Book Sheds Light on Korean Shakespeare Theater
By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
William Shakespeare's works are timeless and universal masterpieces that are endlessly being recreated around the world.
Korean thespians have also reinterpreted the classic pieces with a modern twist and developed their own local treats and colors, receiving rave reviews from Western critics.
To introduce Korean interpretations of Shakespeare's dramas, a book titled ``Glocalizing Shakespeare in Korea and Beyond'' has been recently released, the first one its kind published here in English.
Korean theater critic and professor at Soongsil University Shim Jung-soon and seven other authors, including five foreign professors, co-wrote the book.
``Korean professors, including me, made efforts to let those (foreign professors) interested in Korean theater to better appreciate it,'' Shim said.
The book was written to raise awareness about Korean Shakespearean theater because it is not apparent to the international theatrical community.
``Looking back, I remember seeing Kathakali King Lear at the Edinburgh Festival in 1991, and a Japanese one-woman play, portraying several famous heroines of Shakespearean plays. And no one Korean play was there. Along with this, I also have my personal experience of the global theater scholarship arena during the past twenty-some years. I realized that in most of the international theatre conferences I attended and read papers, so little was known about Korean theater, so little discourse about it was shared among international scholars,'' she said in the preface.
The lack of studies about Korean theater seems to be clear when compared with those of neighboring countries such as China and Japan.
She explained that several socio-historical reasons can be possibly cited for all this paucity. More specifically, firstly, the history of Korean Shakespearean theater which began with the first production of ``Hamlet'' in 1949 is relatively short, and even that was interrupted by the Korean War in the early 1950's. Only after reconstruction did Shakespearean productions began to grow in meaningful numbers and scale in the 1960s and 1970s.
Secondly, Korea was under military dictatorships from the early '60s to the late '80s, during which strict censorship was enforced.
Korea, however, has undergone its own version of opening and innovation since then. In 1987, the notorious pre-performance script review system, which limited freedom of expression, was abolished. In the same year, it was followed by the Declaration for Democratization by President Roh Tae-Woo, thus opening Korean society to international trends. All this happened just one year before, and in preparation for, Korea's hosting of the Summer Olympic Games in 1988. The country was then subject to the financial crisis in 1997, which ironically expedited further opening of Korea to the process of globalization.
It was also during this latter part of the 1990s when Korean Shakespearean productions, such as Lee Yoon-taek's ``Hamlet'' and Won Young-oh's ``Hamlet of the East,'' made their way into the international theatre community. Over the course of the `90s, Korea lifted its ban on the importation of Japanese popular culture, thus opening society to further influence from Japan-mediated global popular culture.
Entering the new century, Korean theater witnessed sudden popularity for its Shakespearean adaptations, most of which were characterized with a young, free and experimental style. Shakespeare is now revisited and remade as a global cultural icon in Korea as he is around the world.
The book offers a general outline of contemporary Korean Shakespearean theater and maps it from a global theater studies context.
``I hope that it will help establish a small bridge of cultural communication with the global scholarship community and with my international colleagues, so that Korea including me as its tiny part will be better understood as a culture and as a people,'' said Shim.
Brian Singleton, Maria Shevtsova, Ravi Chaturvedi, Daniel Gallimore, Kobayashi Kaori, Lee Hyon-u and Kim Dong-wook participated in the research project.