This much I’d been expecting. Along with billions of others, I had watched the grandiose Olympics opening ceremony and goggled at pictures of the megalomaniacal structures by Koolhaas and Foster and Arup that now stippled Beijing’s skyline. What I had not appreciated was that, in China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, the Chinese arts were a rarefied commodity. Barring a few half-hearted displays in the lobby, in fact, I couldn’t see any of the stuff at all. The complex contained three state-of-the-art auditoriums. The main house, which seated 2,416, was designed specifically for European opera, the music hall for symphony orchestras. Though the smallest space – which, at 1,040 seats, was only a whisker smaller than the British National Theatre’s largest auditorium – could accommodate jingju, traditional Beijing opera, its raison d’être was western drama and dance.
Zhang proudly escorted me through a CD shop stuffed with western classical music and an exhibition heavy with Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti, Bizet. In the six years of its existence the NCPA had staged nearly 70 new opera productions to an average of 80 per cent capacity. Many tickets cost under 80 yuan, less than the price of a decent meal.
A lift whisked us soundlessly to the top floor, which led to an open gantry from which we could gaze over the full sweep of the building. The ellipsoid curved giddily away beneath, blending into the polished marble floor so that it appeared never to end. In the foyer far below, a soprano was mounting a full-frontal assault on the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria from Die Zauberflöte. Top Fs pinged shrilly off the glass.
As Harry rushed off to locate a disorientated Spanish television crew, I drifted into yet another exhibition, this one devoted to the building itself: flowcharts and graphs, showing dizzying rises in audience numbers, online membership, VIP card holders, web visitors. Even if the whole lot were blithe fiction, it was impressive. ‘Since its opening,’ one panel read, ‘NCPA has been adhering to the guiding principle to be “an important engine for the development and prosperity of socialist culture” and to be “World-class with Chinese characteristics”.’
There was no mistaking the nod to Deng Xiaoping’s famous formulation, first uttered in 1982 and since adopted into the Communist Party manifesto. Wily moderniser that he was, I felt that Deng might have balked at the phrase being used to advertise a French-designed shrine to Wagner and Verdi.
As I turned around, a poster announcing a festival caught my eye. SALUTE! SHAKESPEARE it read, in bilious yellow text on a hot-pink background. Next to it was a face I hadn’t seen for a while – though for novelty’s sake the artist had superimposed a migrainous pattern of swoops and swirls in magenta, vermilion and tangerine. It looked as if Shakespeare had been assaulted by Andy Warhol while recovering from an LSD trip.
In Britain, the 450th anniversary of his birth in April 2014 had caused a modest flurry of interest, most of it centred around a jokey feature in the Sun newspaper – ‘FOREST FAIRIES FIASCO’ for a spoof news report on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; ‘HUBBLE BUBBLE THIS SPELLS TROUBLE (GHOST OF BANQUO: AMAZING PICTURES)’ on Macbeth. The excitement had soon fizzled. I assumed it would barely have made an impression 6,000 miles away.
Not for the first time, I’d assumed wrong. Checking the news on the way in from the airport, I discovered that Life Week, China’s bestselling current-affairs magazine, had just placed Shakespeare on the cover of a commemorative issue. In addition to the Salute Shakespeare festival there was at least one other festival, in Shanghai, not to mention the brand-new Asian Shakespeare Association, whose inaugural conference in Taipei I was due at in just over two weeks’ time. A British Council survey had pronounced Shakespeare one of the five British ‘icons’ most adored by the Chinese, beating even Benedict Cumberbatch and the Queen. If China was hot for western culture, it was positively randy for Shakespeare.
I bent down and attempted to decode the listings. Touring productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a Chinese-Japanese Macbeth, a Chinese Romeo and Juliet, Verdi’s Otello … The thing was going on for seven months.
Harry had rematerialised. He pointed to the poster, beaming. ‘China Central Television filming last week, big press conference!’
In China, apparently, the party was just getting started.
*
By the standards of every country I had so far visited, China was a blushing newcomer on the Shakespearian stage. Two millennia of ‘closed-door’ economic and cultural policies meant that no hint of Shakespeare’s existence – in common with knowledge about a great deal of western culture – reached mainland China until nearly halfway through the nineteenth century.
Irked by the Middle Kingdom’s isolationist policies, the British made periodic attempts to prod the sleeping giant. They were given an excuse in 1839 after the Qing emperor Daoguang banned the sale of opium, one of Britain’s most valuable imports to China from India, inside his territories. Promptly declaring war, the British navy overwhelmed the Chinese fleet at Hong Kong and an expeditionary force mounted aggressive assaults against several Chinese cities culminating in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the first of what are still bitterly called ‘unequal treaties’. It demanded the cession of Hong Kong and the opening of five treaty ports to British trade.
Yet again, where the East India Company trod, Shakespeare followed – but in China the story had a twist. The very man given the task of confiscating the Company’s opium, the diplomat Lin Zexu, took it upon himself to become better acquainted with the enemy by supervising the part-translation of an Encyclopedia of Geography by the Scottish writer Hugh Murray. Lin’s aim was to introduce his countrymen to the ways of the clever-clever English (pleasingly described as ‘greedy, tough, alcoholic, yet skilful in handicrafts’). The translation was published in 1839, the year hostilities broke out. Shakespeare’s name featured in a list of famous British authors – the first time it had appeared in any Chinese publication. Despite Murray’s florid assertion that ‘Shakespeare stands unrivalled among ancient and modern poets, by his profound and extensive knowledge of mankind, his boundless range of observation throughout all nature’, nothing made it through to the Chinese version other than the terse statement that he was ‘prolific’.
More details trickled through. In 1856, an English missionary translated a Chinese textbook in which there was mention of a mysterious writer called ‘Shekesibi’. In 1877, the first ever Chinese ambassador to London observed in his diary that the most renowned writer of his adopted country was ‘a talented playwright living in England about two hundred years ago. His stature is comparable to the Greek poet Homer.’ In 1895, the scholar Yan Fu translated yet another reference work, this time dilating on Julius Caesar:
Shakespeare wrote a play recounting the murder of Caesar. When Antony delivers a speech to the citizens while showing the body of Caesar to the public, he uses logic to stir up the citizens cleverly because Brutus warned him that he would not be allowed to redress a grievance for Caesar and blame the murderers. The citizens are greatly agitated by the speech and their resentment against Brutus and his comrades is running high. We should attribute Antony’s success to the function of logic!
This view of Shakespeare as a supreme embodiment of western rationalism was influential. Determined to end their country’s ancient resistance to outside influences, in the early twentieth century a group of intellectuals began to argue that if China had any hope of modernising, it was high time to engage with western culture. In 1907 the young writer Lu Xun, studying in Japan – itself forced to open up at the barrel of a western gunboat – wrote an astringent article arguing that Dante, Goethe, Byron, Milton, Pushkin and Shakespeare were ‘warriors of the spirit’, and that China must recruit and train its own spiritual warriors. The call would often be repeated.
Despite this, when Shakespeare was finally translated into Chinese, it was not as drama, but bedtime stories. Back in the nineteenth century, the British brother-and-sister team Charles and Mary Lamb collaborated on a book entitled Tales from Shakespeare, Designed for the Use of Youn
g Persons, first published in 1807. Containing twenty stories drawn from the most popular plays, The Tempest to Othello, Tales from Shakespeare cleverly stitched pieces of the original text on to a narrative webbing supplied by the Lambs themselves, embroidering the plays into attractive moral samplers. Originally intended, in the words of the Preface, to ‘be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare’, they were aimed at young female readers most especially, less likely to be given education. Lamb’s Tales, as the book became known – in early editions only Charles was credited – has never been out of print in the English-speaking world since.
Much as the abbreviated scripts toured around Europe by the English Comedians in the 1600s helped propagate Shakespeare’s stories in cultures where his work was unfamiliar, so too did the Lambs’ Tales two centuries later. Short, cheap to publish and a great deal more straightforward to translate than Renaissance playtexts, they became enormously popular worldwide, especially in Asia (the film-maker Vishal Bhardwaj, who I’d spoken to in Mumbai, was one of many satisfied Indian readers). Though bowdlerised and heavily edited, they helped Shakespeare become a globally recognised name, reaching audiences far beyond the British children they were originally intended to serve.
First translated into Japanese in the 1870s, the Tales were printed in nearly a hundred separate editions in Japan in the next sixty years. Chinese readers had to wait until 1903, when an enterprising translator – unfortunately anonymous – published a selection of ten stories in classical Chinese. Each was given a sensationalistic heading, designed to snag the eye of male book-buyers: ‘Proteus Sells Out his Close Friend for Lust’ for The Two Gentlemen of Verona; ‘Playing Tricks, the Devoted Wife Steals the Ring’ for All’s Well That Ends Well. The book’s introduction emphasised the theme of Shakespeare as a global icon:
His plays and stories became fashionable in England for a time and have been rendered into French, German, Russian, Italian and read by people all over the world. Nowadays Shakespeare is recognised and praised by the Chinese academic circle.
The subtext was clear: Shakespeare, already the world’s poet, was long overdue in China. In recognition of this novelty, the publishers proudly called the book Xiewai qitan – ‘Strange Tales from Overseas’.
It took another version of the Lambs’ Tales, this time the complete set of twenty, to plant Shakespeare’s stories firmly in the imaginations of Chinese readers. Lin Shu (1852–1924), perhaps the most prolific Chinese editor-translator of his period, forged a highly profitable career making foreign texts available to eager consumers, translating writers including Dickens, Hugo and Balzac, and The Arabian Nights – with the help of a team of assistants, as Lin himself knew no foreign languages. In 1904, they brought out a new book entitled Yingguo shiren yinbian yanyu (‘An English Poet Reciting from Afar on Joyous Occasions’), which rendered all the Lambs’ stories into semi-classical Chinese for the first time.
Lin’s introduction went to some trouble to explain that, despite his title, these Shakespearian tales were an excellent match for Chinese sensibilities, where shenguai xiaoshuo, fantastical stories of gods and spirits, were established genre fiction. ‘Shakespeare looked to fairies and monsters for his inspiration, themes and language,’ Lin argued, continuing, ‘the intellectual elite of the west is so fond of Shakespeare’s poetry that every household in the country seems to be reading and reciting his lines all day long.’
The Merchant of Venice, the first volume in the collection, became Rou quan (‘A Bond of Flesh’). Hamlet was given the evocative title Gui zhao (’A Ghost’s Summons’). A Midsummer Night’s Dream evolved into Xian kuai (‘Cunning Fairies’) while Romeo and Juliet became the enticing Zhu qing (‘Committing the Crime of Passion’). Lin’s translators also recalibrated the texts for Chinese consumers: Hamlet became a Confucian parable on the importance of filial duty and respect; others were adjusted to make them resemble popular Qing-era love stories.
An English Poet sold so well that it was reprinted eleven times in the next three decades. In 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the same year that Israel Gollancz was assembling his goliath Book of Homage (which included just one tribute from a Chinese writer, Liu Po Tuan), Lin followed it up with another batch of tales, this time ones the Lambs had ignored, the Roman and history plays. China may have been slow to fall for Shakespeare’s charms, but, courtesy of Lin’s business acumen, a mass readership was soon devouring the stories of ‘Sha Weng’ or ‘Old Man Sha’.
Throughout, one question dogged publishers – what should Shakespeare’s formal Chinese name be? Shekesibi, Suoshibier, Yesibi, Xiakesibier (pronounced ‘Sh-iack-ess-ee-bee-yer’): every translator tried a different option, attempting to squeeze these unwieldy consonants and diphthongs into a shape that Chinese mouths could form. Eventually an academic, Liang Qichao, came up with a sleeker alternative, Shashibiya. Not only pronounceable, it sounded plausibly Chinese. It stuck.
I wasn’t entirely innocent of Shakespeare with Chinese characteristics. Sent out to Beijing the previous year to interview one of contemporary China’s leading theatre-makers, Lin Zhaohua, I had seen his epic staging of Coriolanus. It was a colourful if somewhat outlandish experience. Translated into contemporary Mandarin and featuring a cast of nearly a hundred extras dressed in druidic robes like something out of The Lord of the Rings, the show was accompanied by two on-stage heavy-metal bands, going under the fearsome names of Suffocated and Miserable Faith. As the breastplate-wearing soldier-hero – a statuesque actor called Pu Cunxin, hugely famous in China – roared his way through speeches pouring scorn on cowards and commoners alike, the twin bands supplied a soundtrack of caterwauling guitars and pounding bass. It made the productions I’d seen in Germany look bashful.
When I interviewed Lin, I asked him why he had decided to amplify Shakespeare with hard rock. The maestro had smiled cryptically. He liked the noise, he said.
Coriolanus was being revived as part of the Salute Shakespeare festival, but not until later in the month. In the meantime, there was another home-grown production on stage at the Egg, The Taming of the Shrew, performed by a young troupe from Shanghai. Harry asked whether I wanted to come. Courtesy of that anonymous Shanghainese translator, Shrew had been among the first of the Lambs’ Tales to be done in Mandarin, and one of the earliest Shakespearian productions on the Chinese stage. I most certainly did.
This new version was advertised as a smartly contemporary rom-com, something of an experiment in China, where Shakespeare was still often regarded as the purview of western companies or experimental directors such as Lin. I was interested to see what they made of it – even more interested as to whether the Beijing audience would reveal the same encouraging taste for William Shakespeare as they displayed for grand opera.
The first surprise was that the show was booked out. There was not a seat to be had, so much so that urgent calls were made to Shanghai to secure me a ticket. The second surprise was that I was nearly the oldest person there. I’d been told that live theatre in China was popular among the millennial generation born since the mid-1990s, and hadn’t entirely believed it. Looking around the auditorium, it seemed to be true. I hadn’t seen a crowd this eager and fresh-faced since attending a Harry Potter superfan event some years before (for work, I feel it important to point out).
Forewarned that there were no surtitles, I had downloaded a Shakespeare app on to my phone, figuring that I could bury it in my programme and consult the text by stealth. This precaution proved unnecessary: the arrival of the actors seemed to be a subliminal signal for everyone in the audience to slide out their smartphones, only occasionally pausing to consult the stage. A man two rows in front of me spent most of the performance checking stock-market prices on his Samsung. The fingers of a girl to my side flew busily over WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp. The auditorium was dotted with glimmering tiny blue screens.
In any case, the show needed little translation. Set in a 1930s-ish
Shanghai, it was done in minimal fashion with a cast of eight. Some scenes had been rearranged, but the play had been boiled down to its essence: a cautionary tale about the dangers of women not obeying men. Katherine, the headstrong ‘shrew’ of the title, refuses to be married off, to the lasting irritation of her dutiful sister Bianca, who is besieged by suitors but banned from marrying until Katherine does so first. The gold-digging Petruccio is persuaded to make a bid for Katherine and does so with gusto, ‘taming’ her into obedience by a combination of badinage and bullying tactics. Somehow all ends happily.
It was both captivating and chastening to watch. In Britain and America, The Taming of the Shrew is generally regarded as a problem comedy because of its streak of violent misogyny: how else to portray a world where women are bartered and sold like sacks of grain? Or in which a wife is starved and subjected to sleep deprivation by her husband so she might become more pliant to his will? Earnest debate centres on the final scene, in which Petruccio sets up yet another blokeish bet, as to who has the most obedient wife. Not only does the newly tamed Katherine appear promptly when called, she delivers a forty-four-line speech on spousal duty. ‘A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,’ she declares, later continuing:
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
In the western tradition, particularly since the pioneering work of feminist critics such as Juliet Dusinberre and Lisa Jardine in the 1970s and 1980s, the speech is a famous crux. Is Katherine being wilfully ironic? Is this a private joke between her and Petruccio? Should she mumble the lines, spirit crushed, like a victim of torture? I’d seen any number of variations on stage, but never a hint that Katherine might be serious, and seriously suggesting that – as she goes on to say – a woman’s rightful place is beneath her husband’s ‘foot’.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 47
