“O, Let Me Not Be Mad, Not Mad, Sweet Heaven”: A Cognitive Poetic Comparison of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran

As cornerstones of human culture, stories embody shared experiences and themes. Through adaptations, these stories are enriched, gaining in value and relevance as they transcend historical and cultural boundaries. The present research offers a comparative reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) in light of theories of cognitive poetics. As an interdisciplinary approach, cognitive poetics explores the interplay between textual structures and cognitive processes. Exploring the role of foregrounding, defamiliarization, and figure-ground dynamics in shaping these stories, this study explores how Ran is, essentially, a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy and how, in the hands of Kurosawa, adaptation functions as an act of preservation and reinvention, providing profound insights into human nature. It is argued that Kurosawa does not merely transpose Shakespeare’s narrative into a new context; he reimagines it to mirror the artistic and cultural exigencies of his medium and time, thus enriching the source material, creating an ongoing dialogue between the two works. This study offers a new reading of these works in order to maintain how the concepts in the field of cognitive poetics might facilitate the study of adaptations, their reiterations of a work and their deviations from it, and provide novel means of meaning construction.