Authenticity Through Intermedial Liveness: Throne of Blood and The King and the Clown

This chapter begins with the argument that the widespread printing of play-texts in the burgeoning print culture of early-modern England gave rise in counterpoint to a new sense of liveness in the theatre. With this foundation, I study how famous metaphors of theatre (“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,” etc.) are evoked and reworked by recreating the sense of liveness through cinematic means in the films Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s classic retelling of Macbeth, and The King and the Clown, a very loose, Korean adaptation of Hamlet. With regard to Throne of Blood, I revisit the film’s well-recognized reliance on the aesthetics and moral vision of Noh to study moments in which the mise-en-scène recalls not only the Noh stage but the platform stage of Shakespeare’s amphitheatre, as in the film’s famous ending scene in which Washizu (the Macbeth figure) appears on the castle gallery and gets killed by a shower of arrows. Such moments of liveness reinforce the Buddhist sense of the ephemerality and nothingness of even the most intense human actions. I juxtapose this reading with my analysis of The King and the Clown, a film set in Chosun Dynasty Korea that tells the story of two itinerant clowns, or players, who perform subversive variations of talchum (Korean masked drama) in various yards (madang) of Korea and eventually get punished for them. I conclude that the film presents live theatre as the performance of a defiant form of authenticity.