Shakespeare Manga Business in the 21st Century

Abstract

The comic adaptation of Shakespeare is one aspect of Bardbiz, which has recently flourished in England and America. Particularly, a great range of Shakespeare comic versions have been released on the market during the first decade of the 21st century and are becoming popular among ordinary young readers and even in the secondary education curriculum. Most of the recent comics have in common a few conspicuous features which distinguish them from most previous attempts. First, their comic writers and publishers appropriate Japanese comic tradition and even label their works as manga, following the original Japanese name. The second trait is the scope and size of publications, which is targeting the global market. Another characteristic of Shakespeare comic publications is the emphasis on its educational intent, which claims that Shakespeare comic books will expand the range of Bard readership and eventually lead young readers to the world of original Shakespeare texts and productions. Due to the complexity of both cultural icons -Shakespeare and manga-the comic adaptation of Shakespeare raises a great number of cultural and political questions. First, manga is a peculiar cultural product utilizing two different semiotic symbols, text and images, simultaneously in the same space. The first appeals to human reason while the other to human senses. Text and image, which were separated and developed respectively for two different cultural and social sectors, have contributed to the division of high and low cultures. Shakespeare has been, and will always be a representative symbol of high culture in the West while he has been widely popularized through a lot of different formats since his life time. In addition, recent Shakespeare manga is drawn in a real Japanese style by the comic illustrators who were born or educated in the English-speaking countries and later learned the Japanese manga tradition. In this article, the cultural term ‘hybridity’ is used to define the multi-layered cultural phenomenon of Shakespeare manga industry. In myriad strata of cultural appropriations, one politico-cultural icon is merged with another and creates a new form which in the end breeds hybridity. This hybridity requires us to rethink the globalization of Shakespeare, particularly with regard to the necessity of academic consideration of manga. Furthermore, it problematizes the traditional distinction between text and image, high and low cultures, Japanese and Western traditions in comics and so on. Consequently, the disintegration of such binary oppositions leads to the questions of national identity based on geography as well as one’s own cultural independence in globalized society.