ABSTRACT
Claribel? Who’s she? Don’t worry too much if that’s your first response to my title. Claribel doesn’t get widely discussed in criticism of and commentary on The Tempest. One reason for that is that the play itself passes over her, and her story, in a rather perfunctory way. But I think she has important things to say about the play. Claribel is one of a number of women who are both in and not in the play. That is, like Sycorax and Mrs Prospero, as Carol Ann Duffy would call her, Claribel is talked about but doesn’t appear on stage. (Isn’t The Tempest the only Shakespeare play to feature just one woman in the stage-action?) All three of these absent but talked-about women, incidentally, do actually appear in Peter Greenaway’s remarkable film Prospero’s Books and Mrs Prospero even gets allocated a name (but I’ve forgotten it).
