UCLA

Through an analysis of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear, and Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet, this essay contends that what makes Shakespeare popular across cultures—his prismatic vision—also makes his tragedies especially difficult to render faithfully in foreign adaptations. Intent on tracking a moral trajectory the Japanese, Russian, and Chinese auteurs are unable to replicate a distinctive hallmark of the mature tragedies—dubbed variously as “negative capability” (John Keats), “complementarity” (Norman Rabkin), “Comic Matrix” (Susan Snyder), “indefinition” (Stephen Booth), and “polyphony” (Marvin Rosenberg). But in adapting and incorporating scenarios and lines from the English original into different cultural milieus, these directors bring out dimensions hitherto uncharted in the two plays.