Global King Lear: Crisis, Performance, Adaptation (Global Shakespeare Inverted)

Global King Lear provides a kaleidoscopic view of multinational adaptations of King Lear with a focus on productions across Asia and Eastern Europe.By approaching Shakespeare’s great tragedy as a global phenomenon its signature themes become context-dependent and culture-specific whilst avoiding simplistic appeals to the play’s universality.International scholars of literature and theatre explore those culturally specific interpretations as new plays, films, and critical contributions on their own terms.As a film in Japan, King Lear becomes a meditation on contemporary eldercare and the question of celebrity; on a stage in Hungary the play emerges as a ferocious invective against domestic abuse; in another performance in Hungary the play considers childhood trauma and a crisis in maternal care; and a pan-Asian Lear emerges out of multiple adaptations on stage and screen in India, Japan, and China.Taken together these readings are dismantled as merely derivative interpretations and cast