Tempted by The Tempest: Derek Jarman’s Gay Play with Shakespearean Romance

Abstract

[Abstract] This paper reassesses Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest (UK 1979) against recent developments in film adaptation theory in order to reach conclusions about its controversial handling of the Shakespearean source material. After locating the film’s lack of general critical acclaim in the practice of traditional fidelity criticism, current concepts of film adaptation theory are applied to the film’s content and structure, placing it in the cultural context of British counterculture in the 1970s. Jarman’s Tempest is analysed by discussing the film’s three male protagonists in terms of gender, considering its director’s choices of characterisation and plot against the backdrop of queer politics. Moving from Caliban’s characterisation as non-racialised, non-threatening and essentially human on Jarman’s queer agenda, Caliban and Ariel are contrasted as conflictive sexual tendencies within their master Prospero, interiorising the film’s action in the latter’s mind as an allegory of the release of homo-erotic desire. As a result, Jarman’s rewriting of the original is seen as a subversive deconstruction in service of his gay politics and an independent piece of art.