General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Prospero's Books

Prospero's Books is a 1991 film written and directed by Peter Greenaway, adapting William Shakespeare's play The Tempest with John Gielgud as Prospero. It is less a conventional film version of the play than, in the words of critic Jonathan Romney, "a variation in the musical sense, an annotated commentary [...], or - quite literally - a reading of it"¹. Greenaway treats Prospero as an avatar of Shakespeare: while composing the play's script, Prospero delivers every role's lines and tells the tale, with the proceedings interrupted by animated pages drawn from his beloved books.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Peter Greenaway, adapting Shakespeare's The Tempest¹
Release	1991; co-production of the Netherlands, France, Italy, and the UK with Japanese involvement; released in the US by Miramax Films¹^•²
Lead	John Gielgud as Prospero, who had played the role on stage four times and long sought a film version¹
Central device	The 24 books of Prospero's library, the last of which is The Tempest itself²
Technique	First extensive use of high-definition television processes for a feature, using the Quantel graphics paintbox at NHK in Tokyo²^•³
Key crew	Music by Michael Nyman; cinematography by Sacha Vierny; produced by Kees Kasander⁴
Running time	Reported variously as 125, 127, about 129, and 106 minutes by different catalogs and reviews²^•¹^•⁵

Spoilers

Interpretation

Scholars have read the film as more than an adaptation. James Tweedie, a film scholar whose work appears in Moving Pictures, Still Lives (Oxford University Press, 2018), frames Prospero's Books as an allegory of the adaptation of canonical literature to cinema, with The Tempest's colonial concerns refigured as a confrontation between a "masterful" original and an "unfaithful" follower, and situates the film's neobaroque aesthetics against the discourses of heritage circulating in Thatcherite Britain¹¹. Greenaway himself summarized the film's theme as "You are what you read": we are all products of our education and cultural background, which is largely perceived through text, and text is desperately important in this film¹⁰.

The film also stands in a lineage of Tempest adaptations. Estella Ciobanu, a scholar at Ovidius University of Constanţa, groups it with Fred McLeod Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956) and Margaret Atwood's novel Hag-Seed (2016) as contemporary re-tellings that explore past-and-present re-bonding through re-telling¹².

Origin and conception

John Gielgud had cherished the idea of bringing The Tempest to the screen for years; he had played Prospero on stage four times, and he initiated the project by approaching Greenaway, who rapidly transformed the play into his own idiosyncratic vision¹^•². The film takes its structure from a brief mention in the play of the 24 books from Prospero's library that he is permitted to take into exile, volumes given to him by his friend Gonzalo as a parting gesture²^•⁶.

Greenaway explained the title himself: "One of the reasons we have called the film Prospero's Books rather than The Tempest is to indicate to an audience that it is not a straight attempt to reproduce a familiar text"². He treated the play as a written text and made the 24th book The Tempest itself, so that the whole film is structured around Shakespeare and Prospero, both embodied by Gielgud, sitting in his cell on the island writing the play the viewer sees². The film opens with Gielgud at his desk experimenting with the word "Bosun", the play's first word, a term used orally by illiterate seamen and written down as "boat-swain", which Greenaway called a nice opening point about the topsy-turvy use of oral and written language².

The books

The 24 books are the film's organizing principle. The first is the Book of Water, supposedly put together by Leonardo da Vinci, in whose pages Prospero begins imagining, speaking, and writing the play while in his bath²^•⁷. The scholar Steven Marx, an English literature scholar at California Polytechnic State University, describes how the books appear both as props in the narrative and as "real" documents in a separate picture plane, described by a donnish voice distinct from that of the protagonist-author⁷. Reviewers cataloged their properties: a book of mirrors, a book of architecture with three-dimensional diagrams, a book of utopias, a book of games, an atlas belonging to Orpheus with scorched maps of Hell, a book of motion that dances so determinedly it must be weighted down, and a scented red and gold book of love⁸. The Book of Mirrors has pages that are mirrors of exotic materials, the Book of Water's pages are wet and flowing, the Book of Anatomy is drenched in blood and plasma, and the Book of the Dead writes itself⁹.

The books exist only for the film. As Greenaway put it, the apocryphal volumes, which never existed, are created in the first minute and destroyed in the last minute of a two-hour film².

Form and technology

Gielgud's voice carries the film. While remaining faithful to Shakespeare's text, Greenaway put the words of all the characters into Prospero's mouth for the first two-thirds of the film, breaking the arrangement open when Prospero decides to forgive everybody². Roger Ebert, the longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that Gielgud, at 86, does a great many of the speaking roles and seems in full and sonorous command of his vocal instrument⁵.

The film was visually the densest of Greenaway's works to that point, thanks to the first extensive use of high-definition television processes for a big-screen feature. HDTV uses twice as many lines as conventional television, giving better resolution, higher contrast, and a wider range of colors, and its images can be manipulated with video techniques such as slow motion, superimposition, and animation². The 49-year-old director used the Quantel graphics paintbox at NHK facilities in Tokyo, combining computer technology with high-definition television and transferring the effects back to film³. Shot on 35mm, the film was edited with a combination of conventional film techniques and television post-production; Greenaway spent a month in Japan using NHK's HDTV facilities, which the broadcaster contributed free of charge, about £2 million worth of editing time against a production budget of about £1.5 million².

The visual texture layers images and text: pages of books slide over the central image, sometimes two or three deep, and the film is filled with nudity treated in terms of Renaissance painting, which earned it an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America⁵.

Cast and reception

The cast included John Gielgud (Prospero), Michael Clark (Caliban), Michel Blanc (Alonso), Erland Josephson (Gonzalo), Isabelle Pasco (Miranda), Tom Bell (Antonio), Kenneth Cranham (Sebastian), and Mark Rylance (Ferdinand)¹^•⁴.

Reception was polarized from the start. Ebert wrote that the film is not a movie in the usual sense but an experiment in form and content, likely to bore most audiences while enchanting others, and that it should be approached like a record album or an art book⁵. The critic Nathaniel Bird praised its stunning visuals while acknowledging that the film might be inaccessible to most audiences⁸. In France, the two main film journals, Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif, took opposite views of Greenaway's cinema, and the scholar Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, writing on the film's French reception, argues that the film remains a tantalizing work that divides audiences and is an apt subject for discussing Shakespeare in the digital era¹⁰.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Shakespeare on film

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?