Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace - edited by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross - shows readers how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) such as Arden: The World of Shakespeare. The papers in the volume provide a background for these modern developments showing the history of how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures defined - and continue to define - themselves. Hollywood films and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth are now conjoining in cyberspace making a world of difference to how we experience Shakespeare. The papers by experts in the field provides an introduction to the diverse incarnations and bold sequences of screen and stage that in recent decades have produced new versions of Shakespeare’s great comedies and tragedies and new ways of experiencing them. Authors in the first part of the collection examine body politics and race in Hollywood Shakespearen films film techniques and complement the second part in which the history of Shakespearen readings and stagings in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Malaya, Korea, and Hong Kong are discussed. Papers in the third part of the volume contain analyses of the transformation of the idea of Shakespeare in cyberspace, a rapidly expanding world of new rewritings of both Shakespeare and/in Asia. Together, the three sections of this comparative study show how Asian cultures and Shakespeare affect each other, how one cultural is translated to another, and how the combination of Asian and Anglo-European modes of representation are determining the future of how we see Shakespeare’s plays.
