Abstract
The chapter argues that Hamlet lends itself to mythologizing as Shakespeare’s most frequently adapted text which explores what it is “to be” in the modern age. Vickers Walkling examines two region-specific case studies, Lin Zhaohua’s Hamulaite (China, 1990) and Jan Klata’s H. (Poland, 2004), focusing on how Hamlet has been appropriated into analogous socio-cultural realms by late twentieth and early twenty-first-century experimental theatre directors to speak back to the experiences of a specific time: 1989. Through reconfiguring Shakespeare’s tragedy, Lin and Klata struggled with the ideological voids left in their societies as their leaders flirted with the free market economy. Both reconstructed “Elsinore” for the New Millennium, engaging with and subverting myths of Hamlet and their nations’ recent histories as part of this process.
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Notes
- 1.
Qin would become the first emperor to take over and then unite all of China, but at a cost of terrible bloodshed. He filled his tomb at Xian with a vast army of terracotta warriors to protect him from his enemies in the afterlife.
- 2.
I came across this source in a Chinese university library.
- 3.
The May Fourth student demonstrations in response of the annexation of Shandong Province to the Japanese in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) became one of the founding patriotic and modernizing movements of the New China.
- 4.
See “The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press” by Jay Mathews of The Washington Post in the Columbia Journalism Review (2010) and “Olympian Myths of Tiananmen” by Brendan O’Neill in The Guardian (2008).
- 5.
This has now been replaced by the European Solidarity Centre. The building’s architecture replicating a rusting ship’s hull: a huge museum, arts space and library, it powerfully propagates an official national history of the Solidarity victory of the people over the Polish People’s Republic.
- 6.
Roman Catholic Poland defines itself through its religion in resistance to Protestant Germany and Orthodox Russia.
- 7.
This was The Hamlet Constellation Conference at the University of Craiova, Romania, in 2010, convened by Dr. Nicoleta Cinpoes of the University of Worcester.
- 8.
See also Aneta Mancewicz (2014) Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages.
- 9.
Wajda was the man who had ensured the global dissemination of the Solidarity myth at the height of the communist clampdown on the trade unionists with his Palme D’Or winning film about the movement, The Man of Iron (1981), followed more recently by the hagiographic Man of Hope (2013). He was also one of the most important theatre directors in post-war Poland whose repeated return to Hamlet—he directed it four times—represents the way that the play can be used to continually question and challenge myths of theatre, nation, and the self (Walaszek 1998).
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Walkling, S.V. (2018). Denmark’s a Prison: Appropriating Modern Myths of Hamlet After 1989 in Lin Zhaohua’s Hamulaite and Jan Klata’s H. . In: Mancewicz, A., Joubin, A. (eds) Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89851-3_9
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