Emma de Beus is undertaking her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focus is contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare. She holds postgraduate degrees from Columbia University and The Shakespeare Institute. Her work has been published in the peer-reviewed Humanities and LEA – Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente. She has presented her work at meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, the British Shakespeare Association, the Theatre & Performance Research Association, the Association of Adaptation Studies, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, the British Society for Literature and Science, the European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This paper will analyze the potential of one specific optical phenomenon–refraction–for understanding the work taking place in twenty-first century adaptations of Shakespeare’s “offensive” comedies.  When light travels into a new substance, it bends.  Refraction looks like a straw in a glass of water: if examined from the side, it appears to bend at the point where the air meets the water.  Arguably, cultures have edges and that it is due to these edges that refraction occurs. The edge of one culture is where the change in light occurs.  When the light rays of Shakespeare are sent over the edge of one cultural medium into another, each ray of meaning will refract according to angles of deviation established by the new medium into which they are adapted.  These cultural edges are particularly charged in locations which have experienced colonialism.  

The potential the notion of refracted adaptation brings to Shakespeare’s “offensive” comedies in the 21st century will be considered in two plays: The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, given the misogyny in the former and the antisemitism in the latter.  The refracted adaptations considered here  are the 2008 South Korean film Nallari Jongbujeon, directed by Lim Won-kook (Shrew), and Māori production Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēniti, directed by Don Selwyn in 2002 (Merchant).  By reading these two adaptations specifically as refractions, it will be possible to better understand how they both leverage linguistic, cultural, and temporal bending to reform Shakespeare for the twenty-first century and how they establish a pattern for refracted adaptation of “offensive” comedies.  Moreover, analyzing South Korea and New Zealand (Aotearoa) as the specific settings for these two refracted adaptations enables a joint interpretation particularly charged by colonialism.