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Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest raises questions about how adaptation theory and film authorship are often constructed along perceptions of gender. Despite positive reactions to Helen Mirren’s performance as a re-gendered Prospera, the film was critically panned on release. Critics and reviewers criticized Taymor’s film technique, accusing the director of reveling in stylistic excess and relying too heavily on intrusive digital effects that overshadowed the imagination and language of the Folio play-text. These critiques draw attention to what this article suggests is most crucial to Taymor’s adaptation. This article argues that Taymor’s blending of the naturalistic with the artificial represent a deliberate style that emphasizes the collaborative processes of adaptation. Taymor’s intercutting of digital effects and naturalistic footage emphasize the hybrid authorship of film technique—a trait embodied in Ben Whishaw’s performance as the spirit Ariel. The re-gendering of Prospera furthermore situates the film against the grain of the historically gendered and romanticized conception of the film auteur as a stable and overriding masculine genius.

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In act IV of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Lavinia, daughter to the titular Roman general and now widow to the recently dispatched Bassianus, attempts to communicate to her father and uncle a crime of which she has been made victim. The crime -Lavinia's violation and mutilation -has been perpetrated by the sons of the Goth queen Tamora, who were first prisoners to Andronicus and are now "incorporate" (I.i.467) in Rome through Tamora's marriage to the newly ascended emperor Saturninus. 1 Her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, Lavinia must find some way to testify to the guilt of her assaulters in order for the revenge plot to advance. She haunts her nephew, young Lucius, like a spectre; unlike the outraged paternal ghost common to the revenge tragedy, however, Lavinia pronounces neither exposition nor instruction, and is capable only of indirect address. In addition to being deprived of speech, gesture, and the ability to end her own life, Lavinia has been stripped of her symbolic chastity, bound up at the start of the play with the competition for Roman rulership. She is trapped in an alienated body, obscure and frightening to her young nephew in a way that Titus' corpse, viewed near the close of the play, is not.Lavinia has transformed into a figure of otherness and must resort to external props in order to translate effectively what has happened to her into some sort of comprehensible discourse. What follows is a scene in which two male figures "read" Lavinia as she uses props and prostheses -a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses culled from Young Lucius' grammar school books and a staff with which she traces names and words in the dirt -to make her plight known. The play foregrounds in this scene Lavinia's compromised communication, as well as the interpretive problems attending Titus and Marcus' mediation of the silenced female form who, in order to produce testimony, in order to name the crime and her assailants, must resort to literary and legal precedent and must make the texts of the past speak to her present conditions. This article argues that Lavinia's mutilation and subsequent attempts to communicate embody not only imitatio but also the fraught relation between evidence and testimony:Props and Prostheses: Lavinia the "speechless complainer" Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus, 10 | 2021