Shakespeare S Cultural Capital In Popul

Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital in Popular Cinema:
Chinese Filmic Spinoffs of Hamlet

Lingui Yang

Year 2006 saw two made-in-China films based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet—Feng Xiaogang’s Madarin Yeyan (The Banquet) and Sherwood Hu’s Tibetan Ximalaya wangzi (The Prince of the Himalayas). For their Shakespearean components, the films join their counterparts elsewhere around the globe that interpret, appropriate, dissemble, and reconstruct Shakespeare’s canonical text. To be sure, they have in their own ways recycled and added value to the Bard’s cultural capital in a re-boost of his popularity in postmodern media—either on the niche or the commercial market. Since foreign language films based on Shakespeare are out of the theoretic radar of Shakespeare adaptation, fidelity seems beyond concern,1 and in spite of their relations with the play, it is not my position to do justice to the ways in which the two filmic spinoffs handle the English Bard’s authority. Rather, I would focus on how the two movies as independent art works make use of his cultural capital to present their hermeneutics of both Shakespeare and local cultures through the popular media. I will examine how they reinvent the Shakespearean story and how they treat the local history and culture, in which they set their cinematic narratives. I will also ask these questions: Are history and culture thematically or dramaturgically crucial to Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Or, why are they significant to such a revenge story anyway? In addressing some of the questions, I will critique the movies’ revalorizations of the natural sphere and some particular cultural meanings they unintentionally consolidate or attempt to challenge. Some of these meanings may be to feminist chagrin or problematic from a post-structural perspective. Finally, I will argue that the two films add complexities to our definitions of modernity and postmodernity in terms of cultural production. While the films confirm some of Fredric Jameson’s assertions, they also provide new edges for us to approach the hybrid nature of cultural products in their own ways of addressing contemporary consumers. Successful or not, there is some novelty, with which the two films retell the Hamlet story, in the adaptors’ presentations of history and culture, as relevant to Shakespeare’s fiction, for 21st century multimedia audiences.

The narratives of both films are structured by an unusual style that celebrates local landscape and ancient culture through borrowing, one way or another, Shakespearean plots wrapped in a color-saturated mise-en-scène. The notable plot of a prince’s revenge within the royal family, along with other families’ revenge subplots, a play-within-the-play, eavesdropping, and the prince’s tragic fate, is clearly visible and comparable in both movies. Yet the prince has lived a new life in period costumes of different cultures before he has to embrace his universally-accepted trademark destiny. The Prince of the Himalayas takes his spirit onto the globe’s highest plateau while The Banquet sets him in a political center of ancient China. Through reinventing the Shakespearean story and the local cultures at once, each makes a cinematic myth of a fictional world of ancient history—either in pre-Buddhism Tibet or in the war-ridden Chinese empire of the 10th-century. In addition, either myth is framed with audio-visual effects of the particular cultures in a multi-dimensional space of the cinema. Various elements of this frame define the characters and events through visual and narrative textures, modern lighting, color contrast, period music, moving camera, and peculiar positioning of figures. Intriguingly, all these elements in the two movies, albeit in different ways pertaining to their specific thematic requirements, rely on landscape and cultural particulars in the filmic re-significations of the story.
Hu’s movie is set in an unclear territory of the geo-cultural borders, which we know now as Tibet and other culturally-related Himalayan provinces of China, in a pre-Buddhist period before the 7th century A.D. Hu has recruited two Tibetan writers as his co-playwrights along with an all-Tibetan cast to participate in the reconstruction of cultural memories of the region so that the film features cultural details of the Himalayas. They construct minstrel tales, mystic traditions, surreal relations between nature and tribal history, gods of nature, and close-ups of Tibetan physiology, and ethnic customs, costumes, and rituals. In addition to capturing typical Himalayan landscapes in the true colors of the snowy mountains where one can experience the four seasons within one day, the director has attempted to revoke or rebuild an epic tradition through cinematography in adapting the Hamlet story in the Tibetan language.
Shakespeare’s revenge story becomes a tale of hope for the tribal kingdom, where people have experienced mistakes as a result of seeking love and hate and eventually show the strength of their reconciliation and forgiveness. The force of such emotions as affection, desire, and loneliness has been explored in another way in Feng’s retelling of the revenge story. In The Banquet, desire creates and destroys as well in a society where it takes charge in human relations; it devours and takes into perpetual darkness all it touches including the subject who desires, leaving no bright or rosy memories to the audience. The theme of desire is developed in a matching frame within a specific moment in Chinese history when desire, in multiple forms, takes reign of the private and public lives of kingdoms.
Set in the interior of China in the period known as Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, when mighty lords wrestled for power after the collapse of the last regime of the glorious and prosperous Tang Dynasty in 907 A.D., the movie unfolds how desire works in political intrigues and power struggles. Civil wars and upheaval plague the country when unrestricted desires are unleashed and pervade all corners of society. As such, a voiceover as narrator of an audio-visual prelude, composed with the sound and fury of battlefields, brings modern audiences into the cultural landscape of Chinese history. Against this background, the movie intersperses filmic reconstructs of historical and cultural artifacts with the fiction about events of an imperial family.
Presenting this Chinese story containing loosely Shakespearean plots, the filmmaker fills a 131-minute filmic space with full and contrastive colors (especially red, white, black, and green), dazzling period landscape and architecture, breathtaking martial arts, historical and cultural allusions, fascinating musical and melodramatic effects, technologically-treated lighting, and symbolic and sometimes ostentatious visual imagery. All the technically filmic strategies have been used to make a “Chinese neo-classicist film”2 that the director proclaims to achieve in making such a film of mixed-genres, mixed-sources, and mixed-media for mixed international audiences.
In their own ways, therefore, these two China-made movies have come to join in the international game of adapting Shakespeare’s stories. Not only that Shakespeare’s story is used and altered, but historical and cultural elements are exploited to claim for a unique style of filmmaking, so much as Akira Kurosawa’s revolutionary use of Japanese landscape and costumes, or Kenneth Branagh’s 19th-century period setting, or Michael Almereyda’s postmodern spin-off. Whether or not these new comers are comparable with the recognized Shakespeare adapters such as Kurosawa and Branagh, at least they provide more alternatives to the Hollywood-styled filmmaking.

The two films’ specialties of the landscape and cultural elements are attractive enough for both domestic and international viewers with a nostalgic or tourist curiosity. Why Shakespeare, then? Why is the foreign name of Hamlet invoked as revenge stories similar to, or more complicated than, Hamlet are available in Chinese art and history? Surely, through almost two centuries of Shakespeare’s popularity in China, his adaptations in Chinese art forms, and especially his re-exports in various forms of xiqu, news about the marriage between the English Bard and Chinese culture does not sound odd to either Chinese or foreign ears any more. For Chinese filmmakers to put Shakespeare in their production list, however, there must be things in him that are particularly appealing. Clichéd, the saying that the revoking of the foreign and the past always serves specific local and present purposes is true to the cinematic circulation of Shakespeare’s cultural capital. At least, this capital is resourceful for defining the modern and postmodern elements and sentiments in the two films in question. What’s more, the films give us chances to see how Shakespeare is engaged beyond the cultural signs within the cinema. The various processes, in which the made-in-China Shakespearean movies negotiate with the social-cultural conditions under which they are produced, involve at once the spaces of high-popular culture and local-global culture in postmodern life. As much as we can say that the whole world is a market in the global village, therefore, everything of the postmodern is cultural in Fredric Jameson’s words. Jameson’s distinction of modernity and postmodernity in Western society is dictated culturally by whether or not we see history as a totality, in which meanings as well as humans are explicitly stratified, and economically by a periodization of capitalist development, especially after the United States has taken domination in the world capitalist system in a globalizing attempt3. While the modernist sees a utopian view of history with a clear designation of meaning, the postmodernist destabilizes it by separating the signified from the signifier. Meanings are specifically and locally assigned to a sign that used to be seen to represent a stable, universal meaning. Social and cultural activities are eventually determined by the economic forces according to the classic Marxist view that Jameson subscribes to. The logic of capitalism relies on the operation of the market, which has been increasingly globalized by corporations and international financial systems operated at Wall Street4. Like other forms of production, cultural production in the capitalist system, whether or not with its relative autonomy, relies on the market, and the cinema is a “product of the most sophisticated forms of industrial production.”5 If we scan The Prince of the Himalayas and The Banquet against each of the cultural and economic definitions, we may spot both matching points and misfits. Culturally, we may identify Hu’s root searching for meaning through filmmaking as modern and Feng’s collation of multiple cultural signs as postmodern. While the former’s ultimate root may dwell on a query over the meaning of life through realistic and surrealistic cinematography, the latter totally defies the Hamletian philosophical dilemma, which albeit may mean postmodern to many, through a pastiche practice, in which even Empress Wan’s final irony can be deconstructed. Hu’s capturing of the Prince on the plateau demonstrates the classic dilemma as Hamlet experiences or a Freudian Oedipus complex: both the father(s) in the film and the father in the director’s life must pass a will to the heir or the newly-born who avenges the death with making available the rebirth, either of a tribe/nation or of hope for future. The father teaches the lesson of life in an agonic death. The film gives meaning to life in a utopian view that eternal life exists in the transmigration of love and passes that view to the audience through symbolic shooting of the unions of the landscape elements and of nature and the human body, and of body and soul. Even the mythical elements as in the figure of Lady Wolf serve a human cause. She heals the prince’s wounds and helps him out of mental crisis with a portion of the love therapy. The Christian notions of love and forgiveness are naturally yet magically transplanted into the Tibetan soil. In this sense, the film gives a humanist edge to Tibetan Buddhism or its predecessor Bon. For the director, the humanist cause is relayed from his father’s will for directing a Chinese performance of the play in the name of Hamlet, who has been idealized as the typical humanist hero by artists of the old Hu’s generation. Emphasizing the power of love is what that generation of Chinese intellectuals would find in Shakespeare’s humanism and would restore to Chinese life upon closing of the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, during which humanist values were criticized and banished. Furthermore, the human sacrifice, though unavoidable, is worthwhile because it brings the spiritual growth and final redemption. In Lady Wolf’s words, the prince is “doomed to face suffering and death” to find out the secrets of his fate. In facing his fate and rejecting the Ghost’s teaching of hatred, he gets strength and becomes the real hero of the Himalayan epic, in which humanity regains its integrity in a fictional frame. The epical film’s modernist search for humanist meanings ends up with a perfect circle starting from the “to be, or not to be” question. The reconstruct of a Tibetan utopia of love and forgiveness is a modernist illusion, magically woven into a filmic language through a lens of local landscape and culture. Feng’s film displaces the question and replaces it with a “seemingly abstract philosophical thought”6 of loneliness, a quotidian sentiment in technology-dominated postmodern life, in which nothing is real except money. The former is too philosophical and too high-cultural for this life, whereas the latter provides a quasi-philosophical feel in the 21st-century popular trend of performance of emotions without the burden of getting the “real” meaning. Catering to this trend, The Banquet allegorizes loneliness for mass consumption using cross-cultural, cross-historical signs and mixed genres and styles, a practice that falls into Jameson’s definition of pastiche as a postmodernist mode of cultural expression that imitates past styles without depth and historicity. This displacement does not contain any sense of parody of Chinese history or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the alleged sources for the movie, exemplifying pastiche’s displacement of parody. As Jameson defines:
Pastiche is, unlike parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.7
What the film wears is not only a linguistic mask or “masks of extinct mannerisms,”8 but masks literally as part of its mimicry of the Tang style as discussed earlier. What the mask does to the film, furthermore, is fulfilled with the change of faces—the displacement of a fictionally historical face by the face of the movie star, Zhang Ziyi. Zhang’s glamour as the internationally-know star for her roles in award-winning films by Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee and recently in Memoir of a Geisha is more important than Wan’s loneliness to the box office success of the film. To highlight her role for the Japanese cinema market, the title of the film is even changed to “女帝(Empress)” at its Japanese premiere. And its title for the US release on DVD, Legend of the Black Scorpion, identifies the empress with the venous scorpion, further testifying the key role of Wan in the film as well as the importance of her performer Zhang Ziyi to the film. Here another displacement takes place: the image of the performer displaces the ambitious empress in the film. Or, more exactly, the ambitious role has been created to give the actress more time and more room for performance. Modernist “aesthetic” concerns give way to face value of stars in postmodern time to follow the market rule. Hence, it does not matter if the performance is in Japanese or Chinese costumes or whatever historical period the cultural references are to. The most important is starry effects of images of the past.
In addition to the masks, there are visual and aural images of other “historical” artifacts: costumes, hairdo, architecture, court dances, archaic paintings, and a “classic” poem, dated even earlier than the “historical” setting of the movie. This poem is scored into a theme song by Tan Dun, an artist who has cross-cultural education and professional experience and sung by singers of different ethic and gender groups. Images of the past are matched with musical effects, including a melancholic tune for the forest scene with the modern instrument of piano, and another song of the theme of loneliness, in a gloomy modern melody for Empress Wan or rather Zhang Ziyi.
The “aesthetics of classic Chinese culture” in Feng’s coinage, then, is represented with these glossy images. All the references to the Tang Dynasty, one of the most glorious periods in Chinese history, seems to have some nostalgic value. Using the cultural signs or past “referents,” the film “approaches the ‘past’ through stylistic connotations, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image.”9 By celebrating the cult of images, Feng’s postmodern pastiche is appealing to his audiences who are in compliance with the blockbuster way of entertainment. In fact, this multicultural international audience, already modeled by the popular cinema, does not care if historicity is “genuine” and if its performance of loneliness represents real experience in postmodern life. Therefore, the filmic glossing of historical effects is conditioned with commercial concerns and the paradoxical practice of marketing. Market success relies on the quality of contemporary remaking of past styles while it vacates their historicity and reduces them to signs, necessitating the breakdown between signifier and the signified. As a pioneering Chinese commercial film director, Feng has been skilful in playing with aesthetics of the film industry and is ready to explore the commercial film market. The Banquet has been produced in this time when China is transforming from the world factory to a big market for cultural products as well as consumer goods and when the Chinese cinema has begun to experiment the concept of the commercial film market10. Around the millennial turn, Chinese filmmakers and directors11 enter the market, which has become so sophisticated elsewhere that the contradictions between art quality and marketability, between high and low cultures, between the local and the global tend to collapse within and beyond the cinema12. Consequently, the success or failure in practitioners’ handling these contradictions may not be a criterion for judging their box office achievements, on the one hand. They may rely on both ends to keep their financial investment balanced, on the other hand, as they target both the domestic and the international markets. It is at this point, or in economic sense, that the two Chinese Hamlet films share some postmodern qualities. But, it does not mean that the filmmakers adopt the same strategies for the production and circulation of the movie.
In addressing these markets, the production of the two films demonstrates contrastive trajectories of success, which illustrates that the cinema as a cultural site can be both modern and postmodern in its cultural and economic senses as well. While The Prince of the Himalayas may be identified as an art film for its low investment and in arguably targeting an overt niche market, The Banquet articulately exploits the international market of the commercial cinema. The former, pronounced to be a filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Tibetan language, appeals to audiences who have an interest in Shakespeare and a curiosity in how he can survive in an exotic cultural location. The latter, based only loosely on Shakespeare’s play, adopts strategies in business operation for success in mass entertainment. Yet, the niche-versus-mass distinction may conceal the complexities of the films’ statuses in postmodern culture. In this culture, capital flows at both ends of extremes in the globalized, digitalized, and corporationalized entertainment industry13. In the case of the two films, both niche and popular labeling can be self-serving commercial hooks.
The Banquet’s producers have equipped the big-money making of the film with all the appeals to the box office: worldwide campaigning team with aggressive strategies to advertise the all star crew, commonly-recognized cultural signs, period film’s glossy images of the past, and kung fu actions featured in an artistic frame. First of all, the film owns the bankable, brand-named director, Feng Xiaogang. Though labeled as a Feng film, it is a corporate product. As a commodity, it belongs to the investor and producer, Huayi Brothers.14 According to Wang Zhongjun, the CEO and Producer of Huayi, the making of film is the company’s choice, and Feng’s status as one of the most valued Chinese directors would help the company get back investment substantially and make profit on the 120 million CNY (about $17 million) project.15
The big-name director recruits an all-star crew, composed of stars well-known in the Chinese speaking world and some globally known, including Zhang Ziyi, Zhou Xun, Ge You, Daniel Wu, and Huang Xiaoming. The shiny system is decorated with Tim Yip’s art design, Tan Dun’s score16, and Zhang Liangying17 and Teng Ge’er’s songs. Advertising in the form of entertainment news was already initiated even before the story was in form and roles were fixed. Word was released in 2005 that Feng would direct a Chinese version of Shakespeare’s tragedy and the leading role would be given to an actress who had won international recognition, such as Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li, who appears in Zhang Yimou’s big-budget wuxia film Curse of the Golden Flower released earlier in 2006. Feng is proud of his choice of Zhang Ziyi, who he considers crucial to the success of the film, as he revealed addressing the press before the making was complete:
If I tell European and American vendors that I would relate a Chinese story taking place in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, my translator wouldn’t know how to translate. But if I say this is an Asian version of Hamlet starred by Zhang Ziyi, they will get it. In addition to her performance, Zhang Ziyi will be helpful to the film’s distribution. Knowing it is performed by Zhang Ziyi, big film vendors from all over the world will contact you actively for a view….18
So, in the two international appeals Feng mentions—Shakespeare’s Hamlet (who can say the figure is not used as a star in world culture?) and the film star—the latter overpowers the former in marketable glamour. Zhang Ziyi’s appearance, either personal or nominal, was made a full use in all the promotional events for the film in China or abroad in 2006, at its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival, at the film vendors preview at the Cannes Film Festival, at the Toronto International Film Festival, at the World Film Festival of Bangkok, and at all luxurious domestic campaigns. Both Shakespeare’s cultural capital and the star system’s popular capital prove to be effective, as the film gleans hard capital for its makers if not prominent professional recognition as its own cultural capital19. By the end of 2006, the overseas sales had exceeded the investment, and its 150-million-yuan domestic box office was the net income along with the surplus of international sales.20 Any criticism, negative or positive, cannot affect its popularity and economic efficiency. Although criticized for its ambiguous genre, unclear narrative, mixed language styles, tendency to cater to the popular taste for visual consumption, lack in depth of characterization, and problems in cultural references by domestic critics21, it is a success on the market. That’s the popular market rule. Conversely, this rule also seems to apply in evaluation of postmodern cultural products: a film’s success on the market is a testimony of its value in the industry it represents. For The Banquet’s making the box office, a blogger considers it a herald to the dawn of the era of Chinese big-budget films.22 Others summarize the positive values of the film to the building of the Chinese commercial film market23 and find in it an alternative narrative to the Hollywood mode of story telling. For example, the unexpectedness of Emperor Li’s suicide is considered a unique way of narrative to the typical Hollywood treatment to an evil character. Thus, a key difference of the Chinese formula of commercial films from that of the blockbuster films lies in the ending of the story. As an authoritative voice asserts, for example, the Chinese approach to the heroic figure—Wu Ming in Zhang Yimou’s wuxia film Yingxiong (Hero) or Wuluan in The Banquet—is a marker of the Chinese mainstream films.24 Both heroes as representatives of positive values will not get worldly happiness but fulfill their ideals by sacrificing their lives. Arguably, this theorization of the Chinese mainstream films attempts to ascribe high culture values to the popular cinema. As discussed earlier, however, the film actually does not owe its commercial success to ethical judgments of its characters, and Prince Wuluan is not the “hero” of the movie at all. The Prince of the Himalayas might fall into this “mainstream” of Chinese films if viewed from the closed ending narrative of its princely hero for its themes of positive values as that film expert suggests. Nonetheless, it is not comparable to The Banquet in box office so far so as to contribute to the expert’s optimistic vista of Chinese commercial films. To transform the Bard’s symbolic capital into hard capital, Hu might learn from Feng about how to employ the face value of Shakespeare and international stars without dipping much into his text, as too much Shakespeare and amateur leading performers might mean a box office killer. While Feng has never given credit to Shakespeare except for a mentioning of the Bard’s name in marketing maneuvers and employs an all star crew, Hu not only makes it clear at the end of his film that it has been “[a]dapted from Hamlet by William Shakespeare” as his salute to the Bard but lets his unknown performers utter Shakespearean lines in a minority language. Although this adaptation has departed substantially from Hamlet in the apocalyptical Tibetan story of love and forgiveness, it adopts much of the “Shakespearean” style of speech so that “too Shakespearean,” or too much of huaju style to be exact, is a problem some viewers find in Hu’s film25. Hu explains that the film only uses one-tenth of the soliloquy to respond to the comment that the “To be, or not to be” speech is too Shakespearean.26 The problem is that speeches in both the Tibetan and Chinese versions include the dramatic lines directly from the bilingual translations of Hamlet27, and are delivered as if the prince were on the huaju stage. More intriguingly, Hu called back his all-Tibetan filmic crew and led them into the huaju theater in his hometown soon after the film’s premiere. He pushed The Prince of the Himalayas onto the stage at Shanghai Grand Theater in May 2007 and revived it in four night shows as a special program for the Ninth Shanghai Art Festival at Shanghai Experimental Theater located on the campus of Shanghai Drama Academy later the year. The huaju performances of The Prince of the Himalayas have won great success28. And, this success surprisingly tends to break the boundary between the theater, the professional space of huaju, and the cinema, as well as the boundary between the high cultural shrine of Shakespeare and stardom, the world of popular stars and their fans. Hu does not need, then, to attend Feng’s commercial film school to learn skills for fixing the box office margin anymore since he has found self-serving marketing channels and owns a star-to-be to play the leading role in film, on stage, and on market. The breaking of the boundaries is significant on various levels. First of all, there can be some interface between theatrical space, supposedly dedicated to high culture, and cinematic space, mostly for the popular culture. Hu’s direction has made it possible for his crew and audiences to switch between the two spaces, as Lady Wolf does between the magical world and reality. Hu innovatively integrated episodes from his film to make stage settings using technological and cinematic techniques. He projected episodes, the montage scenes from the film, to a digitalized three-dimensional screen as background. As a result, the performance on stage seems to appear within the mise-en-scène of the film while adding a live effect to the film. The landscape of the Himalayas from the movie provides the “natural” context, in which players present the dramatic lines that connect the magical Tibetan elements with the illusional effects created with modern devices. And here, there may be another boundary collapsed, one between reality and illusion. Secondly, therefore, the promoting activities can be trafficking in two directions. The success of the stage performances helps the sale of the electronic copies (DVD copies for the home theater and filmic copies for the cinema), whereas the filmic existence has already offered a popular vendor for the theater tickets, on the other hand. The huaju and filmic versions of The Prince of the Himalayas are a mutual and double promotion of each other. On a third level, Hu has brooded a popular star in its incubation, and the star assists the sale of the film in turn when his name is established. Hu trained a potential actor with a Hamlet film before the actor became a national idol. Purba Rgyal, the performer of Prince Lhamoklodan, was green in performance and nameless when Hu recruited the Tibetan young man and began to shoot the film. About the time when the filmmaking was wrapped up, Purba Rgyal unexpectedly became a princely figure in the mind of Chinese youth upon winning the 2006 title of My Hero, the initial competition show on Shanghai Oriental Satellite TV. The real-life popular “prince of the Himalayas” came into being! Promotion of the film thereafter can rely on the prince’s glaring appeals to his fans. As soon as Purba Rgyal was nationally recognized, the marketing of both versions started to highlight the popular star, who having received professional training, became more skilful in performance as he graduated from Shanghai Drama Academy in September 2007. More importantly, his name is able to be put in favorable and profitable use for advertising The Prince of the Himalayas, both filmic and theatrical copies. If the two summits—the Himalayas where the Everest is and Shakespeare, the plateau of high culture from the uppermost of the Renaissance—are not appealing enough to Chinese audiences, the star will surely attract fans to his performances to unite the Bard with the popular kingdom. International fame may come late but is never useless for the popular market. Hu and his star have brought back awards from international festivals. The movie was recognized at the 2007 Los Angeles International Film Festival. Hu won the Best Director Award at an Italian International Film Festival in 2008. And, now the prince has become a king, as he was crowned with the Best Actor title at the Third Monaco International Film Festival in May 2008. As the epical story calls for the rule of Lhamoklodan’s son, the future king of Jiebo, Lhamoklodan’s player Purba Rgyal has begun to lead the popular world. Probably these awards may grow into a celebrity effect, which may shoot the sale of a filmic product to the sky. What’s more, his appearance in The Prince of the Himalayas, labeled as “A Sherwood Hu Film,” is helping promote Hus Entertainment Co. Ltd. and its multilingual, multicultural products. Last but not least, Hu’s practice shows us that Shakespeare’s universal image can be segmented into various local applications so that the whole enterprise of appropriating the Bard becomes a niche in business world. When Shakespeare becomes the brand name of the niche market, Shakespearean film is niched. In postmodern fragmentation, his high-culture image becomes integral with popular entertainment. Hu has added an entry to the Shakespeare film market; and, it is the Chinese market where all school children are officially introduced to the Bard and his Hamlet through their required and supplementary textbooks for the enlightenment of modern culture as their educators expect for including Shakespeare in the syllabus, not for their entertainment, though. The film makes the Hamlet story entertainingly accessible with the prince appearing in their idol’s image now. The niche market can be potentially profitable when each year millions of Chinese kids get to know the story, read the universal line of “To be, or not to be” in translation or in the original language, and probably enjoy a watch of a local prince in the movie. Hu always has an eye for the potential, perhaps unintentionally, as he did in ferreting out and training a latent star. Pertinent to both films, thus, are these factors, some of which may seem contradictory to each other but can work perfectly together to produce a postmodern artifact for the entertainment market: cultural capital of a classical or canonical figure, the star system, popular media, and some investment, large or small, in the form of either hard capital or symbolic capital (festival registrations or time and energy on a potential star). Both cases come to prove that Shakespeare’s over-400-hundred-year-old cultural capital is worth monetary investment before it can help bring add-on values for the producer. But, a prerequisite is that neither the producer or filmmaker nor audiences can be too serious about who this figure is and whether or not the product is faithful to the original. Or, is there an original? As with The Banquet’s and its fans’ reticence about Shakespeare, The Prince of the Himalayas’ discourse of adaptation from Shakespeare’s play makes an implicit claim that there is Shakespeare in the film, but it is not his Hamlet. That is why some critics may complain about fake Shakespeare in the mass media or Schlockspeare, a mixture of Shakespearean elements and local cultures or some fake traditions, in our case, of Tang (Chinese classic culture) or Tibet, while others find the hybrid cultural images appealing and worth of theorizing 29. Both films are cases of Schlockspeare even though one seems to be more Shakespearean than the other. These Schlockspearean works offer filmic spin of Shakespearean plots or motifs into exotic landscape and culture to extend the Bard’s afterlife, on the one hand. They provide postmodern consumers of cultural products with a taste of the classic. The charm of Shakespeare in postmodern life, on the other hand, lies in its value on the market, niche or commercial. The “loser” criticism’s clinging to high culture values has to give way to the popular rule in postmodern culture,30 as fidelity is not a criterion for evaluating postmodern spinoffs of classic works. The Bard must grin from behind the scene. Who can say Shakespeare is not the final winner of all the popular revitalization of his cultural capital?