This collection of essays by different hands on Shakespeare’s plays as they’ve been approached in various parts of Asia is edited by Taiwan’s Bi-chi Beatrice Lei (雷碧琦), founder of the Taiwan Shakespeare Association and a research fellow at National Taiwan University’s Research Center for Digital Humanities. She also contributes a chapter on a crucial turning-point in Shakespeare production in Taiwan.
In that chapter she highlights a production of Hamlet in Taipei in April 1964, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Prior to that, she writes, the autocratic government of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) had seen to it that any theater productions other than state-supported propaganda and shows mounted by troupes affiliated to the military were difficult to stage. As a result, many theaters closed down or were converted to cinemas.
But beginning in 1964, and perhaps with this very Hamlet production, Shakespeare began to be perceived by authorities as an anti-communist force, without much alteration. He stood, perhaps, for humanism, the integrity of the family and Confucian values in general. King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance, all stood for, or could be seen to stand for, the protection of the family against assaults from without. Foreign invasion, present in all three plays, need not be out of place considering the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) longstanding ambitions vis-a-vis China, although a play such as The Tempest, which depicts a ruler unjustly ousted from his kingdom and taking refuge on a small island, could present problems.
Over the next two decades of straight Shakespeare productions in Mandarin a reaction set in — but a reaction in theatrical fashion in the newly democratic country rather than any change in the perception of the Bard’s political position. And Shakespeare performances have continued in one form or another in Taiwan ever since.
Lei also contributes an editorial introduction, arguing that the book’s motivation was her realization that most critics have failed to notice that Shakespearean productions in Asia have not only put him into another language but have promoted “new ways of seeing, hearing and knowing” him. Ample evidence is presented for this thesis. Lei says the book covers Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, countries that have often been omitted from such surveys before.
Furthermore, Asian productions of Shakespeare can serve to unite this huge region, Lei says. Whereas it may be pointless to compare an Indian dance, a Chinese opera and a Japanese film, to look at their respective handlings of the same Shakespeare play are very illuminating.
Nevertheless, connections between 16th century England and 20th century Asia can be misplaced. Hamlet’s revulsion at sex, for instance, apparent in many passages, cannot be viewed as comparable to Gandhi’s chastity, let alone seen as a way of focusing his life on a political aim and accepting the workings of providence, as Gandhi’s was. Yet Poonam Trivedi, one of this book’s editors, argues something similar. Hamlet’s revulsion was more likely simply Shakespeare’s own, in a play that is characterized by the diversity of its non-political themes.
Some of the productions described here would be wonderful to experience. One is Park Jung-e’s ongoing One-man Show: Macbeth, played by a single man and a single women on alternating nights. It’s in Korean, but there are scraps of English text, both in a modern and the original version, projected high up in one corner, and the setting is a squalid basement room in an undesirable Seoul suburb.
Another is the celebrated 2007 Beijing production of Coriolanus. It was mounted under the Chinese title The Great General Kou Liulan (大將軍寇流蘭) and transferred to the Edinburgh Festival in the UK the same year. Not only did it have an on-stage heavy metal band, despite beginning with a passage from Mahler’s Symphony No:8; it also, sensationally, featured around 100 real, albeit mute, migrant workers to stand for Shakespeare’s plebeians. For those who understood Chinese, however, the greatest shock of all was probably the unabashed parallels the production made between Shakespeare’s Rome and the China of that time.
Three Indian film versions of The Comedy of Errors, not all acknowledging the original author, are examined. The play was first translated into Bengali, astonishingly, in 1869.
Shakespeare is a bore according to pop culture, or so it’s alleged. But Japanese anime and manga often quote fragments, as we’re told in an essay that takes its title from Cole Porter’s song in his 1953 musical Kiss Me Kate (based on The Taming of the Shrew), that begins “Brush up your Shakespeare,/ Start quoting him now.”
In an astute preface, Dublin’s Dennis Kennedy notes that neither the dates of Shakespeare’s birth or death are known for certain, though both are clearly in the fourth week of April. Fixing each of them on April 23, the saint’s day of England’s patron saint St George, was “an act of wizardry.” He goes on to note that few seem to notice that April 23, 1616, the assumed day of his death, would have been thus only according to the Julian calendar then in use, but that today, by our Gregorian calendar, the date would be May 3.
Incidentally, I’ve recently been pondering over a phrase from Richard II. The relevant couplet is as follows: “High stomach’d (i.e. angry) are they both, and full of ire,/ In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.” What does “deaf as the sea” mean? My provisional conclusions are “deaf to the cries of drowning mariners” or “deaf from the roaring of its waves.” Does anyone have another explanation?
Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys is full of insights, often occurring as asides, and will in addition be of special interest to readers in Taiwan concerned with drama or local literary history. Most of the articles in the book were given as papers at the inaugural meeting of the Asian Shakespeare Association, of which Lei is the founder, in Taipei in May, 2014.
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