Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance
Multicultural Shakespeare is an international journal devoted to Shakespearean studies; it is a forum in which researchers, especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, can air local concerns and themes that contribute to the creation and understanding of Shakespeare as a global phenomenon. Initially devoted mainly to translations, Multicultural Shakespeare developed into a publication mediating vigorous discussions on the adaptation of Shakespeare’s texts, their ontology and cross-cultural significance. It created an opportunity to present the universal dimension of Shakespeare’s works by focusing on the local values found in the cultures of Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA.
Introduction: The Global Origins of Shakespeare Studies
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“Shakespeare is a Finnish national poet:” Developing Finnish Shakespeare Scholarship from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century
In this article, I will take up the idea of “origins” as it pertains to Finnish Shakespeare during Finland’s time as an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia from 1809-1917. While not technically the beginning of Shakespearean performances, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the beginning of the rhetorical use of Shakespeare in public discourse used to establish cultural sovereignty distinct from Sweden and Russia. Beginning with a brief overview of Shakespearean mentions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I will analyse the public discourse found in Finnish literary journals and newspaper articles in the 1810’s and 20’s. Following an analysis of J. F. Lagervall’s 1834 Ruunulinna, I will then briefly track how shifting attitudes towards translations such as those found in J. V. Snellman’s writings influenced the emerging Finnish literary and theatre tradition, most notably with Kaarlo Slöör and Paavo Cajendar’s Shakespeare translations and the establishment of the Finnish Theatre in 1871. Finally, an analysis of Juhani Aho’s untranslated essay in Gollancz’ 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare will highlight the legacy of prior Finnish Shakespearean traditions, while also highlighting the limits of translation. Ultimately, I suggest that Shakespeare was appropriated early on as an accessible figure of resistance in the face of Swedish linguistic supremacy and the increasing threat of Russian assimilation and oppression.
Activist Discourse and the Origins of Feminist Shakespeare Studies
This essay reconsiders interpretations of Shakespeare by Irish writer Anna Murphy Jameson and the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Developing an informal method in which the voice of the female critic rallies in defence of Shakespeare’s heroines, they intervene in a male-dominated intellectual sphere to model alternative forms of women’s learning that take root outside of formalized institutional channels. Jameson, in Shakespeare’s Heroines, invokes the language of authentic Romantic selfhood and artistic freedom, recovering Shakespeare’s female characters from earlier critical aspersion as figures of exceptional female eloquence and resilience; she adopts a conversational critical voice to involve her female readers in the interpretative process itself. Fuller, in Woman in Nineteenth Century, speaks authoritatively as a kind of female prophet to argue that women’s creative reinterpretations of Shakespeare point the way to a revitalization of a sterile literary critical field. Both writers call for the reform of women’s education through revisionist interpretations of history attuned to the representation of female exceptionalism. In embryonic form, these nineteenth century feminist writings formulate a persistent strain of socially engaged, activist feminist criticism of Shakespeare.
Writing and Rewriting Nationhood: "Henry V" and Political Appropriation of Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Henry V is often regarded as a nationalistic play and has been appropriated for political spin and propaganda to enhance the sense of national unity. Shakespeare captures the emerging nationalistic feeling of the Tudor era in Henry’s emphasis on national history and pride, but various parts of the text suggest a more diverse and complex figures of the king and his subjects than a war hero and the united nation. Such complexity, however, is often ignored in political appropriation. Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation during WWII glamorizes the war and defines the English nation as a courageous “band of brothers” through its presentation of Shakespeare’s play a shared story or history of national victory. Kenneth Branagh’s film in 1989, on the other hand, captures the ugliness of war but it still romanticizes the sacrifice for the country. In 2016, Shakespeare was made part of the Brexit discourse of growing nationalism at the time of the EU referendum. Brexit was imagined as a victory that will bring back freedom and sovereignty the country once enjoyed, and Shakespeare was used to represent the greatness of Britain. Shakespeare’s text, however, depicts the war against the continent in a more skeptical than glorifying tone. The war scenes are scattered with humorous dialogues and critical comments and the multi-national captains of Henry’s army are constantly at odds with one another. Shakespeare thus provides us with a wider view of nationhood, resisting the simplifying force of politics.
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Introduction: “With Such Perfection: ” Imagining Utopia through Shakespeare
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“Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:” the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography
The paper examines the spatial overlap between the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the performance of William Shakespeare’s plays in the United States. In America, William Shakespeare seems to function as a prelapsarian poet, one who wrote before the institutionalization of colonial slavery, and he is therefore a poet able to symbolically function as a ‘public good’ that trumps America’s past associations with slavery. Instead, the modern American performance of Shakespeare emphasizes an idealized strain of human nature: especially when Americans perform Shakespeare outdoors, we tend to imagine ourselves in a primeval woodland, a setting without a history. Therefore, his plays are often performed without controversy—and (bizarrely) on or near sites specifically tied to the enslavement or disenfranchisement of people with African ancestry. New York City’s popular outdoor Shakespeare theater, the Delacorte, is situated just south of the site of Seneca Village, an African American community displaced for the construction of Central Park; Alabama Shakespeare Festival takes place on a former plantation; the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia makes frequent use of a hotel dedicated to a Confederate general; the University of Texas’ Shakespeare at Winedale festival is performed in a barn built with supports carved by slave labor; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival takes place within a state unique for its founding laws dedicated to white supremacy. A historiographical examination of the Texas site reveals how the process of erasure can occur within a ‘progressive’ context, while a survey of Shakespearean performance sites in New York, Alabama, Virginia, and Oregon shows the strength of the unexpected connection between the performance of Shakespeare in America and the subjugation of Black persons, and it raises questions about the unique and utopian assumptions of Shakespearean performance in the United States.
New Interpretations and Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays in Japan from 2020 to 2023
This essay examines some notable Shakespearean productions and adaptations in Japan from 2020 to 2023. The main focus is on a Hamlet production by Mansai Nomura, a Kyogen performer, in March 2023; it was an amalgamation of the traditional Japanese theatres, such as Kyogen, Nô, Kabuki, and Bunraku. Mansai’s aspiration to produce Hamlet, utilizing all the elements of traditional Japanese art forms, began twenty years ago, when he played Hamlet in Jonathan Kent’s production in London and in Tokyo. He re-examined the text and offered a completely new interpretation of a scene, giving the play a fresh dimension. Moreover, this essay examines other recent Shakespeare productions and adaptations, including my two new plays based on Shakespeare, as well as Kôki Mitani’s Thirteen Vassals of Kamakura Shogun, a serial historical TV drama, broadcast by NHK (Japan’s version of the BBC).
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“To Go ‘Into’ My Dialect”: Jane Lai’s Cantonese Translation of King Lear and the Historical Context of its Performances in Hong Kong
The English performance of Shakespeare in Hong Kong during the early colonial governance period served partly to support the cultural security of the British expatriates, and partly the edification of the locals. However, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an increase in Cantonese translations and adaptations of Shakespeare, which marked a new way of leveraging Shakespeare to resonate with the local culture and its sentiments. Within this wave of Cantonese productions, the translations by Jane Lai, a translator, professor, and native of Hong Kong, have garnered widespread acclaim within both theatrical and translation spheres. This article will focus on Lai’s Cantonese translation of King Lear, produced in the 1980s for stage performance, and conduct a comparative textual analysis of the Cantonese translation with its English source text and the corresponding Mandarin translations, with an aim to explore the translation strategies employed by Lai to ensure the Cantonese King Lear’s acceptability to the local culture on the page and stage. Moreover, the article will delve into the historical context of the play’s performance to unravel the elements that contributed to the success of the Cantonese King Lear on the stage during that specific period.
Hamlet (Un-)Masked: SPAC’s Hamlet under COVID-19 Restrictions
One of the reasons why Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as a play representing the essential problematics of Western Modernity, is still relevant today, is that it contains the cultural dynamics that ranges over issues around colonialism, patriarchy, and individual identities, all of which have been causes and consequences of the Western Modernity. More specifically, in the current context of the declining Western hegemony, symbolized by regional military conflicts and environmental degradation, among other crises, the urgency to freshly produce and interpret this play seems to be increasing. This essay attempts to question the significance of staging Hamlet today by examining Satoshi Miyagi’s version of the play at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and through its analysis, we aim to reflect how Hamlet, while characterizing Western Modernity, harbors the potential to critique its essence.
“Words, Words, Words.—Between Who?”: Alterations and Interpolations in the RSC Chinese Translation of Hamlet
This article is a case study examining the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Chinese translation of Hamlet, which is part of its “Shakespeare Folio Translation Project” that was launched in 2015. Textual interpolations and alterations of the plot in this version are demonstrated, ranging from cuts of critical scenes and roles to lines and single words rendered in an “audience-friendly” way into an alleged Chinese context. Based on an analysis of the translator’s edits, textual transpositions, and choices of Chinese wording, this paper recognizes this version’s contribution to the diversity and acculturation of Shakespeare for a special intellectual community in a different culture in twenty-first-century China. Nevertheless, it proposes that this edition be more accurately entitled “RSC Hamlet for the Chinese Stage” rather than the officially designated “RSC Chinese Folio Hamlet” in order to avoid possible misconceptions of “acknowledged authority” that Chinese readers and audience may conceive under the halo of RSC and the misleading label of “Commissioned Folio Translation.”
As a crucial concept in critical theory, intersectionality satisfies a need within global Shakespeare reception studies. The reason for this is the way it permits cross-currents between conceptions of race and gender in particular; it also allows for an awareness of the historical and cultural location of the audience or reader as distinct from the moment of the production of a particular play. It is therefore fundamentally dynamic and can be further extended via discussions of rank, sexuality or religion. This essay argues for the importance of a lively approach to intersectionality that integrates concerns of race and gender in Othello with social rank in Shakespearean Venice and Cyprus. The article deliberately eschews a psychological analysis of character, insisting that a sense of inwardness, that these stage figures should somehow be treated as though they were real people, is a much later, modern preoccupation. Instead, the play is treated as not only early modern but pre-modern. This is also why there is no treatment of class as such; that too is a much later modern category that carries all sorts of baggage, anachronistic and otherwise. Class is not a sophisticated enough notion to account adequately for the permutations in a society that was obsessed with tiny gradations in rank, dignity and honour. Beginning with reference to Toni Morrison’s conceptualization of modern American literature as predicated on a constructed whiteness, the essay moves by analogy back towards Shakespeare’s drama to the structured interplay between gender, rank and race that is this play. Althusser’s sense of interpellation is revived in order adequately to describe how these positions work to emplace Othello and Desdemona in order to open up the play to a global perspective that accounts for multiple possibilities. The article therefore goes well beyond the old familiar groupings so beloved of character-based criticism, instead insisting on the primacy of social definitions of the positions available to the personages in the play.
Indian Supplements to Shakespeare: The Hungry and We That Are Young
While there is no longer any debate about Shakespeare’s position as a global author, the rapidly expanding worldwide archive of the versioning of his works continues to pose a critical challenge. Questions like how far and to what extent can this be seen as Shakespeare or not Shakespeare are raised. Estimation of value is vexed, too: does it reside mainly in the local, or can it also extrapolate meaning globally? Methodologies, too, are debated: is archiving the starting or the endpoint of reception? Or is the construction of networks of analyses around and between them the mode towards negotiating appreciation? Taking a leaf out of Derrida’s “That Dangerous Supplement,” this paper will propose a critical perspective of supplementarity as an intervention in the debate on the proliferating versioning of Shakespeare. This sees the traffic in Shakespeare as both a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude and also a substitute filling a void. It considers translation, adaptation, appropriation, and even performance of Shakespeare as additions which enhance and complete making good an insufficiency. It will locate this discussion on two much-acclaimed adaptations to emerge out of India: the film The Hungry (2017), directed by Bornila Chatterjee, of Titus Andronicus, and the novel We That Are Young (2017) by Preti Taneja, based on King Lear.
Historicizing the Bard of Avon: Shakeshifting Shakespeare and the Constitution of Guarati Literary Culture
In a century and a half of his continuous presence in India, Shakespeare has shapeshifted into manifold textual and performative “avatars,” from an agent of moral edification transforming into a subversive stick with which to beat the imperial culture. The “Bard” adapted to his immediate environs like a chameleon on the one hand, while standing tall on his native stage, on the other, asserting the imperial will and throwing the native cultural background in sharp relief. The Gujarati theatre and literary histories have borne witness to this ceaseless transformation. The present paper traces the high points in the histories of the “Bard’s” localization—from Shakespeare to Sheikh Pir—as well as his “non-localizations,” examining in the process how they reflect the evolution of the Gujarati literary culture along the caste, ethnic, and communal lines. An attempt is made in the paper to understand the role these histories could have played in engendering the essentialized, elitist, and monolithic ideas and identities that Gujarati literary culture still suffers from. Finally, the paper also points to the possible directions the translation and staging of Shakespeare’s plays can take in the postcolonial era.
Blood and Revenge: Animal Metaphors and Nature in Macbeth and the Oresteia
Renowned classicist Gilbert Murray has made compelling arguments about the connection between Aeschylus and Shakespeare in his famous essay Hamlet and Orestes: A Study in Traditional Types. Through a close reading of the Oresteia and Macbeth, it is not difficult to find that the latter play, to some extent, is an intentioned “translation” and “rewriting” of the great theatrical tradition of the Attic tragedy, especially that represented by Aeschylus. The dramatic elements inviting such a comparative reading, among many other things, include the motif of bloodstained hands, masculine queens, sleeplessness and dream terrors, and most important of all, the mechanism of blood-shedding and revenge. This paper discusses their affinity through the lens of allusions to birds, and animals, inversion of the established order, and its final restoration to reveal Macbeth as a play that is fundamentally concerned with the classical theme of blood-shedding and revenge with its borrowing of multiple dramatic techniques.
Shakespeare Engraved: Frontispiece and Bardolatry
The term Bardolatry has been used for over a century to describe the adoration of an Elizabethan playwright, Shakespeare, but the causes of this phenomenon have not been fully elucidated. The study explores the nature of this worship produced and disseminated by various theatrical cultures during the long eighteenth century. To understand the formation of the phenomenon, this paper examines the shifts in the engraved frontispieces, taking The Tempest as an example.
Greece Reinvented: Shakespeare’s “Greek Plays” as a Subgenre
This article justifies the addition of “Greek Plays” as a subgenre to classify Shakespeare’s works. The six plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, Two Noble Kinsmen, The Comedy of Errors, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and Troilus and Cressida) in this subgenre are defined as adaptations of ancient Greek literature, staged in Greek or closely related settings, and featuring characters from Greek mythology and history. Through a review of the research history of Shakespeare’s Greek plays and an exploration of interactions between Englishmen and Greeks, the authors provide a brief but comprehensive reading of his Greek plays and argue that Shakespeare juxtaposes ancient Greece with its early modern counterpart—a territory of difference and the Other—on the very edge of Europe, penetrated by the alien East and Islamic cultures. Greece is a land of ambiguity, reinvented by Shakespeare as a liminal space, and characterized by a mixture of humanist admiration for the grandeur of ancient Greek civilization, cautious respect for and alertness to its pagan origins, a profound desire for economic benefits in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Christian apprehensions and anxieties in Englishmen’s encounters with the Turks. By introducing “Greek Plays” as a subgenre, this paper not only helps to enrich our understanding of Shakespeare’s portrayal of “a world elsewhere” from multifaceted cultural perspectives but also attempts to expand the existing territory of Shakespearean studies.
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Exploring the Visual and Performative Appropriation of Shakespeare in Pakistani Theatres
This research paper examines the experimental nature of appropriation focusing on The National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) renditions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) and Richard III (1597). It investigates how these adaptations bring about changes in both dramatic structure and artistic expression, dissecting visual and performative elements to uncover diverse meanings within live performances. The research delves into how NAPA’s creative choices offer new ways to examine Shakespeare’s universal themes—jealousy, incest, ambition, and hatred— through unconventional theatrical presentations, viewed from a post-dramatic perspective. Using Hans Thies Lehmann’s Post-dramatic theory (1960), it analyses alterations dramaturgical and aesthetical presentation such as plot construction, sign and symbol presentations. By bridging the gap between the art world and stagecraft, this study aims to deepen our understanding of how appropriation, aesthetics, and performance intersect. It also explores how these adaptations contribute to the global presentation of Shakespearean plays, offering insights from Pakistan’s theatrical landscape.
Reclaiming Cross-Dressing: Masculinity Construction in the All-Female Yue Opera’s Shakespearean Adaptations
Because it offers the stage such scope for polyerotic interpretation, crossdressing has held an irresistible appeal to theatre practitioners across times and cultures, including Shakespeare in early modern England. The Shakespearean cross-dressing theatre, however, has long excited critical disapprobation as a cultural form which excluded women. However, can cross-dressing as a theatrical device be reclaimed by women as an alternative mode of Shakespearean performance? What academic and practical significance can a reversed, all-female casting of Shakespearean production offer? This paper will argue that the Chinese Yue opera’s Shakespeare adaptations may shed light on how gender impersonation can be used to express women’s wishes and desires. As the second largest Chinese opera genre, Yue opera is a theatreform in which all roles are played by actresses for a predominantly female audience. Interestingly, Shakespeare is also Yue opera’s most adapted foreign playwright. General Ma Long (2001, an adaptation of Macbeth) and Coriolanus and Duliniang (2016, an adaptation of Coriolanus) are two representative specimens of Yue opera Shakespearean adaptations with all-female casting. The male protagonists of both are played by cross-dressed actresses. How do Yue opera female performers, whose style is generally perceived as soft and feminine, stage the Shakespearean war heroes famous for their bloodthirsty masculinity? Deploying a theoretical framework based on Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory and Bertolt Brecht’s account of the epic theatre, this essay aims to examine the masculinity construction in the all-female Yue opera Shakespearean adaptations, in order to open a discussion of how cross-dressing can be used to deconstruct and reassemble gender norms.
The Cultural Paradox of All-Male Performance: (Dis)Figuring the Third Beauty in the Studio Life’s Twelfth Night
The aim of this article is to explore the ambiguous and unstable boundaries of gender images depicted in Studio Life’s Twelfth Night (2011) where male actors perform female characters similar to the practice on the Shakespearean stage. As Akira Uno, one of the influential illustrators of Japanese shōjo manga, participated in designing the stage set, costumes, and make-up of the characters, the production presents the effect of “the third beauty.” This is characterised by both masculine and feminine attributes while simultaneously being neither masculine nor feminine. This unique feature reflects the position of women in modern Japanese society, where representations of female gender and sexuality are often marginalised and oppressed under the male-dominated social atmosphere. Consequently, the image of female gender has been rigidly fixed and stereotyped according to traditional norms. In this setting, the effeminate and beautiful boys in an exotic place become surrogates for females, who can freely explore their gender and sexual identity within the illusory world, where both homoerotic and heterosexual relationships are explored. Studio Life’s Twelfth Night reflects this illusion by adapting the styles of shōjo manga, but the production seldom offers critical insights or questions on gender issues, especially in the context of the realities faced by Japanese women in daily life. This article examines descriptions of female characters performed by male actors and interviews with the director, Kurata Jun. The main focus is on how the artists perceive and express the concept of gender in relation to Japanese social conditions, demonstrated through their physical portrayals and gestures in all-male casting.
Shakespeare and Covid Drama in This England (Winterbottom, 2022)
This article considers the significance of different Shakespearean allusions in a political docudrama miniseries This England (2022), directed for Sky by Michael Winterbottom and scripted by Winterbottom and Kieron Quirke. The action focuses on the first crucial months in England after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, offering a panoramic view of the nation under duress as a newly formed government, with Boris Johnson at its helm, mishandles the crisis. The article seeks to explain the presence of multiple Shakespearean references, from the title alone, through numerous direct quotations to the casting of Kenneth Branagh as Johnson. Shakespearean traces play a pivotal, though confusing, role as they both critique the actions of the government and its leader by offering an ironic framing device while increasing the viewer’s sympathy for its central protagonist via the presence of a Shakespearean celebrity.
A Tempest and The Tempest: Aimé Césaire and Shakespeare
Through an analysis of the play, the article seeks to demonstrate that Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest is a “reinscription” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as “a drama of rebellion.” It is told from the point of view of “the loser”, Caliban, the “colonized”, who confronts and defies Prospero who has usurped the island and deprived him of his patrimony. He demands his freedom and refuses to accept the “hegemonic europocentric vision of the universe.” Césaire “demythifie[s]” Prospero who is not the benign Magus figure of traditional criticism but the “prototypical colonizer,” a despot, “the complete totalitarian.” The paper argues that, although he never mentions him, Césaire is influenced by George Lamming’s radical reading of Shakespeare’s play through “colonial” and “national” lenses, a reading that anticipates that of Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists and pre-empts the question of “linguistic colonialism” which is so crucial to them. While the colonial paradigm has featured in recent discussions of the plays and Césaire and Lamming have been grouped together, the article analyzes and applies Lamming’s reading to both Shakespeare and Césaire and provides a fresh reading of both. The article also goes beyond the argument of Greenblatt and the New Historicists. A Tempest ends equivocally, on a questioning note, and Lamming observes that the Epilogue in The Tempest leaves the latter work, too, somewhat open-ended, a point that is taken up and discussed. The article in conclusion gives a significant, new interpretation, of the titles of the two plays which ties up with and highlights the theme of colonialism which is the focus of both plays.
Shakespeare Translators’ Voices: The 21st Century Perspective
Shylock in Fuquieo: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the Trial of a Portuguese Stranger by China’s Courts in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations
In 1548, the Portuguese merchant Galeotto Perera was captured along with his shipmates in the waters off China’s southeastern coast. In his account of his time as a prisoner in Fuquieo (in contemporary Fujian province), Perera details his trial before the city’s magistrates in a Chinese court of law, writing of his amazement when he and his fellow Portuguese merchants were acquitted of the charges brought against them by two of the city’s most prominent men. Perera’s prison account reached an Elizabethan readership via Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589), a sprawling compendium of European travel writing translated into English. In this essay, I maintain that the outcome of Shylock’s trial in Shakespeare’s comedy entails a reversal of Perera’s legal fortunes in China. In light of Perera’s assertion that the Chinese legal process “cannot be falsified, as it happeneth sometimes with vs,” I argue that The Merchant of Venice asks why these European failures of justice, mercy, and truth sometimes happen in Europe’s courts and in negotiations with non-Christian peoples. I aim to demonstrate that the comedy’s treatment of economic and religious exchange with strangers is inflected by Perera’s account of his encounters with the Chinese during his time in Fuquieo—as well as by other travel writings collected by Hakluyt that describe legal, financial, and inheritance quandaries that European traders faced during their travels to places like China, Java, and modern-day Myanmar.
Radicalising Shakespeare: Staging the Sri Lankan Juliet in Julietge Bhumikawa
Through an analysis of the Sri Lankan film, Julietge Bhumikawa (1998) (Illusions of Juliet), I argue that the film radicalizes Shakespeare-inspired film through providing a bold site of enunciation to the character of Juliet. While the Sri Lankan Juliet is cast as mistress, interrogating discourses of purity surrounding not only the original source text—Romeo and Juliet—but the contemporary Sri Lankan society as well, Julietge Bhumikawa reconfigures female gender ideologies by unraveling the nexus between female madness and patriarchal culture.
Figuring Displacement: Spaces of Imagination in Early Modern and Postmodern Intertextual Transmissions
This essay examines, ecocritically, geocritically, and comparatively, the metaphoric spaces represented in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters—seas, mountains, islands, jungle—to show that these spaces allow for different interpretations, yet they are spaces of individual imagination in both the play and the novel, suggesting transformation and metamorphosis. I argue that these literary spaces show a common feature of displacement, which allows human language to re-imagine other worlds—in literature and in visual arts. The spaces of imagination proliferated through Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Barnes’ novel have suffered a transformation in time and space, as they speak to past and present audiences and readers. The sea in Barnes’ chapter entitled “Shipwreck” symbolizes danger but also hope, as does the sea in the storm scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Mountain in Barnes’ eponymous chapter represents an isolated and inaccessible landscape on Mount Ararat, at the intersection of three cultures (Armenia, Turkey and Russia), but it also represents the biblical language of faith and hermitic isolation. Similarly, the island in The Tempest, which is—geologically—a mountain above the water, represents metaphorically the island of the mind. The jungle in Barnes’ chapter “Upstream” is a remote place in the forest on the Orinoco River, where Europeans and native Indians interact while making a movie; this movie is a work of visual art, represented in a novel; so is any one of the many productions of The Tempest, which reiterates the island’s imaginary space in various directorial interpretations. All these locations are metaphoric spaces of imagination, transmitted through different media, in which reality is transformed into literary representation by means of fictional description or theatrical action.