ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Globe Theater re-emerged in London, in 1997, yet Shakespeare has taken to traversing the globe in the twenty-rst century. Kim Dong-Wook denes “glocalizing” Shakespeare as “global + localizing.”1 Lee Hyon-u links Shakespeare directly to politics and democratization, even as he posits the Koreanization of Shakespeare along the lines of translation, incorporation, and adaptation.2 Korean scholars and theater professionals continue to stress the “global” world of Shakespeare production, even at the same time that they are committed to making Shakespeare “local,” or Korean. That is to say, Korean dramatists are crafting and performing Korean Shakespeare that is Korean, and local, for local audiences (per Kim’s “localizing”), in addition to the staging of this very same Korean Shakespeare at and in the global arena. To respond to the question of why Asian cultures are performing Shakespeare now, Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan propose three kinds, or trajectories: nationalist appropriation, colonial instigation, and intercultural revision.3 Nationalist appropriation involves Asian cultures who take on Shakespeare as something of their own, to show and raise their standing in the world. Colonialist instigation involves the complicated path by which Shakespeare moves through the colonial power into the colonized culture and then … in and around that same culture as both a part of and apart from. Finally, intercultural revision “the most innovative type of contemporary Shakespeare, attempts to move away from political applications into more self-consciously aesthetic realms.”4 These “intercultural revisions” always already bring with them the politics of both cultures, even as they strive to distance themselves. At stake are concepts of nation and culture, power, and privilege, where Shakespeare is held above the cultures in which new Shakespeare plays are being produced. My experience of Shakespeare performance in Seoulincluding Park Jung-E’s One-man Show: Macbeth, along with Yang Jung Ung’s W. Shakespeare The Twelfth Night and his A Midsummer Night’s Dream-leads me to challenge the notion that Shakespeare supersedes foreign culture, or that Shakespeare comes rst. There are still productions in Korea working along the lines of translation, and “intercultural” suggests a sort of blending, privileging neither the delity of adaptation
nor the wholly other of appropriation. In Seoul, I see Shakespeare-in Korean, incorporating traditional Korean art, blending Shakespeare’s themes with contemporary Korean issues-producing what I argue to be a Korean Shakespeare.
