‘Liberamente inspirati dell’ “OTELLO” di WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’ (‘loosely based on William Shakespeare’s Othello’), according to the closing credits, Iago (dir. Volfango di Biasi, 2009) was released on 27 February 2009 (in Italy only). While the film takes Othello as its source of stimulation, it reimagines the play in several key respects. It features a lengthy ‘preface’, taking some considerable time (over half of the film’s length) to set up the drama of act 1. Approximating iambic pentameter with a demotic Italian vernacular, Iago then proceeds to follow the plot and structure of Othello quite closely. But completing the film’s adaptive excess is an ‘additional act’: this ‘extra’ screen time shifts the anticipated ending of Othello and delivers a narrative attendant upon, and emerging from, the Shakespearian conclusions of act 5.

The chapter considers several directions through the field of Shakespeare and world cinema while acknowledging that no one interpretive method can do justice to the variety of filmic engagements with the dramatist’s work across the globe. Accordingly, this chapter looks at films from Africa, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Slovakia, Spain and Thailand in terms of a range of approaches the auteur approach, regional perspectives, time-bound moments of production and reception, the woman practitioner, and the place of particular plays in the adaptive process. It attends to the adaptations of auteurs such as Vishal Bhardwaj, Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa and, at the same time, introduces readers to diverse adaptations of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, thereby making visible the methodological challenges and joys necessarily entailed in any encounter with world Shakespeare.

I explore the ways in which O Jogo da Vida e da Morte and A Herança deploy locale – the favela and the sertão. I stress the extent to which the films find comparable metaphorical resonances in their respective habitats, highlighting, in so doing, a series of intricate relationships between land, property and poverty. I go on to suggest, in the second section of the chapter, that the films’ intersecting treatment of the communal, the spiritual and the racial is evidenced in their privileging of rituals and celebrations, such as the Claudius/Gertrude wedding or the Old Hamlet/Ophelia funerals. O Jogo da Vida e da Morte and A Herança, I argue, are preoccupied with communities that fail or are unable to provide for their own, thereby introducing images of Brazil that run counter to populist conceptions. As I maintain in the chapter’s final section, A Herança discovers Omeleto/Hamlet at his death as distributing the estate to the peasantry, thus marking a radical break with traditions of land ownership in the north-eastern regions. O Jogo da Vida e da Morte, in contrast, visits little capacity for change on João/Hamlet, stressing his distinctive powerlessness and inertia. While A Herança endorses the ideal of a socialist utopia, then, O Jogo da Vida e da Morte assumes a more nihilistic attitude. Responsive to the straitened political conditions of Brazil in the early 1970s, O Jogo da Vida e da Morte and A Herança reveal the capacity of Hamlet to be pulled in two directions at the same time, occupying recuperative and defeatist positions, to address similar sets of difficulties.

This chapter discusses Hamile: The Tongo ‘Hamlet’ (dir. Terry Bishop, 1965), from Ghana, with an all-black cast, and the Boyokani Company’s Hamlet (dir. Hugues Serge Limbvani, 2007), from the Republic of Congo, which, with the exception of one white actor, also deploys a black cast. Hamile and the Boyokani Hamlet are preoccupied with a thematics of place, whether this shows itself, in the former case, in the will to affirm the élan of a newly formed nation state or, in the latter case, in the ventilating of African-centred questions about woman and the supernatural. Developing such thematics, both films assert varieties of what has been termed ‘Africanity’, a repository of shared discourses, experiences and inheritances, and find that a British/European play can indeed be made to work in an African milieu.

This chapter argues that cinematic adaptations of Hamlet illuminate the cross-fertilizing ways in which Western Europe has continued to define and represent itself. The play is enlisted firstly as a means of assurance and democratization and as a channel for unease. Secondly, the play is used to ventilate conflicting national preoccupations in contexts of industrial discontent, youth culture and mass movement protest. Thirdly, the play in cinematic form points up how the post-war project of European integration comes into conflict with new developments arising from mass immigration, demographic realignment and the pressures involved in increasingly networked European organizations.

The first section argues that İntikam Meleği and Tardid are distinguished by elaborating different constructions of the Old Hamlet/Ghost figure, which is foregrounded in such a way as to address ideas about the execution of justice, the mission of the Hamletian protagonist and the status of the image. Acknowledging the adaptive process entails a corresponding focus on issues of performance. In the second section, I unpick the political valences of both films’ immersion in performance idioms, identifying the significations of the play-within-the-play in İntikam Meleği and the coded ways in which metaphors of water in Tardid, and Siavash/Hamlet’s photojournalism, intimate resistant ideologies. Even as İntikam Meleği and Tardid conjure expectations about the trajectory of the play, I maintain, they also subject them to scrutiny and reversal. This is nowhere more obvious than in both films’ privileging, via casting or rewriting, of women’s roles: İntikam Meleği’s dynamic female Hamlet, for example, is matched by an equivalently pro-active Mahtab/Ophelia in Tardid, who is granted an agency beyond the constrictions of her Shakespearean equivalent.

In Tardid/Doubt (dir. Varuzh Karim-Masihi, 2009), a stylish and innovative Iranian film adaptation of Hamlet, ‘To be, or not to be’ is allusively referenced. In an archivist’s cluttered and grimy basement office, the camera zooms in on a framed quotation in Farsi hanging on the walls, but, rather than the words of the Qur’an, as might be expected, it is the opening lines of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy that are visualized. The power and reach of the lines were brought home to me on a blustery autumnal day in 2014 as I made plans to interview Tardid’s director and speak at the inaugural ‘First International Conference on Shakespeare in Iran’. In search of an elusive visa, and in the context of the closure of the Iranian Embassy in London, I presented myself at the Iranian Embassy in Dublin. Once beyond the forbidding gates, the official in charge leaned in towards the glass separating us and inquired rather fiercely as to the purpose of my visit. Eager to ingratiate myself, I explained that I was keen to speak at the first Shakespeare conference in Iran. The official seemed uncomprehending, and a barrage of unpromising questions followed. At no point did I mention Hamlet. But, after ten minutes back and forth, he beckoned me closer and, with a half-smile playing around his lips, whispered, ‘To be, or not to be’, before whipping away my passport for approval. Left alone, I wondered if he knew of the Qur’an-like soliloquy in Tardid or perhaps was aware of the long-standing traditions of translation and performance of Shakespeare in the Middle East. Whichever way, the brief moment of connection was typical of the often humbling encounters that have informed my thinking about Hamlet’s cinematic kudos and power in the world.

This chapter contends that fully capturing the diversity of Hamlet adaptations in India involves taking much more account of regional distinctiveness.[i] Between the earliest of the Hamlet films and the three adaptations of the play discussed in this chapter – Karmayogi (dir. V. K. Prakash, 2012), Haider (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2014) and Hemanta (dir. Anjan Dutt, 2016) – there are shared approaches which stand as testimony to a revitalized interest in the multiple ways in which Hamlet is mobilized. Karmayogi, Haider and Hemanta contest the usefulness of the ‘Bollywood’ identifier and go beyond current applications of the label in theme and content, opening fresh ways of accessing Shakespeare inside Indian milieux. Each film renders explicit what is involved in the work of adaptation, acknowledging the play as a reflexive prompt for dialogue, iconography and on-screen text.

I explore the ways in which O Jogo da Vida e da Morte and A Herança deploy locale – the favela and the sertão. I stress the extent to which the films find comparable metaphorical resonances in their respective habitats, highlighting, in so doing, a series of intricate relationships between land, property and poverty. I go on to suggest, in the second section of the chapter, that the films’ intersecting treatment of the communal, the spiritual and the racial is evidenced in their privileging of rituals and celebrations, such as the Claudius/Gertrude wedding or the Old Hamlet/Ophelia funerals. O Jogo da Vida e da Morte and A Herança, I argue, are preoccupied with communities that fail or are unable to provide for their own, thereby introducing images of Brazil that run counter to populist conceptions. As I maintain in the chapter’s final section, A Herança discovers Omeleto/Hamlet at his death as distributing the estate to the peasantry, thus marking a radical break with traditions of land ownership in the north-eastern regions. O Jogo da Vida e da Morte, in contrast, visits little capacity for change on João/Hamlet, stressing his distinctive powerlessness and inertia. While A Herança endorses the ideal of a socialist utopia, then, O Jogo da Vida e da Morte assumes a more nihilistic attitude. Responsive to the straitened political conditions of Brazil in the early 1970s, O Jogo da Vida e da Morte and A Herança reveal the capacity of Hamlet to be pulled in two directions at the same time, occupying recuperative and defeatist positions, to address similar sets of difficulties.

This chapter contends that Gamlet is important not so much as an end-point than as a beginning. The film, I argue, establishes a template for interpretation that has determined the thinking of subsequent Russian, Central and East European filmmakers.