Shakespeare & East Asia by Alexa Alice Joubin (review)

From the mid-nineties through the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, dozens of books and many more scholarly articles appeared on the subject of Shakespeare in Asia. In some cases, the volume spoke of a single nation, sometimes comparatively within and without Asia. From the introduction of this volume, Joubin indicates a different path from previous studies. The “and” of the title (instead of “in”) indicates an interplay between the two giants “Shakespeare” and “Asia,” as opposed to the “nationalist lens” that has dominated the field thus far (p. 6). Joubin relies on a variety of methodologies and offers a volume that engages with live performance but at heart is cinematic-centered, often putting cinema and theatre in an interplay as well (e.g., considering how Kurosawa Akira’s film Kumonosu-jō was a shaping influence on Ninagawa Yukio’s production of Macbeth). In four chapters, sandwiched by an introduction and an epilogue, Joubin moves from Japan to China to Korea and ends in Singapore, seeking to break down binaries (east/west, Shakespeare/indigenous theatre, modern/traditional, etc.) and instead, “move through concentric circles of analysis, from formalistic and sociological criticism to reception studies and the politics of multilingualism” (p. 19). The result is an eminently readable, insightful volume that moves quickly, but never without depth in its analysis.

The first chapter considers Kurosawa’s and Ninagawa’s transculturations of Macbeth, seeing the former not just as drawing on traditional Japanese theatre but also a metacinematic text, even as the latter is a metatheatrical one. Joubin posits three models of adaptation/translation/appropriation of Shakespeare to an East Asian context: localization and assimilation of the story, a “cultural catalyst” approach, and fusion production, which blends indigenous and other forms. For Joubin, Shakespeare never moves across cultures alone or complete. The plays and the epiphenomena of “Shakespeare” have accreted meanings, references, and other attachments which also shape meaning. The second chapter considers the politics of remediation, seeing King Lear as “holding a special place in the genre of reparative Shakespeare,” that is, the plays are used dramaturgically within a specific locale with a remedial or reparative function (p. 68). Ong Kang Sen and Kishida Rio’s Lear is held up as a model of the practice in an Asian context. Joubin also analyzes the films The Banquet and The Prince of the Himalayas as remediated versions of Hamlet that recover Ophelia and looks for Buddhism in western films of Hamlet on the way to the heart of the chapter: analyses of Anthony Chan’s 1988 film One Husband Too Many and Lee Kuo-hsiu’s long-running Taiwanese production Shamlet. One of the strengths of the volume is Joubin’s almost encyclopedic approach to Shakespeare across East Asia. Rather than simply looking at films and productions within their national and historic contexts, positing the local Shakespeare as only being about the local, Joubin places these films and productions in conversation with each other, seeing larger patterns of the intersections between Shakespeare and local culture and transnational approaches to theatre.

Korea is underrepresented in Shakespeare studies, which makes the third chapter on “Polyphonic reception” in South Korean theatre a wonderful addition to the literature. After considering The King and the Clown and Ophelia: Sister, Come to My Bed, much of the chapter considers Oh Tae-suk’s productions of Shakespeare, especially 2006’s Romeo and Juliet. Joubin focuses on the touring production of that show and Oh’s subsequent The Tempest, asking two important questions: First, what is the agency of the non-western director presenting Shakespeare in western contexts? Second, to what end does the western media (and, if we are honest, western scholarship) focus on political allegories to the loss of other non-western interpretations? Korean audiences understood Oh’s plays radically differently than their western counterparts. Joubin reminds us that performing Shakespeare in Asia is not always about “talking back” to...