Abstract
Multitudes of intermedial Shakespearean adaptations, especially since 1975, have captured Iranian theatrical stage, cinema or radio as the Bard’s texts are frequently modernized, transfigured and indigenized in order to add to his globalization. Hamlet works well in the mechanisms of temporality, spatiality, power, control and sexuality, socio-political discourses, economic upheaval, female self and gender struggles even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hence, Iranian directors such as Varuzh Karim-Masihi and Arash Dadgar as well as the British director Gregory Doran have re-interpreted this text based on new ideological grounds in which the characters are at times similar or different. In this article, the transformation and characterization of major characters, especially female ones such as Gertrud/Mah-Tal’at and Ophelia/Mahtab, are analyzed based on Hutcheon’s Adaptation Theory to see how they are represented in an Asian society whose Islamic ideology necessitates a unique transcultural, transhistorical rendition.
Highlights
Invocation of Shakespearean drama in various media and social milieus has established a cultural mosaic that is constantly evolving in various directions
Ophelia, offended by the remark, believes that he rejects her because she had surrendered her body to him. This physical and verbal violence forms resonant connections with hysteria resulted from the suffocating patriarchal power structure of the country, whether it is Denmark, England or Iran in which, as Foucault indicates, multiple mechanisms of control in relation to sexuality are at work
The comparative study of these works reveals that since Shakespeare‘s era, women as social entities and female characters as social illusions have gone under great changes
Summary
Invocation of Shakespearean drama in various media and social milieus has established a cultural mosaic that is constantly evolving in various directions. The process of adaptation which includes re-interpretation will study the reasons of retelling the story over and over, in different cultural grounds, this time in an Islamic Middle-Eastern country with almost no direct sociopolitical connections with Britain— unlike India or many other countries which were colonized by it and whose educational system had been re-structured to fit the colonizer‘s ideology. Social, political, economic, philosophical and ideological issues of the time prove to be influential in the attitude and mood of the work. Testing the existing theoretical clichés of modes of involvement in these works can reveal much about the social norms, ideological patterns and new historical interpretations focusing on how cultural, economic, legal, pedagogical, political, and personal reasons interfere with an adaptor‘s motivation for adapting a work such as Hamlet which can be extremely intimidating for the directors
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