Yeeyon Im

The concept of New Asia is based on the belief that global capitalism has displaced the boundary between the First and Third worlds, redrawing the world map according to the distribution of capital. This essay examines the implication of interculturalism in New Asia and ultimately the relationship between West and East, focusing on Lee Yountaek's production of Hamlet that premiered in Seoul in 1996. The analysis of Lee's Hamlet in the context of Korean history showcases the dilemma and delusion

The Shakespearean productions of Yukio Ninagawa pose intriguing questions about the nature of intercultural theatre. Despite their popularity among theatregoers and theatre critics, Ninagawa's Shakespearean stagings have caused more scepticism than optimism among intercultural theorists and Shakespearean scholars about the prospect of the so-called intercultural theatre where East meets West. Ninagawa's first international success came in 1985 at the Edinburgh International Festival, where his p

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé: Disorienting Orientalism Yeeyon Im (bio) Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salomé occupies a puzzling place in the late nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism. One sign of Orientalism, according to Edward Said, is “the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient—its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness—into a separate and unchallenged coherence,”1 all of which seem to characterize Wilde’s drama of exces

Writing as recently as 2011 , Michael Bennett asks if Salomé is an anomaly in the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde (viii). Read against his witty societal comedies of manners, it certainly appears to be one. Salomé has been regarded as a fine example of symbolist drama in the history of British theatre, and few critics would dispute its “seriousness” as such. Its growing significance in recent discourses of gender and sexuality also adds seriousness to the play. Although Feminist and gender critics show li

Shakespeare is unarguably a most active participant in the so-called intercultural theatre, but has attracted little attention from intercultural theorists and critics. This essay locates Shakespeare within intercultural debates, the two most significant issues of which are cultural equality and authenticity. In most intercultural Shakespeare productions, non-Western cultural elements are no more than scenographic embellishments to the framework of Shakespearean plot, character and theme. Despit

This essay examines Yeats's Purgatory via A Vision, in an attempt to understand his view of salvation in particular relation to Indian philosophy. Read from a Christian perspective, Purgatory may be a work far from purgation, as T. S. Eliot once complained. I wish to show in this essay that Purgatory indeed places emphasis on purgation by a negative example, if in a different way from the Catholic one. Yeats denies the linear eschatology of Christian theology as well as its doctrine of salvation

Abstract: Changgeuk Lear of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea presents an intriguing case of interculturalism. Produced in 2022 by an elite creative team representative of Korean theatre , Lear is remarkable for its lack of traditional spectacles that have characterized many Korean Shakespeare performances. This essay analyzes the transcultural esthetics of changgeuk Lear in comparison to the Koreanized spectacle of changgeuk Romeo and Juliet (2009), placing both productions in the history

Han Tae-Sook’s Lady Macbeth , a theatre adaptation by a leading woman director in Korea, has been interpreted largely from a feminist and intercultural perspective. In this article Yeeyon Im examines a body of criticism on Han’s production to raise awareness of the danger of totalization in current critical geography in Korea, which may marginalize non-ideological views. The humanist issues of evil, desire, and guilt, which are explicit themes of Lady Macbeth , have been neglected by critics in

Everyman, arguably the most popular English medieval play, still appeals to the modern audience as a work of the ars moriendi. Despite its universal theme of death, however, the play in its entirety is far from being timeless. This essay draws attention to its unique structure that encases its cardinal Catholic doctrine in the middle, which allows an easy cutout in modern adaptations. The scene of Everyman’s visit to the House of Salvation breaks the play into two parts: the general lesson of co

In this article, I critique the hegemony of the Western-centred intercultural theatre that imposes Orientalism on Asian Shakespeare, and reclaim the concept of transculturality to move beyond the West/‘rest’ binarism underlying intercultural theatre. Drawing on the ‘transcultural turn’ in other academic disciplines, I re-define the term with a shift of emphasis in the prefix ‘trans-’ from ‘beyond’ to ‘across’ and ‘changing’. The re-conceptualised notion of ‘transculturality’ can provide a critic

This essay examines Barry Jackson’s modern dress experiments, questioning the validity of the idea of “Shakespeare Our Contemporary” and re-considering the meaning of Shakespeare’a universality. For this purpose, the paper focuses on Jackson’s two modern dress experiments, Hamlet (1925) and Macbeth (1928). As a successful translation of Shakespeare’s classics into the modern world, Jackson’s Hamlet is often taken to be a proof of Shakespeare’s universality. However, a close examination reveals t

The Herne’s Egg, like Yeats’s other late plays, is a great challenge for readers. In addition to putting forward an esoteric philosophy that evades coherent interpretation, the play is deliberately anti-heroic, grotesque, and sexually offensive. Yeats’s remark that the play is Purohit Swami’s “philosophy in a fable” has guided critics toward the Upanishads for clues. This essay questions longstanding assumptions about the Indian influence on the play, examining Yeats’s appropriation of the Upani

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and East Asia by Alexa Alice Joubin Yeeyon Im SHAKESPEARE AND EAST ASIA. By Alexa Alice Joubin. Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; pp. 272. Shakespeare and East Asia is the latest addition to the flourishing scholarship on Asian Shakespeare. Unlike many other monographs that focus on a single nation or genre, it brings together notable film and stage works from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore. The range

Janek Ledecký’s Musical Hamlet is a significant addition to Shakespeare’s musicology that deserves scholarly attention. This Czech-originated musical, which ran worldwide from 1999 to 2012, is a rare version of the play that successfully accommodates the tragic in a commercial musical form. This article examines the birth of Musical Hamlet as tragic melodrama in relation to the rise of the mega-musical. After a brief description of how it is adapted into a tragic romance, it considers Shakespear