Recent decades have witnessed diverse incarnations and bold sequences of Shakespeare on screen and stage. Hollywood films and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth are now conjoining in cyberspace, making a world of difference to how we experience Shakespeare. Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace shows readers how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). The papers in the volume provide a background for these modern developments, showing the history of how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures defined—and continue to define—themselves. Authors in the first part of the collection examine culture and gender in Hollywood Shakespearean film and complement the second part in which the history of Shakespearean readings and stagings in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Malaya, Korea, and Hong Kong are discussed. Papers in the third part of the volume analyze the transformation of the idea of Shakespeare in cyberspace, a rapidly expanding world of new rewritings of both Shakespeare and Asia. Together, the three sections of this comparative study demonstrate how Asian cultures and Shakespeare affect each other and how the combination of Asian and Anglo-European modes of representation are determining the future of how we see Shakespeare’s plays.
Introduction to Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross
Part One: Shakespeare in Hollywood
Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Screwball Comedy, by Mei Zhu
Method Acting and Pacino’s Looking for Richard, by Peirui Su
Underwater Women in Shakespeare on Film, by Charles S. Ross
Cultural Anxiety and the Female Body in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, by Xianfeng Mou
Part Two: Shakespeare in Asia
Imagining the East and Shakespeare’s Asia, by David Bevington
Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and East Asia’s Macbeth, by Yuwen Hsiung
Silence and Sound in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, by Lei Jin
The Visualization of Metaphor in Two Chinese Versions of Macbeth, by Alexander C.Y. Huang
Shakespeare in Contemporary Japan, by Daniel Gallimore
The Tokyo Globe Years 1988-2002, by Michiko Suematsu
Hamlet in Korea, by Meewon Lee
Bangsawan Shakespeare in Colonial Malaya, by Nurul Farhana Low bt Abdullah
Shakespeare, Noh, Kyōgen, and Okinawa Shibai, by Masae Suzuki
Samritechak and Intercultural Shakespeare in Cambodia, by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Spectres of Hamlet in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia, by Evan Darwin Winet
Remembering the Past in the Shanghai Jingju Company's King Lear, by Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak
One Husband Too Many and the Problem of Postcolonial Hong Kong, by Adele Lee
Part Three: Shakespeare in Cyberspace
Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Taymor’s Titus, by Lucian Ghita
Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, by Simone Caroti
Mobilizing Foreign Shakespeares in Media, by Richard Burt
Appropriation and the Design of an Online Shakespeare Journal, by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar
Performing Shakespeare for the Web Community, by Peter Holland
Part Four: Chronology and Selected Bibliography
A Chronology of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, by Alexander C.Y. Huang
Bibliography of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, by Lucian Ghita and Alexander C.Y. Huang
Contributors' Profiles
Index
Alexa Huang is Founding Co-Director of the GW Digital Humanities Institute, Director of the Dean's Scholars in Shakespeare (a signature program of GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences), Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Professor of English, Theatre and Dance, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.; and co-founder and co-director of the open access Global Shakespeares digital performance archive (http://globalshakespeares.org) and research affiliate in Literature at MIT.
Charles S. Ross teaches comparative literature at Purdue University. He has translated Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1989) and Statius’s Thebaid (2004) and is the author of Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare (2003) and The Custom of the Castle from Malory to Macbeth (1997).
