Shakespeare in the Orient screen: Cinematic adaptations in China, India and Japan

Abstract

This article presents the subtle coalescence of Occidental text with Oriental vision, our conception of Shakespeare’s ‘modernity’, which is ever-changing, ever- progressing and being further enriched with cross-cultural revisions of form, content and character. It aims to assess Asian (Chinese, Indian, and Japanese) film adaptations of Shakespearean plays, of how perpetually universal themes have sustained the interest for re-creating these works. In other words, it investigates how narratives have evolved across different spatial and temporal dimensions, offering new perspectives, introducing different ‘voices’ and echoing certain sentiments characteristic of that sphere.