To love or not to be: Janek Ledecky’s musical hamlet and Shakespeare negotiations in Korea

Janek Ledecký’s Musical Hamlet is a significant addition to Shakespeare’s musicology that deserves scholarly attention. This Czech-originated musical, which ran worldwide from 1999 to 2012, is a rare version of the play that successfully accommodates the tragic in a commercial musical form. This article examines the birth of Musical Hamlet as tragic melodrama in relation to the rise of the mega-musical. After a brief description of how it is adapted into a tragic romance, it considers Shakespeare’s relation to popular culture, particularly in the South Korean context, examining the production, marketing and reception of Musical Hamlet in Seoul. The four revivals of Musical Hamlet in Korea record a process of careful negotiations between Shakespeare and the theatre market to produce a middlebrow cultural entertainment. Shakespeare’s dwindling share in the negotiations demonstrates the dominance of late capitalist nobrow over residual high art in the cultural geography of South Korea. Yeeyon Im is Associate Professor of English at Yeungnam University in South Korea, where she teaches Shakespeare and drama. She has also translated the plays of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe into Korean scene.