Here in China, however, the play seemed to be something else entirely. Petruccio was played as a professional wide boy and gambler, Katherine as a sharp-as-knives vixen whose six-inch heels added genuine danger to her athletic kung fu. I tried hard, but could sense little apparent anxiety about the gender politics: as Petruccio grabbed Katherine and flung her on top of the on-stage piano, pausing only to bash out Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, everyone in the audience guffawed loudly. When it came to her concluding speech – delivered without a flicker of irony – even Samsung Man lowered his screen and cheered. A group of teenagers nearby were roaring with laughter, their faces flushed with pleasure.
As I headed out, I pondered my reaction. There’d been numerous stories in China about what were grimly called sheng nu (‘leftover women’), women in their late twenties who had focused on getting an education and developing a career instead of playing the dating game. Despite a cursory amount of debate over the obvious sexism of the term, it seemed to be assumed that if women were ‘leftover’ it was entirely their fault, especially in a China where, as a result of the one-child policy, there were around 20 million more men than women under the age of thirty. If the response I’d seen in the theatre was any guide, the only way of looking at independent-minded single women in China was that they were ‘shrews’ in serious need of taming.
But then of course one could argue that this was authentic. However ironic or otherwise Shakespeare’s retelling of the story (or his response to earlier folk traditions), it would have been an irony lost on large sections of an Elizabethan audience, most of whom would no doubt have responded exactly as this Chinese one had done – with whoops and cheers of delight at the sight of a woman finally doing as she’s told. The unreconstructed humour might not have suited my taste, but one thing seemed clear, at least tonight: Shakespeare had found his audience.
Still, in a country where Mao had once famously claimed that ‘women hold up half the sky’, I found it disheartening. When Lin Shu and his team rendered the story in 1904, they gave it a simpler name: Xun han (‘Taming a Shrew’). It sounded disturbingly like an instruction manual.
‘What we must understand about Shakespeare,’ said Shen Lin, ‘is that it is ideological.’
He gestured benevolently outside his window – trees in leaf, chattering birds, a children’s play area, a woman shuffling into the building opposite with a basket of washing – and swung back, his eyes mischievous.
‘But then, naturally, everything in China is ideological.’
This homily was only slightly undercut by the fact that Professor Shen, head of theatre studies at the Central Academy of Drama, was addressing me from the end of his double bed. I had been heading out to his office when a text message arrived, asking if I could come to his apartment instead. Forewarned about the self-importance of certain Chinese academics, I had put this down to haughty behaviour. The reality was more humdrum: Shen had broken his ankle and was housebound.
Adjusting his position on the bed with a grimace, he launched into a detailed definition of ideology in a Marxist-Leninist context. Somewhere in the narrow apartment a kettle rumbled; a young student was busying herself with spring tea and rice cakes.
I had arranged to meet Shen because I was hoping for guidance on something that seemed near-impossible: squaring the works of William Shakespeare with Chinese communist ideology. Shen had kindly offered to give me a brief tutorial. He spoke energetically, in lightly accented English, but the tutorial did not look like being especially brief.
Lesson one: everything was ideological. Lesson two was equally important – that it had been so from Shakespeare’s earliest arrival in China. Lin Zexu, the diplomat whose 1839 translation of a British encyclopedia had introduced the ‘prolific’ Shakespeare to the Chinese, had been working for a government fighting the British. Later, the earliest enthusiasts for Shakespeare’s works were modernisers, seeking to wrest China out of (as they saw it) the intellectual dark ages. Lin Shu, the energetic translator-adapter who turned the plays into shenguai xiaoshuo, tales of gods and monsters, had his own ideology, making ancient Chinese culture commensurate with the best from the west.
When communism arrived, it was no different, Shen explained; but then one could not explain this without introducing the relationship between Marx and William Shakespeare …
The student arrived with the tea. I abandoned my notebook.
What I had not fully grasped was that Karl Marx, fiercely iconoclastic in so many ways, was a model Bardolatrous German. Introduced to the works as a young man in Trier, he memorised passages from the plays in both English and Schlegel’s German translation. (His daughter Eleanor later recalled that ‘Shakespeare was the Bible of our house’.) Marx’s reverence for Shakespeare was such that while living in London he joined a Shakespeare society, and thus had a walk-on part in the ill-starred tercentenary celebrations in 1864.
Marx peppered his articles and correspondence with Shakespearian allusions, was disconcertingly well-schooled in textual studies, and showed himself an alert critic. As a journalist and agitator, he deployed Shakespeare to score satirical points or to ram home a thesis. He drew frequently on The Merchant of Venice for its themes of justice and mercy, and returned more than once to Shylock as the image of the money-grubbing capitalist who uses high finance to turn human flesh into mere exchange value.
But it was in one of the most neglected texts in the canon, Timon of Athens, that Marx found an exemplum so perfect that it could almost have been designed to illustrate the radical social philosophy he had begun to develop in the early 1840s. The fable-like tale of an Athenian plutocrat who uses, abuses and loses his wealth, then is driven into the wilderness, Timon of Athens has been seen as a trial run for themes explored in agonising depth in King Lear. Both plays were most likely written around 1604–06, in the nervy, uncertain early years of James I’s reign.
Like King Lear, Timon of Athens is tormented by questions of value and worth, specifically monetary value. Marx seized on them. In a series of manuscript notes for Das Kapital made in 1844 he quoted Timon’s scathing denunciation of gold, that ‘yellow slave’:
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, gods, I am no idle votarist:
Roots, you clear heavens. Thus much of this will make
Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant.
‘Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money,’ Marx scribbled in his notes, seizing on Timon’s suggestion that capital is a violation of the natural order, divorcing objects and people from their true worth. By permitting the raw demands of the market to determine value, money allowed everything to become its opposite.
Shen smiled triumphantly. ‘These lines made Shakespeare famous among Chinese intellectuals!’
It was also important to note the role of the USSR. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Soviet technicians were sent out in their hundreds to help Chinese industries and universities modernise; alongside chemists and structural engineers were theatre directors and literature professors. Marxist books and essays on Shakespeare were translated and placed on curriculums. In Russia, Shakespeare had been revered since the eighteenth century; in this as in much else, China copied its ‘Elder Brother’.
Chinese scholars obediently analysed the plays in dialectical terms, ransacking them for examples of class conflict. One critic described King Lear as ‘the portrayal of the shaken economic foundations of the feudal society’. Hamlet became not a study in savage introspection, but a ‘social tragedy’ whose hero’s solemn duty is to free the Lumpenproletariat. The description of the Renaissance offered in Dialectics of Nature by Marx’s co-author Friedrich Engels (yet another passionate Shakespearian) as ‘the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants’, was often quoted. That Shakespeare had been a shareholder in a pro
fitable entertainment business was conveniently glossed over.
So it went on, Shen nexplained: China became one of the only countries in the world where Timon of Athens – neglected academically, barely staged – was not only read but keenly debated. Even Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers became subject to remorseless dialectical-materialist forces: I had heard Romeo and Juliet described in many ways, but never before as a reflection of ‘the desire of the bourgeois class to shake off the yoke of the feudal ethical code’.
I sensed I was being a dull student. Shen briskly shook his head. ‘Yes, this Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare is not very original, much of it is just imported from Russia. But Marxist analysis did make a dramatic impact on Chinese interpretation of art and history.’
Did he have a favourite play?
He barely paused. ‘Coriolanus. Coriolanus is my favourite play.’
Could he give me a Marxist reading?
He grinned narrowly. ‘Class war. Nothing new to China. Shakespeare is a very keen observer of this class war.’
Where did he place himself, politically?
‘I would be put on the left side. But it depends.’ He grinned again. ‘Another truth about China: change is all!’
Outside on the street, the atmosphere was of a sedate, slightly beery carnival. I had forgotten: it was May Day, the socialist holiday and in China the start of a three-day public festival. As I walked down Wangfujing towards the central shopping district, the crowds were out in force, enjoying as much of the spring sunshine as could be detected through a bilious filter of smog. Young fathers with chubby toddlers on their shoulders, wives in hot pants sporting serious-looking handbags, sharply dressed teenagers by the score: I threaded my way through them all as they mounted a combined offensive on the citadels of Starbucks and Zara and Gap.
On a corner I saw a camera store. One window proudly displayed portraits of Mao and Deng Xiaoping; the other glittered with hundreds of imported Canons and Nikons. It seemed as clear a metaphor as one could want for the present state of China.
Strange Tales from Overseas … When Shakespeare had first been translated into Chinese, via the Lambs, it had been as stories from the remote and exotic Occident. It took significantly longer for the plays to appear as they’d originally been written: dramas to be performed on stage.
Partly this was because – not dissimilar from India – China had its own vigorous and highly characteristic theatrical traditions. By western standards, the drama of the Middle Kingdom is almost unimaginably ancient. Its deepest origins, possibly religious or shamanic, are obscure, but by the Shang dynasty (which began around 1600 BCE, a millennium before Thespis, the first recorded Greek actor, stepped on stage) hunting rituals had become codified into dances and performances. By the time of the Zhou dynasty (c.1046–256 BCE), these had become chorus dances. Grand spectacles known as baixi (‘hundred entertainments’) became popular at the imperial court, a smorgasbord of music, miming, magic, martial arts and dancing.
Back in my apartment, I studied photographs online: Tang-dynasty tomb figurines from c.700 CE were especially vivid; graceful renderings of dancers with sexily sashaying hips and long, flowing sleeves. Had it not been for their chipped paint, they could have been sculpted yesterday.
The Tang emperors were especially passionate about drama, staging lavish spectacles – the most remarkable of which, laid on for a Turkish embassy during the seventh century, required a kilometre-square stage and several thousand acrobats, dancers and magicians. Many early playtexts date from this period. Surviving scripts include one entitled Tayao niang (‘The Dancing, Singing Wife’), in which a husband who beats his partner receives his just deserts (a nice riposte to Shrew the other evening, I thought), and a vaguely Hamlet-ish story called Buotou buotou (‘Head for Head’) telling of a youth whose father has been killed by a tiger and is bent upon revenge.
Many of these forms are preserved in Chinese opera–which, though codified much later, is a pottage of ancient ingredients. Beijing opera, the form best known in the west, is just one branch of traditional opera (known overall as jingju, jing meaning ‘capital city’). There are local variants throughout China, encompassing a dazzling variety of techniques – martial arts, mime, dance and acrobatics alongside singing, acting and costume/make-up.
In Britain a few years before, I’d watched a company from Shanghai perform a version of Hamlet called The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan. It was my first exposure to live jingju, an art form as remote from my previous experience as Aboriginal Dreamtime dance or Tanzanian hip-hop. Visually, the piece was spectacular, the stage crammed with actors in flowing robes and elaborate headdresses, with Hamlet as an athletic and dauntingly active warrior prince balancing on platform heels five inches high. The music was even more memorable: to an artillery of clanging percussion and squealing fiddles, the performers affected a nasal, fearsomely virtuosic singing style that sounded as though it could penetrate a brick wall at a thousand paces. I left the performance both deafened and impressed.
A morning’s research and a visit to the Zhengyici theatre, one of the very few traditional ‘tea-house’ opera houses left in Beijing – built in 1688 and beautifully restored, a lustrous jewel box in crimson, emerald and gold – helped me understand a little more. That the acting is heavily stylised was already obvious, but what I hadn’t appreciated is that similar imperatives govern plot and character.
Jingju is an actors’ art. Just four basic roles exist – sheng (male), dan (female), jing (painted-face male) and chou (male clown). These divide into subtypes of age or disposition (laodan, old woman; daomadan, young female warrior; huadan, ‘flower girl’, a coquette). Traditionally performers are taught in specialised schools from a young age, and spend many years in gruelling physical training, acquiring the strict requirements of their character type – the trembling falsetto of an adolescent boy, or the flashing sword skills of a virile young warrior (this must have been Hamlet, I realised). They might sometimes graduate within that type – ageing gracefully from xiaosheng (young scholar) to laosheng (elderly scholar) – but they would almost never leave it. Of the thousand-plus operas considered part of the repertoire, nearly all are centred on these types. Players spend entire careers performing just one character, honing it to flawless perfection.
Shakespeare would have recognised one aspect of jingju at least: female performers were initially banned from participating and only began to do so in the late nineteenth century. A few companies keep the old ways alive. At the Zhengyici I watched a male actor who specialised in the qingyi (‘green robes’) role of a mature or married woman wafting dolefully across the stage, resplendent in robes rippling with chrysanthemums and plum blossoms. Beneath a teetering headdress encrusted with pearls and flowers, his face was painted chalk-white. His voice was high and thin, but affecting in its fragility. For the first time, I understood why the sound was so piercing–it needed to project unamplified above the crashing and caterwauling of the orchestra. Sad and sweetly funny, he would have made a splendid Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.
But the rigorous refinements of jingju made it a prison. Inspired by the scholars calling for Chinese literature to open itself to outside influences, reformers argued that traditional opera was incapable of communicating genuine dramatic truth. They began to agitate for different kinds of theatre on Chinese stages. Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the founding of the Republic, interest grew in wenming xi, ‘civilised drama’, based on western models.
One model was provided by the schools and universities founded by missionaries in treaty ports such as Nanjing and Shanghai, which had exposed Chinese students to western-style education – including Shakespeare – and the rudiments of translation. Students had been taking part in English-language performances of the plays since at least the 1890s, including stagings of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice.
Enter Shashibiya and, again, Lin Shu. In July 1913, an adaptation called Rou quan (‘Bond of Flesh�
��), based on Lin’s version of the Lambs’ retelling of The Merchant of Venice, was acted by the National Renewal Society of Shanghai. A box-office hit, it sparked a fashion for Shakespearian dramas, both comedies and tragedies – notably Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew.
Whether these count as ‘Shakespeare’ is moot, because, even more so than equivalent versions in India, these were adaptations of adaptations of adaptations, and furthermore not conventionally scripted but given to the actors as set scenarios (mubiao) to be improvised around.
A 1916 advert in the Republican Daily for yet another version of The Merchant of Venice entitled Nu lushi (‘The Female Lawyer’) is a case in point. The synopsis sounds enticing, though perhaps implies that something has been lost in translation: ‘It involves cutting off a piece of one’s own flesh to borrow money, while the heroine, though a woman, nevertheless becomes a lawyer.’
The publicity materials for a 1914 version of Much Ado About Nothing called Yuan hu (‘Bitterness’) boast an even bigger sell, Shakespeare’s global celebrity, rendered in the tremulous language of Hollywood copywriters:
In Britain there are theatres that specialise in putting on Shakespeare’s plays. You can imagine how expensive the tickets are! Bond of Flesh has won high acclaim. Today we present Bitterness to you, in which men and women deceive each other from the beginning to the end. The bickering couple become happy foes, and this makes you laugh to death. Later, the bridegroom stirs up trouble in the wedding hall, and the bride screams for justice. This makes you cry your eyes out …
Although to modern eyes wenming xi would look impossibly stiff, it helped shape a fledgling form known as huaju (‘word drama’). This flourished not in the imperial city of Beijing, where jingju reigned supreme, but in cosmopolitan Shanghai, more exposed to imported cinema and drama.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 48
