Lancastrian Shakespeares: Hamlet and King Lear in North West England (2005–2014)

Liz Oakley-Brown makes a case for seeing Juliet McKoen’s Frozen (2005) and Jenn Ashworth’s ‘Doted’ (2014) as representing Lancastrian renditions of Hamlet and King Lear. As Lancastrian visions of Hamlet and King Lear respectively, we see how these pre-modern plays of elite sensibilities help articulate the identity politics of contemporary culture. Both film and short story are seen to have structural and thematic links to Shakespeare’s two great tragedies, themselves bound up with geography, with sea and land and the elements, and in her exploration of ‘site-specific critical and creative “collisions”’, Oakley-Brown convincingly argues for the diversity and distinctiveness of Lancastrian Shakespeares.