Dogmatic Shakespeare: a recognition of ghostly presences in Thomas Vinterberg's Festen and Kristian Levring's The King is Alive

This article explores the relationship between a number of film products of the Dogme New Wave and the various intertexts at play in their creation; it poses questions about the very nature of adaptation and the interplay between so-called precursory texts and their seemingly adapted offspring. In particular, it interrogates the ways in which Vinterberg's Festen (1998) and Levring's The King is Alive (2000) echo, at a conscious or a subconscious level, performative and ideological facets of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601) and King Lear (1608) respectively.