Shakespeare and East Asia by Alexa Alice Joubin (review)

Shakespeare and East Asia is the latest addition to the flourishing scholarship on Asian Shakespeare. Unlike many other monographs that focus on a single nation or genre, it brings together notable film and stage works from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore. The range and diversity of case studies offered in the book would often require multiple authors in the form of collected essays, such as Shakespeare in Asia (2010), Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia (2010), Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys (2017), and Shakespeare and Asia (2019). As a single-authored monograph, Shakespeare and East Asia presents a clear agenda of resisting national allegory approaches in favor of rhizomatic readings, which can highlight connections and cross-fertilization among Asian and Western Shakespeare works in intercultural, intracultural, and intermedial ways.

In the prologue, Joubin takes issue with what she terms “national profiling” and “compulsory realpolitik”: “a tendency to characterize a non-Western artwork based on stereotypes of its nation of origin” and “the conviction that the best way to understand non-Western works is by interpreting their engagement with pragmatic politics” (7). Such an approach flattens the complexity of these works and impedes full appreciation of their artistic merits. Furthermore, it can unwittingly serve cultural imperialism by assuming Western practices as norms and instrumentalizing global Shakespeares “for the purpose of diversifying the scholarship and curricula” in the West (8). Firmly breaking from such discursive practices, Shakespeare and East Asia focuses on “aesthetic and social functions of performances,” situating them in “a postnational space of exchange” (12). Joubin identifies “four themes” noticeable in post-1950 East Asian engagements with Shakespeare: “form, ideology, reception, diaspora” (15). Each of the four chapters focuses on one theme, anchored in one cultural sphere.

Chapter 1 examines the formalistic achievements of two world-renowned Japanese directors, Yukio Ninagawa and Akira Kurosawa. Joubin focuses on Ninagawa’s Macbeth (1988) and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), closely analyzing their visual, aural, and musical elements to show how they enhance certain themes effectively. While such analyses of the well-known productions may appear less exciting, they are carefully grounded within the Japanese cultural, theatrical, and religious contexts to bring out new meanings, as exemplified by her discussion of gendered pronouns unique to the Japanese language in Throne of Blood. Joubin also situates the aesthetics of the two directors in the history of Shakespeare’s reception in Japan, draws parallels in their works, and traces rhizomatic cross-citations in other Japanese and Anglophone works, including Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001) and John R. Brigg’s Shogun Macbeth (1985).

Chapter 2 looks into some Sinophone adaptations to explore “the myths of Shakespeare’s remedial merit,” or the belief that Shakespeare can improve personal or social circumstances (64). Joubin attends to the remedial recasting of gender roles through the empowerment of the Ophelia figure in Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006) and Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas (2002). Along with gender, she identifies spirituality as another prominent aspect in remedial Shakespeare, discussing various productions of King Lear as well as Buddhist allusions in Michael Almeryeda’s Hamlet (2000). Her approach proves particularly insightful with her analysis of Lear Is Here (2001), a solo jingju performance directed by Wu Hsing-kuo, who negotiates Chinese performance tradition and his Taiwanese identity through Shakespeare. Through lively discussions of little-known works such as One Husband Too Many (1988) and Shamlet (1992) in comparison with Stoppard’s play, Joubin shows how the myth of reparative Shakespeare is parodied as colonial legacy through metatheatrical devices.

Titled “Polyphonic Reception,” chapter 3 examines differing views in production and reception of Shakespeare performances, with case studies from South Korea. Polyphony serves as a metaphor that links diverse discussions in the chapter. It is applied to “artistically constructed echoes” (106) in King Uru (2000), which interweaves strands of different “voices” drawn from King Lear, Korean folklore, and shamanism. Joubin traces Shakespearean echoes in the 2005 blockbuster The King and the Clown...