Michael Clark as Caliban in Propero’s Books (1991) Photograph: Allstar/Channel 4 The Wizard of Oz is only pretending to be a real magician: really he’s a fraud. And illusionists always have a dubious side to them. All of these figures are illusionists, as artists are. In my book about writers and writing – called, oddly enough, On Writers and Writing – there’s a chapter on the artist as magician and/or impostor called “Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co”. I’d thought about The Tempest before, and written about it as well. It contains a great many unanswered questions as well as several very complex characters, and the challenge of trying to answer the questions and tease out the complexities was part of the attraction. In honour of his 400th anniversary the Hogarth Shakespeare project has invited a number of authors to choose a play and revisit it in the form of a prose novel. And I too have redone Shakespeare, also with odd results. People have been redoing Shakespeare for a long time, often with odd results.
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