Samurai Lear?

Most academic scholarship dealing with Akira Kurosawa's Ran has concentrated in a rather Anglocentric fashion on the film's status as an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. Mr Gorringe's book takes issue with this approach by looking at the wider cultural and filmic context of Ran, in particular its status as a Japanese samurai film, in order to make a judgment about how much the film has actually been influenced by Shakespeare's play.