“Report Me and My Cause Aright”: 한국셰익스피어학회의 50년

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to record in a summary form all the activities the Shakespeare Association of Korea has been involved in for fifty years since its inception in 1964. Although Prof. Jae-Nam Kim already summarized the thirty- year history of the Association as an article in 1993, this record takes over Prof. Kim’s task of recording and attempts to report the whole story of the Association mainly after 1993, focusing on the areas of its management, academic activities, and performances. It is important to notice that this record is written from all the formal documents stored in the homepage archive, the printed journals, or the official papers and proceedings, not from the personal documents, interviews, or memories. This means this record aims to play the role of a formal archive from which further studies for the development of Shakespeare studies and performances can be done. I believe this record can also offer us an opportunity to critically examine all the cultural and academic activities involving Shakespeare to shape the future of Korea with Shakespearean messages. In that sense, this task of telling the whole story of the Association resembles Horatio’s mission “to report [Hamlet] and [his] cause aright / To the unsatisfied”(Hamlet, 5.2.318-19).