Abstract
Japanese productions of Shakespeare’s plays are almost always discussed with an exclusive focus upon their visual and physical aspects without any due considerations to their verbal elements. Most Japanese stage performances of Shakespeare use vernacular translations of Shakespeare. This chapter analyses Nakayashiki Norihito’s all-female productions of Hamlet (2011) and Macbeth (2012) in the historical contexts of Japanese Shakespeare translation. I will look at the ways in which the deliberately chosen rude or rough verbal expressions have enabled Nakayashiki not only to focus upon actresses’ corporeality but also to question the conventional ideas of Shakespeare’s language in the vernacular. The myth of Shakespeare as an icon of high culture has been challenged in verbal as well as theatrical terms.
This chapter is a revised version of the paper published in Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance. vol. 14 (29), 2016, 30–42.
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- 1.
See http://a-s-i-a-web.org/en/home.php for Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive, http://shakespeare.digital.ntu.edu.tw/shakespeare/home.php?Language=en for Taiwan Shakespeare Database and http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/# for MIT Global Shakespeares.
- 2.
One of the notable examples is the introduction of matters as the subject of a sentence. The Japanese usually say, “Why did she do so?” and still seldom say “What made her do so?” with what as a subject of a sentence. But Shingeki plays in the “translation style” used that kind of sentence.
- 3.
Here I do not refer to the adaptations of Shakespeare in the 1980s and afterwards, as they completely change the characters’ names and sometimes even the plots. The two Shakespeare productions by Nakayashiki follow the plots of the plays and retain the characters’ names and place names as well.
- 4.
Matsuoka Kauzko, who has started rendering the complete Shakespeare canon into Japanese single-handedly, often attends directors’ rehearsals when her translation is staged, and she sometimes revises her translation in the course of the rehearsals. Kawai Shoichiro, who has also begun a project to render all Shakespeare plays into Japanese, once worked with Nomura Mansai, a kyogen master, and got Nomura to read his translated texts aloud so as to make sure the translated texts “flow” smoothly as dramatic texts. But these are still rather exceptional cases.
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Minami, R. (2018). The Myths of Bold Visual and Conservative Verbal Interpretations of Shakespeare on Today’s Japanese Stage. In: Mancewicz, A., Joubin, A. (eds) Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89851-3_14
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