Global King Lear provides a kaleidoscopic view of multinational adaptations of King Lear with a focus on productions across Asia and Eastern Europe. By approaching Shakespeare''s great tragedy as a global phenomenon its signature themes become context-dependent and culture-specific whilst avoiding simplistic appeals to the play''s universality. International scholars of literature and theatre explore those culturally specific interpretations as new plays, films, and critical contributions on their own terms. As a film in Japan, King Lear becomes a meditation on contemporary eldercare and the question of celebrity; on a stage in Hungary the play emerges as a ferocious invective against domestic abuse; in another performance in Hungary the play considers childhood trauma and a crisis in maternal care; and a pan-Asian Lear emerges out of multiple adaptations on stage and screen in India, Japan, and China. Taken together these readings are dismantled as merely derivative interpretations and cast instead as theatrical and cinematic engines of transformation. Despite the play''s focus on the cultural context of England, this volume highlights King Lear ''s position as one of the most popular texts for international directors and playwrights to explore their own nations'' troubles and challenges. This collection focuses on the potential for King Lear to be performed, adapted, and understood anew by multiple audiences in a range of mediums and contexts.

Autorentext
William R. Rampone, Jr. is Professor of English at South Carolina State University, USA. Eric S. Mallin is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning (2019).

Klappentext
Global King Lear provides a kaleidoscopic view of multinational adaptations of King Lear with a focus on productions across Asia and Eastern Europe. By approaching Shakespeare's great tragedy as a global phenomenon its signature themes become context-dependent and culture-specific whilst avoiding simplistic appeals to the play's universality. International scholars of literature and theatre explore those culturally specific interpretations as new plays, films, and critical contributions on their own terms.

As a film in Japan, King Lear becomes a meditation on contemporary eldercare and the question of celebrity; on a stage in Hungary the play emerges as a ferocious invective against domestic abuse; in another performance in Hungary the play considers childhood trauma and a crisis in maternal care; and a pan-Asian Lear emerges out of multiple adaptations on stage and screen in India, Japan, and China. Taken together these readings are dismantled as merely derivative interpretations and cast instead as theatrical and cinematic engines of transformation. Despite the play's focus on the cultural context of England, this volume highlights King Lear's position as one of the most popular texts for international directors and playwrights to explore their own nations' troubles and challenges. This collection focuses on the potential for King Lear to be performed, adapted, and understood anew by multiple audiences in a range of mediums and contexts.

Inhalt

Introduction by Eric S. Mallin (University of Texas at Austin, USA) and William R. Rampone, Jr. (South Carolina State University, USA)

I. Social and ethical responsibilities

1. Leave the Brits, take the Shakespeare: Echoing King Lear, Banishing British Blood, and Indigenizing Shakespeare in 36 Chowringhee Lane
   Melissa Croteau (California Baptist University, USA)

2. Upon a Wheel of Fire': King Lear and Social Reparation
   Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University, USA)

3. Populism with a distinctly macho flavor: a contemporary King Lear in a Post-Communist context
   Gabriella Reuss (Pázmány Péter Catholic University*, Hungary*)

   II. Aging, death, and citizenship
   

4. Institute of English Studies; "The Spectres of Lear: Shakespeare's Apocalyptic Tragedy in Selected Polish Theatre Productions"
   Malgorzata Grzegorzewska (University of Warsaw, Poland)

5. Indian Lears, Aging, and Culture
   Paromita Chakravarti (Jadavpur University, India)

6. Masahiro Kobayashi's Lear on the Beach: Tatsuya Nakadai and the Modern Issue of Aging in Japan
   Hisao Oshima (Kyushu University, Japan)

   III. Lear's theatres and metatheatricality

7. The Transformation of King Lear in the Process of Huaju Sinicization
   Jing Li (Peking University, China)

8. Lear's Death-a tragicomedy on the Hungarian Stage
   Agnes Matuska (University of Szeged, Hungary*)*

9. The Last Lear: Stagecraft, Cinema, and the Crisis of Representation
   Amrita Sen (University of Calcutta, India)

10. Continuity in the Floating World: King Lear in King Qi's Dream, a Peking Opera
    Zhang Qiong (Fudan University, China)

    IV. Cross-Cultural encounters and the drama of ideas

11. Productions of King Lear on German Stages in the late Eighteenth Century
    Claudia Olk (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany)

12. Fathers, Daughters, and Absent Mothers: Power and Gender in Kishida Rio's Lear Colleen Lanki (University of British Columbia, Canada)

13. Beyond Pragmatism: Apocalypse, Adaptation, and Historicity in King Lear and Some of its Czech Versions
    Martin Procházka (Charles University*,Czech Republic*)

    Index