ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study on two adapted works based on William Shakespeare that are experimented by two Taiwanese playwrights, “Lear is Here,” “Cleopatra and Her Fools.” In “Lear is Here,” Wu Hsing-Kuo, as the main character on the stage, mutates himself from a contemporary narrator into various characters portrayed in Shakespeare, including Lear, each of Lear’s daughters, the fool, Edgar, and Edmund, while the playwright Wei-Jan Chi creates a character/playwright in “Cleopatra and Her Fools,” trying to decode Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra in his phenomenological terms. The stagecraft relating Cleopatra and Her Fools to metadrama is the use of “estrangement” and “alienation” to decode cultural phenomenon and values. According to James Calderwood, the major function of metadrama is to communicate through aesthetic distancing so as to create significance by crossing the borders between fiction and reality. Wu’s Lear is Here and Chi’s Cleopatra and Her Fools are both innovative theatrical practices through code readings.
