각색의 미학과 정치학

Aesthetics and Politics of Adaptation: Mixture of Styles and Production of New Meanings in the Adaptation from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrewd to Akhtar’s The Who and the What

Adapting the wedding stories of both The Taming of the Shrew and Mohamed and his seventh wife Zaynab, Ayad Akhtar approaches the similarities and singularities of gender politics between the Renaissance period and the Islamic society in The Who and the What. With the intertextual dialogism between the two different cultures at its focus, this study examines the aesthetics of adaptation which refers to the production and reception of a new meaning for Islam in the hypertext. Borrowing the dialogue, “not to bestow my youngest daughter before I have a husband for the elder” from the hypotext, Akhtar seeks ‘equivalences in meaning’ and matches ‘narrative codes’ with the hypotext. With ‘the mixture of styles’ such as comedy, satire, and tragedy, and ‘novel within a play’ which has resonance of Shakespeare’s famous ‘play within a play’, Akhtar represents resistance of the subject which is veiled and/or erased in the hypotext.