This issue of Forum for World Literature Studies focuses on the English Renaissance from a global perspective. It consists of two collections of essays, one for each of the two greatest English poets, William Shakespeare and John Milton. The first collection, titled “World Shakespeares,” continues work begun in Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross (Purdue University Press, 2009), and has been further inspired by the recent publication of Chinese Shakespeares by Alexander C. Y. Huang (Columbia University Press, 2009). These articles look at Shakespeare’s influence and legacy not only in different countries but also in different regions and literary genres; that is, not only in France, China, and Brazil, but also in Iowa and the mythical town of Macondo.

The French have long both admired Shakespeare and despaired at finding a way to compete with his greatness. Voltaire imitated Othello in his play Zaïre, to great success, while perhaps the greatest French film, The Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis), includes a rousing staging of the death of Desdemona on the French stage of the 1830s. The main characters in the film each stress some aspect of how the French sought to incorporate Shakespeare while maintaining their own cultural identity.

Shakespeare and the U.S. state of Iowa have few, if any, direct connections. Yet even from Iowa’s early pioneer days of the mid‑nineteenth century, Shakespeare has maintained a notable presence in Iowans’ reading habits and imaginations due to his use of agricultural motifs to portray families in crisis, particularly in Hamlet and King Lear. Centered around the associated themes of individual toil and familial strife, this article surveys the history of Shakespeare in Iowa—from Hamlin Garland’s recollections about farm life in the 1870s to two contemporary film adaptations, Field of Dreams and A Thousand Acres.

Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas reverses the characteristic gaze of Hollywood films by refusing to confine itself to the “other” position. The film is an example of hybrid Shakespeare, but instead of waiting passively for Shakespeare’s gaze, Hu challenges Shakespeare—especially Shakespeare’s characterization of the female characters in the play. Using elements of Eastern culture, Hu rewrites Gertrude and Ophelia, and creates the wolf‑woman. By reversing the relationship between the gazer and the gazed, Hu establishes the theme of love, forgiveness, and faith. Hu’s anti‑gaze marks a new trend of Asian Shakespeares.

This paper investigates the cultural logics that justify the typical marketing decision to opt for a complete localization of the original materials and thus minimize the foreign literary source in transnational Chinese film adaptations. I will use Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet as a case study to examine the cultural logics and politics of transnational Shakespeare adaptation in contemporary Chinese cinema. I argue that Feng Xiaogang’s appropriation of the Shakespearean text is a re‑production of a textual cultural identity that situates the narrative within the continuum of Chinese visual and literary traditions through thematic displacement, structural gender politics, and visual signifier re‑configuration.

Until the mid‑1990s, Brazilian cinema often depicted women as exotic sexual objects. After the turn of the 21st century, however, Brazilian movie directors began to reproduce women as strong characters who defy traditional patriarchal authority. This paper investigates four Brazilian media works that appropriate Shakespearean plays, namely the soap opera O Cravo e a Rosa and three movies: O Auto da Compadecida, O Casamento de Romeu e Julieta, and As Alegres Comadres. In each case, directors not only incorporate elements pertaining to Brazilian cultural identity into Shakespearean plots, but also portray female characters who subvert traditional female roles in order to exert their agency.

Modernity’s impulse to control both collective and individual memory in an effort to shape a more marketable persona parallels a shift in the regard of magic—a shift that characterizes the postcolonial revolutions invigorating Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad as much as the early modern renaissances that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. While Hamlet struggles with the irruption of magic in a world that no longer has room for ghosts, the Buendías of Macondo suffer the extinction of a magic that stitches their world together. In both cases, the ability to control memory represents modernity’s sublimation of magic and the means to its reconstruction of the world.

In this essay I explore the question of the kind and degree of interest in Egyptian antiquities that may have existed in England during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Would at least some members of the audience for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the time of its initial production have known (or thought that they knew) something about ancient Egypt other than what could be gleaned from North’s translation of Plutarch, and would Shakespeare have been able to assume that this knowledge existed so that he could invoke and play upon it? I am not arguing that Shakespeare either knew or cared about Hermetism or the related Neoplatonic esoterica circulating in Humanist circles in the period, much of it mistakenly associated with ancient Egypt. I am more interested in the relatively mundane question of whether or not there was an intellectual, and even a practical, commerce in the “stuff” of ancient Egypt—pyramids, mummies, burial goods, hieroglyphics—during Shakespeare’s later career. Could and would such “stuff” be represented on the English stage?  Since Antony and Cleopatra itself yields little explicit direction on these questions, the answers are circumstantial and involve some contextual bracketing of the play, using evidence available in reasonably close chronological proximity, whether before or after, to the play’s putative first production date of 1606–07. But I think a good case can be made that the prevalent English attitude toward the monuments and practices of ancient Egypt emphasized a notion of inordinate expense in the service of mysterious ends, and that Shakespeare made use of this notion in creating Cleopatra’s Alexandrian milieu.

The presence (and absence) of non‑English vernaculars in the travel narratives of the second edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600) is considered in light of what Stephen Greenblatt calls the “epistemological optimism” of early modern English travelers. While linguistic difference (and some resulting incomprehension) would seem to be an inevitable condition of travel, especially travel beyond Europe, English travelers tend to give relatively little attention to the languages spoken by the people they encounter. They acknowledge linguistic difference in two contexts in which epistemological optimism fails: when they encounter the languages of people they consider savage, and when they find themselves under stress and mention their interpreters. When the English hear unfamiliar foreign languages, they tend to take them as overwhelming, and their textual descriptions and judgments seek to reinscribe distance and difference. Language is worth writing about when it is heard as strange, and travelers seem to hear patterns and sounds as much as they hear individual, meaningful words. In court settings, language difference is acknowledged mainly through occasional mentions of interpreters. Interpreters are mentioned either when the possibility of comprehension is novel or when the English traveler is uncomfortable or uncertain in a foreign setting. When travelers write about language difference we can see a break in the epistemological optimism that often characterizes encounters between the English and the “other” in early modern travel texts. The captivity narrative of Miles Phillips is a striking exception. Phillips uses language flexibly in order to navigate global networks of exchange.

The literary tradition romanticizing Alexander the Great began with the pivotal text Pseudo‑Callisthenes (ca. 200 A.D.), which was translated and disseminated along two trajectories: Eastern and Western. This thriving literary tradition established Alexander as an immensely influential figure, a king whose greatness was to be aspired to and emulated. The admiration for Alexander was a truly cross‑cultural phenomenon, reflected in the majority of the Alexander texts, from England to the Middle East. However, if medieval texts were alike in their glorification and claiming of Alexander, they were even more united in their attitude toward—if not their treatment of—Olympias. This essay argues that closely examining the alterations regarding the representations of Alexander and Olympias at the two most disparate points along the trajectories—the Middle English The Wars of Alexander (ca. 1400) and the Arabic Qissat Dhulqarnayn (ca. 1200)—reveals the underlying cross‑cultural congruity in the medieval period. It illuminates the extent to which Alexander became a universal figure, transcending cultural boundaries, while Olympias became a controversial, polarizing, and variable entity: a figure of paramount importance who is both preserved intact and fundamentally altered.

Offering descriptions of a few works of prose fiction written in English from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the present essay attempts to supplement T. S. Eliot’s somewhat polemical notion of Joyce’s “mythical method,” which is here re‑understood as a continuous element in certain select narratives, rather than as any kind of substitute for narrative method itself (as it apparently is in The Waste Land). The essay demonstrates the workings of this kind of (modified) mythical method by retailing novels that subordinate correspondence with—and allusion to—a somewhat mythic or archaic original to their own particular stories, even while wittily maintaining contact with a specific archetypal narrative, or “scripture,” overtly or covertly acknowledged or disclosed by the text in the course of its own narration. The novels summarized and quoted from are Ian Fleming’s Dr. No in relation to the St. George myth, George Meredith’s The Egoist in relation to the legend allegedly found on willow pattern china, Henry Fielding’s Amelia in relation to Virgil’s Aeneid, and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather in relation to the Davidic Succession Document in the Bible. The last two novels of Henry James in relation to the patriarchal marriage saga in the Bible, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in relation to Moby‑Dick, bracket the discussion overall, and demonstrate de‑mythicization and re‑mythicization as the two poles and termini of the discourse.

Milton’s Paradise Lost draws upon the classical epic tradition, while seeking to revise it in Christian terms. Adam’s tragic choice in Book IX is modeled on Achilles’ in Homer’s Iliad. Achilles chooses to live a short but heroic life rather than a long but inglorious one. Confronted with Eve’s transgression in Book IX, Adam makes a similar choice—to join Eve in sin and thereby expose himself to the possibility of death. Following the Bible, Milton must present this act negatively as a fall, but he nevertheless portrays Adam’s decision in epic terms and hence as heroic. Viewing Milton’s characters in light of Hegel’s theory of recognition in his Phenomenology of Spirit helps to analyze the ways in which Eve and Adam seek to establish their autonomy as human beings. In Hegel’s—and Milton’s—terms, they cannot be fully human until they leave the sheltered, animal‑like state of Eden and risk death. In line with Milton’s claim in Areopagitica—“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue”—his notion of the fortunate fall is fundamentally Protestant. What appears to be Adam’s turn away from God turns out to be a heroic path toward a new spirituality, a path of Protestant struggle.

This essay identifies and explores the situation of characters in three interventions of Satan by the good angels over Paradise Lost, proceeding to a reference to a confrontation with Satan in a single verse signifying the textual significance of a common configuration in linked works. It begins with the apprehension of the sleeping Adam and Eve in Book IV of Paradise Lost, continues with the confrontation between the Archangel Michael and Satan in the New Testament Epistle of Jude, and concludes with a related scene from Book XVI of Homer’s Iliad, where Zeus confronts the body of his son Sarpedon.

John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is an odd devotional text, and it seems especially so when attempts are made to speak of its spiritual efficacy for early modern readers. Donne’s text does not conform to the standard devotional conventions of the period, whether employed by Catholic or Protestant devotional writers, and its peculiar emphasis upon recording a prolonged experience of suffering marks it as distinct from similar early modern works of “daily devotion”—works that instead focus upon detailing protocols for devotion and not the emotional and psychological effects that result from enacting those protocols. This essay looks at the conventions that were typical of early modern devotional writing, using St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and Bishop Joseph Hall’s The Art of Divine Meditation as representative examples of devotional writing in the period.

In April 2010, the result of the 2nd Nara International Myriad Leaves Prize of Japan was announced publicly. Professor Wang Xiaoping, member of the FWLS Editorial Board from Tianjin Normal University in China, was awarded the prize. The Asahi Shimbun and other major newspapers of Japan reported the news.