6. Prospero's Wife

It has been debated to what extent The Tempest itself conducts, or permits, a critique of colonalism, and of the attitudes toward gender, power, and artistic control that Prospero exhibits and that almost irrestibly seem allegories of all that is wrong and has been wrong with the West in its relation to colonial peoples since the Renaissance.¹³ The same problems beset any interpretation of Prospero's Books, for it is seldom clear to what extent Greenaway glories in, to what extent condemns the exaggerated rigidities and grandiose pretensions of his Prospero. I want to look briefly at aspects of his treatment of gender, especially the representation of reproductive anatomy, and his treatment of space for two reasons -- both carry out, in Greenaway's characteristically overschematic way, a self-critique of Western attitudes on which the film's longing for the destruction of books is predicated, and because each, in its way, recasts motifs that have become familiar in feminist and anticolonialist discourse in ways that connect them to Greenaway's allegory of the transition from print to digital media.

A frequent element of contemporary screen versions of The Tempest is the restoration, so to speak, to the status of characters of the women who hover at The Tempest's edges. Sycorax appars in Derek Jarman's Tempest as well as in Prospero's Books; in Paul Mazursky's Tempest, Antonio, the wicked brother has been transmuted into Antonia, the estranged wife of the film's would-be magician, played by John Cassavetes. Greenaway offers a cameo, non-speaking role to Claribel (she appears naked and drenched in blood, deflowered or sodomized by her African husband, in a wordless enactment of the Milanese fears for her safety in the text) and, in flashbacks, to the "four or five women" who attended Miranda in Milan; but chief among his additions to the female dramatis personae is Propero's wife, who bears the name of Shakespeare's favorite daughter, whose husband, as Richard Wilson has recently reminded us, was a specialist in diseases of women. Her appearance spans two of Prospero's 24 books -- the Atlas of Orpheus and Vesalius' lost Anatomy of Birth.

In 1978, Jeanne Roberts showed that an accident of the printing house produced a kind of textual analog to the play's exclusion of women¹⁴ -- and deprived the text, if not of Prospero's wife, then at least of the word "wife" in a crucial place, for when Ferdinand declares the island to be Paradise, the received reading suggests that the reason is that the island contains "so rare a wondered father [that is, Prospero] and a wise.

but Roberts found two Folger copies in which the crossbar of the "f" appeared to be intact, yielding the reading so rare a wondered father and a wife

and half a dozen more in which the crossbar could be seen in various stages of breaking off. Steven Orgel adopts this reading in his 1986 edition, and, in a influential article related this variant reading to the notable lack, in the play, of references to Prospero's wife, Miranda's mother.¹⁵