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Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms by John G. Demaray. Pittsburgh, Perm.: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Pp. 174. $48.00.
The overwhelming visuals and sounds of Prospero@ Books, Peter Greenaway's film adaptation of The Tempest, left me exhausted after two hours in my seat. So visually striking was the film that my companion did not even recognize it as Shakespeare. Greenaway's emphasis on the visual is appropriate to the original conception and staging of The Tempest according to John Demaray His new book develops some of the interests in theater and spectacle found in his earlier works, Milton's Theatrical Epic and Milton and the Masque Tradition. He argues that the initial staging at Whitehall and the courtly audience influenced the masque-like structure and content of the text of The Tempest as we have it in the First Folio. Demaray makes an important point when he insists that a critical consideration of The Tempest would be incomplete without addressing the contexts of its original production.
As the First Folio is Demaray's primary evidence, he has followed Sidney Lee's contention that the Devonshire copy of the First Folio (Huntington 56399) is the most accurate (139). Using this copy of the play enables Demaray to avoid any contentions that an edited edition might raise. Demaray's analysis of The Tempest sheds light on Jacobean stage technology, poses answers to several of the play's critical problems and responds to twentieth-century critics who tend to focus on selective elements of the play at the expense of the whole.
The book begins with an overview of the critical reception of The Tempest. Though the play is grouped in the First Folio as a comedy with a traditional five-act structure, Demaray believes this classification is not authorial, but has to do with the unifying comic ending. He claims the play's sequence of events lends itself more to a continuous series of scenes than to a five-act division, which was probably the work of an editor. According to Demaray, the play itself is a transitional work, marking the change in theater from staged dramas to elaborate, spectacular Restoration dramas such as William Davenant's adaptation of The Tempest (1670).
For Demaray the play fuses elements derived from...