Spectator Violence and Queenly Desire in The Banquet

Authors

  • Rebecca Chapman Vanderbilt University

Abstract

Cluster: Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective

Edited by Alexa Huang

Unique among Hamlet adaptations, The Banquet resists the tendency in Hollywood cinematic tradition of minimizing Gertrude to a structural device used to develop the figures of Hamlet and Claudius. Instead, Empress Wan, loosely the Gertrude figure, emerges as a figure of adaptation itself, usurping the structural and visual focus as she usurps the throne. However, Wan's mysterious murder at the film's end poses the question of just how perverse an adaptation spectators are willing to accept.

Author Biography

Rebecca Chapman, Vanderbilt University

Rebecca Chapman is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, where she received her Ph.D. in English in 2009. Her research explores the fantasies and anxieties surrounding the concept of stage drama — especially Shakespeare's — as a cultural catalyst in the early modern period and in the present moment. She is currently working on her first book project, Rehabilitating Shakespeare, in which she develops a performative-based and interdisciplinary mode of queer theory to examine the emergent paradigmatic quality of Shakespeare as a tool for social rehabilitation.

ssue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009. Image: Two dancers from a still from The Banquet pose with their faces close together.

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Published

2009-05-01

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2009): Spring/Summer

Section

Articles