William Shakespeare's King Lear and Akira Kurosawa's Ran: Adaptation or Distortion

Abstract

Shakespeare’s King Lear has repeatedly experienced severe textual abridgments and mutilations more than any other plays, as Nahum Tate’s version represented. However, in modern times, the absurdist interpretations of the play accept the whole text of King Lear as a play of the “grotesque” without textual abridgments and mutilations. Therefore, in our century, if a director tries to recreate King Lear into a movie or a stage performance, he should be conscious of its stage and textual history in his interpretation on the original play. Moreover, if the director comes from cultural areas alien to the western tradition, the range of his choice is so inconceivably wider that he must overcome certain complex problems. When a Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa made the film version of King Lear in 1985, which was titled as Ran, he also was not an exception. Additionally, since the motion picture is an artistic form born in the modern era, Kurosawa must solve the problem of how King Lear can be assimilated not only into an alien culture but into an alien art form as well. By bestowing an historical background on the original play, Kurosawa made Ran surpass the supposed improbability of the original King Lear, while his version of King Lear could keep the absurdist and nihilistic adaptation of recent criticism at a certain respectable distance. Kurosawa’s Ran is comparatively successful in deciphering and adapting the dramatic codes of King Lear in terms of the historical and cultural context of Japan without losing the essential philosophy and poetic sentiments of the original play. Any literary work in adaptation should undergo twofold simultaneous processes at once: one is the process of alienation from the native ground and the other, that of naturalization in an adopted culture. Therefore, Kurosawa’s cultural and historical challenge of transfiguring Shakespeare’s King Lear into a Japanese historical drama Ran may give us a valuable opportunity of rethinking the cultural transplantation in literature.