Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late twentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia. There are five striking themes surrounding cultural, racial, and gender dynamics. Gender…[Read more]

Four themes distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theaters from works in other parts of the world: Japanese innovations in sound and spectacle; Sinophone uses of Shakespeare for social reparation; the reception of South Korean presentations of gender identities in film and touring productions; and multilingual, disability, and racial…[Read more]

The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse in London in 1599. Performances of Shakespeare not only create channels between geographic spaces but also connect different time periods. Divided into two major sections, Shakespeare and World Cultures and Shakespeare and Genres, the…[Read more]

“As You Like It” breathed abroad is as in an understanding of compare to the treatment of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” in the name of Sir Thomas Walsingham and his wife Lady Audrey.

“Shamanistic Shakespeare: Korea’s Colonization of Hamlet” offers a timely reminder about the dangers of imposing a reformulated national myth on international Shakespeare productions. Focusing on a London performance of Korea’s Yohangza Theatre Company’s shamanized Hamlet, this case study invites far broader consideration of the readability of glo…[Read more]

Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature’s reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled…[Read more]

Global studies enable us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on the modern period and introduces readers to a number of key concepts in Shakespeare and global studies, namely censorship and redaction, genre, gender, race, and politics of reception. Performing Shakespeare not only creates channels between…[Read more]

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

The epilogue tackles the ramifications of these new modes of inscribing temporally and visually ambiguous articulations of Shakespeare and China into a global vernacular in theater (Lin Zhaohua’s Richard III) and cinema (Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet). A paradox of infatuation with Asian visuality and rejection of ethnic authenticity emerged in the…[Read more]