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[SOFT COVER : US] Shakespeare on the Chinese stage

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Aug 16, 2009, Page 14

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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.

It’s true, of course, that the English theaters were closed down by the Puritans a generation after Shakespeare’s death, that when they were re-opened in 1660 it was often with musical versions of the plays styled on the French pattern, and that a revival of interest in Shakespeare purely as a dramatist did take place in the early 18th century. However, a quick look at the prefatory material to the Folio edition of almost all of Shakespeare’s plays of 1623 unambiguously demonstrates that his reputation was sky-high even seven years after his death, with his friend and colleague Ben Jonson asserting that he was probably a greater dramatist than any produced by Greece or Rome.

This absurd relating of Shakespeare’s status to British imperialism isn’t the only flaw in this otherwise competent book. There’s another howler, too, when the critic G. Wilson Knight is associated, alongside the older critic A.C. Bradley, with the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays via their characters. Knight in reality led a movement in the very opposite direction, playing down analysis through character in favor of one using patterns of poetic imagery that were studied independently of the characters who gave voice them.

Alexander Huang is keen to find ulterior motives for the adoption of Shakespeare in Asian contexts, but the real reason for it seems to me disconcertingly simple. In a globalizing age, anything from any one part of the world is deemed to be perfectly serviceable in any other. It would be absurd if planes or cars were found only in the countries that first invented them, and it’s equally absurd on the cultural front for products to remain for long in their places of origin. Moreover, it’s not because this is a globalizing era that such things happen — they happen because they can happen, and it’s only in retrospect that we dub our age a global one. Why Shakespeare is performed in Asia thus doesn’t need explaining. What would need explaining would be if he wasn’t.

So, from the performance of Hamlet on board a ship off Sierra Leone a mere five years after it was written to the multiple versions found today almost wherever you care to look, Shakespeare is a global phenomenon. Of course there are crossover influences in all directions, but apart from that, Shakespearean productions in Chinese are no different from any others. It would, after all, constitute a form of very special pleading to suggest that they even might be.

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