Shakespeare Retold by Iranians in the Popular State TV Sitcom The most popular sitcom in Iranian state TV, Red Hat (Kolah Ghermezi), has been broadcasted for almost twenty years and by now is an inseparable part of New Year and religious holidays. The intertextual, unofficial and highly satirical quality of this sitcom, has brought its popularity. It paradoxically incorporates and challenges what it parodies. It also forces a reconsideration of originality by utilizing different texts created by canonical artists, philosophers, and scientists. In this program, the puppets perform adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies and history plays: Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Pericles. Benefiting from a comparative framework, this paper intends to scrutinize the director’s recontextualization of Shakespeare that can magnetize wide range of audience and fit the cheerfulness of Persian New Year, Nowruz. Since entertaining children of the past who used to watch Red Hat twenty years ago as well as children of the present is the main aim, the sitcom stands on the borderline of parody and pastiche. In this new production of Shakespeare, the plot is changed, moral lessons are added and the violence is silenced like other adaptations of Shakespeare for children. However, many times, the change from tragedy to comedy means to attract the adult audience. Though we see the dialogical tradition of the carnivalesque where animals become human and men become women, the choice of puppet who play Shakespearian characters is highly related to their public persona as being introduced cunning, helpful, or simple minded.

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