Offering the first book-length study in English on Tsubouchi and Shakespeare, Gallimore offers an overview of the theory and practice of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translation and argues for Tsubouchi’s place as "the Japanese Shakespeare." Shakespeare translation is one of the achievements of modern Japanese culture, and no one is more associated with that achievement than the writer and scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935). This book looks at how Tsubouchi received Shakespeare in the context of his native literature and his strategies for bridging the gaps between Shakespeare’s rhetoric and his developing language. Offering a significant contribution to the field of global Shakespeare and literary translation, Gallimore explores dominant stylistic features of the early twentieth-century Shakespeare translations of Tsubouchi and analyses the translations within larger linguistic, historical, and cultural traditions in local Japanese, universal Chinese, and spiritual Western elements. This book will appeal to any student, researcher, or scholar of literary translation, particularly those interested in the complexities of Shakespeare in translation and Japanese language, culture, and society.

Leading Japanese and Western Shakespeare scholars study the interaction of Japanese and Western conceptions of Shakespeare.

This collection considers contemporary performance of Shakespeare's plays in non-English-speaking theatres.

This highly original new book by a leading Shakespeare expert and cultural critic argues controversially that the 'samurai Shakespeare' of the Japanese cinematic and theatrical masterpiece-makers Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa represents the greatest achievement of Japanese Shakespeare reproduction. Holderness argues that 'samurai Shakespeare' is both consistent with our own western engagement with Japan, and true to the spirit of Japanese culture. / Shakespeare was an exact contemporary of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yet when he was first imported into Japan, in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the plays were performed in contemporary dress, not in the conventional British historical styles, and received as the modern counterpart of Ibsen and Shaw, Gorky and Chekhov. / Today in Japan the Edo past is lovingly preserved, reproduced and displayed. Almost 30 million international tourists enter Japan each year to visit the old capitals of Kyoto and Nara, drawn by the magic of Edo castles, ancient temples, swords and samurai, geishas and sumo, maple leaves and cherry blossom. At the same time Japan represents itself as a society of ultra-modernity, free from the burdens of the past. This book examines why and how early Japanese Shakespeare was assimilated to the modernising and westernising tendencies of the Meiji regime, and kept well away from that very recent but dangerous feudal past of Edo Japan to which at least some of the plays should surely have been seen to belong. / When Shakespeare was finally integrated with the Edo past, it was to a contradictory mixture of acclaim and condemnation. In 1957 Akira Kurosawa released his great film Kumonosujo, known in the west as Throne of Blood, where the plot of Macbeth, without Shakespeare's language, is brilliantly relocated to feudal Japan, and which has been described variously as 'the most complete translation of Shakespeare into film' and as 'not really Shakespeare at all'. Kurosawa followed Kumonosujo much later in 1985 with his samurai version of King Lear, Ran. In the theatre Yukio Ninagawa staged in 1980 what is perhaps the greatest ever Japanese production of Shakespeare, his Macbeth set in mediaeval Japan. Ninagawa produced The Tempest in an equally traditional style, as 'A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado' (the island to which Zeami, the great playwright of Noh, was exiled). Across a period of 30 years (1957-1987) these great theatre and cinema artists finally resolved the conflicts between Shakespeare and Japan by setting the plays back into their own beloved but disputed past. These 'Samurai Shakespeare' productions were initially received in the west and in Japan with enthusiasm, though not without some critical reflection on the dangers of 'exoticism' and 'orientalism.' / However, after this great florescence of 'samurai Shakespeare' (1957-1987), the theatre in Japan returned to its Shingeki roots, preferring modernity to tradition. The phenomenon of Edo Shakespeare became a definitive cultural moment, and many subsequent productions allude or pay homage to the work of Fukuda, Kurosawa and Ninagawa. However ultra-modern a Japanese Shakespeare production may be, it has had the facility to acknowledge the country's own past as one of Shakespeare's multiple global histories. At the same time 'Samurai Shakespeare' can be found alive and well in other Japanese media, especially Manga. / This is an important study of the complexity and contradictions of crucial cultural and historical moments in Japanese history, and in the relations between Japan and the West. / Contents: Introduction: Shakespeare and Japan / 1 'Show me a samurai' western admiration of Edo culture, 1890-1900. / 2 Modernity and tradition in Japanese theatre 1900-1957. / 3 Tsuneari Fukuda / 4 Akira Kurosawa / 5 Yukio Ninagawa / 6 'Samurai Shakespeare' in Japanese theatre 1980-2000. / 7 Conclusion: Manga Shakespeare. / Bibliography, Index.

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation explores the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of literary genres and new media forms. This comprehensive reference and research resource maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice and the methodologies that underpin them. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of enquiry for students, researchers and creative practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions and theories of Shakespeare adaptation and emphasises how Shakespeare is both adaptor and adapted.A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms and cultures to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement and sensory pleasures. The volume's third section provides the reader with uniquely detailed insights into creative adaptation, with writers and practice-based researchers reflecting on their close collaborations with Shakespeare's works as an aesthetic, ethical and political encounter. The Handbook further establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including a guide to research resources and an annotated bibliography.

Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.

From the earliest days of the cinema to the present, Shakespeare has offered a tempting bank of source material than the film industry has been happy to plunder. Shakespeare on Film deftly examines an extensive range of films that have emerged from the curious union of an iconic dramatist with a medium of mass appeal. The many films Buchanan studies are shown to be telling indicators of trends in Shakespearean performance interpretation, illuminating markers of developments in the film industry and culturally revealing about broader influences in the world beyond the movie theatre. As with other titles from the Inside Film series, the book is illustrated throughout with stills. Each chapter concludes with a list of suggested further reading in the field.