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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