Adaptations of Hamlet in Different Cultural Contexts: Globalisation, Postmodernism, and Altermodernism

Although there has traditionally been a resistance to the study of adaptations, adaptation studies as a subsection of 'intertextuality‘ currently has a significant place in academic debates. Hamlet is "the Mona Lisa of literature" (T.S. Eliot), and has been the subject of constant scrutiny, mythologizing and adaptation. Hamlet has been adapted and appropriated into and by various cultural contexts. Even confining our attention to the same medium as Shakespeare‘s text, there exists an array of theatrical adaptations in languages and cultures as diverse as Persian, Korean, Arabic, German, Russian, and Turkish. Borrowing Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s metaphor of 'family resemblance,‘ I argue the usefulness of his idea, enabling us to examine not simply a small number of common properties among adaptations of Hamlet, but rather to explore the 'complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing‘ (Philosophical Investigations, §66). I further propose subdividing the 'global family‘ of Hamlets from around the world that participate in this/these web-like resemblances into 'local families‘ of adapted Hamlets, to enable better intercultural and cross-cultural studies.

In this thesis I analyse seven theatrical adaptations of Hamlet in Turkish, Russian, Arabic and Persian cultural contexts, from the perspectives of postmodernism, globalisation and altermodernism. I also scrutinise the Persian family of Hamlet in the light of 'intertextuality‘. Given that each adaptation per se brings together 'self‘ and 'other‘ at the same time, I go on to coin two new terms: homointertextuality and heterointertextuality, in order to explore fully the various connections of the adaptations of Hamlet in Iran with the 'cultural self‘ (Persian culture) and the 'cultural other‘ (Anglophone culture).