Shakespeare in China (review)

As a new publisher in the field, Continuum has produced a growing list in cutting-edge Shakespeare studies in the past few years, including a handsomely designed new series entitled "Shakespeare Now!" (Douglas Bruster's To Be or Not to Be and Lukas Erne's Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators, among others). Although it is not part of the Shakespeare Now! series, Shakespeare in China by Murray Levith (author of Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays) shares the compact format with volumes in that series. It provides students and teachers a basic historical overview of twentieth-century stage adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in mainland China, with a personal touch—accounts of the author's trip to China and photographs of the author and Chinese scholars (74 and 59).

In our times, China, like Shakespeare, has become a major international presence. As cross-cultural collaborations and dialogues, Chinese interpretations of Shakespeare are becoming increasingly difficult for Shakespeareans to ignore. The unique dynamics between Chinese and Shakespearean modes of signification provide rich opportunities to explore a wide range of questions for audiences interested in provocative and bold re-imaginings of Shakespeare and for scholars interested in Shakespeare's currency in our world. Although the appropriation of Shakespeare has been the cornerstone of postcolonial criticism that focuses on such locations as India, Africa, and the Caribbean, the history of Shakespeare in East Asia where the local cultures have a more ambiguous relation to the European West is less known by teachers and students of Shakespeare. Ironically, the marginalization of the field does not result from the lack of critical attention per se, but from an overflow of "reports" without theoretical reflection that make Asian interpretations into predictably exotic objects that are never positioned to be properly known.

Levith's Shakespeare in China is aimed at a general Anglophone readership and is similar in structure to John Pemble's Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (2005) and Li Ruru's Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (2003). In the preface, Levith contrasts the idea that Shakespeare is "a socioeconomic export product from an imperialist West bent on the . . . exploitation [or] depreciation . . . of unique local cultures" with the possibility that "various peoples [such as] the Han Chinese have happily . . . adapted Shakespeare to . . . serve their own particular ends" (xiii). Chapter 1 rehearses the early history of Shakespeare in mainland China up to 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, and concentrates on translation and criticism. Chapter 2, titled "Shakespeare and Mao," pursues Mao Zedong's Marxist-inflected literary utilitarianism and how the tendency has negatively influenced the already complicated process of cross-cultural interpretation. Levith discusses the role of Mao's influential "Talks at the Yenan [should be Yan'an]" in Chinese interpretations of Shakespeare between 1949 and 1966. Chapter 3 contains Levith's musings about the Cultural Revolution and Shakespeare, including observations on the similarities between Henry V and Taking Tiger Mountain, a Chinese revolutionary model play (52), Chinese anti-Westernism, as well as American journalists Lois Wheeler Snow's and Edgar Snow's relationships with the Chinese government during and after the times of political crackdown (42; 48–49; 51–54). Readers may benefit from a more systematic account of how these erratic events relate to the topic of this chapter.

Chapter 4 records the revived mainland Chinese interest in Shakespeare after the Cultural Revolution, a well-known story. Levith notes that even after the revolution, Chinese Shakespeare criticism still tended to follow the same "tired and dogmatic models of Marxist criticism" (86) and remained unsophisticated. Levith seems to follow a tired critical paradigm. He quotes He Qixin, a mainland Chinese scholar, at length and agrees with He's judgment that Chinese criticism of Shakespeare "very often miss[es] the essence and dramatic power of the plays" (87). A better course would have been to analyze such misreadings and take readers beyond the facts to understand the many historical and cultural questions in Shakespeare's...