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In Hamlet , Ophelia has nothing to do with the supernatural. She is not a witch, fairy or deity; nor does she return to life as a zombie or a ghost for revenge, in spite of the mistreatment and injustice she suffered in life. But in her afterlives in Japanese popular culture Ophelia has metamorphosed into a supernatural woman in various forms, such as a powerful sea goddess, a guardian of the tree of life and a grim reaper. This chapter explores these various afterlives, and contextualises Ophelia's metamorphosis from an innocent victim
, 1989 – Dir. Jeannette Lambermont Peter Brook’s most memorable choice in his stylisation of the violent action in Titus Andronicus was to employ scarlet ribbons in place of blood, a technique he adapted from Asian theatre. In 1967, Gerald Freedman’s New York Shakespeare Festival production borrowed the same strategy and made the Asian connection explicit by using costumes that ‘“recreated an unknown people of a non-specific time” with elements of “Roman-Byzantine and feudal Japanese”’ (see p. 30 ). Director
During the decade following the release of Julie Taymor’s film, at least one major stage production of Titus Andronicus represented each of the four lines of descent in the play’s performance history. Yukio Ninagawa’s Japanese production exhibited the influence of Peter Brook’s stylised technique, while both Bill Alexander, for the RSC, and Gale Edwards, for the Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, DC, followed the realistic example set by Jane Howell. Richard Rose’s Stratford, Ontario production, set in
Thousand Plateaus , p. 419. In the original text: ‘La machine de guerre est l’invention des nomades en tant qu’elle est extérieure à l’appareil d’État et distincte de l’institution militaire’, Mille plateaux , p. 471. 2 The game of Go is a ‘Japanese board game of territorial possession and capture, played with
, 168). In his own critical writing, in addition to the praise Yeats gives the autochthonic dance of the Celts in 1903’s ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ ( Yeats, 1997 a: 132), he also venerates dancing in Japanese Noh theatre in 1916’s ‘Certain Noble Plays of Japan’ ( Yeats, 1997 a: 169), as well as dancers performing their Spanish national dance ( Yeats, 1997 a: 165). He acknowledges
Elizabeth Scott-designed Memorial Theatre, which had been opened twenty-one years earlier on Shakespeare's birthday by the new queen's uncle, then Prince of Wales (whose spectacular erotic delinquency and abdication – all for love – was the messy family business that had propelled Elizabeth to the throne). In April 1953 the flags of eighty-two nations would be unfurled along Stratford's Bridge Street (including Japan's, for the first time in post-war Britain), and fifty-six nations would be represented by sixteen ambassadors, twelve ministers, four high commissioners
Theatre in London ‘with all the nimbleness of Inspector Clouseau’ ( Mail on Sunday , 12 July 1992). Two years after that, London critics hostile to the RSC's internationalist initiative, ‘Everybody's Shakespeare’, complained of having to sit through Shakespeare in German and Japanese. In translation, wrote Jeremy Kingston, productions ‘come without the poetry’ and so the actors ‘must fall back on plot and fancy dress’ ( The Times , 1 November 1994). Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph admitted that while it might be ‘stimulating to be exposed to different views on
converts as the image of ideal Christians. Like his brethren, Metello Saccano commented that when he heard confessions he found the converts so innocent that there was little or nothing for which to give them absolution. 18 In describing the port city of Faifo, where there was a community of both Vietnamese and Japanese expatriate Christians, Christoforo Borri remarked, ‘that
that Brook gained his distinctive effects, which influenced succeeding performances, by making two key decisions: to cut the script heavily and to stylise the play’s violence within a ritualistic framework (see p. 25 ). I would add that this stylisation drew upon techniques from Asian theatre, which reappear as Japanese elements in two of the three productions stemming from Brook’s example: Jeannette Lambermont’s 1989 Stratford, Ontario version, Daniel Mesguich’s production at the Theatre de l’Athénée in the same year
constant spectral presence in contemporary culture. 65 Yukari Yoshihara explores the intriguing afterlives of Ophelia in Japanese pop-cultural appropriations and transformations in her chapter ‘Ophelia and her magical daughters’. The paradoxical realism of the fairies in Dream contrasts with the otherworldly treatment reserved to a very human character from Hamlet , Ophelia, whose figure has haunted popular culture. While in Shakespeare's Hamlet there is no supernatural dimension to Ophelia, in her Japanese