• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.503-515
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• 2018

This paper reevaluates the influence and value of Shakespeare inherent in the history of music, focusing on the works of playwright William Shakespeare who have had an absolute influence on the history of music and various musical works derived from his work. To consider ways referred to the original work of Shakespeare, and at the same time to analyze the different musical pieces with his same material, and also about the musical implementation according to theatrical devices provided by Shakespeare through the four aspects of 'Shakespeare's musical descriptions and texts', 'Configuration model and its variants', 'Portrayal of person and human character' and 'Genre diversity and Creative possibility'.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.65-84
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• 2017

Media has become an inseparable companion of $21^{st}$ century culture, exerting immense influence on our daily lives. This article aims to reveal how cultural aspects and media in a particular part of the Silk Road have adapted Western cannons. Iran has redefined and transformed Western culture through the modern Silk Road by the method of cinematic adaptation. Karim-Masihi employs the general plot of Hamlet, the well-known drama by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), in his movie Tardid (Doubt 2009); however, he transforms some of the characters to reflect the current socio-cultural aspects of Iranian society. One of the characters is named Siavash, whose life is similar to Hamlet. In passivity, he awaits his imminent death and other tragic consequences. Yet, the movie ends differently. It is not an Elizabethan tragedy in a strict sense, although the final scenes abound with corpses. This article aims to find the similarities and differences between the two works, while reasoning the significance of the alterations. It concludes with how different cultures react to the same themes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.527-544
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• 2013

William Shakespeare's dirge, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is still a crux in the Shakespearean canon and interpretation. The poem is still believed a dark allegory dealing with some arcane and obscure courtly matters and politics. However, we cannot recover its allegorical significance. This interpretive situation enforces us to read the poem as a self-conscious artwork in terms of its paradoxical language and meta-poetic metaphors. Paradox, as a subspecies of metaphor, challenges categorical and judgmental absolutes, and produces a sense of wonder in reconciling the logically contradictory opposites. In this poem the urn containing the ashes of the phoenix and the turtle is the icon of the mysterious unity of art, born of the wonderful marriage of male and female. Shakespeare's poem demonstrates in itself the magical power of poetic language in transforming an elegy into an epithalamion. The union of the phoenix and the turtle defies the singularity of their respective entity, and at the same time it retains their distinctive particularity of the two-ness. This neo-Platonic mystery of the "married chastity" is a paradox which confounds reason and verifies the poetic truth of imaginative intellect. The marriage of Christian perichoresis is crystallized in the artwork of the urn, which is admired at by posterity, though the marriage was issueless, due to its passing virtue. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" depicts the metaphor-making process and its effect, the poem.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.30
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• pp.7-29
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• 2013

A movie which brought its material from a historical character or incidents in the past was produced by a story suggestion through a historical fact. It is because Shakespeare created a story based on a mythical element related with his life in the plot which was written from the script of the play and was on the show in the cinemas of London. It is an obvious fact that the historical drama of this movie was intentionally modified and the fictional story was added to episodes in order to create a dramatic effect. However, reflecting historical backgrounds and cultural aspects accurately through a historical study would also be an important factor. Therefore, the backgrounds and aspects presented in this movie are a kind of storytelling which was reconstructed as if a historian added his opinion to historical facts like a discourse. A historical background in was a story about Shakespeare who worked at the theater in London as a writer in 1593 the period of England Reneissance. The movie included the working and playwriting of Shakespeare who is a main character. This indicated not only the environment of the theater and literature during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I but also historical aspect in the early modern industrial society in England. This movie, that is, described that time as a recreation such as a cultural acceptance and an achievement of an initial capitalism in Renaissance in the life of characters. In particular, the factor of theaters flourishing during the Renaissance was because a newly emerging class, bourgeoisie, who held the capital emerging from a policy for middle class led to a box office hit through founding theaters and drama company and selling tickets and performing plays by themselves. Like this, the movie depicted the time led by plays to a industrialization. Moreover, Social aspects in the late 1500s were revealed in this movie through a depiction of the cinemas and the city of London. The depiction of the city of London reflected a social situation of an initial capitalism rapidly developed in trade and commerce. The social aspects such as conflicts between social classes based on getting richer and poorer, mammonism, a corrupted love between the male and the female, a immortality with growing brothels, religious and political conflicts with the foundation of the church in England were closely linked with characters' daily routine at that time in London and were reflected in this work overall. The reason why we highlight characters' job and custom like this in the movie is that these are ideationally inherent in a critical mind from people at that moment. The historical background and reproduction of the image depicted in the movie were focused on characters' daily routine and indicated the problem mentally and independently exposed in the form of initial capitalism.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.163-189
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• 2017

The mourning and grief practice richly registered in Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the abiding themes that critics have been fascinated with. This paper attempts to take a fresh look at the issue by building its arguments on Benjamin's insight that the modern art (mechanically) reproducing the exhibition value brings about the destruction of the ritual value and favors the conditions of melancholy. Instead of taking for granted that Hamlet's performance of grief is fundamentally different from those of other characters such as Gertrude, Ophelia, and Laertes, this paper argues that Hamlet's performance comes to be recognized masculine and different from others, only because he presents himself to be so through his theatrical performance as well as his princely power that the subjects (others in the story) ought to ascribe to. To prove this point, this paper closely analyzes Hamlet's rhetorics and the ways he constructs his mourning self, which is emblematic of the shift in art history that Benjamin has characterized with the terms of "ritual value" and "exhibition value." In conclusion, this paper suggests that Shakespeare's Hamlet marks the change of the historical horizon, a permanent removal from the past in which the ritual value had been once protected, pushing us to a new age to live with melancholy and the disconnection from things and their muted language.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.463-472
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to suggest a development model of English literature database, which will be widely available for narrative creation and editing in digital environment. The database will be allowed to assist effective recycling of various motifs prompted by existing literary works. This paper suggests how to build a story database of English literature by demonstrating a motif abstracting model with Hamlet originally written by William Shakespeare. It is hoped that this study will contribute to producing quality contents of storytelling and also give English literature experts chances of collaboration in the development of digitalized contents.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.83-103
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• 2013

This paper focuses on the function of suicidal images in the history of art including literature. Death has been romanticized or repoliticized into an existential act of defiance and rebellion in literary works, so questions remain about the correlation between literary suicide and the essence of suicide. Although Jacques Ranciere insists that the order of art contrasts with the order of common people whose acts and gestures can express either their specific purposes nor the rationalities of their frustration, literary suicide reflects the outside life of readers. In fact, images of suicide produces the order of things about the real world. William Shakespeare's Hamlet handled two oppositional self-murder significantly. As Ron M. Brown pointed out, Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is voluntary, thus he avoids self-destruction and feels triumph of heroic fashion. Ophelia's self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and diminishes her from the tragic to the pathetic(16). In the $19^{th}$ century, the resurrection of Ophelia acted as the context for later periods where life itself is fictionalized from the differing periods of network of signifier and texts. Finally, in Ophelia's case, fiction became life(Brown 285). Her suicidal image was fixed in the Victorian Culture whose visual discourse was strikingly similar to that of the men. Likewise, the ambiguities of the suicide became intertwined with the social, cultural issues of a certain period, and the paradigm of suicide was conformed to the changing needs of successive generations. However, if literary art understands that a European culture grappled with the almost impossible task and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent of phenomena, it will be able to focus on of the multi-layered suicide by recognizing the inherent instability of the verbal sign which cannot reveal the design and grammar of truth.