Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (review)

Alexander C. Y. Huang's Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange comprehensively assesses the engagements made between China and Shakespeare over the past two centuries. Having extensively researched the archives of Shakespearean theater, film, and opera productions from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Huang evaluates both the productions and the nature of their critical reception. Intent upon exploring the manner in which Shakespeare has been appropriated by the Chinese, and deployed to serve various personal, social and political agendas, Huang first asks whose Shakespeare has been performed, as well as whose, and which, China has generated the various performances. In tandem, he probes the manner in which Shakespeare, as a canonical presence, transforms when interfacing with the sociopolitical and aesthetic dimensions of Chinese performance culture.

Recognizing the malleable nature of Shakespeare's works, Huang carefully traces the history of their interactions with the Chinese. Regarding cross-cultural transmissions of literature less as a process of translation and degradation than of "citation and appropriation," Huang questions the efficacy of traditional academic models for the analysis of canonical literature in translation (119). Rather than ascertaining the degree to which translations adhere to or depart from the customarily perceived essence of a work, he probes the new meanings generated by the vitalizing processes of adaptation, performance, and reception. Huang intentionally calls readers to recognize in his efforts an attempt to provide "a crucial step toward reinventing the interpretive energy.… dulled by ideological investments in various conventions of authenticity informed by notions of the original and the derivative" (20). Grounding this investigation into the manner in which the two global icons interact to create a unique interpretive subject is Huang's coining and use of the term "Chinese Shakespeares."

Requiring analyses focused upon the nature of site-specific readings, Huang examines the role locality and temporality play in generating meaning. Huang spends the bulk of his attention examining the purposes behind specific performance styles and locales as he carefully notes the evolution of Shakespearean performances beyond initial tendencies to perform Shakespeare in a legitimizing, classical European manner. His analysis, therefore, centers upon the reasoning behind both the directors' localization of action, aesthetics, and significance, as well as the deconstructive "truncation and rewriting" of both Shakespeare and China (17). Of note is his discussion of the role played by silent film in developing the field of signification of Shakespearean productions. Huang's underlying focus upon global markets and vernaculars comes to the fore, as he discusses how film studios, finding their reach extending to global communities, chose to rely upon Shakespearean works in order to market themselves to a varied audience. While identifying the ways in which Shakespeare and women were utilized as symbols of modernity and cosmopolitan urbanization, Huang concentrates upon directors' efforts to disrupt these central symbols in order to appropriate a personal cultural space for China and express ambiguous sentiments regarding contemporary life.

The impact China's recent history has had upon the reception and assimilation of Shakespeare resounds throughout this work. Of note is Huang's quiet aside concerning the impact had by the Cultural Revolution. He observes that rather than being performed publicly, Shakespeare was at this time read and experienced in a solitary manner by those imprisoned in labor camps. In evaluating the highly personalized performance styles that developed following the opening of China in the 1980s, Huang lightly traces the impact wielded by that type of reading, which allowed personal experience to be "politicized and aestheticized" (9). However, he focuses more significantly upon the influence that exposure to market forces and a global vernacular now wield upon recent production styles. His discussions of such productions, which privilege the individual voice over the collective, stand out among his analyses for their provocative reading of the contemporary use of religious imagery and multiple regional dialects, and the place of the visual image in global culture. A detailed and absorbing chronology of international, as well as specifically Chinese Shakespearean performances, follows Huang's analysis. This work...