Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (review)

Since David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, the Shakespeare industry has been steadily growing, both in English-speaking countries and worldwide. The proliferation of global and intercultural theatre in recent decades—exemplified in productions by artists like Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Ninagawa Yukio and by filmmakers like Kurosawa Akira—has enlarged scholarly attention to Shakespearean performance in other cultures. Alexander C. Y. Huang contributes to this scholarship in his book Chinese Shakespeares, in which he examines interactions among Shakespearean text and performance and Chinese culture throughout the past two centuries, both in mainland China and in the more liminal zones of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In Chinese Shakespeares, Huang begins with the premise that both "Shakespeare and China are narrative systems read and written within the framework of performance and cultural translation" (24), and thus symbiotically enhance and transform each other's uniqueness. By treating them as overlapping narrative systems, Huang avoids uncritical generalizations about both Shakespeare and Chinese culture; instead, he provides case studies of intersections between China and Shakespeare in order to "examine the transnational imaginary of China in Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare's place in Chinese cultural history from the first Opium War in 1839 to our time" (5). Central to Huang's method is his focus on the locality of particular performances. Defining locality as the space "where authenticity and intentionality is derived and . . . where differences emerge" (17-18), Huang opposes it to the universalizing gestures of much intercultural global performance.

Huang begins his book by noting that, while Shakespeare has exerted quite an influence on Chinese theatre, both xiqu (Chinese opera) and huaju (spoken drama), and while xiqu (especially jingju, Beijing opera) has reciprocally influenced Western productions, the history of Shakespeare in China is brief, compared to other parts of the world. (The first recorded reference to Shakespeare in Chinese appears in 1839, by Lin Zexu, the Chinese scholar and official who tried to stop the opium trade.) Chinese Shakespeare, Huang points out, "does not fit easily into the postcolonial theoretical models commonly used to interpret Asian rewrites of the European literature" (26).

In his first chapter, "Owning Chinese Shakespeares," Huang examines the terms "China" and "Shakespeare," observing that, throughout the history of Shakespeare in China, a moral rhetoric of faithfulness (whether to Shakespeare's texts or to traditional Chinese aesthetics) persists. The second chapter, "Shakespeare in Absentia: The Genealogy of an Obsession," explores the prehistory of Shakespeare in China, demonstrating how, well before his works were translated or performed there, Shakespeare represented "the West." To figures like Lin Zexu, Shakespeare was a way to "know thy enemy," while for Chinese elites who read or saw Shakespeare's plays in England he inspired cultural yearnings for the West. Chapter 3, "Rescripting Moral Criticism," explores early Shakespearean "translations" and adaptations, including Lin Shu's Chinese version of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and Lao She's parodic short story "New Hamlet." Huang argues that these texts can serve as examples of the ways Chinese writers in the early twentieth century conveyed their locality, using Shakespeare to "map their temporal and local coordinates" (69).

Huang's fourth and fifth chapters are grouped together as "Locality at Work" and examine how Shakespeare has allowed Chinese artists to perform their changing culture. In "Silent Film and Early Theater," the author examines the silent films The Woman Lawyer (1927, based on The Merchant of Venice) and The Amorous Bandit (1931, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona), showing how they reflect changing concepts of womanhood in early twentieth-century China. In this chapter, he also discusses huaju performances, including a Romeo and Juliet in Shanghai in 1937 and Hero of a Tumultuous Time (1945, from Macbeth), discussing how these productions exoticized Englishness and localized their stories to conditions in China. The following chapter (chapter 5) is devoted to three site-specific productions: a 1942 staging of Hamlet in a Confucian temple, the University of Chicago-educated professor Wu Ningkun's reading of...