Global King Lear : Crisis, Performance, Adaptation

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.

William R. Rampone, Jr. is Professor of English at South Carolina State University, USA.

David Schalkwyk is Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. and Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and his books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays (2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (2004), Shakespeare, Love and Service (2008).

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).

Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English at Verona University, Italy, where she specializes in early modern English theatre, with a focus on Shakespeare. She has published two monographs - on Hamlet and on the idea of non-being, besides translations into Italian of a number of Shakespeare's plays, including the Arden edition of Double Falsehood edited by Brean Hammond.