Adapting Shakespeare’s Richard III: A political reading of Hamid-Reza Naeemi’s Richard

Since the introduction of Shakespeare to Iranians in the late nineteenth century through stage productions, his work has been positively received and many of the plays have also been adapted in Persian literature and theater. In contemporary Iranian drama numbers of adaptations of canonical works of Western literature, including Shakespeare, have increased substantially, largely because they offer an ideal platform for reflecting on sociocultural and political problems of present-day Iran. A daring playwright, Hamid-Reza Naeemi, whose theater shows a strong inclination to adapting Western masterpieces, adapts Shakespeare’s Richard III (ca. 1593) in his modernized reworking of the play entitled Richard, in order to express disapproval of undemocratic government system and thorny sociopolitical issues in modern Iran, particularly the era of the Pahlavi State (1925–79). Through intertextual analysis and adaptation theory formulated by Linda Hutcheon, this study analyzes how Shakespeare’s tragic drama has been adapted by Naeemi to shape his dissident discourse to critique the state power and restriction of freedom in the above play. It also recontextualizes and analyzes Shakespeare’s tragic theme of the rise and fall of a tyrant in Naeemi’s reflection of the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty in winter 1979.