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To Twin in Shadow, To Twin in Fury: “Life as a tale full of sound, but signifying nothing” in Jiehae Park’s Peerless

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2025, 38(1), pp.197~224
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama
  • Received : March 12, 2025
  • Accepted : April 12, 2025
  • Published : April 30, 2025

Bensalah sihem 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

“Life’s but a walking shadow... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” laments Macbeth as his pursuit of power culminates in his own ruin. Jiehae Park’s Peerless, a reimagining of Macbeth, echoes this existential despair through its Asian American twin protagonists, M and L. Trapped in a relentless cycle of ambition and desire for recognition, they find their efforts futile within a system that has already shaped their identities through racialized structures. On both a textual and performative level, Peerless incarnates this void, casting the twins as shadow and fury—twin forces locked in a cycle of (self)destruction. Like Macbeth, they cling to a prophecy that promises success, only to find that their striving leads not to fulfillment but to erasure. Bound by the dictum that “one can’t be both,” their twinhood becomes a fatal paradox: one can only rise if the other falls. This paper examines how Peerless reconfigures twinness as both oppression and resistance, employing it as a narrative and textual device to explore fractured identity in contemporary minority storytelling. The doubleness and duplicity that fracture the character’s identities extend to the very structure of the play, with Park’s work simultaneously reflecting and deflecting Shakespeare’s play. In transforming adaptation into an act of reclamation, Peerless inscribes minority youth experiences within a tragic lineage, exposing systemic exclusion while carving out space for their representation within literary and theatrical traditions. This analysis contributes to Shakespearean adaptation studies and critical race theory, highlighting the power of literary adaptation not merely to challenge and reshape dominant cultural narratives, but to extend their reach across temporal and cultural boundaries.

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