April 23rd this year is Shakespeare’s
400th death anniversary, and throughout 2016 arts organisations in the UK are holding events to celebrate
his life and works. Beyond the UK, the British Council has organised Shakespeare Lives, a global programme of
events and activities which will reach Asia along with every other continent. Within Asia theatres, libraries and universities are also offering tributes. For example in
January Beijing’s Star Theatre presented With
Love, William Shakespeare, which reinterpreted favourites such as Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Taming of
the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's
Dream in the context of modern China. Against this background, Asian Books
Blog is delighted to re-post, from the blog of Oxford University Press, this
overview of the on-going discussion between Shakespeare and Asia, by Michael Dobson.
When a weary Egeon laments in the first scene
of The Comedy of Errors that in quest of his lost son he has
spent five years “Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia,” Shakespeare is
characteristically using the word only in its classical sense, to indicate the
Roman province of Asia Minor, a territory roughly equivalent to that of modern
Turkey. Shakespeare’s sense of the geography of the rather larger area we now
call Asia, like that of many fellow Elizabethans, is more vague. Although he
had apparently seen Emmineux Molineux’s world map of 1599 “with the
augmentation of the Indies” (Twelfth Night, 3.2.75), and although Falstaff
hopes to make Mistresses Page and Ford his “East and West Indies” (The Merry
Wives of Windsor, 1.3.64), Shakespeare (unlike his colleague Fletcher)
never set a play in Indonesia, and he makes no reference to either Japan or
China, getting only as near as the legendary neighbouring realm of Cathay (and
then only when Sir Toby Belch and Pistol each use the slang term “Cathayan” as
an insult in the same two plays). In that Shakespeare’s works - taught,
translated, adapted and performed - have long since roamed clean through the
bounds of modern Asia, however, this deficiency in the Shakespeare canon has
been thoroughly rectified, and even within the British performance tradition
his works have been widely inflected by Asian techniques, conventions, and perspectives.
The one part of Asia which Shakespeare did
mention with more insistence – India, where Titania and her pregnant mortal
votaress gossiped together “in the spicèd Indian air, by night” before the
birth of the little changeling boy who, though he remains offstage, motivates
so much of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - has appropriately been
the one with the longest and richest history of engagement with the Shakespeare
canon, admittedly because it once endured the longest and most fraught history
of engagement with British colonialism. Although the incorporation of
examinations about Shakespeare into the process of recruiting Indians into the
running of the colonial civil service in the nineteenth century was intended to
foster cultural deference, Shakespeare’s works soon escaped this framework,
becoming the basis for popular hybridized dramas in Indian languages - Bhanumati
Chittavilasa, for instance, a Bengali Merchant of Venice (1852).
During the twentieth century, especially
after independence, the emergent Bollywood cinema industry took up Shakespeare
(the supplanting by film of an older colonial tradition of touring the plays in
English is simultaneously lamented and enacted by the first Merchant-Ivory
film, Shakespeare Wallah, 1965), and recent years have seen
high-profile Indian Shakespeare films achieve worldwide acclaim. Vishal
Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean trilogy provides only the most conspicuous example: Maqbool (based
on Macbeth, 2003), Omkara (Othello, 2006),
and Haider (Hamlet, 2014). The growing presence of
Indian diaspora personnel in the arts in Britain has over the same decade
produced significant Indian-inspired and Indian-inflected work in the
mainstream Shakespearean theatre, including Tim Supple’s Dash Arts/RSC A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (2006), and Iqbal Khan’s 2012 RSC Much
Ado About Nothing, with Meera Syal and Paul Bhattacharjee, set in a version
of Messina based on present-day Delhi.
Those territories Shakespeare omitted to
mention, however, Japan and China, have been equally remarkable in their
continuing dialogue with Shakespeare’s plays. Opened to Western influence
only in the 1850s, Japan soon learned to assimilate Shakespearean drama to
native theatre forms dating from roughly Shakespeare’s period: by 1885 there
was a Kabuki version of The Merchant of Venice, called Sakura-doki
Zeni no Yononaka (literally, ‘Cherry Blossom Time and Money Makes The
World Go Around’). It was not until the 1960s, however, that actors from
the stylized, traditional dramatic forms of kabuki and Noh would appear in
Shakespearean productions alongside performers associated with the
Western-style realist drama known as ‘shingeki’, but since then Japanese
directors of Shakespeare have excelled at hybridizing elements of older
Japanese theatre with elements of post-modern popular culture. The most famous
remains Yukio Ninagawa, whose acclaimed productions have toured
internationally, from Romeo and Juliet (1974) to Cymbeline (his
contribution to the World Shakespeare Festival in London in 2012) and
beyond. Elements of traditional Japanese theatre, admired by early
twentieth-century modernists such as Yeats, have been emulated or at least in
effect quoted by a number of Western directors of Shakespeare, including Peter
Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, though their efforts in this direction have
sometimes been accused of mere touristic orientalism.
China’s engagement with Shakespeare was
drastically interrupted by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and
1970s, but in recent years the interest in translating, adapting, and
performing Shakespeare first glimpsed in the early twentieth century has
revived. A Shakespeare Society of China was founded in 1984, and since then
Shakespeare’s works have been revived by Chinese companies in styles comparable
to those favoured by post-modern directors worldwide. The Beijing People’s Arts
Theatre, for instance, took a Coriolanus on international tour
in 2013 which, directed by Lin Zhaohua, featured imperial-period costumes but
also two on-stage heavy metal bands. The growing international influence
of the People’s Republic, meanwhile, is being felt even in Stratford-upon-Avon,
where the Royal Shakespeare Company has not only embarked on a project to commission
and oversee a new actor-friendly translation of the Complete Plays into
Mandarin and to bring productions to Beijing and Shanghai, but has undertaken
to perform its own English-language versions of classic Chinese plays.
Shakespeare may have said comparatively little about Asia, but with major
theatre and film industries now flourishing in Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and
Malaysia — as well as India, Japan, and China — Asia has more and more to say
about Shakespeare.
Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies and
Director of the Shakespeare Institute, at the University of Birmingham, in the
UK. He is an executive trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and an
honorary governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company: He is the co-editor of The
Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.
Re-posted from the Oxford University Press blog by kind permission of
Oxford University Press, and Michael Dobson. For more on Shakespeare across the globe, see the OUP site, Illuminating Shakespeare.
