From Prospero to Peter Palmer : Appropriation of a Shakespearian Character in a Contemporary Short-Story Rewriting of The Tempest
Abstract
As far as its afterlife during centuries is concerned, several transcodifications have been performed on The Tempest to make it go beyond the textual and stage limits prescribed by its hypotext, as if it had its own border to cross. This paper tries to focus on a peculiar transcodification, a contemporary short-story, “Rough Magic”, included in the volume Shakespeare Stories edited in 1982 by Giles Gordon (1940-2003), and written by the British journalist, literary critic and novelist David Hughes (1930-2005). Starting from a short overview both of the cultural reception of the play and of its adaptations, this paper aims at interpreting the story through a double perspective. First, by tracing the clues of a continuing fascination of imperialist will to power nowadays and its (metaphorical?) colonialist implications through a contrapuntal reading. Second, it attempts at exploring and decoding the complex multi-layered structure of dichotomies concerning the key-concept of borders which underlie the short-story narrative strategies, given the idea that the colonizing process performed by the protagonist can be seen as a multiple sequence of crossing borders.
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