2024 Abstracts

Pure Love in Flux: (Re)Choreographing Ricardo G. Abad’s Sintang Dalisay, a Filipino Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet

MCM Santamaria, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

July 2024 witnessed the third restaging of Dr. Ricardo G. Abad’s Sintang Dalisay onto the Philippine stage. The production is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as relocated in an imaginary Muslim community in the Philippine south. The play uses the Sama-Bajau igal as theatrical movement vocabulary. From a choreographic perspective, three big factors of change may be cited since its first and second runs in 2011 and 2013. First, the play moves from the 200-seater Rizal Mini Theater to the 850-seater Hyundai Hall of Areté, Ateneo de Manila University. The much bigger stage required adjustments to the initially more intimate approach to movement aesthetics. Second, some changes in the script, which were mainly dictated by Dr. Abad, necessitated additional choreographic passages to help move the plot dramatic narrative forward. Finally, the passing of Dr. Abad somehow prodded the transmission of knowledge and skill from one generation to another: Guelan Varela-Luarca takes over artistic direction from Dr. Abad; Jayson Gildore takes over music from retired Professor Edru Abraham; and, Brian Matthew Sy shares the responsibility of movement direction and choreography with MCM Santamaria. Taking off from the “archipelagic” perspective of Asian Shakespeare and in line with the concept of the constantly changing contours of the “shoreline,” this work discusses choreographic continuity and transformation in five scenes of this contemporary (re)iteration of Shakespeare’s work anchored in local memory and traditions.

“This sceptr’d isle’: England’s Insularity, Precarity and Siege Psychosis as Represented in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Ananya Dutta Gupta, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

It may seem anachronistic to preface a paper on King Lear with a eulogy cum elegy pronounced by John of Gaunt in King Richard the Second, II.i.40. However, its prefatory purpose lies precisely in its encompassment of Shakespeare’s refractions of his island-country’s post-Armada preoccupation with its insularity. Also, in view of the said monologue’s wishfully and wistfully utopian projections, the phrase is also an aptly ironic preface to Shakespeare’s representation of a political dystopia in King Lear. The proposed paper shall not only place the two plays, King Richard the Second and King Lear in dialogue around fundamental issues of kingly (in)competence and its repercussions for the health and safety of a beleaguered island-realm and its bodypolitik. In any case, King Lear is remarkable in its self-reflexivity, retrospectively vis-à-vis various earlier and proleptically in relation to later plays by its author on intergenerational conflict and its intersections with political well-being. By re-visiting this particular utopian vision in the context of King Lear, I shall try to posit the latter text as a culminating text in “shoreline” precarity. After all, an island is all shoreline. This is where what I have outlined in the title as the siege psychosis, a relatively under-explored trope in King Lear, acquires relevance. Precarity, I would like to argue, in the context of a still young island-nation-state only just stepping out of the long shadow of Elizabeth’s tight-fisted regime with its lingering spectre of imminent peril, is inevitably wound up in a chiastic overlap with the threat of a siege. Put simply, precarity is exteriorised as the threat of siege and perceived external/coastal vulnerability as island-nation is interiorised as siege psychosis. In a further complication betrayed by much contemporary literature, the threat of siege and the fear of civil war are caught in a dynamic of mutual and chiastic causation. If there is a siege, civil war will render the besieged more vulnerable. Conversely, if there is civil war, vulnerability to external siege is proportionately enhanced. In King Lear, the reader/spectator is confronted with a concentric spiral of crises and catastrophes directly likened to or represented as siege. The proposed paper will seek to predicate the comprehensive tragedy in King Lear upon the premise of island and hence shore-encircled precarity.

Trans-figuring Shakespeare: Using Transgressive Performance in Asia to Transect the Binary Shoreline of Gender Liminality and Narrative

Bruce G. Shapiro, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

As the waves in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 grapple “in sequent toil” with looming contentions, they also bury past realities on the shoreline of a liminal afterlife. Hidden there are transgender lives, like those represented in the photo-essay, To Survive on this Shore. Both shoreline metaphors harmonize with the bi-definitional shoreline of gender liminality and narrative that interact to create meaning in human lives. Revisionist research into Shakespeare’s life and the queer lives he dramatized provides these three intersecting shorelines with historical context. Shakespeare lived in a homosocial atmosphere of intense male friendship and queerly adventurous desire, embracing Galen’s concept that people could change sex spontaneously throughout their lives. A queer dramaturgy sustained Shakespeare’s theatre, epitomizing both homosexual desire and patriarchal power. Crucially, males fulfilled feminine desire by playing the “female” characters, a 16th-century subversion of ostensibly binary gender narratives. By transecting the bi-definitional shoreline of gender liminality and narrative in Shakespeare’s plays, transgressive performance discloses an afterlife of buried transgender lives. For example, in Hamlet, trans-figuring Ophelia—i.e., reimagining her as transgender—recasts her madness as the affective dysphoria of transgender despair coupled with the shame of rejection. Similarly trans-figuring Juliet transmutes Romeo and Juliet’s narrative of forbidden love into a same-sex rebellion against conformity and discrimination. Finally, trans-figuring Cordelia unlocks King Lear’s striking narrative of patriarchal demise and transgender ascension. Regrettably, contemporary performances rarely trans-figure Shakespeare, ironically sustaining a centuries-old binary gender orientation that constrains the plays’ potential for renewed relevance, particularly in Asia, where the landscape of gender identity is evolving unconventionally. For example, despite discrimination, 17% of Filipinos identify as transgender, the highest in Asia. Hence, this presentation argues for transgressive performances of Shakespeare that trans-figure the binary shoreline of gender liminality and champion an afterlife of transgender narratives across Asian shores.

When the Womb Heats Up, the Vapors Rise, and the Mother Suffocates: The Question of Lear’s “Shoreline” “Mother”

Su Tsu-Chung, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

After experiencing all kinds of humiliation done by Goneril, and finds his messenger Kent in the stocks, King Lear, in Act 2 Scene 4, conjures up the “mother” to express his outburst of rage and physical symptom sensations: “O! how this mother swells up toward my heart; / Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow! / Thy element’s below. Where is this daughter?” (II.iv.56-58) Who is this “mother”? Or what is this heaving, wavy, “shoreline” “mother”? As many critics have identified, this “mother” is another name for the womb, matrix, or uterus. That the “mother swells up” points to the disease called hysteria. Yet, who is responsible for the rise or wandering of Lear’s “mother”? Does Lear experience some sort of gender confusion by conjuring up the “mother”? Or is Lear a male hysteric? We may wonder what has Lear to do with the “mother,” since his anatomy is obviously deficient of such a body part and disease. But why do we want to focus on this “mother” after all? One thing is certain that the swelling of the “mother” is overwhelmingly sophisticated. It holds significant clues to our interpretive enterprise. It is obvious that the “mother” revealed and represented by Lear’s words is a complex representational figure, simultaneously “real” and “fantasized.” It is “real” in the sense that Lear can in no way deny or repress the mother’s urgent emergency and its terrifying power and burning rage. It is “fantasized” in the sense that there is simply no bodily space to mark its presence. On the other hand, the “mother” is a metaphor employed by Lear to express his emotional and physical crises. Given the entire absence of “real” mothers in the play, this conjuring up of the “mother” seems particularly significant and meaningful. The purpose of this paper is to explore the theme of hysteria as well as to diagnose the “swelling” of the “mother” in Shakespeare’s King Lear from a feminist-informed perspective. The restless and out of place “mother” in Lear is the symptomatic focus of this project. It provides us with a critical means to engage with the domestic strife and the patriarchal culture, and directs us to the absence of “real” mothers in King Lear. It is also the site from which we can re-formulate our view about the play. Thus, this paper is a re-interpretive effort aiming at examining gendered discourses and implications in King Lear.

Teaching Shakespearean Acting in Indian Theatre Departments: Problems and Possibilities

Santanu Das, Rabindra Bharati University, India

Shakespeare is more than two hundred years old on the Bengali stage. Study and performance of Shakespearean plays still plays a central role in Indian literary and theatrical academia. A large part of the Shakespearean corpus performed across India are adapted versions of his plays. Translation, often prose translations, plays a major role here; but training actors to act such translations raises several questions: for example, whether the Shakespeare’s alternation of Blank Verse with prose is not a theatrical statement in itself; whether the preferred acting style is not bound up with Shakespeare’s English; and whether expressing Indian sentiments through a Shakespeare-based Indian narrative can capture the Elizabethan acting spirit or not. Shakespearean monologues were actually speeches addressed to the audience from the apron stage; but the proscenium stage (as also the films) obliges the actor to address himself only. Sometimes an altogether unexpected acting style emerges: as in B. V. Karanth’s Macbeth (in Yakshagana folk theatre form) where every theatrical element—acting, costume, make-up, set, music—are supplanted together with the language. It becomes a new kind of play, whether Shakespearean or not. But quite demonstrably, the adapted versions are more popular than the translated one. And in the theatre we should be more concerned with reaching Shakespeare out to the masses rather than make it a private literary programme. Thus it is high time that we map the history of the different kinds of adapted and translated Shakespearean productions in India to chart our path towards a new Shakespeare of our own.

Intercultural Pedagogy for Shakespeare: A Joint Performance of The Winter’s Tale

Lee Hyon-u, Soon Chun Hyang University, South Korea

This essay explores an intercultural adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, performed collaboratively by the English drama club at Soon Chun Hyang University (SCH) and the Department of Theatre at Wellesley College (WC). The SCH students portray the Bohemian sections of the play, integrating elements of namsadangpae, a traditional Korean traveling theatre, and contemporary K-pop and dances, while the WC students reinterpret the Sicilian sections through American cultural motifs. This creative reimagining of the play highlights the cultural differences between Bohemia and Sicilia, reflecting the broader thematic contrast of chaos and order. Additionally, the production is performed gender-free, challenging traditional gender roles and adding fluidity to the characters’ relationships. By blending Korean and American cultures and transcending historical and gendered boundaries, the performance offers a unique interpretation of The Winter’s Tale that emphasizes its themes of misunderstanding, reconciliation, and harmony. This joint intercultural production not only showcases the artistic collaboration between students from two different cultural backgrounds but also serves as a pedagogical model for fostering cross-cultural understanding through performance. Ultimately, the process of staging the play becomes a metaphor for the play’s central message of overcoming differences to achieve peace and unity, making the production a powerful celebration of cultural diversity and mutual respect.

Shakespeare, Education, and Freedom in Modern Japan

Uchimaru Kohei, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan

This paper examines the intersection between Shakespeare, education, and freedom in modern Japan, by focusing on school adaptations of King Lear. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese secondary schools offered students a spate of Shakespeare materials through locally produced English textbooks. The first Shakespeare story to appear in a local English textbook was King Lear in 1889 and those adaptations that granted a happy ending continued to feature favourably. In those versions, Cordelia’s moral integrity came into sharp focus. She seemingly conformed to Confucian-like filial values that would appeal to educational authorities, who started cracking down on liberals after the High Treason Incident in 1910. However, her moral integrity also highlighted her recalcitrance ‘against Lear’s tyrannical behavior’ (Stephen Greenblatt). For liberal educators, therefore, King Lear potentially served to address freedom from authoritarian rule, hidden beneath the conservative mantle of Cordelia’s filial piety. It is small wonder that liberal educators found such a message in King Lear, because those materials were derived largely from school textbooks produced for primary schools for working-class children in England. With the advent of the Education Act of 1870 in England, those school textbooks began addressing the parameters of citizenship by describing the relationship between freedom and duty within a democratic framework. Those textbooks included Shakespeare materials, including King Lear, to teach about ‘democratic citizenship’. The integration of those materials into locally produced textbooks was promoted in keeping with Japan’s democratic movements that culminated in the late 1910s and 1920s. This paper concludes that the preference for King Lear in schools emanated from its potentially ambiguous interpretation: While educational authorities could admire Cordelia’s filial obedience, liberal educators could appreciate her freedom.

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t Shakespeare”: Rolando Tinio’s 1964 Macbeth Adaptation with the Ateneo Experimental Theatre

Ian Harvey Claros, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Rolando Tinio, Filipino a poet, actor and director, wrote a groundbreaking essay, The Play’s The Thing (1964) at the Philippine Studies, a local university based academic journal. There, he lays the modern tenets of Philippine Theatre casting expectations and functions of the text, spectator, artist, playwright, and the director where the last two have an equal footing in terms of authorial independence. In its footnote, Tinio discloses that his recent staging of Macbeth drew a particular consternation commenting that “ whatever it was, it wasn’t Shakespeare”. This study investigates the historical conditions of Tinio’s 1964 Macbeth with the defunct Ateneo Experimental Theatre (AET), a school-based theater production in the Philippines, which led to the controversial reception. In doing so, it unearths a multi-layered rupture in postcolonial Philippine Theater which analogously outgrows the colonial and authorial relations between a Shakespearean text and its adaptation. Its framework explores archival data, current models of Global Shakespeare studies, personal interviews of surviving AET actors, published accounts of his colleagues, and Tinio’s own essays to yield an intersubjective account of the theatre scene in and out of the university. Aside from his treatise The Play’s The Thing, Tinio’s sense of the modern can be evinced in his directorial choices and beliefs, interpretation of Lady Macbeth, and the stylized visual and choreographic effects of the 1964 Macbeth.

Displaced Tales/Tales of Displacement: Kalyan Ray’s East Words as Shakespearean Adaptation

Taarini Mookherjee, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Kalyan Ray’s 2005 novel East Words is a literary mélange, drawing on canonical texts from both the Western and Indian traditions to weave together into a tale of colonialism, the slave trade, and first encounters; of the loss of parents and children; of naming and historical accuracy; and of competing perspectives and the idea of original authorship. The Indian boy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the critical interpretation of The Tempest as proto-colonial are used to “re-vision” and blend these two plays from the perspective of the colonized. Narrated by Sheikh Piru, a witty witness to the tale, this novel is unsettling, both for readers familiar with its sources, and in the literal displacement of characters set against a historical backdrop of extraordinary flux. Of the many reimagined and renamed characters, young Pakhee most clearly exemplifies what it means to be displaced. Born in Bengal’s Gangetic delta with the ability to fly, he is later “discovered” and renamed Puck by the colonial explorer Oberon, torn away from his mother, enslaved, and finally trapped in the cloven pine of a printed letter “P.” Eventually, released by Prospero, Pakhee-Puck-Ariel returns to the land of his birth, having forgotten his own history and unaware that the other occupant of the island is his half-brother, Kalyan-Caliban. In this paper, I read these two figures and the linguistic slippage at the core of this Shakespearean adaptation within the framework of contemporary diaspora studies to explore the shifting relationship between displacement, trauma, memory, and language loss.

Tamwa-anay sa balkonahe: An Inter-Island Tradaptation of Romeo and Juliet in Bikol and Hiligaynon

Irish Joy G. Deocampo, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines
Julie B. Jolo, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

Existing translations of Shakespeare in Bikol draw from the diverse dialects in the region (Santos, 2023)—providing a translation that, in interpreting Shakespeare toward the Bikol imaginary, plays with and changes him, re-homes him in the many islands of the region. Meanwhile, early Hiligaynon translations of Shakespeare, such as Ricaredo Ho’s Ang Komersiante sa Venecia in 1933 (Ick, 2013, 2015), hint at a preference for a vernacularization of form rather than a localization of the actual texts. By using both languages to translate the famous balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet through a lecture-performance, our project hopes to reframe the act of translating Shakespeare as an experiment of archipelagic co-imagination. The lecture-performance of the famous balcony scene is a practice in tradaptation (Gillen & Santos, 2023) and our response to the continued centering of Anglo-American language and literature education in the Philippines, despite the implementation of mother tongue-based multilingual education. What if Romeo and Juliet’s difficult family heritage manifested in language, in this case, multiple languages? Tradaptations of Shakespeare, according to Gillen and Santos, recognize language as a “key site of political and cultural negotiation in the borderlands.” In line with tradaptations’ aim to disrupt language hierarchies and unsettle “borders” in Shakespeare’s after-lives, our project “speaks back” not only to Shakespeare but also to local and regional appraisals of Shakespearean text, specifically in two of Philippines’ major languages, Hiligaynon and Bikol. The project explores how language itself can be the manifestation and affective resolution of generational and geo-political conflict/romance.

Gillen, K., & Santos, K. V. (2023). “Shakespeare and the Politics of Tradaptation.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 138 (3), 715–720. https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000391

Ick, Judy. (2013). The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare in Philippine Literatures. Kritika Kultura, 185-209. 10.13185/KK2013.02127

——. (2015). Unknown Accents, Unborn States The Renegade Shakespeares of Colonial Southeast Asia. The Journal of English Studies.

Santos, M. L. M. (2023). Between Bikol and the Bard: Gode Calleja’s Postcolonial Sinaramutan Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 18 and 29. 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 29 (3), 228–242. https://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2023-2903-16

Performing the Shakespearean Eloquence: Case Study of Classic Speeches/Debates in Shakespeare: The Animated Tale

Vivian Ching-Mei Chu, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Shakespeare is a giant of Western literature, and his 38 plays contain many brilliant long speeches and debates. Whenever such scenes occur, conventional Shakespearean actors would amaze and captivate the audience with their eloquent and forceful recitations as well as flamboyant and exaggerated physical performances. However, as history entered the twentieth century, how did film, television and animation directors convey the meaning of Shakespeare’s famous public speeches and debates through the techniques of acting, camera movement, editing and mise en scene? This paper takes the animation series of Shakespeare: The Animated Tales produced by the British Broadcasting Company in the 1990s as an example, and analyzes the design that as Shakespeare’s plays were transcoded into animations, the characters opted for scanty speech and the images would do the talking instead, especially during the climaxes of exciting speeches and arguments. In such scenes, the BBC’s Russian directing team employed the strategy of substituting the depiction of physical trivialities in everyday life with a number of powerful imageries to express deep emotions. The performances in the animations would brim with the characters’ symbolic physical interpretations with imagery overtones, which bring out the profound themes of the original work and the surging sentiments in the characters’ hearts. The focus of this study is to explore how Shakespearean performances could be transformed and reborn via the transcoding of the new medium of image, and the innovative aesthetic style of Russian animation directors’ adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.

Othello as Magic Entertainment: Tenkatsu’s New Othello and Theatre of Modernity

Hsu Yi-Hsin, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Through the case of New Othello as a magic show, this paper examines the artistic strategy and career paths of a celebrity whose influence and experiences traversed the Japanese Empire, its colonies, as well as Europe and America. Itō Hirobumi was her known admirer. The Crown Prince and Gojong of Korea were reported to have requested her performances at court. She was Tenkatsu Shokyokusai (1886-1944), magician, actress, and a legend who commanded the stages of the Meiji and Taishō eras. Built on first-hand archival research, this paper situates Tenkatsu’s New Othello, a magic rendition of Tarokaja Masuda’s 1907 comedy, within the discourse of colonial modernity, highlighting her employment of new technologies and feminine nudity as spectacles of modernity. In addition, this paper argues that Tenkatsu leveraged Shakespeare’s prestigious status to attain respectability, creativity, and innovation. Finally, this paper asserts that Tenkatsu’s success was deeply rooted in her ability to facilitate and engage in intercultural exchanges. Her career trajectory and dramaturgical decisions in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and America highlight that embracing cultural hybridity was essential to her fame and enduring legacy.

What Japanese Pictorial Representations of Othello Tell: (Re-)Creating Othello and Manga as Educational Entertainment for Young Girls

Minami Ryuta, Tokyo University of Economics, Japan

One of the earliest manga adaptations of Othello is the one published in 1969 by Ikeda Riyoko, a leading Japanese manga artist renowned for The Rose of Versailles (1972-73). As it was targeted at young female readers, Ikeda’s manga version retells the play succinctly with a primary emphasis upon Desdemona. Unlike her other leading works, Ikeda rendered this manga version of Othello at the request of the publisher. Adapting a Shakespearean tragedy for a weekly girls’ manga magazine seems a very unlikely decision, considering the fact that most of works in weekly girls’ manga magazines in the 1960s featured romantic stories of teenage girls set at school in contemporary Japan or Europe. Her depiction of Othello and Desdemona not only shows the stereotypical images of ‘western’ characters in girls’ manga of the time, but also suggests shifting positions of Shakespeare as well as that of girls’ manga in Japan around 1970. This paper aims to illuminate how Shakespeare was recreated and consumed in the Japanese youth culture, where both Shakespeare and manga were ‘discovered’ or were recongnised in ways different from those of the preceding years.

Shakespearian Case Studies: Business Readers’ Responses

Alan Thompson, Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University, Japan

Scenes from Shakespeare’s plays—marshalling forces in 1 Henry IV, buying poison in Romeo and Juliet, negotiating a loan in The Merchant of Venice—are packaged as business case studies in a business communication class at a Japanese university. The intent is to spur reflection on business communication strategies. Each scene serves as an example of several aspects of a business meeting, including: framing (managing perceptions of self, business partner, and meeting objectives), managing proposals (making presentations, responding to presentations), managing a negotiating position (pressing for response, redirecting attention, and keeping a fall-back position). In contrast to prescriptive teaching of strategies for these various aspects of business communication, students are encouraged to work out their own guiding principles as they consider the effects of differing personalities and strategies on outcomes in the Shakespearian scene. This session will briefly demonstrate how the scenes are deployed in class, to wit: 1) the first presentation of the text in a simplified version that highlights the transactional nature of the scene; 2) students’ production of schematic diagrams of the transaction; 3) the presentation and practice of the original text; and 4) students’ improvisation as they play the characters as business roles. After the improvisations and a debriefing discussion, written questionnaires are completed by the students. I will summarise the insights that students derived from the process, manifested in their improvisations/discussion or explicitly stated in their questionnaire responses.

“Citational Opportunism”: Shakespeare in the U.S. Presidential Elections

Kim Kang, Honam University, South Korea

William Shakespeare has left an indelible mark on the world of literature. His works, which are characterized by their profound insights into human nature, have transcended time and culture, captivating audiences across the globe. However, it is perhaps surprising to note that Shakespeare’s influence extends beyond the realm of literature and into the world of politics, particularly in the context of the United States presidential campaign. The connection between Shakespeare and the presidential campaign in the United States can be traced back to the use of Shakespearean language and themes in political speeches and debates. Many politicians have drawn inspiration from Shakespeare’s works, using his language and ideas to convey their messages and connect with voters. For example, in the 2012 presidential election, then-President Barack Obama quoted Shakespeare in his victory speech, saying, “We are more than our fears, we are more than our doubts, we are more than our history.” This quote from Julius Caesar reflects the idea that individuals possess the power to overcome adversity and shape their own destiny. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s works often explore themes of power, leadership, and political intrigue, which are relevant to the dynamics of a presidential campaign. Candidates often use these themes to discuss their own qualifications and experiences, as well as to critique their opponents. For instance, during the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump frequently invoked the image of a “rigged” political system, a concept that can be found in Shakespeare’s plays such as Macbeth and Coriolanus. In addition to the use of Shakespearean language and themes, the presidential campaign also draws inspiration from the playwright’s exploration of character development. Shakespeare’s characters often undergo significant transformation throughout their journeys, which can be seen as a reflection of the candidates’ own personal growth and development as they navigate the political landscape. My paper will examine with some tangible examples that Shakespeare’s influence on the United States presidential campaign is evident in the use of his language and themes in political speeches and debates, as well as in the exploration of character development. His works continue to resonate with politicians and voters alike, providing a rich source of inspiration and insight into the complexities of politics and human nature.

Where Shakespeare Meets Sejarah Melayu: Julius Caesar on Malaysian Shores

Kok Su Mei, University of Malaya, Malaysia

Likening a traveller to a merchant, Freya Stark notes that one only discovers how universal certain values are by peddling these wares on various shores. “Such delicate goods as justice, love and honour…are valid everywhere; but they are variously moulded…differently handled, and sometimes nearly unrecognizable…in a foreign land” (Perseus in the Wind, 146). This paper brings audiences to Malaysian shores to trace the curious afterlife of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Malaysian political speeches and opinion pieces. It explores how these seek to instruct their audience on the best way to interpret Brutus’s motives and actions, frequently quoting or paraphrasing Shakespeare’s text to deliberately and unironically liken specific figures to Caesar. Of particular interest is the repeated comparison of Brutus and Caesar to Si Kitol and Raja Mendelier, figures recorded in the 17th-century account of the Malacca sultanate known as Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals. These bring into conversation the literary traditions of the Anglophone and Malay-speaking worlds, to assert that Si Kitol is rightly condemned for his act of betrayal in contrast to Shakespeare’s romanticization of Brutus’s deed. As I show, Malay politicians in contemporary Malaysia engage with the themes of justice and honour prevalent in Julius Caesar, but variously mould and handle them in ways which counter traditional interpretations of the play.

A Thousand Several Tongues: Notes on Sound and Noise in RD3RD

A. X. Ledesma, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

RD3RD, Anton Juan and Ricardo Abad’s 2018 adaptation of Richard III, transposed properties of the Richard III to respond to Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody War on Drugs, detecting resonances between Richard’s ascent to the throne and Duterte’s political manoeuvres as well as their attendant regimes of violence. The adaptation involved numerous interventions on the text including Shakespearean verse disrupted by emulations of Duterte’s speech, a fragmentary approach to narrative structure, and concomitant elements in set, costume, and sound design. Creative and curatorial considerations in producing the sonic environment for the play echoed the transgressive energies and composite strategies of the directorial and dramaturgical approaches, utilising similar techniques involving disruption, fragmentation, and appropriation. This presentation collects a series of production notes that detail considerations in the composition of music and the generation of the soundscape of the adaptation, engaging with conceptions of sound and noise in relation to RD3RD and its various stagings. The discussion centres on how analog and digital technologies were used to disrupt, fragment, and subvert existing musical forms and recordings, how approaches drawn from experimental musical idioms such as musique concrete and noise foregrounded RD3RD’s thematic and political concerns, and how these strategies reinforced the aesthetic and political dimensions of the play.

Reception of Shakespeare as a Shoreline in Okinawa

Suzuki Masae, Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan

In this presentation, I will focus on how Shakespeare is adapted in Okinawa, the boundary of Japan, and see how the bard’s works were used to strengthen the and recreate the indigenous theatre for the local audience. As described in the TV drama Tempest (2011), Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his black ships landed in the shore of the Ryukyu Islands in 1853, before arriving in mainland Japan to conclude the unequal treaties to open to　American trade. Treaties with Britain and other European countries followed, and this led to the fall of the Ryukyu Kingdom and her annexation to Japan as the prefecture of Okinawa. This caused the trend to modernize the local theatre, and the introduction of Shakespeare was a part of it. After WWII, the US military government decided to revitalize the local performing arts as a part of their cultural politics. New Uchinah Shibai (the commercial theatre created in the early twentieth century using their local language) troupes were created, including Tokiwa-za, led by Makishi Kochu (1923- 2011) as well as the all-female Otohime-Gekidan. After the reversion of Okinawa to Japan (1972), because of the popularity of films and TV shows, Uchinah Shibai troupes lost their position as the main source of entertainment, but some of the plays are revived on special occasions, especially if they are adaptations from Shakespeare. The most recent case is that of Makishi’s play Rakujo, which includes one scene from Macbeth, produced at National Theatre Okinawa in 2024. I would like to examine how Shakespeare’s lines are giving this play a special tension to revitalize it as a historical drama for the Okinawan audience.

Empowering Lady Macbeth: Gender Roles and Feminine Agency in Sinophone Appropriations of Macbeth

Mike Ingham, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Tang Bin Brittany, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Of all the Shakespeare plays in the repertoire, two in particular have stood out among Asian Shakespeare stage productions of the past half-century as being overwhelmingly more popular and, by implication, more transposable to an Asian context than most others, namely King Lear and Macbeth. A number of more recent Sinophone appropriations have given greater prominence to the character of Lady Macbeth than is afforded her in Shakespeare’s play and other Western adaptations. Our paper will explore the affinity between the Macbeth dramatic narrative and Chinese-language theatre in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with particular emphasis on the representation of the female co-conspirator, including productions in which either she is the protagonist or the gender roles of the Macbeth couple are switched. Her role in these revisioned versions inhabits the borderline between Shakespeare’s play and experimental Chinese theatre, as well as between theatrical representations of masculinity and femininity.

As Branagh Likes It?: Japonism Retrospective and Microaggression

Koizumi Yuto, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

As You Like It presents a number of issues pertaining to the representation of race and class. To illustrate, audiences in the 16th century would have been able to discern a character’s class with a reasonable degree of accuracy based on the lines spoken, particularly those pertaining to the shade of the character’s skin. The visually dark skin of Celia’s disguised Aliena is intended to mislead other characters into thinking she is of a lower class (Espinosa 2021). As Karim-Cooper (2023) notes, Rosalind describes Phoebe’s appearance as “inky brows” and “your black silk hair” (3.5.45). In light of these lines, the project that Kenneth Branagh’s film As You Like It (2006), which this presentation deals with, is set in 19th-century Japan is sufficiently complex and daring. Nevertheless, the project has been beset with difficulties from the standpoint of diversity and inclusion, in addition to failing to meet box-office expectations. The film’s grasp of Japanese culture is notably superficial, and its portrayals of Asian countries exhibit a lack of clarity and coherence. It is notable that none of the Japanese actors are given dialogue. Given the passage of time and the emergence of new racial issues since the film’s release, it is valuable to revisit this work. In this presentation, I aim to examine the “shoreline” / intersection between Shakespeare’s drama and Asia, focusing on the issue of microaggression in Branagh’s As You Like It.

Accessibility, Cultural Mobility and Performance Exchange in the 2024 Hong Kong International Shakespeare Festival

Jason Eng Hun Lee, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

The first ever Hong Kong International Shakespeare Festival (HKISF), organized by the Tang Shu Wing Theatre Studio in June 2024 with generous funding from the Hong Kong government, was billed largely as an East-West cultural exchange, raising concomitant issues of internationalism and mobility in the post-pandemic and National Security Law era. The official festival line-up included an all-female theatrical production of King Lear (Hong Kong, Romania), an all-male Sardinian language production of Macbeth (Italy), a one-man production of the King Henry V figure across Henry IV (1 and 2), Henry V and Henry VI (part 1) (Australia), a co-created dance-drama production centred around the Lady Macbeth figure (Italy, Hong Kong) and a humorous Korean clown adaptation of Hamlet (South Korea). In particular, the distinctly non-verbal productions of King Lear (presented by the Tang Shu-Wing Theatre group but featuring cast members from Romania’s National Theatre Marin Sorescu Craiova), and Lady Macbeth (which paired The Hong Kong Dance Company with Pisan-based Walter Matteini’s imPerfect Dancers Company), raised the prospect of improving Shakespeare’s accessibility across Hong Kong’s language and educational divide, as well as the creation of a theatrical “safe space” to better mediate the territory’s fraught political and cultural environment. In this paper, I consider the extent to which these two co-created and cross-disciplinary productions help navigate the “glocalizing” imperative of the HKISF and, given the uneven dissemination of Shakespearean theatre across the world festival circuit, Tang Shu-wing’s attempt to bridge the dynamic between a large, well-funded ‘destination’ festival and the smaller-scale “community” festival. These issues tie back to Shakespeare’s legacy in postcolonial Hong Kong, his contemporary reception across different language audiences, and amid ongoing attempts to reinforce the cultural projection of Hong Kong as China’s most “international” city.

My Mistress with a Monster is in Love: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Resonances in The Ancient Magus’ Bride

Maria Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

It can be said that the head and hind of the chaos experienced by the amorous pairs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream stem from a quarrel of a couple already married, Oberon and Titania. Given that the conflict is motivated by Oberon and Puck’s conspiring to steal a human child from Titania has taken to foster, it seems fitting that, in Yamazaki Kore’s The Ancient Magus’ Bride, Oberon and Puck have coalesced into one character, half fairy king, half troublemaker, and still husband of the Fairy Queen Titania. The rendition of Oberon and Titania in Yamazaki’s manga and its anime adaptation may find them more akin to the figures celebrating their Golden Wedding Anniversary in Goethe’s lyrical intermezzo. This cross-reading is possible, as the creator has used the Faust myth as reference for a separate manga series, Frau Faust. Yet the inter-iconic—visual and figurative—as well as thematic references to Shakespeare’s comedy resonate through The Ancient Magus’ Bride in relation even to the titular magus, Elias Ainsworth, whose skull head is reminiscent of a Welsh Mari Lwyd or perhaps Nick Bottom with an ass’s head, and the titular bride, Chise Hatori, a Japanese girl who turns out to be a human Sleih Beggey, a loose take on the Manx fantasy creature. It is the entry of Titania, riding on a white donkey, that makes the connection clear, even before her puckish husband appears. This study traces the character blends or reconfigurations of Shakespeare’s fairy cast before unpacking a deeper narrative transformation: Yamazaki has tended to assemble her characters into relational units, easily called “found families,” a narrative decision that puts the Japanese text at odds with cultural premises behind the marital squabble in Shakespeare’s play. Though not strictly an adaptation, the visual resonances and thematic ties to the comedy emphasize the impact of Shakespeare’s figurations of the fey and “their ways,” but also recasts these characters as atypical families, even before a wedding—or three—can take place.

Macbeth on the Shorelines: Reading Paddayi (2018) and Mandar (2021) in a Globalising India

Paromita Chakravarti, Jadavpur University, India

The proposed paper will read two recent Indian film productions of Macbeth in regional languages, set in small coastal fishing villages, literally on the shoreline. While Paddayi (Dir. Abhaya Sinha, 2018) is a feature film in Tulu, a language spoken by a very small community of people in southern India, Mandar (dir. Anirban Bhattacharya and Pratik Datta, 2021) is a six part web series in Bangla, the seventh most spoken language in the world. Both set the play in remote seaside locations where the ocean becomes a player as well as a perpetual symbol of renewal and change much like in Shakespeare’s late romances. The proposed paper will examine if these two films, through their shoreline settings and symbolic use of the sea, seek to give Shakespeare’s tragedy an alternative generic cast. It will further explore the contexts and implications of their provincial settings and deployment of regional culture on the one hand and their use of the international reach of Shakespeare on the other, to set up a dialogue between the local and the global, between the small town and the metropolitan and their traffic with the cultural capital that Shakespeare represents in India’s colonial and post-colonial history.

Shorelines of Transformation: Liminal Spaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Gunesekera’s Reef

Lestari Manggong, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia

The shoreline in Shakespeare’s works frequently symbolizes a boundary between worlds, a meeting point of the familiar and the unknown, and a space where transformation occurs. This motif finds a parallel in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef, where the shoreline serves as a metaphor for Sri Lanka’s shifting political and personal landscapes. This essay aims to show that in both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Gunesekera’s Reef, the shoreline represents a liminal space—whether it is the physical coast in The Tempest or the metaphorical shore of change in Reef. In The Tempest, the island’s shore becomes a site of exile, revelation, and eventual reconciliation. Likewise, in Reef, the shoreline mirrors Triton’s journey from innocence to experience amid national unrest. Gunesekera’s ever-changing shoreline reflects Triton’s inner turmoil, just as Shakespeare uses the motif to explore the tension between stability and change. This essay argues that in Reef, the shoreline not only marks the sea’s edge, but also symbolizes the threshold where modernity encroaches upon tradition. Ultimately, the discussion leads to a conclusion that this connection between the natural and the personal highlights broader themes of transformation, loss, and the unstoppable passage of time, linking the Elizabethan world with postcolonial Sri Lanka through a shared literary symbol.

Storms and Sea-Changes: Shakespeare on Bikol Shores

Maria Lorena M. Santos, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the sea is evident in both his poems and plays where storms and shorelines serve as powerful metaphors or narrative and dramatic gateways. Across distant shores, the Bikol region in the Philippines is very prone to storms both because of its location in the country’s typhoon belt and because of environmental degradation; hardest hit are the coastlines of its provinces of Albay and Catanduanes, the latter known as the “land of the howling winds.” Yet even while Bikol is dubbed the Republic of Calamity (Republika ng Kalamidad), the storm poetry of its writers displays an awareness that humans are merely a part of a larger and more complex (ecological) system. In this paper, I examine translations by Bikol poets of sonnets and passages from Shakespeare in which images of storm, sea, and shore were originally brought together for the purposes and from the perspective of a British writer. Specifically, I analyze the “sea-changes” that take place in Bikol and Tagalog translations by Albayanons Jaime Jesus Borlagdan and Merlita Lorena-Tariman and Catanduanon Allan Popa of “A Sea Dirge” from The Tempest. I also look into storm and shore imagery in Bikolnon writer and microbiologist Godehardo Calleja’s translations of Sonnets 18, 34, 60, and 116. I argue that the simultaneous separation of and connection between the source texts and the translations by Bikol eco-poets, results in a profound transformation of Shakespeare’s “sea winds” which, upon reaching Bikol shores, whisper – or howl – messages of cleansing (pagbagunas) and hope (paglaom).

Digital Shakespeares on the Shores: Mandaar, Macbeth and Ecological Crisis

Amrita Sen, University of Calcutta, India

Mandaar (2021), one of the latest OTT adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, chooses as its location the coastal regions of Bengal in India. The name of the titular character itself evokes the coastal village of Mandarmoni in the Bay of Bengal where parts of the web series was also shot. The vast yet precarious shorelines of the Bay of Bengal dominate the visual imagery. The region in question is at the front-lines of climate change with successive cyclones having salinated the surrounding region, making the soil unfit for cultivation. Fishing remains the only viable occupation, generating an underworld dominated by major fish-traders. It is against this backdrop that the 5 part web series is set. Coming at a time when OTT platforms are proving to be serious competition to the mighty Bollywood industry, Mandaar focuses on regional geographies and peoples abandoning the larger-than-life narratives of Indian films. Rather, following the trend of Indian web series it focuses on local stories, the endangered ecological state of the subcontinent, and the lives of the marginal communities that eke a living in coastal areas. The web series symbolically connects Mandar’s (Macbeth) impotence and Lali’s (Lady Macbeth) desperation to conceive a child to the growing salinity and shifting shorelines. Even the witches who live on the shore in make-shift structures embody the hardships of coastal life. This paper will examine Mandaar as part of the new phenomenon of digital Shakespeares to emerge out of India, but one that uniquely focuses on the ecological changes of shorelines.

Rewriting Claribel’s Voyage to Tunis: Crossing Marine and Racial Boundaries in The Island Princess (1621) and the Renegado (1624)

Rita Banerjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

While Claribel, the princess of Naples was given away in marriage to the king of Tunis in The Tempest (1610), in John Fletcher’s The Island Princess and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado written a decade later, we see European Christians acquiring Oriental princesses as brides, who convert to Christianity. All three plays show interracial and inter-faith marriages accomplished through sea voyages, involving the crossing of the boundaries of the Western Christian world. However, while Claribel was lost to Europe and bestowed on an African, the later voyages demonstrate the triumph of Portuguese adventurers-cum-traders and Italian gentlemen who gain converted Asian princesses as wives. This paper analyzes the plots and characterizations in the two later plays, as shaped by the prevailing conditions of the Pacific- and Indian-Ocean and the Mediterranean regions. By modifying his source, Bartolome Leonardo de Argenola’s Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609), Fletcher shows the daring rescue of the king of Tidore from Ternate’s prison by the Portuguese hero and his marriage with the princess as a recompense, while Massinger dramatizes the rescue of an abducted Christian maiden, the union of the Sultana Donusa with her Venetian lover, and the flight of the whole party by the redeemed renegade’s ship. While trade aids colonization of the East Indies by European traders in one, the second eliminates the multiplication of renegade European pirates in the Mediterranean and the rescue of Europeans from Turkish prisons.

Racial Anxieties behind Othello as Light Entertainment in the 19th Century

Iwata Miki, Rikkyo University, Japan

In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reflecting the emergence of the modern (and oppressive) conception of race, maintained that Othello should be a Caucasian bronze moor rather than a “blackamoor,” saying that “Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth,—at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves?” (Lectures on Shakespeare, 1811). Historically, Coleridge’s remark is not really accurate but his almost automatic association of “negroes” and “slaves” is distinctively modern. While Coleridge’s anxiety influenced the performances of Othello at the patent theatres, especially those by Edmund Kean, and promoted the bleaching of the skin of Othello on stage, the same anxiety also produced an antipodal theatrical representation of Othello in illegitimate theatres. After the passage of a bill emancipating British-owned slaves in the West Indies, there emerged several burlesque versions of Othello in which Othello (or sometimes even Desdemona too) is described as an African ex-slave from the West Indies. In this presentation I would like to focus on one of the earliest examples of these burlesque versions, Othello Travestie: A Burlesque Burletta (1834) by Maurice G. Dowling. Even though both Othello and Iago are reframed as stereotypical funny-English users in the burlesque (Iago is from Tipperary and Othello is from Haiti), Iago’s stage-Irish is not so conspicuous as Othello’s stage-slave dictions such as ‘him’ as a first-person pronoun and “massa” for “sir.” This presentation will examine how the Othello figure in the light entertainment industry of the day commented on the problem of racial otherness from the viewpoint of language as well as the visual image.

Gekidan-Shinkanse’s Minatomachi Jyunjyou Othello

Matsuyama Kyoko, Komazawa Women’s University, Japan

Performing Shakespeare’s Othello has always been a difficult task in Japan due to the homogenous nature of the actor’s race and the cultural nature of preferring not to address such social issues within an entertainment. Gekidan-Shinkanse’s Minatomachi Jyunjyou Othello has challenged such matters by adapting the setting of Shakespeare’s Othello from Cypress to pre-war Japan and changing Othello from general in the service of Venice to Yakuza boss with a mixed-race background, Brazilian-Japanese and African. This change allows the audience to understand the nature of the problem in Othello. Yet it keeps the fantasy of a theatre performance by using the setting of pre-war Japan and the world of Yakuza. Yakuza has been a popular entertainment theme in Japan and its strict code of conduct or intricate nature of relationships within the Yakuza society fits well with Renaissance English society. Also, pre-war Japan’s class system allows the audiences to understand the difficult position of Othello within society first as a member of Yakuza and second as a descendant of a Brazilian-Japanese immigrant who has returned to Japan but as a child of a mixed-race marriage between Japanese and African. These factors would show the cruel discriminations and views that Othello has faced and paints the image of tragedy much more vividly than performing a non-adapted Shakespeare Othello. This presentation mainly deals with the 2011 performance of Minatomachi Jyunjyou Othello as its main source of discussion.

Two Recent Adaptations of Othello in Japan

Yoshihara Yukari, University of Tsukuba, Japan

This presentation takes up two recent adaptations of Othello in Japan, as cases showing anxiety over widening class divisions and increasing ethnic diversity in Japan. One is comic, parodic and cynical: Future Century Shakespeare, Othello (2008). The other is serious, gloomy and dark: Osero-san (2018). The first one reflects the widening class disparity in Japan and the increasingly impoverished status of manual laborers. The Othello figure is a mechanical engineer who always wears gloves to hide his hands, blackened with machine oil. The Desdemona figure is a children’s nurse, whose job is “cleaner”. This adaptation manages to be a cynical, gloomy and misogynistic comedy, because the Desdemona figure had extramarital affair with the Cassio figure. The latter concerns xenophobic, authoritarian and universalist approach to the Bard in Japan. The protagonist is an African American actor who, disillusioned by American theater world that gave him only racist stereotypical black roles, came to Japan hoping that the country would give him chance to perform Othello. The adaptation shows how he is forced to succumb to xenophobia and conformism in Japan, when he is allowed to perform Othello only on the condition that he adjusts himself to the universalist and authoritarian ideas in Japan that Othello is a “universal” tragedy that has nothing to do with racism. By comparing these two recent Japanese adaptations of Othello, I would argue that adaptations of Othello can be a means to address to our current interest in class, gender and ethnicity.

Reading Gender in Performance between East and West

Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University, USA
Roweena Yip, National University of Singapore, Singapore

What happens when East and Southeast Asian performances of Shakespeare, which primarily employ non-realist performance aesthetics, are placed in intercultural engagement with Western feminist theories? What implications do non-Anglophone performances have on Anglo-American theories of gender, especially given the increasing focus on identity politics and cultural representation in the West? In this presentation, we examine and reflect on the intercultural process of collaboratively writing and editing the general introduction to Gender and Shakespeare in Asian Theatres, a multimedia digital collection that is part of the forthcoming A|S|I|A Scholarly Performance Editions series. This digital collection includes (i) five full-length video recordings of performances that foreground gender as a central modality for staging Shakespeare in Southeast and East Asia, (ii) individual introductions by an editor for each production, (iii) a set of annotations organised by categories for each production, as well as a complete (iv), bibliography and (v) glossary. By focusing on several examples such as the treatment of structure and of the relationship between theoretical discourse and performance practices, we aim to elucidate the issues and principles underscored by the process of co-writing the general introduction. The format of this joint presentation enacts the very process of collaborative writing and synthesis of plural perspectives.

George Eliot’s Realistic Rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in Daniel Deronda

Irene Chan, National Chengchi University, Taiwan

As an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare, George Eliot is known for her carefulness of “weaving” Shakespeare in her works. In her journals and correspondence, Eliot also frequently quotes or paraphrases Shakespeare. Besides these, some characters in Eliot’s novels consist of the writer’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae. Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine of Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda, is believed to resemble Rosalind, the heroine of As You Like It. Eliot deliberately appropriates Rosalind’s playful charm, assertiveness and self-centredness in her depiction of Gwendolen. However, Gwendolen’s plot in Daniel Deronda is not a rewriting of Shakespeare’s pastoral play. With her habitual observation and criticism of her contemporary society, Eliot re-creates a painful, failed attempt of shrew-taming in Gwendolen’s miserable marriage with Henleigh Grandcourt, a ruthless Victorian wife-beater. The writer criticises women’s subordination in patriarchy as well as Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew through Gwendolen’s suffering. This paper will set out from the analysis Eliot’s re-creation of Katherina’s marital abuse in Gwendolen’s plotline in Daniel Deronda as her criticism and proceed to the discussion on the Shakespearean heroine’s empowerment to Eliot’s heroine in the fictional rewriting of the play.

The Shifting Sands and Shorelines of Current Shakespeare Study: A View on Gendering Social Justice

Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare studies is their resilience and flexibility: from the close textual analysis of New Criticism, to historicism, New historicism, Feminism, theory wars — Marxism, modernism and post-modernism, postcolonialism — cultural and popular adaptation to ecological and global contextualisation and now to social justice, they have moved with the intellectual currents of the times. Much has changed about how we read Shakespeare and what Shakespeare means the world over. Yet much still remains to be done. This paper will take a “long distanced” view mainly on the key issues animating social justice via Shakespeare, in the classroom, in media and in the canon itself, particularly with regard to gender. It will focus on the differences of perspectives involved and on how many of Shakespeare‘s women, like Volumnia, Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well and Joan of Arc could do with some justice in critical assessment.

New Woman and Hamlet: Asta Nielsen Starred in Hamlet (1921)

Park Unyoung, Kyungpook National University, South Korea

The Danish actress Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) was the first international movie star in the German film industry. The star system was initiated in Germany with her earlier than in Hollywood, and she is regarded as having set a milestone in film history. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Nielsen was associated with the phenomenon of the “New Woman,” which emerged in Metropolis coincidentally during the silent movie era when Nielsen was acting as its muse. In this regard, her 1921 movie Hamlet is particularly interesting since the protagonist Hamlet is depicted as a person who is forced to act as a prince even though Hamlet is biologically a princess. This interpretation was inspired by Edward P. Vining’s book The Mystery of Hamlet (1881) and adapted to the post-World War I situation in Germany. To perform this Hamlet, Nielsen appears in prince’s costume, exposing her legs, emphasizing her boyish body, and, moreover, with bobbed hair. These outer characteristics corresponded exactly to those of the “New Woman,” and Hamlet’s conflicts with her environment also mirrored those of the “New Woman.” Thus, it can be assumed that Hamlet’s fate is equated to that of the “New Woman” or vice versa. In this presentation, I will demonstrate Asta Nielsen as a role model for the “New Woman” by comparing her with the history of female Hamlets and her Hamlet as a prototype of the “New Woman” in the context of war and societal crisis. By doing this, I will suggest a media-related interpretation of the mystery of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s text.

Adapting Shakespeare’s “Offensive” Comedies: Misogyny and Antisemitism in Nallari Jongbujeon and Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēniti

Emma de Beus, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

This essay will analyze the potential of one specific optical phenomenon–refraction–for understanding the work taking place in twenty-first century adaptations of Shakespeare’s “offensive” comedies. When light travels into a new substance, it bends. Refraction looks like a straw in a glass of water: if examined from the side, it appears to bend at the point where the air meets the water. Arguably, cultures have edges and that it is due to these edges that refraction occurs. The edge of one culture is where the change in light occurs. When the light rays of Shakespeare are sent over the edge of one cultural medium into another, each ray of meaning will refract according to angles of deviation established by the new medium into which they are adapted. The potential the notion of refracted adaptation brings to Shakespeare’s “offensive” comedies in the 21st century will be considered in two plays: The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, given the misogyny in the former and the antisemitism in the latter. The refracted adaptations considered here are the 2008 South Korean film Nallari Jongbujeon, directed by Lim Won-kook (Shrew), and Māori production Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēniti, directed by Don Selwyn in 2002 (Merchant). By reading these two adaptations specifically as refractions, it will be possible to better understand how they both leverage linguistic, cultural, and temporal bending to reform Shakespeare for the twenty-first century and how they establish a pattern for refracted adaptation of “offensive” comedies.

Underground Shakespearean Musicals in Taiwan Directed by Show Ryuzanji

Mika Eglinton, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan

Ever since the Toho Company’s production of My Fair Lady in 1963, musical theatre in Japan has had a strong ‘western’ connotation as the import of Broadway or West End hits. This led to the proliferation of the ‘translated musical’ in the entertainment industry in Japan and beyond in East Asia. Against the backdrop of ‘mock-western’ commercial musicals, Show Ryuzanji, has been creating theatre in an Asian context since the late 1960s, influenced by leading shogekijyo (little theatre) artists of the day, such as Shuji Terayama, Tadashi Suzuki and Juro Kara of the angura (underground) movement. In 2016 and 2018, Ryuzanji worked with Taiwanese actors on musical adaptations of Macbeth with Our Theatre based in Chiayi and Twelfth Night at the National Taiwan University of Arts. In this paper, I will reflect on the achievements and contentions at work in these collaborations. How did these productions represent an alternative process to commercial western-led musicals?

What Japanese Pictorial Representations of Othello Tell: (Re-)Creating Othello and Manga as Educational Entertainment for Young Girls

Minami Ryuta, Tokyo University of Economics, Japan

One of the earliest manga adaptations of Othello is the one published in 1969 by Ikeda Riyoko, a leading Japanese manga artist renowned for The Rose of Versailles (1972-73). As it was targeted at young female readers, Ikeda’s manga version retells the play succinctly with a primary emphasis upon Desdemona. Unlike her other leading works, Ikeda rendered this manga version of Othello at the request of the publisher. Adapting a Shakespearean tragedy for a weekly girls’ manga magazine seems a very unlikely decision, considering the fact that most of works in weekly girls’ manga magazines in the 1960s featured romantic stories of teenage girls set at school in contemporary Japan or Europe. Her depiction of Othello and Desdemona not only shows the stereotypical images of ‘western’ characters in girls’ manga of the time, but also suggests shifting positions of Shakespeare as well as that of girls’ manga in Japan around 1970. This paper aims to illuminate how Shakespeare was recreated and consumed in the Japanese youth culture, where both Shakespeare and manga were ‘discovered’ or were recongnised in ways different from those of the preceding years.

Otojiro Kawakami’s “True Drama” Othello and Japan’s Colonialism

Oshima Hisao, Kyushu University, Japan

Otojiro Kawakami (1864-1911) is one of the earliest Shakespearean directors in Japan. He took his company including his wife Sada (1871-1946) to the United States and Europe in order to learn the Western drama and make a fortune with staging their Japanese repertoire. Their goal of making money abroad was not achieved well as they had expected but Kawakami and Sada impressed not only the American and European audience but Henry Irving and Ellen Terry touring then in the U.S. They learned the Western acting techniques from the great Shakespearean actor and actress and staged Shakespeare’s plays after they returned to Japan. On the returning ship. Kawakami got the idea of a Japanese adaptation of Othello set in Taiwan. With Sada (in fact, the first Japanese Shakespearean actress), he started the movement of “Seigeki” (True Drama) trying to import the Western drama into plays of Shimpa (New Wave), and staged a unique Japanese adaptation of Othello (set in Taiwan under Japan’s colonial rule) at Meiji Theatre in Tokyo in 1899 (M32). Replacing the Mediterranean geopolitical power relation between Venice and Cyprus with the South Asian one, Kawakami’s “true drama” reflects Japan’s colonial gaze to other Asian countries which resulted in the Pacific War (1491-45) in the end.

Downer, Lesley. Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West. Gotham Books, 2003.

Inoue, Seizo. The Life of Otojiro Kawakami. Ashi Shobo, 1985.

Kawato, Michiaki, & Takanori Sakakibara, eds., Shakespeare in the Meiji Period, 2 Vols. Ozora-sha, 2004.

Oshima, Hisao. “The Tempest and Japanese Theatrical Traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku” in Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Vol.29: “Critical and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest-1611 to the Present,” eds., Tobias Doering and Virginia Mason Vaughan, pp.149-72. Narr Verlag, 2013.

Oshima. “Ophelia and the Tradition of ‘Joyu’ in Japan.” Shakespeare Review, Vol. 57, No. 4: Special Issue 2022: “Intersections in Shakespeare,” 615-32. The Shakespeare Association of Korea, 2022.

Yamaguchi, Reiko. Joyu Sada Yacco. Shincho-sha, 1982.

Korean Shakespeare and Postcolonialism?

Scott Shepherd, Chongshin University, South Korea

Recent work on Korean performance of Shakespeare has drawn heavily on postcolonial theory that was developed in very different contexts. This paper responds by exploring the historical development and current state of Korean Shakespeare. I argue that to apply postcolonial theory in its traditional form (as it is applied to Shakespeare in India, for example) to Korean productions of Shakespeare is at the very least inconsistent. Korea’s colonial experience under the rule of Japan, not of Europeans or even Americans, merits a unique Korea-centric theory to Shakespeare performance. While the performance of Shakespeare in Korea is sometimes focused inwards as an expression of nationalism or an exploration of historical performance modes or both, more often a production simply explores that specific play’s broader themes or questions. I argue that Korean Shakespeare is neither an expression of Western imperialism nor a ‘self-orientalizing Korean spectacle’ (Im, 81). By contrast, my paper seeks Korean-centric approaches which do not impose a decontextualised Western theoretical framework on the country but instead attempt to examine Korean Shakespeare on its own grounds.

A Malaysian Postcolonial Experience Reading: Colonial Influences and Discriminatory Languages in Shakespeare’s Othello

Hanita Hanim Binti Ismail, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

The blackamoor in Shakespeare’s Othello is subjected to multiple forms of discrimination at numerous levels, causing some to even associate him with postcolonialism. Yet, the reading of Othello as a subject of colonialism may be distant to some younger readers, especially those who are unfamiliar with the concept. This paper intends on exploring initial conception of colonialism among the Malaysian generation Z through their production of graphic images based on their reading of Shakespeare’s Othello. 50 final year undergraduate (N=35; F= 29, M=6) from the English Language Teaching programme were introduced to the idea of postcolonialism as their elective to consider teaching English using the Shakespearean text. The assessment of this initial production of graphic images is based on students’ selected images and words to narrate samples of colonialism, that would in turn, shape their final production towards the end of the semester. Findings would help instructor’s assessment of students’ comprehension of colonialism, especially with the current turn of events evolving around the world and their versions of postcolonialism as the Z Generation.

Hybrid Approaches for AI-supported Shakespeare Adaptation in Animation

Hannes Rall, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Since the advent of generative AI for imaging, there has been an extremely binary debate about generative AI’s impact on creative industries, especially animation. Concerns about AI stealing from artists have played a huge part in the discussion, with rightful calls for protection of creators’ intellectual property. Achieving artistically convincing results through generative art creation (AI) is far from being an automated process. Human art direction and the integration of traditional artistic approaches with AI-methods are needed to arrive at successful results. However, the prevalent discussions often tend to generalize and over-simplify the diverse uses of AI in creative processes. Instead of merely drawing from other artists work, AI can be a competent tool to simplify mechanical work and facilitate production, serving the unique artistic vision defined by the authors themselves. Hybrid approaches that combine human artistic vision with AI blur the lines between technological support and artistic creation. Existing literature often highlights problems but rarely indicates solutions towards reconciling technological potential and ethical rigor. ​​By solely using work that is officially in the public domain as a basis and integrating AI-technology with tradition animation techniques we propose just that: An ethically responsible use of AI that does not infringe on existing copyright, while taking full advantage of its capabilities for technological innovation. This paper will present a case study of how AI can be used in the process of animated adaptation, bringing the look and style of famous Shakespeare illustrators like Delacroix to life.

Using Artificial Intelligence Tools for Shakespeare Adaptation: Experience of Using Prompt Engineering to Adapt Othello to a New Play by Using Text-to-Text AI Tools

Sarnayzadeh Majid, Iran

Artificial Intelligence tools open many new windows in front of us to implement our ideas in a creative process. Now we can adapt and produce new works based on Shakespeare faster and more creative than before, in the other word, AI tools democratize creativity by helping arts and literature lovers to access to a wide variety opportunities. In this presentation I want to share my experiences to produce a new play based on Othello by using ChatGPT in addition to the advantages and disadvantages. I needed a new play based on Othello that was suitable for performing by two actors. At the first phase I used prompt engineering techniques to produce a plot that the result was:
“Title: The Lute’s Lament
Characters:
1. Aria – A female lute player
2. Cadence – A male percussion player
Plot:
Set in a Renaissance-inspired world, Aria and Cadence are court musicians who have served Desdemona for years. They witness the tragic events of Othello’s jealousy and Desdemona’s demise from a unique perspective…. As they play, they discuss the growing tensions they’ve observed between Othello and Desdemona…. Through their dialogue and music, we learn about the main events of Othello’s story – the accusations of infidelity, the lost handkerchief, and the mounting suspicion….”
And in the next phases I was working on characters and the scenes by using the tool and the most important points in the process was related to my knowledge about Shakespeare, about theater standards and about suitable dialogue with the tool.

Shakespeare on the Shore: AI Shakespeare, the Triumph of the Text and the End of the Human

Reto Winkler, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The publication of Shakespeare Manga Theater, the English version of a collection of Osamu Tezuka’s manga adaptations in July 2024, prompted a renewed interest in Shakespeare. The Japanese manga artist, renowned for his contribution to the field, produced several adaptations of Shakespeare plays during his lifetime, including The Merchant of Venice (1959), Robio and Robiette (1965), Macbeth (1966), Hamlet (1981), The Taming of the Shrew (1981), and Othello (1982). Surprisingly, the adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays into comic book form in China is not a recent phenomenon, with examples dating back to the 1980s. However, the Mandarin versions of Shakespeare manga published in the late 20th century, and even the English or bilingual versions that emerged in the 21st century, remain relatively unknown. This highlights the necessity for a more comprehensive investigation into the reception of these adaptations and their contribution to contemporary Shakespeare studies. Factors such as educational reforms, the rise of manga’s popularity, and China’s increasing global cultural exchange have likely influenced the development and dissemination of these works. Furthermore, understanding the interplay between these cultural forces and the adaptations could shed light on the broader dynamics of cross-cultural literary adaptation. This paper will clarify these questions and further explore how adapting Shakespeare’s works into manga has influenced the accessibility and popularity of Shakespearean literature among young readers in China.

Shores of Departure: Imagining the Initiation of Conquest in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Henry V

Ari Adipurwawidjana, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia

Numerous studies have been carried out which places Shakepeare’s The Tempest in the postcolonial and New Historicist frameworks, most noteably the kind pioneered by Greenblatt, showing how the play represents the English early modern imaginings of the beginning of its advent as a global imperial power. The Tempest along with its contemporaneous co-texts form a cultural discourse supporting and justifiying England’s domination overseas. Taking advantage of the concepts proposed in Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (1985), I would like to propose the idea that The Tempest not only presents moments of initiation and atorization of conquest but also the notion that the text itself is a moment of alterazation incorporating act of altering colonized peoples and lands. These moments of alterization are often set on shores as tropes of beginnings as well as encounters. With this mind, I would also like to compare scenes set on shores in The Tempest to those occurring in Henry V to argue that England’s desire for conquests as represented in The Tempest is linked to the desire for recognition of England European powers. Thus, shores in these two plays serve as metaphors for both England’s marking its departure to future global dominance as well as its appeal to its perhaps questionable genealogical past.

To Dissonate or to Hybridize? The Ambiguity of Interculturality in Ong Keng Sen’s Lear Dreaming

Dong Qingchen, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Arbaayah Ali Termizi, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia

Shakespeare’s introduction to Asia occurred through Western colonialism, economic imperialism, and Asian cultural modernism. Notably, the intertwined histories of diaspora and British colonization have shaped multicultural traditions in the practice of adapting Shakespeare in Singapore. The Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen adeptly amalgamates diverse Asian languages, visual arts, dances, music and rituals in his Shakespeare-inspired adaptations Lear Dreaming (2012), intensively raising debates over the transformation, fidelity and faithfulness to Shakespeare’s plays when contextualized within the Asian framework. Through the juxtaposition of multicultural and multilingual elements, this selected adaptation challenges traditional narratives while engaging with the imagery and archetypal emotions of the original text. This article examines the intricate interplay of intercultural dissonance and hybridity, and further delves into the ambiguous intercultural approach employed by Ong to navigate the tension between fidelity to the source material and creative reinterpretation. Moreover, the analysis explores how Lear Dreaming strikes a balance between Western literary canon and Asian cultural convention, and how it ultimately subverts dominant paradigms in Asian intercultural Shakespeare theatre. The findings suggest that Lear Dreaming serves as a compelling example of the transformative potential of Asian intercultural Shakespeare adaptations, enriching our understanding of adapting Shakespearean texts within non-Anglophone cultural contexts.

Thinking Shakespeare and Korean English Education with Hannah Arendt

Jang Seon Young, Kongju National University, South Korea

This paper explores two critical issues by examining Shakespeare and Korean English education through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy in her 1958 essay, “The Crisis in Education.” First, it critiques the current state of Korean English education, and second, it investigates how to reconcile Shakespeare, as a symbol of tradition, with the newness of students in Korea. Specifically, the paper addresses the declining role of Shakespeare in Korean public school curricula by drawing parallels to Arendt’s critique of American education. Arendt identifies three key factors in this crisis: the separation of the child’s world from the adult world, the shift of pedagogy toward scientific pragmatism, and the replacement of learning with doing and playing. These trends mirror Korea’s learner-centered, communicative approach to English education, often prioritizing practical skills over traditional content like Shakespeare. However, Arendt emphasizes that educators, by introducing children to the world, act as intermediaries between the private and public spheres. Their authority stems from their love of the world and their responsibility to conserve and transmit it. Moreover, educators play a crucial role in nurturing children’s potential, standing between the tradition of the world and the newness that children bring about. In this context, the paper examines how Korean educators might bridge Shakespeare’s legacy with students’ “natality,” fostering innovation while preserving cultural and literary heritage.

Rewriting along the Shoreline of Excess and Access in Barrier-Free Macbeth (2024)

Kim Geonlyung, University of Minnesota, USA

This paper proposes to think about excess as a strategy of rewriting that opens points of entry between rewriting and rewritten text, and ultimately reshapes how we understand access in Shakespeare performances. I analyze the case of the barrier-free production of Macbeth (2024) directed by Kim Miran as an example. The production combines diverse temporalities, genres, and aesthetics, as do many contemporary Shakespeare rewritings inspired and enabled by the shifting media landscape. References ranging from folklore, Pansori, lullaby lyrics, delivery order requests, and other rewritings richly inform the performance. Moreover, performers convey action through Korean Sign language, narration and narrative singing, and puppeteering, loosely followed by text media art projected on large screens. I suggest that models like the Palimpsest, re-mix, nodes, “rhizomatic” networks, fluidity etc. often employed to theorize the interconnectedness between rewritings can be used to translate excess of content to excess of contexts. In other words, incorporating more recognizable fragments means there are more opportunities for connection. What is being accessed is neither limited to Shakespeare’s language or message, nor is the destination fixed within one performance. The resulting visions of access are not reduction of gaps in perception, but rather active appropriation of them, to create a loosey intertwined bundle of paralleled experiences that form tensions between individual and collective audience experience.

From Jacob’s Sheep to Manna from Heaven: The Changing Perception of Money and Profit in The Merchant of Venice

Okuyama Atsuko, Nagoya University, Japan

The friction between the English people and usurers as well as between the English people and foreign merchants began to be portrayed in plays at a time when both people and capital were flowing in from overseas and the economic system was changing from feudalism to capitalism. Money symbolizes the sin of greed, and those bearing that sin were ridiculed. However, relationships to money also exposed the contradictions concealed in the hearts of the ridiculers. Observing that money has played a role in plays by making human relationships more complex and interesting is not an exaggeration. The main theme of The Merchant of Venice is financial conflict. When we unravel Shylock’s attitude towards profit as evidenced by the episode involving Jacob, we discover that what underpins his business philosophy is the ingenuity he has learned from his mentor, Jacob, and his drive to seize and capitalize on opportunities. This paper considers how the character of the funds obtained through Shylock’s espousing of Jacob’s work philosophy changes after he lends Antonio money and after the trial. Evidently, the nature of money changes depending on who owns it; that is, it changes to suit the owner’s convenience. Moreover, hidden in this movement of money is irony regarding Christians’ opportunistic money-making. Christian opportunism is projected onto a Jewish moneylender, revealing the anxiety and conflict lurking deep in the hearts of Christians, who are torn between making money and morality.

Hamlet through the Philosophical Lens of Scruton

Luigi Antonio F. Pinga, University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines

This proposal aims to examine Shakespeare’s play Hamlet through the philosophical lens of Scruton by describing, interpreting, and evaluating the character, Ophelia. There are three areas which are ripe for discussion: addressing the misconception that Ophelia is a weak female character, analyzing her unique loyalty to Hamlet despite his contempt against her, and interpreting how she fell into madness. Scruton’s book On Human Nature provides a humanistic perspective in analyzing Ophelia by focusing on the interpersonal relations she has with her family and Hamlet. Scruton’s book also explores the value of words and intentions human beings have for one another and how we can be affected by blame, praise, and forgiveness. Scruton’s philosophy can be used to interpret her as an active subject who embodies deep individuality in her actions, words, (and poem). Active subject means that she is a dynamic character who cannot be easily stereotyped by cliches or tropes in terms of storytelling. Deep Individuality describes the human being as an agent across time and place who has unique responsibilities to herself and others. The world that Shakespeare created in Hamlet is rich in portraying different interpersonal attitudes. Scruton’s chapters (Encounter with Evil and Sacred Obligations) would be used to interpret her falling into madness as a cautionary tale, one that is analogous to Juli’s story in Jose Rizal’s The Reign of Greed and one that has a different lesson from Hamlet.

When Stock Characters Meet Role-Types: A Study of the Stock Character Innamoratti in Chinese All-Female Yue Opera’s Romeo and Juliet Adaptation

Wu Yueqi, Shakespeare Institute at University of Birmingham, UK

Despite the direct correlation between each other, Shakespearean theatre and Chinese opera share a lot of exciting commonalities, particularly in their heritage from “primitive theatres.” Influenced by the sixteenth-century Commedia dell’Arte, the performance style of Shakespeare’s plays in the early modern period might be a far cry from the psychoanalytically based realism prevalent on contemporary Western stage. Chinese opera, on the other hand, still maintains the highly stylized performing conventions which can be traced back to the thirteenth-century. Similar to the Commedia dell’Arte actors specialized in particular characters that they tended to play throughout their lives, Chinese opera characters can be divided into four main role-types: the male, the female, the painted face and the comedians. Each role-type has different subcategories according to age, social status and personality, with different acting conventions in gait and posture, which require long-term training and are detached from the performer’s own gender and age. It is the purpose of this essay to analyse how Chinese all-female Yue opera localises the stock character “Innamoratti” in their Romeo and Juliet adaptation (1985), in order to discuss whether the performance style on Shakespeare’s stage is naturalistic or formularistic.

Who is Macbeth: Boundary, Interaction and Political Anxiety in 21st-Century Chinese Operatic Shakespeare

Yin Yuanwei, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

What does Macbeth mean to the Chinese opera stage? The answer is rooted in fascinating yet little-known facts—while Shakespearean plays appeared on the Chinese opera stage as early as 1913, the first Chinese adaptation of Macbeth did not emerge until 1986, marking the boundary between Macbeth and Chinese opera. Despite this late start, the development of the Chinese operatic Macbeth has flourished. Based on available data, Macbeth has become the most frequently adapted Shakespearean play in Chinese opera. Notably, all existing Chinese operas based on Macbeth use modified titles. In December 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one such adaptation captured the ongoing search for understanding with the title Who is Macbeth? The features of this production highlight the boundaries and interactions of adapting Shakespeare to Chinese opera. The opera juxtaposes Macbeth with ancient Chinese figures, trying to break the boundary by making the audience more empathetic. Besides, the concept of “desire” is embodied through the performance of a Chinese opera actor/singer, exploring Macbeth’s major themes across different contexts. Moreover, the layered set design and open ending imply the relationship between Macbeth and Chinese opera. Additionally, Who is Macbeth? challenges geographical and psychological boundaries, particularly those stemming from pandemic-related restrictions, evoking political anxieties. Through analyzing the text and performance of Who is Macbeth?, this paper illustrates that Chinese opera continuously engages with Shakespeare within its cultural framework, inevitably triggering certain political anxieties.

What’s Eating the Danish Prince? On Designing a Hamlet-Themed Print and Play Doll and Write Game for the Classroom

Joachim Emilio B. Antonio faculty University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines

With the surge of interest in analog games the past decade, the further growth of game studies, and the proliferation of the print and play subculture during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has come to a point when designing one’s own game customized for one’s own classes has become quite feasible. In this symposium presentation, the designer will narrate the process of creating the Hamlet themed print and play roll & write game “What’s Eating the Danish Prince?” following the Evocative, Enacting, Embedded and Emergent Narratives, as based on Henry Jenkins’ Games as Narrative Architecture. In this game, the players get to play as Hamlet managing the crises he faces in the original play. In relation to this, the designer will also discuss designing within a teacher’s budget constraints and the parameters of a classroom setting, in the hopes of encouraging more teachers to explore this path of gamification in the classroom.

Zoe Seaton’s The Tempest (2020) and Zoom as a Digital Seascape

Anne Nichole Arellano-Alegre, University of the Philippines in Diliman, Philippines

This paper takes a look at Zoe Seaton’s The Tempest produced online during the 2020 lockdown by Creation Theatre. A born-digital performance through the Zoom platform, I seek to explore the intersections between digital media and the Blue Humanities by investigating the interactions between human and non-human elements of Shakespeare’s most characteristically “marine” play and how the digital space allows water to be a decisive and necessary character in its own right. What initially emerges through the use of Zoom — the play’s digital “stage” — is how The Tempest highlights the post-human and planetary aspects of Shakespeare’s works rather than its anthropocentric narrative. The digital stage blurs the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, mirroring the fluidity of the sea and highlighting the ecological interdependence of planetary waters, as theorized by Steven Mentz in his seminal introduction to the Blue Humanities. In this essay, I argue that the use of the digital stage as its “seascape” invites us to consider the ethical implications of our engagement with the marine world, allowing us to swim under the surface of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and dive into how the play engages us to reflect on issues of climate change and global oceanic issues.

“Then Can I Drown an Eye”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Lyric in the Age of AI

Victor Felipe S. Bautista, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

This inquiry uses the image of the shoreline to explore these questions. How can the critic of Shakespeare’s sonnets lead the reader toward the embodiment of his poems as lyrics? In other words, how can the critic read Shakespeare’s sonnets, so the reader’s and Shakespeare’s shorelines meet and dissolve into one another? In contrast, how do Language Learning Machines (LLMs) such as ChatGPT turn the sonnets and its existing readings into text generated by an AI incapable of being in the world? This inquiry seizes this kairos in which two several crucial moments overlap: first, the recent passing of the poetry critic Helen Vendler; and, second, the emergence of LLMs. Vendler defined the lyric “the most intimate of genres, constructing a twinship between writer and reader. [It] presumes that the reader resembles the writer enough to … speak the lines the writer has written as though they were the reader’s own,” and it is this idea which I extend to describe a meeting between the reader’s and Shakespeare’s shorelines. I examine Vendler’s work (including her book The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets) to look at the way that the critic of the bard’s sonnets facilitates this poetic embodiment. Joshua Rothman recently urged human beings to find their distinction from AI by thinking of what is lost by replacing human work with content by LLMs. Thus, I contrast Vendler’s criticism with readings generated by ChatGPT to determine the value of both the poetry critic and Shakespeare’s sonnets as lyrics.

Slings and Arrows: Shakespeare and Mashup Combat Board Gaming

Emil Francis M. Flores, University of the Philippines in Diliman, Philippines

Unmatched is an asymmetrical combative board game that pits characters from mythology, film, television, comics, literature, and history in one-on-one or team combat. Given the popularity of mashups and multiverses, Unmatched has been a commercial success with competitive tournaments held worldwide. Major media companies such as Marvel, Universal and Nickelodeon have licensed their characters for the game. Thus, Marvel characters such as Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and Moon Knight can battle the Raptors from Jurassic Park and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The game was first introduced though with license-free characters such as King Arthur, Medusa, Beowulf and Little Red Riding Hood. Non-Western characters such as Sinbad, Sun Wukong and Yennenga are part of various released sets. Historical figures Nikola Tesla, Oda Nobunaga and Bruce Lee are also characters featured in different sets. A set called “Cobble and Fog” features Victorian literary characters such as Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and Sherlock Holmes. Given the eclectic mix of characters involved in Unmatched, the latest game set still caught fans by surprise. Released in June 2024 (August 2024 in the Philippines), the set called “Slings and Arrows” features Hamlet, the Wayward Sisters from Macbeth, Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. This paper will explore popular culture mashups and the mechanics involved in asymmetrical board games and how Shakespeare and his works have become part of contemporary “geek” gaming culture. A brief history of board games based on Shakespeare will also be included.

Shakespeare Meets Manga: The Development of Adaptations in China

Ma Yujing, Soka University, Japan

The publication of Shakespeare Manga Theater, the English version of a collection of Osamu Tezuka’s manga adaptations in July 2024, prompted a renewed interest in Shakespeare. The Japanese manga artist, renowned for his contribution to the field, produced several adaptations of Shakespeare plays during his lifetime, including The Merchant of Venice (1959), Robio and Robiette (1965), Macbeth (1966), Hamlet (1981), The Taming of the Shrew (1981), and Othello (1982). Surprisingly, the adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays into comic book form in China is not a recent phenomenon, with examples dating back to the 1980s. However, the Mandarin versions of Shakespeare manga published in the late 20th century, and even the English or bilingual versions that emerged in the 21st century, remain relatively unknown. This highlights the necessity for a more comprehensive investigation into the reception of these adaptations and their contribution to contemporary Shakespeare studies. Factors such as educational reforms, the rise of manga’s popularity, and China’s increasing global cultural exchange have likely influenced the development and dissemination of these works. Furthermore, understanding the interplay between these cultural forces and the adaptations could shed light on the broader dynamics of cross-cultural literary adaptation. This paper will clarify these questions and further explore how adapting Shakespeare’s works into manga has influenced the accessibility and popularity of Shakespearean literature among young readers in China.

Shakespeare Is Pantropiko: Using Filipino Pop Music to Engage Students in Discovering Shakespeare’s Themes as Universal, Timeless, and “Filipino”

Ernesto A. Pang, Jr. , Philippines

Filipino students often have the impression that “ancient” literature like Shakespeare’s have no relevance to them whatsoever. This paper proposes that Shakespeare teachers may find that Filipino pop music can be an effective tool in engaging their students in the classroom and help them discover that Shakespeare’s themes are actually universal and timeless and “very much Filipino.” Bini’s hit “Pantropiko” (lit. tropical) talks about summer much like how the poet does in “Sonnet 18.” SB19 hit “Gento” (word play on gold and “Here I’ll show you”) can be juxtaposed with how gold becomes the central figure in Timon of Athens. And “Kahit Kunwari Man Lang” by Agsunta and Moira del Torre may just be Viola’s theme song in Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare Reimagined: The Interaction of Translation, Adaptation, and Hybridisation in Indian Cinema

Parthajit Baruah, Renaissance Junior College, Assam, India

This paper employs theoretical frameworks of translation, adaptation, and hybridity to scrutinise the transformation of Shakespeare’s works in diverse cultural contexts. It specifically analyses the Assamese adaptation of Othello (2014), Local Kung Fu 2 (2017), Himangshu Prasad Das’ play Lady Macbeth (2019) and Indian cinematic interpretations such as Maqbool (2003), Haider (2014), Omkara (2006), and Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013). The study analyses how these adaptations navigate cultural identities and societal challenges while maintaining the primary themes of Shakespeare’s original texts, using postcolonial and intertextual theories. The Assamese adaptation of Othello highlights the incorporation of local narratives and linguistic elements, reshaping the themes of jealousy and betrayal to fit within the socio-cultural backdrop of Assam. On the other hand, Local Kung Fu 2 combines elements of Shakespearean themes with humour and martial arts, resulting in a lively blend that resonates with modern audiences. Das’ Lady Macbeth provides a new interpretation of the character, focussing on gender dynamics and societal roles within a specific context. This approach offers a unique viewpoint on Shakespeare’s intricate female characters. Maqbool portrays ambition and betrayal in the Mumbai underworld, while Haider explores retribution and moral ambiguity in the setting of Kashmir’s unrest, offering a thought-provoking commentary on current events. Omkara, a rendition of Othello, skilfully integrates the themes of caste and honour into its storyline, while Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela offers a lively Bollywood interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. This paper argues that these adaptations not only honour Shakespeare’s legacy but also enrich it, fostering a dialogue between global literary heritage and localised expressions. The text explores the intricate relationship between translation, adaptation, and hybridisation within the framework of Shakespeare’s lasting influence on different cultures.

Between Translation and Transformation: In Shakespeare Soliloquy

Choi Ji Young, Seoul Institute of the Arts, South Korea

This paper deals with how to translate vividly to convey the words, rhymes, nuances and personal feelings contained in Shakespeare soliloquies. It is necessary to understand a role’s psychology so that the choice of translated words could fit into the situation. When the translator deeply imagines and understands each of the roles in Shakespeare play, could transform characters to Korean speaking Shakespeare roles. Examples of the translated Soliloquies will be King Lear, Edgar, Hamlet, Claudius, Juliet. The honest feelings hidden in soliloquies should be absorbed into the translation so it could be more personal and touch the heart. This paper aims to consider the importance of understanding each type of character more deeply before translating.

Rituals and Desire in Green Spaces: Revisiting Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night through Joaquin’s Summer Solstice and May Day Eve

Neal Amandus D. Gellaco, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been regarded as a green play, with critics from Barber onward highlighting its depiction of natural spaces as realms of festivity and misrule. This paper revisits this critical framework by juxtaposing Dream with two tales by Nick Joaquin, a canonical Filipino writer in English and an admirer of the Bard. Joaquin’s “Summer Solstice” and “May Day Eve” explore temporal and spatial frames (St. John’s Day and May Day Eve, respectively) that enable rituals and desires to unfold freely, characterized by their movement towards the natural world. The eco-pockets of 19th-century Manila (the riversides,
rural areas) and the elements in them (such as dust, water, air, and the moon) both shape and are shaped by the ritualistic and superstitious behaviors of human characters. This dynamic mirrors the world of Dream, where the epic quarrels of Titania and Oberon and the illusion-inducing potion highlight parallel themes. In these three works, both the material spaces inhabited by characters and the metaphorical substance of language converge in their treatment of desire—whether for romance, sex, or power. Informed by post-colonial ecocriticism, this paper compares the recurring narrative and symbolic patterns found in these green spaces, while also identifying key differences shaped by religion and time. While midsummer festivities and May Day celebrations find their roots in early European traditions, their translation and adaptation in Philippine contexts reflect both adherence to tradition and its subversion. This comparative study, grounded in the theoretical principles of green spaces, illuminates these distinctions.

Pericles’s Journey in Its First Persian Translation (1996): A Lexical-Cultural Analysis

Ali Khodadadi, Iran

Set in ‘several clime[s]’ covering ‘longest leagues’ in an intercontinental network of coastal cities around the Eastern Mediterranean, Pericles is unique in Shakespeare (Antioch interestingly being one of Shakespeare’s easternmost and nearest to Asia). A narrative of wandering and constant journey, it is about extremities as well as in-betweenness, reflected not only geographically but in its co-authorship as well as the spectrum of events Pericles and his folks are tossed into. Arguing that this characterises its first ever Persian translation, by Ala’uddin Pasargadi (1996), of the only two, I explore his choices of equivalents for some of the central motifs: ‘Fortune’ is rendered as widely as ‘طالع ’ (from Arabic ‘rising star’), ‘تقدیر ’ and ‘سرنوشت ’ (both ‘pre-ordained events in a person’s life’ in Islamic/Persian lore). ‘Knave’, ‘villain’ and ‘rogue’ are assigned their extreme early modern development via ‘شیّاد ’ (‘swindler’), discarding the earlier sense of ‘a lowly person’, whereas ‘noble’, ‘honour’, ‘chastity’ and ‘virtue’ with their similar varieties are taken interchangeably as a near-emphasis on the mores of chastity and/or pure ‘moral goodness’, and the sensitive sorts, e.g. ‘incest’ or ‘loss of maidenhead’, are either toned down or omitted. It sometimes substitutes Persian forms of divinity for Greco-Roman deities (‘ فرشتهآسا ’ [‘angel-like’] for ‘Juno’) or ‘خداوند ’ (‘God’) for ‘gods’, transferring the original polytheism into a monotheism. This flow of multicultural motion in a classical pre-Christian locale harboured within a Persian translation of Pericles foregrounds both literal and figurative points of contact and departure from one ‘shore’ to the other.

Beyond the Shoreline of Europe to East Asia: From Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare to Yin Bian Yan Yu

Jasmine Niu, University of York, UK

In 1806, Charles and Mary Lamb produced the highly popular Tales from Shakespeare, a set of prose adaptations of the plays. A century later, the Tales were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu and Wei Yi, under the title English Poet Yin Bian Yan Yu. This publication also proved immensely successful, with eleven reprints over the next three decades, and an enduring influence on the Chinese reception of Shakespeare, as well as Chinese literature more broadly. This paper takes Mary Lamb’s hint from her preface to the Tales, examining how Shakespeare was ‘transplanted from his own natural soil’ first by the Lambs and then by Lin Shu and Wei Yi. It asks why the Lambs’ text was translated for Chinese readers at this moment, and draws on the paratexts and histories of both Yin Bian Yan Yu and the Tales to better understand the reception of the Lambs’ adaptation and its relation to ideas of ‘Shakespeare’ beyond the ‘shoreline’ of Western literary culture. I contend that the translation played a crucial role in popularizing Shakespeare in China, situating him as a poet and novelist, rather than a dramatist. To conclude, I offer a brief reading of the court scene in The Merchant of Venice, showing how Lamb adapted Shakespeare and how Lin Shu and Wei Yi, in turn, translated Lamb, creating a Chinese ‘Shakespeare’ with an enduring legacy.

A Study of Shakespeare’s Influence in Philippine Television

May Anne Ticao-Jaro, University of San Agustin, Philippines

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and sonnets, which express the turmoil and societal barriers surrounding forbidden and unrequited love, are literary works that have immortalized their author’s genius as a literary artist. These works have been read, reread, staged, translated, and trans-created, and delving into a critique of works that explicitly and implicitly hold these masterpieces in high esteem is an attempt to confirm Shakespeare’s boundless influence. Thus, this study aims to examine the various versions of forbidden and unrequited love stories featured in Philippine television. It intends to evaluate the merits of these teleplays that share Shakespeare’s intensity and passion manifested in the weave of heartbreaking narratives. How are the love story plots of the country’s drama series today similar to that of Shakespeare’s drama? How distinct are each one of them? Have the standards of society changed in contrast to the type of society reflected in the works of Shakespeare? Do people in love continue to experience the pressures of society in expressing their feelings or maintaining their personal relationships today or have they come to experience a sense of freedom in terms of choosing their life partners? As Shakespeare’s drama offers words of wisdom that come from concerned supporting characters, do characters who give guidance to less mature main characters also play key roles in the drama plot of today’s teleplays? This study aims to see whether characters of teleplays today have learned moderation from the experiences of their predecessors or remained enslaved by their passion.

Exploring Mu Xin’s Literary “Reflection”: A Case Study of Shakespeare

Zhong Jie, Shanghai International Studies University, China

This paper explores the nuanced interaction between Mu Xin, a distinguished Chinese writer and artist, and the works of William Shakespeare, using the concept of “reflection” as a multifaceted literary mechanism. Mu Xin’s interpretation of “reflection” encompasses the art noumenon, reflexive self-awareness, meditation, and recollection, and this paper delves into his interpretative process, which serves both as a literary critique and a personal introspection. The focus is on Mu Xin’s dual role as a receptor and influencer in his dialogue with Shakespearean themes, particularly highlighting how his criticism of Shakespeare mirrors his own internal struggles and aesthetic identity. The paper conducts a thorough analysis of how Mu Xin identifies with the existential dilemmas and philosophical questions manifested in the character of Hamlet, positioning Shakespeare not only as a subject of literary analysis but also as a medium through which he explores and interprets his own life and artistic identity. By examining Mu Xin’s writings and public commentaries on Shakespeare, the study illustrates his dynamic engagement with the texts, showcasing a distinctive synthesis of openness and impactful interpretation. The relationship between Mu Xin and Shakespeare reveals a profound level of subjectivity and initiative, enhancing our understanding of his broader literary and aesthetic perspectives. This paper aims to demonstrate that Mu Xin’s engagement with Shakespeare is an active and reflective process, where literary criticism transforms into a deeper self-exploration and affirmation of his literary and artistic persona. Through this case study, the paper seeks to contribute to the discourse on how classical literature influences and is reinterpreted by contemporary writers across different cultures.