ABSTRACT
The appearance of King Hamlet from the realm of the dead is central to Hamlet’s unfolding as a revenge tragedy, constituting its catalyst, complicating its moral coordinates and grounding its theological interest. In 2006, two Asian film adaptations of Hamlet hit the silver screen: Feng Xiaogang’s costume epic drama The Banquet and Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas. Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet contains the main plot elements of William Shakespeare’s tragedy. Mark Thornton Burnett notes that The Banquet figures “the Ghost as a chainmailed carapace that is empathetically occupied. The setting of Prince of the Himalayas encourages an audience to consider ancient Tibet’s religious culture. It adapts the centrality of ghostly haunting in Hamlet by resituating it in the Himalayas, that part of the world where earth touches heaven and where activities of human beings in the terrestrial sphere are tied up with influence from the spirit world.
