Spectres of Shakespeare: Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet and the intercultural myth

Abstract

Located within the myth of Shakespeare’s universality is a belief in the power and poeticism of his language. If we acknowledge Richard Eyre’s assertion that ‘the life of the plays is in the language’, what becomes of this myth when Shakespeare is ‘transferred’ across cultures? What happens to Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ in these cultural re-articulations? Using Ong Keng Sen’s Search Hamlet (2002), this paper examines the transference of myth and/as language in intercultural Shakespeares. It posits that intercultural imaginings of Shakespeare can be said to expose the hollow myth of universality yet in a paradoxical double-bind reify and reinstate this self-same myth.