Shakespeare in Japan

Shakespeare in Japan PDF Author: Tetsuo Kishi
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826492703
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Since the late Meiji period, Shakespeare has held a central place in Japanese literary culture. This work considers the cultural and linguistic problems of translation and includes an illustrated survey of the most significant Shakespearean productions and adaptations, and the contrasting responses of Japanese and Western critics.

Shakespeare in Japan

Shakespeare in Japan PDF Author: Tetsuo Kishi
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826492703
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Since the late Meiji period, Shakespeare has held a central place in Japanese literary culture. This work considers the cultural and linguistic problems of translation and includes an illustrated survey of the most significant Shakespearean productions and adaptations, and the contrasting responses of Japanese and Western critics.

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage PDF Author: Takashi Sasayama
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521470439
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Leading Japanese and Western Shakespeare scholars study the interaction of Japanese and Western conceptions of Shakespeare.

The Japanese Shakespeare

The Japanese Shakespeare PDF Author: Daniel Gallimore
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040045588
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Offering the first book-length study in English on Tsubouchi and Shakespeare, Gallimore offers an overview of the theory and practice of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translation and argues for Tsubouchi’s place as "the Japanese Shakespeare." Shakespeare translation is one of the achievements of modern Japanese culture, and no one is more associated with that achievement than the writer and scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935). This book looks at how Tsubouchi received Shakespeare in the context of his native literature and his strategies for bridging the gaps between Shakespeare’s rhetoric and his developing language. Offering a significant contribution to the field of global Shakespeare and literary translation, Gallimore explores dominant stylistic features of the early twentieth-century Shakespeare translations of Tsubouchi and analyses the translations within larger linguistic, historical, and cultural traditions in local Japanese, universal Chinese, and spiritual Western elements. This book will appeal to any student, researcher, or scholar of literary translation, particularly those interested in the complexities of Shakespeare in translation and Japanese language, culture, and society.

Samurai Shakespeare

Samurai Shakespeare PDF Author: Graham Holderness
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913087197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This highly original new book by a leading Shakespeare expert and cultural critic argues controversially that the 'samurai Shakespeare' of the Japanese cinematic and theatrical masterpiece-makers Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa represents the greatest achievement of Japanese Shakespeare reproduction. Holderness argues that 'samurai Shakespeare' is both consistent with our own western engagement with Japan, and true to the spirit of Japanese culture. / Shakespeare was an exact contemporary of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yet when he was first imported into Japan, in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the plays were performed in contemporary dress, not in the conventional British historical styles, and received as the modern counterpart of Ibsen and Shaw, Gorky and Chekhov. / Today in Japan the Edo past is lovingly preserved, reproduced and displayed. Almost 30 million international tourists enter Japan each year to visit the old capitals of Kyoto and Nara, drawn by the magic of Edo castles, ancient temples, swords and samurai, geishas and sumo, maple leaves and cherry blossom. At the same time Japan represents itself as a society of ultra-modernity, free from the burdens of the past. This book examines why and how early Japanese Shakespeare was assimilated to the modernising and westernising tendencies of the Meiji regime, and kept well away from that very recent but dangerous feudal past of Edo Japan to which at least some of the plays should surely have been seen to belong. / When Shakespeare was finally integrated with the Edo past, it was to a contradictory mixture of acclaim and condemnation. In 1957 Akira Kurosawa released his great film Kumonosujo, known in the west as Throne of Blood, where the plot of Macbeth, without Shakespeare's language, is brilliantly relocated to feudal Japan, and which has been described variously as 'the most complete translation of Shakespeare into film' and as 'not really Shakespeare at all'. Kurosawa followed Kumonosujo much later in 1985 with his samurai version of King Lear, Ran. In the theatre Yukio Ninagawa staged in 1980 what is perhaps the greatest ever Japanese production of Shakespeare, his Macbeth set in mediaeval Japan. Ninagawa produced The Tempest in an equally traditional style, as 'A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado' (the island to which Zeami, the great playwright of Noh, was exiled). Across a period of 30 years (1957-1987) these great theatre and cinema artists finally resolved the conflicts between Shakespeare and Japan by setting the plays back into their own beloved but disputed past. These 'Samurai Shakespeare' productions were initially received in the west and in Japan with enthusiasm, though not without some critical reflection on the dangers of 'exoticism' and 'orientalism.' / However, after this great florescence of 'samurai Shakespeare' (1957-1987), the theatre in Japan returned to its Shingeki roots, preferring modernity to tradition. The phenomenon of Edo Shakespeare became a definitive cultural moment, and many subsequent productions allude or pay homage to the work of Fukuda, Kurosawa and Ninagawa. However ultra-modern a Japanese Shakespeare production may be, it has had the facility to acknowledge the country's own past as one of Shakespeare's multiple global histories. At the same time 'Samurai Shakespeare' can be found alive and well in other Japanese media, especially Manga. / This is an important study of the complexity and contradictions of crucial cultural and historical moments in Japanese history, and in the relations between Japan and the West. / Contents: Introduction: Shakespeare and Japan / 1 'Show me a samurai' western admiration of Edo culture, 1890-1900. / 2 Modernity and tradition in Japanese theatre 1900-1957. / 3 Tsuneari Fukuda / 4 Akira Kurosawa / 5 Yukio Ninagawa / 6 'Samurai Shakespeare' in Japanese theatre 1980-2000. / 7 Conclusion: Manga Shakespeare. / Bibliography, Index.

Performing Shakespeare in Japan

Performing Shakespeare in Japan PDF Author: Ryuta Minami
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521782449
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description
This is a collection of fourteen essays on particular topics from over one hundred years of Shakespeare performance in Japan. In addition, there are four interviews with leading directors and one with a leading perfomer. Unlike the few existing books on Japanese Shakespeare, this book concentrates on modern and postmodern theater, from c. 1970, and contains contributions from both Japanese and Western scholars and theater practitioners.

Re-imagining Shakespeare in Contemporary Japan

Re-imagining Shakespeare in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Tetsuhito Motoyama
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350116262
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
An anthology of three exciting Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare that engage with issues such as changing family values, racial diversity, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and terrorism, together with a contextualizing introduction. The anthology makes contemporary Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare by three independent theatre companies available to a wider English language audience. The three texts are concerned with the social issues Japan faces today and Japan's perception of its cultural history. This unique collection is thus both a valuable resource for the fields of Shakespeare and adaptation studies as well as for a better understanding of contemporary Japanese theatre.

Shakespeare and East Asia

Shakespeare and East Asia PDF Author: Alexa Alice Joubin
Publisher: Oxford Shakespeare Topics
ISBN: 0198703562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe. Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.

Chikamatsu

Chikamatsu PDF Author: Monzaemon Chikamatsu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231121679
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), often referred to as "Japan's Shakespeare" and a "god of writers," was arguably the most famous playwright in Japanese history and wrote more than 100 plays for the kabuki and bunraku theaters. Today, the plays of this major literary figure are performed on kabuki and bunraku stages as well as in the modern theater, and forty-nine films of his plays have been made, thirty-one of them from the silent era. Translations of Chikamatsu's plays are available, but we have few examples of his late work, in which he increasingly incorporated stylistic elements of his shorter, contemporary dramas into his longer period pieces. Translator C. Andrew Gerstle argues that in these mature history plays, Chikamatsu depicted the tension between the private and public spheres of society by combining the rich character development of his contemporary pieces with the larger political themes of his period pieces. In this volume Gerstle translates five plays--four histories and one contemporary piece--never before available in English that complement other collections of Chikamatsu's work, revealing new dimensions to the work of this great Japanese playwright and artist.

Shakespeare on Mars

Shakespeare on Mars PDF Author: Stratis Panourios
Publisher: Ontime Books
ISBN: 9781914534010
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
William Shakespeare visits Athens in 1600 AD. In the city that gave birth to democracy and the theatre, he will discover a new kind of narration and, with his 'spear of wisdom', travel in future to write his first adventure set outside Earth, in the capital city of planet Mars, New Athens. He recounts the works and days of the explorer, philosopher and great benefactor of planet Mars in the 23rd century AD, Timon the Athenian. An epic on humanity beyond the bounds of time and space whereby William Shakespeare records the chronicle of the human effort to colonise the red planet. Shakespeare on Mars is a story of vindication that connects seven centuries of human will.

Hamlet and Japan

Hamlet and Japan PDF Author: Yoshiko Uéno
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Hamlet has always been the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in Japan. This is a collection of critical essays by Japanese authors, looking at a variety of aspects of the play.