Shakespeare, as well as the reading, translating, teaching, criticizing, performing, and adapting of Shakespeare, does not exist outside culture. Culture in its many varieties not only informs the Shakespearean corpus, productions, and scholarship, but is also reciprocally shaped by them. Culture never remains stable, but constantly evolves, travels, procreates, blends, and mutates; no less incessantly, the understanding and rewriting of Shakespeare fluctuates. The relations between Shakespeare and culture thus comprise a dynamic flux which calls for examination and reexamination. It is this rich and even labyrinthine network of meanings—intercultural, intertextual, and intergeneric—that this volume intends to explicate. The essays collected here, most of them first presented at the Fourth Conference of the National Taiwan University Shakespeare Forum held in Taipei in 2009, cover a wide range of topics—religion, philosophy, history, aesthetics, as well as politics—and thereby illustrate how fruitfully complex the topic of cultural interchange can be.

編者簡介

　　Bi-qi Beatrice LEI 雷碧琦 is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of National Taiwan University and has served as Coordinator of the NTU Shakespeare Forum www.Shakespeare.tw) since 2006. She received her PhD in English from New York University, and has published on Sidney, Shakespeare, intercultural theatre, television drama, and early modern edicine. She is currently working on a book project on and an electronic database of Shakespeare in Taiwan.

　　CHING-HSI PERNG 彭鏡禧, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, National Taiwan University, is currently a Visiting Professor at Fu Jen Catholic University. A recipient of many honors for teaching, research, and literary translation, he has done research at Yale, Oxford, and University of Chicago, taught at University of Virginia as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar, and lectured widely in Taiwan and China. Among some thirty books to his credit are three studies on Shakespeare, plus the Chinese translations of Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice; the latter he adapted (with Chen Fang) into aYuju opera with performances in Taiwan, China, London, and the U.S.A. His latest work, an annotated translation of Measure for Measure, is forthcoming, which has also been adapted into a Yuju opera, to be premiered at Taipei’s National Theater in June 2012.

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword --The Future Is Fusion DENNIS KENNEDY
Preview DAVID BEVINGTON
Introduction BI-QI BEATRICE LEI

Part One: Shakespeare's Response to His Culture
1. The Culture of Early Modern Protestantism: Predestination in Shakespearean Comedy and Tragedy
JASON GLECKMAN
2. Of Moors and Whores: Cultural Contrast in Othello
BARRY HALL
3. Honor and Maternity in Coriolanus
LIN CHI-I

Part Two: Reading in Shakespeare and Reading of Shakespeare
4. “A voucher stronger than ever law could make”: Writing and Media Literacy in Cymbeline
TED MOTOHASHI
5. Shakespeare Reverbatin' : Spectral Media, Unread-ability, and the Weak Sovereignty of the In/Defi nitive Edition
RICHARD BURT

Part Three: Shakespeare in East Asia's Indigenous Theatres
6. Bonding Bangzi and the Bard: The Case of Yue/Shu (Bond) and The Merchant of Venice
CHING-HSI PERNG
7. Korean Shakespeare and the Endings of the Lear Story
HAN YOUNGLIM
8. Is No Shakespeare in Noh Shakespeare? Re-/Mis-Shaping Shakespeare on the Noh Stage
MINAMI RYUTA

Part Four: Asian Shakespeare in Historical Perspective
9. Shakespeare, (Southeast) Asia, and the Question of Origins
JUDY CELINE ICK
10. The First Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism
YOSHIHARA YUKARI
11. Paradox of Chinese Nationalism: Two Gentlemen of Verona in Silent Film
BI-QI BEATRICE LEI

Part Five: Shakespeare as Global Commodity
12. Hamlet and the Market in Cultural Commodities: Global and Local Revisited
ANN THOMPSON
13. Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Film and Television
MARIANGELA TEMPERA

Index