A Hero of the Two Koreas: Yi Sun-shin Dramatized in North and South

Abstract

Yi Sun-shin (1545–98), an admiral of the Joseon dynasty, is a Korean national hero who is admired by both North and South Korea regardless of political ideology. Yet between 1960 and 1970 North and South Korea presented Yi from different perspectives in accordance with their own political interests. In South Korea, Yi was portrayed as a solitary hero who sacrificed himself to save the country despite the blame and entrapment he suffered as a result. Alongside, North Korea presented Yi as an ideal leader with the warmth of a father figure who embraced the people's aspirations to fight against their Japanese enemies. In this article, Seong-kwan Cho and Jae-beom Hong discuss these representations of Yi and survey North Korean theatre of the 1960s, which is rarely examined in theatre scholarship outside the Korean peninsula. Seong-kwan Cho (first author) lectures in the Korean Department of Konkuk University, and published in NTQ136 on South Korean theatre censorship. Jae-beom Hong (corresponding author) is a Professor in the same Department. The pair have recently been researching North Korean realist theatre, and this article is their third on the subject. This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2016.