Abstract
This article explores how Younghill Kang (1903–1972), one of the most important Asian American writers, wrote Murder in the Royal Palace, an unpublished four-act play. It reveals Kang’s writing process, transitioning from novel to play. This article regards Kang as one of the first novelists turned playwrights in Korean American literature in particular and Asian American literature in general. It also discusses the play as a political satire of the political scene in Korea in the 1960s. In addition, it examines how the earlier version of this play was performed in the United States in 1964 and how the final version was later translated into Korean and put on stage in Seoul in 1974.
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Notes
- 1.
There are a variety of reasons why Younghill Kang did not produce any novels after the late 1930s. Among other things, he had to support his family, which had expanded with the births of his daughter Lucy Lynn, in 1930, and his son Christopher (Korean name, Gyeong-gu), in 1936. His second son Robert (Korean name, Na-gu) was born in 1949. In 1928, Kang found work as both an editor at Encyclopedia Britannica and an assistant curator in the Department of Far Eastern Art at the New York Museum of Art. He then obtained a position as a lecturer in the Comparative Literature and English Department at New York University, where he befriended Thomas Wolfe. For some reason or other, Kang was never afforded a permanent place in American life. Always a visiting lecturer, he traveled from one speaking engagement to another in an old Buick, leaving some Rotary Club audiences spellbound with his recitations of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy and with his lectures on East Asian countries, including Korea.
- 2.
There are only two extant versions of Murder in the Royal Palace. The first version, heavily emended by Kang, is now in the possession of the estate of Gunsam Lee. The second, revised copy of the typescript, is in the possession of Wook-Dong Kim. Park Chang-hae, a renowned Korean linguist who had taught at Yonsei University and later at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, procured the second typescript from a librarian at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University while he was staying in New York City in the late 1980s. Throughout this article, I cite from the second, revised copy of the transcript.
- 3.
Incidentally, another similar incident occurred ten years before. In late September to early October 1964, The Martyred , the internationally renowned novel by Richard E. Kim (in Korean, Kim Eun-guk), was adapted by Kim Gi-pal and was put on stage in Seoul by the Korean National Theatre Troupe. It is interesting to note here that Heo Gyu also directed this play. Unfortunately, some Christian leaders, together with conservative Christians, vehemently attacked the performance as very harmful to Christianity. An even more negative response came from fundamentalist Christians when a famous film director, Yu Hyeon-muk, made a movie based on Kim’s novel in 1965. These three incidents will be remembered as shameful episodes in the history of Korean theater and film. It would not be too much to say that these examples of repression of the dramatic and film arts by particular religious groups in modern Korea is somewhat similar in its mindset to the closure of the theaters by the Puritans in the seventeenth-century England.
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Kim, WD. (2019). Younghill Kang’s Murder in the Royal Palace as a Political Satire. In: Global Perspectives on Korean Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8727-2_9
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