There are many ways that Shakespeare and China might interact, even though they are two such different entities. One is an individual Renaissance artist, the other a numerically vast population and a culture that’s both ancient and diverse. How might two such different cultural presences, then, opt to relate?
Firstly there is the point that Shakespeare, irrespective of his country of origin and date in history, is widely perceived as the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. China has no comparable claimant, and it’s Japan’s Chikamatsu who’s usually granted the accolade of being the finest dramatist East Asia has produced. Nevertheless, China’s dramatic traditions, and especially its operatic ones, are a major world presence, and in an age of globalization, interactions between China and Shakespeare on many levels are inevitable.
Chinese Shakespeares seeks to chart many different forms of such a two-way influence — productions of Shakespeare plays in China and Taiwan, productions elsewhere that use Chinese theatrical traditions, adaptations of Shakespearean plays that seek to re-imagine them in Asian contexts, films based on Shakespeare made by Asian film directors, and so on. All form a rich quarry for thoughts on cultural relativity in the modern and earlier ages, and it’s interesting to see that Taiwan in particular comes out of the study with particular prominence.
Its contribution to productions related to Shakespeare is shown to have been very extensive. Among the many directors discussed are Stan Lai (賴聲川) (notably in relation to his Lear and the Thirty-seven-fold Practice of a Bodhisattva of 2000 and 2001), and Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國) who founded the Contemporary Legend Theater (當代傳奇劇場) with his wife Lin Hsiu-wei (林秀偉) in 1986; their productions of versions of Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest in the traditional Beijing opera style were major features of their era. Stylistically similar Shakespearean productions, such as Zheng Bixian’s (鄭碧賢) Othello of 1983, were simultaneously taking place in Beijing.
Also discussed are Taipei’s Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters (莎妹劇團) company (notably its Crazy Scenes of 2002, based on episodes featuring madness extracted from Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello), the Golden Bough Theater’s (金枝演社) Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) Yumei and Tianlai (玉梅與天來) of 2004, based on Romeo and Juliet, and the Godot Theater’s (果陀劇場) Kiss Me Nana (吻我吧娜娜) of 1995, based on The Taming of the Shrew.
But the question nevertheless remains as to what are the motives for the uses of Shakespearean material so far away from its place of origin. And closely related to this is the issue of why Shakespeare achieved his preeminence, both national and global, in the first place.
China, so the argument goes, needed and needs a national poet just as anywhere else does, and if it can’t come up with one of its own — especially in the high-profile area of stage performance — then it will simply have to co-opt somebody else’s. This is as absurd in the Chinese context as it would be in any other, including Shakespeare’s original one in the English branch of European Renaissance culture.
The ridiculous argument has been presented to students for some time that Shakespeare was only one of several equally talented English dramatists in his day, and that he was “promoted” to the role of National Bard in the early 18th century because Great Britain, busy acquiring the first of its sequence of empires, felt the need for a national poet to equal Rome’s Virgil and in some way justify the new national role of imperial expansion.
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