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When Hamlet is our neighbour: reading some of the recent Asian productions of Hamlet

Author Affiliations

  • 1Humanities and Management Departments, Seacom Engineering College, Dhulagarh, Howrah, West Bengal-711302, India

Res. J. Language and Literature Sci., Volume 5, Issue (1), Pages 1-4, April,19 (2018)

Abstract

Through this article we are trying to find out the reasons behind the eminent success of the adaptations of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. We would primarily have to remember that Hamlet, as a play, used to be successful even before it came to be known as a Shakespearean tragedy. Primarily it used to be a comedy and Shakespeare himself started the process of bringing him down to reality. Then, with the advent of modern day theatre works, there has been interesting innovations regarding Hamlet and further both the plot as well as the character Hamlet has gone through several dissections. There has been adaptations where Hamlet has been speaking different languages. Then there has been other works where Hamlet, the character, has been played by different artists within the corpus of the same play. Our work looks at finding out the reasons behind these subtle changes and how Hamlet, the play as well as the character, has been used as an instrument to address several issues which were not even present during the time of the Bard. From the Asian perspective, Hamlet, in the modern works, don't even belong to the royal family. Thus, Hamlet, no longer is a play about revenge and insanity. There are other and obviously broader issues which has been looked after in the recent times. Hamlet's protest against evil has been currently used as a source for highlighting global issues and that too quite successfully.

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