SHAKESPEARE BY ANY OTHER WORD?: SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR AND MACBETH REINVENTED IN THE FILMS OF AKIRA KUROSAWA A Thesis by Erica Lee Zilleruelo Bachelor of Arts, Penn State University, 2002 Submitted to the Department of English and the faculty of the Graduate School of Wichita State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 2007 © Copyright 2007 by Erica Lee Zilleruelo All Rights Reserved SHAKESPEARE BY ANY OTHER WORD?: SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR AND MACBETH REINVENTED IN THE FILMS OF AKIRA KUROSAWA I have examined the final copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts with a major in English. ____________________________________________ Donald Wineke, Committee Chair We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: ____________________________________________ Christopher Brooks, Committee Member ____________________________________________ Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg, Committee Member iii DEDICATION To Art with love and thanks iv What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professor Don Wineke and Professor Chris Brooks for demonstrating that true scholars do still exist in the world. Their wisdom along with their patient and insightful guidance helped in making this project possible. Thanks are also due to Prof. Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg for providing valuable commentary from a new point of view on my project and to Professor Dean Baldwin of Penn State Erie for providing the spark that began my interest in Shakespeare thereby showing me that my only love could, in fact, spring from my only hate. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their continued support: Ut legebitis hoc scio, etsi ut non intellegetis dicebo. vi ABSTRACT Directors world-wide have made countless film adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, so a somewhat heated debate exists in terms of what deserves the label “Shakespearean film,” initiating conversation regarding what constitutes use of the word “Shakespearean.” Without a doubt, and for any given play, Shakespeare borrowed anything from character names to plots, settings, etc.—all the items that form the bulk of his plays. One cannot, however, limit consideration of a signature element to these items, for they exist as stock elements that have repeated and resurfaced over the span of the ages. The language, all inclusively—the diction, puns, measure, etc.—makes Shakespeare’s plays Shakespeare’s. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare writes, “[w]hat’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (2.2.43-4); however, can this statement metaphorically apply to that which we have come to know as Shakespearean film? In other words, when a filmmaker removes Shakespeare’s language, thereby removing Shakespeare’s signature from the work, would the film “smell as sweet,” so to speak, as Shakespeare’s play, purely on the basis that it names Shakespeare as its source material? My project will look at two of Shakespeare’s plays—Macbeth and King Lear—and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s corresponding film versions—Throne of Blood and Ran, and will assess what happens to the Shakespearean element of these films when Kurosawa translates the plays not only into another medium, but another language. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page 1. Introduction 1 2. MACBETH / THRONE OF BLOOD 2 3. KING LEAR / RAN 18 LIST OF REFERENCES 35 viii Shakespeare by Any Other Word?: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth Reinvented in the Films of Akira Kurosawa Directors worldwide have adapted Shakespeare’s works to film for decades, so a somewhat heated debate has surfaced in terms of what deserves the label “Shakespearean film.” This dispute includes a spectrum of opinions on the matter, including one extreme in John Ottenhoff’s assertion that “no performance can substitute for the richness of reading, discussing, and meditating upon a text” (qtd. in Brode 3) to the other extreme in Douglas Brode’s somewhat glib opposing view that “Shakespeare’s approach resembles that of a moviemaker[.] . . . Shakespeare was the bravura crowd pleaser, the Elizabethan predecessor to Cecil B. DeMille and Steven Spielberg” (4-5). To address the former, one must consider the time during which Shakespeare wrote his works. In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt explains that “playing companies were wary about allowing their scripts to circulate widely. . . . [T]hey wanted the public principally to encounter plays in the playhouse, not in the study” (295); moreover, as Brode points out, Shakespeare never even had the plays printed (3), though some evidence stating that he may have intended to do so exists. The presence of such extreme sentiments necessitates an investigation into what must occur in a film to grant it the title of “Shakespearean” in order to help reach some sort of amicable middle ground on the topic. This is not to say that a film that fails to earn such a label also fails as an artistic expression in its own right; however, some of the films that claim one of Shakespeare’s plays as their source material should reasonably go beyond Shakespeare and instead credit the material Shakespeare used as his sources. “As he often did with texts he liked,” Greenblatt reveals, Shakespeare adapted other literary works, “lift[ing] . . . wholesale” (270) anything from character names to plots, settings, etc.—all the elements that form the bulk of his plays. One 1 cannot, therefore, limit the determination of Shakespeare’s signature—that which makes a work uniquely his—to such stock elements, for they have repeated and resurfaced over the span of the ages. Such films should perhaps move beyond Shakespeare and credit a more precise source for their plots—the only thing many of these films retain. For instance, filmmakers, critics, reviewers, and many others declare that the films A Thousand Acres and O root themselves in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello respectively, but as they do not preserve Shakespeare’s language or even attempt to parallel it cinematically, perhaps the filmmakers and others should attribute these works instead to Holinshed’s Chronicles and Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi correspondingly. The language—the diction, puns, lineation, etc.—makes Shakespeare’s plays Shakespeare’s. Because of this, one easily grants the label to those films that preserve Shakespeare’s language, but what of those that alter not only the stock elements, but the language as well, as is the case with Akira Kurosawa’s films Throne of Blood and Ran (adaptations based on Macbeth and King Lear respectively)? In order to call films of this variety “Shakespearean films,” the viewer must recognize some sort of visual element that acts as a linguistic parallel despite the lack of Shakespeare’s language, and the following analysis will determine if that element exists in either of these two films. For Throne of Blood, Kurosawa chose the era of the Japanese samurai for his setting, and though a Western audience might struggle with the idea of Shakespeare’s work presented in such a context, Kurosawa essentially does what Shakespeare did and creates the same atmosphere for his cinematic audience as that which Shakespeare would have provided for his own contemporaries. Due to the amount of temporal distance from the type of events that appear in Shakespeare’s play, twentieth-century filmmakers have to find some other means of putting their 2