ABSTRACT
Delighting people all over the world, William Shakespeare is infinitely portable and transferable – whether or not he is “translatable.” Through a discussion of Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa’s film adaptations of King Lear, and Feng Xiaogang’s adaptation of Hamlet , this chapter demonstrates Shakespeare’s polyphonic indefinition as well as suggests what one can learn from the foreign productions even when they stray from the original. Transporting the playwright into another culture and another theatre, a foreign adaptation can lend a new resonance to the commonplace about Shakespeare’s universality. Kurosawa’s alteration of details at times magnifies rather than diminishes the Shakespearean vision. If the Japanese hovel scene highlights guilt by overshadowing the horror of random evil, the horseback scene, in which Kurosawa condenses Shakespeare’s prison scene and last scene, more than makes up for that overemphasis.
