This Tempest's Hers

Metropolitan Opera's The Enchanted Island and the Feminism of Bel Canto Shakespeare Adaptation

Authors

Amy Scott-Douglass Marymount University

Keywords:

Opera, The Tempest

Abstract

This essay looks at the Metropolitan Opera's The Enchanted Island as a revision of The Tempest that subverts the gender politics of Shakespeare's play. The theory of transgressive adaptation behind this reworking of Shakespeare identifies the music as much as the libretto as the site for potential interpretive freedom, and hinges, in particular, on the voices of divas Joyce DiDonato and Danielle de Niese to articulate their feminist interpretations of their characters and to claim the improvisational liberties that bel canto opera provides to singers in performance

Author Biography

Amy Scott-Douglass, Marymount University

Amy Scott-Douglass is Assistant Professor of English at Marymount University, specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama in performance and literature by early modern women. Her scholarship appears in Shakespeare the Movie Part II (2003), Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections (Ashgate, 2006), "The Public's Open to Us All": Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), Weyward Macbeth: Non-Traditional Casting and the African-American Experience (Palgrave, 2009), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011), and the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia (forthcoming). She is the author of Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars (Continuum, 2007) and the "Theater" section of Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture (Greenwood, 2006).