Overview

This highly original new book by a leading Shakespeare expert and cultural critic argues controversially that the 'samurai Shakespeare' of the Japanese cinematic and theatrical masterpiece-makers Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa represents the greatest achievement of Japanese Shakespeare reproduction. Holderness argues that 'samurai Shakespeare' is both consistent with our own western engagement with Japan, and true to the spirit of Japanese culture. / Shakespeare was an exact contemporary of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yet when he was first imported into Japan, in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the plays were performed in contemporary dress, not in the conventional British historical styles, and received as the modern counterpart of Ibsen and Shaw, Gorky and Chekhov. / Today in Japan the Edo past is lovingly preserved, reproduced and displayed. Almost 30 million international tourists enter Japan each year to visit the old capitals of Kyoto and Nara, drawn by the magic of Edo castles, ancient temples, swords and samurai, geishas and sumo, maple leaves and cherry blossom. At the same time Japan represents itself as a society of ultra-modernity, free from the burdens of the past. This book examines why and how early Japanese Shakespeare was assimilated to the modernising and westernising tendencies of the Meiji regime, and kept well away from that very recent but dangerous feudal past of Edo Japan to which at least some of the plays should surely have been seen to belong.

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9781913087197

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The noted critic Graham Holderness is the author or editor of some 50 books, with overall sales of tens of thousands. His work can be divided into three strands: (1) literary criticism, theory and scholarship, especially in Shakespeare studies; (2) the pioneering of an innovative new method of 'creative criticism'; and (3) creative writing in fiction, poetry and drama. His poetry collection Craeft received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002. His play Wholly Writ was performed at Shakespeare's Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon. His publishers have included Penguin, Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Manchester University Press, and Lion Books. / In addition to his fascinating study of 'Smithfield Stories' Meat, Murder, Malfeasance, Medicine and Martyrdom (EER, 2019) EER will also publish his other new study, Textual Shakespeare, and a new edition of The Prince of Denmark in Spring 2020.

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