeare's works. If a film cites several plays, all the entries dealing with it will be listed under the first play in alphabetical order, and a system of cross-references has been designed in order to avoid unnecessary repetitions. Although this survey seeks to be as comprehensive as possible, certain entries have been discarded, such as abstracts, announcements, dissertations, conference reports, and works containing only passing references. Interviews have only been included if they specifically deal with one or more Shakespeare films. Reviews are also limited to those making reference to the Shakespearean playtext, and the reader may instead consult The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online for a fuller coverage. Similarly, given the increasing number of critical studies on teen films, the bibliography is restricted to English-language items for reasons of space. With the exception of reviews, general discussions of a film, and/or studies that clearly specify the subject they deal with in their titles, entries in the bibliography are annotated, providing further information about their content, and, if they discuss two or more films, I have also indicated the page numbers corresponding to each film in their relevant sections. In order to avoid redundancy, the annotation will only appear the first time the item is listed. Last but not least, although it contains several headings on many of the films listed below, perceptive readers will notice that I have deliberately excluded from the present bibliography a book published in 2000 by the American branch of a well-known publisher because it contains so many mistakes and inaccuracies that it is useless for scholarly purposes. Several people deserve to be mentioned here since they helped me in many different ways while I was looking for relevant material. Gracia Navas did better than her usual best in locating rare journals and books, and now that she is no longer working at the Interlibrary Loan Service section at my university, she will be greatly missed. David Sharp checked a couple of references at the British Film Institute Library with his typical kindness and expertise. Unknowingly, Veronica Castro set me on the track to the Hamlet citations in the film Freaky Friday (2003). Miguel Angel Gonzalez, James L. Harner, Alicia Jimenez, Desiree Lopez, Sofia Munoz, Tanya Romero, Juan Jesus Zaro, and James M. Welsh kindly replied to my queries, provided information about their publications, or photocopied articles and reviews at several institutions. The research that led to the writing of this essay was funded by the Andalusian regional government (research project no. P07-HUM-02507). I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Michael D. Friedman and Kirk Melnikoff for having invited me to contribute this bibliography to the special issue. I. GENERAL STUDIES Boose, Lynda E., and Richard Burt. "Totally Clueless?: Shakespeare Goes Hollywood in the 1990s." Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.8-22. [Surveys trends in the recent proliferation of Shakespeare films while also exploring the tensions between American and British screen productions of Shakespeare.] Howard, Tony. "Shakespeare's Cinematic Offshoots." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Ed. Russell Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 295-313. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 303-23. [A survey of derivatives mainly focusing on Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and The Tempest, as well as those that were filmed in the 1990s. The second edition prints the essay in revised, expanded form. …

The essay which follows centers on the moments before and after seeing the RSC's 2006 Tempest starring Patrick Stewart while it was in residency at Ann Arbor, Michigan. The first part of the paper was written for the "Watching Ourselves Watching Shakespeare" organized by Barbara Hodgdon, and was delivered a matter of hours before seeing the production on which it centered for the first time. I argue for identifying non-textual dements of productions--here associations with a particular actor--as a way of tracking some of what audiences are responding to which often gets ignored by reviewers and critics who limit the semantic weight of a production to the show's use of text or what is narrowly defined as being "on stage." The epilogue reevaluates this argument in the light of the production and then argues for the consideration of 'central irrelevances': those extra textual details affecting audience response however much the resultant sense of audience is limited to small groups or individuals. Prospero and Picard One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons A natural perspective, that is and is not! (Twelfth Night 5.1.215-6) (1) In the teaser for "Emergence," an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG hereafter) broadcast towards the end of the show's seventh and final season, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) plays director to a rehearsal of The Tempest starring the android, Data (Brent Spinet). In the few minutes before the show's credits, we see a suitably costumed Data working Prospero's Act Five soliloquy until his uninterested Captain complains about the low light of the holodeck set. When Data has corrected this problem the discussion turns to what Shakespeare might have been manifesting through this character. The debate is interrupted by the appearance of a steam train barreling through Data's set, the teaser closing with a sense that something bizarre and dangerous is underway. The plot of the episode centers on the strange events on board the Enterprise as the ship begins to develop a mind of its own, stripping captain and crew of the ability to control the vessel's inexplicable leaps into warp. The holodeck--the three dimensional imaging system wherein the crew enact their games and fantasies virtually--becomes a kind of subconscious for the ship, drawing on the stored computer programs to play out dream-like sequences which the crew use to decipher what is going on. What is going on, it turns out, is that the ship is, effectively, giving birth, and needs to find a source of vertiform particles in order to nourish its offspring, an offspring generated by the ship's own systems and its ties to the real and imaginary lives of the crew. "O Brave new world," says Captain Picard, after the offspring eventually floats off into space, "that has such people in it." The "Emergence" episode does not use The Tempest arbitrarily. The "brave new world" of Picard's remark refers both to the characters' sense of their situation, and the show's. It is a brave new world as it is the next generation, a still more optimistic revisiting of Rodenberry's coldwar original with, as the Tears for Fears song puts it, "phasers switched and set to stun." The episode's brave new world resonates variously as a beginning and an ending. This was one of the final episodes, though a new spin off (Deep Space 9) was already in the works, so there is a self-referentiality which resonates with metadramatic nostalgia, hubris and self-deprecation. A humble TV show which assailed the lofty pinnacles of high art at least occasionally and did so with great commercial success might be considered at very least Marlovian in its reach, Shakespearean in its revisiting and testing of familiar forms. But my mission here is not to read the episode and its use of Shakespeare--intriguing though that is--but, perversely perhaps, to do the opposite, to consider Shakespeare's use of Star Trek. …

How is't possible to suffice So many Ears, so many Eyes? ... How is't possible to please Opinion tos'd in such wilde Seas? Thomas Middleton, 1613 (Field 43) You have discovered a perishable treasure, and it is imperative to share it with other people before it fades.... You have only one chance to get it right ... and there is nothing more important in the world than finding words to fix the image that has disclosed the hidden life of the text. Irving Wardle, Theatre Criticism, 1992 (79-80) What is entailed in re-viewing a play, re-performing a performance past? How does one make the disappeared performance reappear in print? And how do we think about our roles as reviewers of Shakespearean performances? The essays in this issue are deeply concerned with such questions, whether that means re-membering past performances from documentary evidence, examining the reviewer's dilemma, meditating on watching a rehearsal, querying the dynamics of sight and sound, or looking (back) at a critical text. The contributors all were participants at "Watching Ourselves Watching Shakespeare"--an international conference on performance and spectatorship held at the University of Michigan, 10-11 November 2006, planned to coincide with the final weekend of a three-week residency by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which staged three productions: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest) Open to the public, the conference drew some 400 auditors over two days. This was not a "one-off" event but one that built on and continued conversations begun at "Shakespeare: Remembering Performance," the Inaugural Conference for the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame (4-5 November 2004), which resulted in a book, Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, edited by the conference organizer, Peter Holland (Cambridge University Press, 2006). A third conference, to be held at the University of Warwick in conjunction with the CAPITAL Centre, will continue the series. The brief circulated to conference speakers posed the following questions: How do we process performance? To what are we attentive? How do we record what we hear and see? What matters? How do we use such documents? What is the place of performance memory as written discourse in the project of Shakespeare performance studies? And how might we go about putting the eye/I back into the analysis and theorization of performance? Participants were invited to address--or ignore--these questions in whatever ways were of particular interest to them. Like the papers published in the previous issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, these build into an ongoing conversation about histories of Shakespearean looking (Barthes 16). To frame that conversation, I want to think about review discourse itself--perhaps the most predictable, rigidly formulaic genre of writing about theatre, and a foundational discourse of "performance criticism"--the tried and true beginnings of what we now are beginning to rethink more expansively as Shakespeare performance studies. Glance at the section of any journal that prints theatre reviews, and a pattern begins to emerge: describe the set and costumes; praise/damn central performers; assess directorial concept; single out one, possible two, moments that seem especially memorable--and you've done your job. You're not given much space, so you have to compress the performance to index-card size, slotting it away for all time. If you're lucky, you may hear about the reviewer's penchant for certain kinds of performed Shakespeare, her or his take on textual fidelity or/and on this performance in relation to other performances of the play. And if you're really lucky, what you'll get is a snapshot portrait of time and space, a slice through culture. How does a performance "work" on us? If we have seen the performance, we can, of course, speak for ourselves, but for the "unseen" staging, our knowledge of how that performance "hit" its original auditors and spectators depends entirely on what the theatre critic says--it is to his or her voice we turn, as historians, hoping to find one, perhaps two or three, pieces that tell us what it was like to be there. …

Ferdinand is an easy mark. Coming ashore after the shipwreck, thinking his father dead, he responds immediately to the soothing strains that surround him. Ariel's magic affects no one more subtly, or, it seems, more sweetly. This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it, Or it hath drawn me rather; but 'tis gone. No, it begins again. (The Tempest 1.2.392-6) (1) That this enchantment will lead to union with Miranda and, ultimately, to the reinstatement of political and social order in The Tempest is of course one of the play's paradoxes and--perhaps it goes without saying--one of Shakespeare's ongoing concerns. How is it that fantasy can remake the real, or deception reclaim the truth? Despite Prospero's abjuration of "rough magic" and his cryptic acknowledgement near play's end of doing wrong by Caliban ("this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275-6)), The Tempest displays throughout the efficacy of such delusive "magic" to achieve the exiled duke's political aims. At the same time, however, it measures with low humor and high seriousness the experience of those manipulated by Prospero's illusions. This dual sympathy generates an ethical as well as dramatic tension that renders the play particularly relevant to our own historical moment, defined as it is by the emergence of mass visual entertainment and the distracted Ferdinand-like viewing practices of popular audiences. What, the play asks us to consider, is the ethic of enchantment? (2) Jim Sheridan's recent film In America (2002) reinscribes in a filmic text Shakespeare's concerns with the politics of fantasy. A semi-autobiographical tale about an Irish immigrant family living in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, In America centers on a young couple, Johnny and Sarah, who, soon after the death of their only son Frankie, move into a dilapidated apartment building while Johnny searches for work as an actor. Often left to their own devices, the couple's two daughters Christy and Ariel roam the neighborhood and encounter a diverse cast of New York characters, including Mateo, a reclusive artist who lives in their building. Striking up an unlikely friendship with Mateo, who has an unnamed disease that resembles AIDS, the girls and their parents come to share in his suffering and eventual death, even as his unadorned honesty gives them hope that they might maintain the family's fragile emotional balance. At first glance, the film offers several noticeable parallels to The Tempest: its repeated emphasis on Manhattan as an island; a massive thunderstorm that occurs midway through the movie; the spirited nature of Ariel, the couple's second daughter; Mateo's mysterious, threatening behavior early in the film. While these parallels do not render In America an adaptation of The Tempest, neither are they simply decorative, for they frame an exploration of fantasy's role in contemporary film production and reception. Through cinematic and dramaturgic allusion, The Tempest becomes a cultural marker that--as a drama, and as a Shakespearean drama in particular--chastens In America's spectacular movements, delimiting fantasy's power to enable the evasion of trauma. More specifically, In America employs The Tempest to counter its own sentimental trajectories and to turn from the ethical trap of relentless fantasizing, a trap represented most clearly in the film by the reappearing figure of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which the characters discuss and which Sheridan visually quotes on several occasions. With a mise en scene and a script that repeatedly cut against its own sentimentality, In America finally resists the totalizing fantasy of emotional wholeness that Spielberg's film offers, that Sheridan's characters for a time seek, and that In America itself comes tantalizingly close to embracing. In America's most important engagement with The Tempest occurs through the figure of Christy, the family's elder daughter, who serves as both narrator and filmic director of the tale. …