«A most strange story»: Prospero e l’arte di raccontare

Since the romantic poet Thomas Campbell, we look at Prosperous as a sort of William Shakespeare’s self-portrait and at The Tempest as a leave taken by the poet of the poetry. We will analyze the position of this character as acteur and actant, trying to explain the evident meta-literary implications of the text and to reconstruct the authorial project which sets that position and those implications. To this purpose we will use the cinematic adaptation of the comedy realized by Peter Greenaway in 1991, Prospero’s Books, whose relationship with the model has the form of a «ring of Möbius, where internal and external face, signifying and signified face, writing and reading face, turn reversing continuously, where writing doesn’t stop reading itself and reading doesn’t stop writing and inscribing itself» (G. Genette). Shakespeare and Greenaway at the same time encode, decode and over-code: they write, read and continually cross the line between writing and reading, accomplishing something that is not only the one or the other, but gathers the features of invention, interpretation, quotation and transposition.