ABSTRACT
What happens when a seventeenth-century English text is rewritten as a play for twentieth-century Japan? What changes when a play written for the stage is reconceived as a film? What, in other words, are the cultural implications of transposing a text from one culture to another, from one historical moment to another, from one medium to another? In its own day, Shakespeare's King Lear was popular entertainment; it was only later that, as it became archaic, it entered Western high culture. In Suzuki's The Tale of Lear it reappears as a twentieth-century theatrical text; in Kurosawa's Ran it re-enters the popular mainstream, but as a film. How can we read such texts? What reading strategies are appropriate? In this paper I shall read these three distinct versions of the Lear story from the point of view of their treatment of gender and inquire into the question of gendered subjectivity in performance.
