The day before, I’d met the Cantonese translator, Rupert Chan. The point he’d emphasised was that – far more than Mandarin – Hong Kong Cantonese was a living, evolving language, continually in flux. It borrowed shamelessly from all across Asia, and was stuffed with loan words from English and elsewhere. In its assimilative urges and hunger for novelty, it reflected Hong Kong itself.
Perhaps it was a few days’ wandering amid grandiose corporate headquarters and skyscrapers, but it hit me how much The Taming of the Shrew is about money as well as sex: Petruccio bragging about how he can make his fortune by bedding a woman with a rich father; the imbalanced marriage market that sees the pliant and saleable Bianca fending off suitors while the strong-willed Katherine is left with none.
After they’d run through the first act, the students took a break. For twenty minutes, in a mixture of Cantonese and English, we talked about patriarchy and relationships in contemporary China, particularly the pressure for women to conform. The subject had been on my mind since Beijing; I was pleased that at last I had someone to ask.
‘This is a big problem in China, particularly on the mainland,’ a boy said solemnly.
‘Hong Kong too,’ a girl on the other side of the room flashed back. It was the girl playing Katherine. ‘It happens in our world. We want to say, we can change this. We can use Shakespeare to change this.’
Another girl brought up the Occupy movement; they had friends who’d been in the protests that lasted from September to December in 2014, demanding greater electoral freedom from mainland China. The atmosphere on the island was jittery; no one was sure how things would go. ‘There is much to change in Hong Kong, many issues,’ she said.
Politics aside, I wondered how they felt about Shakespeare: did he feel British, here in this former colonial outpost? They looked at me blankly. Most were native Cantonese; in 1997 they’d only just been born. The British era? Prehistory.
‘I think Shakespeare is a writer from everywhere,’ someone said in careful English. ‘In Cantonese, he is a Cantonese writer.’
The girl who’d played Katherine spoke up again. ‘His words are very poetic in English, so for me it is quite hard to put myself into these words. For the British, I think it is hard to understand all the poetry. Maybe we here don’t get all that poetry. But in Cantonese we can find something that relates to us now, in Hong Kong, in this society.’
I wanted to ask more, but they were eager for feedback. My turn – supper-singing time. Fourteen faces leaned anxiously towards me. I filled for a few minutes, blathering about Elizabethan marriage codes and property laws. What I really wanted to say was this: I thought they had entirely nailed the play.
Later that afternoon I sat in the sleek bar of a hotel above Government House, sipping green tea and soaking in the Hong Kong skyline. The view across the cloudy green water to Kowloon was spectacular, framed by the gaunt grey exoskeleton of Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters and the angular glass fortress of I. M. Pei’s Bank of China. At the feet of the skyscrapers and mansion blocks was dark, lush forest, carpeting the hills leading up to the Peak. No wonder the British felt such lordly self-confidence in Hong Kong, a confidence inherited by the multinational financiers who now controlled the island. Up here, it was easy to convince yourself you ruled Asia, if not the world.
I thought back to the image of Shakespeare I’d seen in that press conference in Taipei, with the Bard clambering over the globe like a plumper, goateed Godzilla. Did Shakespeare, too, rule the world? Is that what I’d really discovered on my travels?
Hunting through my notebooks, I searched for connections and linkages. I followed the thread back to the place where I’d started, twenty-three months earlier: at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, watching a scratch company from Afghanistan perform a play little-regarded in the west, The Comedy of Errors. Powerfully moved by the experience, I’d spent that summer searching for Shakespeares that looked different from Britain’s National Poet, digging among competing theses as to why he was now the world’s writer.
Some of those theories had certainly borne fruit. No ignoring – particularly here in Hong Kong – the heavy tread of the British Empire, nor the way Brits carried Shakespeare across whichever waves they ruled, from Kolkata on the Bay of Bengal to the Cape on the south-west tip of Africa; to Canada and the American colonies right round through East Asia to Australia and New Zealand. In almost every territory that blushed imperial pink, Shakespeare put in an appearance, a reliable piece of colonial equipment, either performed on stage or part of the education system (and often both).
It was also true that the US-driven global spread of the English language had helped cement his reputation in those territories the British had never reached. Even if I had become increasingly dubious about the claim made by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Council that half the world’s schoolchildren now study Shakespeare – despite the researchers’ best efforts, the evidence was shaky – it was surely true that enormous quantities of people now encounter Shakespeare in some form or another, if not in formal education then via internationally successful television shows and movies such as Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1996), or in story form – novels, Japanese manga Shakespeare (hugely popular across Asia), the Lambs’ Tales. Even if only, say, a quarter of the world’s population brushed past Shakespeare at some point, that was still nearly 2 billion people.
Perhaps most excitingly, a large proportion of these people must have little idea that what they are watching or reading is Shakespeare. With the recent explosion in Indian and Chinese cinema, particularly among the expanding Asian diaspora, the Shakespeares streaming across the globe are now more multifarious than ever.
This was something I genuinely hadn’t computed before I left: what a minority sport English-language Shakespeare now is. In all but one of the countries on my route, English-language texts had far less effect on the dissemination of Shakespeare than translations into myriad local tongues, from Bengali to isiZulu. If an academic paper I’d heard in Delhi was correct, far more people now encounter Shakespeare in modern translation than in Early Modern English, rendering it an absorbing question as to who really ‘owns’ Shakespeare’s texts. Whoever it is, it certainly isn’t the British.
I hadn’t become any more reconciled to the word, but the concept of Shakespeare as a ‘rhizomatic’ cultural figure – decentred, present in many places at once, his roots entwined with many different kinds of local histories – seemed more and more appealing. More, if one pushed the metaphor further, one could think of Shakespeare as a kind of living organism, continually evolving: much of the same genetic code was present, but mutated, so that the organism itself took ever more diverse and wondrous forms. The Cantonese students I’d been talking to earlier, equally influenced by traditional opera, old Hong Kong movies seen on YouTube and third-wave American gender theory, would surely recognise a Shakespeare who emerged from everywhere rather than a bald man with a ruff and MADE IN BRITAIN stamped upon his base.
How about another theory with which I’d set off – that Shakespeare’s global significance was down to his benign universality, the fact that he was the same everywhere you went, an emblem of our common humanity? Though I’d lost count of the number of times people had told me there was something ‘universal’ about Shakespeare, this hadn’t been my experience at all. There were reflections and echoes, yes, but it was more accurate to describe him as a Rorschach blot that never looked the same twice. It didn’t seem to me that interpretational fixedness or solidity was anything like the defining characteristic of the texts I’d seen performed or read: it was the contrasts and competing inflections that were telling. In search of Shakespeare, I’d found him different at every turn.
Even where people had apparently tried to use Shakespeare as a bridge of shared humanity – Solomon Plaatje and his Setswana translations were a telling example – the reality turned out to be more ambiguous and complex. There was something about Shakespeare that made people wa
nt to own him, to claim him as one of them, to give cultural status and legitimacy to their ambitions or concerns, whether it was ‘unser Shakespeare’ and the cause of German nationalism in the nineteenth century or the agitated political situation in present-day Thailand. It seemed to me that no one could reasonably claim that any of these images of Shakespeare were alike. They were defiantly plural; Shakespeares, not Shakespeare.
So perhaps the globalisation theorists had it right, that Shakespeare was a multinational brand, a free-floating symbol that transcended national borders and could attach itself to many different kinds of cultural artefacts. If so, the process had begun even within his lifetime – if not off the coast of Sierra Leone on board an East India Company ship, then at city fairs and princely courts in German-speaking northern Europe. The translated and abbreviated Shakespeare performed by the English Comedians early in the seventeenth century was barely recognisable, just as the heavily adapted Shakespeare so crazily popular in nineteenth-century Britain and America would now be regarded with horror in both those places. The inescapable fact was that, for most of the last four centuries, ‘Shakespeare’ was a concept at best hazily related to the playscripts the man himself had written. But this, in a sense, was the point. Ben Jonson’s famous obsequy in the 1623 First Folio, that his dead colleague was ‘not of an age, but for all time’, contained the grains of a potent idea – that one secret of Shakespeare’s global success is that he is endlessly variable, reinterpretable, translatable, can never be pinned down to exactly one thing.
Yet there was another crucial fact, one I’d discovered reading up on Sierra Leone and had been reminded of in South Africa: that, searching for Shakespeare in many different cultures, one saw his silhouette everywhere, even places he’d never been. Many societies, particularly in the economically poor global south, rubbed along perfectly fine without the works of William Shakespeare, and would continue to do so long into the future. The anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s parable about Hamlet and the Tiv, in which the most famous play by the world’s most famous author failed to impress a group of Nigerian tribal elders, was an essential caution. Not only did it relegate Shakespeare to the status of just one storyteller among many, but it reminded us (reminded me) that some things were stubbornly and unavoidably local. This, too, was something I had only dimly grasped before I began to travel. It was a valuable lesson.
Back in Hong Kong, it was becoming dusk. The apartment blocks and skyscrapers had become speckled with warm points of light and the sky, murky and sullen, had deepened to purplish-grey. The Bank of China tower was illuminated with sharp bars of electric white, broken into crooked reflections by the mirrored glass. Next to it reared the crest of the International Finance Centre, its summit swallowed by the gathering murk. A storm looked to be on the way. For a few minutes, as it stole soundlessly in, I watched the illuminated city meet its twin on the blackening water.
Looking back through my notes, I snorted at where they’d led me: to the image of Shakespeare as an untethered symbol of trans-national, free-flowing capital. Where else would one find a Shakespeare who looked like that, but right here in Hong Kong?
That was another strange thing about Shakespeare: he had a disconcerting habit of reflecting your own self back at you.
At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the foyer was a medley of Shakespearian characters. Using the programme I’d been issued, I attempted to identify them: the girl with the belly padding and the appliqué moustache had to be Sir Toby Belch. The boy wearing streaky dark face-paint must be Othello, but was he the Othello from the University of Macau, Renmin University or Ludong University? How about the three students in Chinese-opera costume and full make-up? Anyone’s guess. The characters wafted around, freezing robotically into pose as selfies were captured and filed, and forming ever more unlikely Shakespearian couplings: Juliet with her arm around Imogen; Prospero cosying up to Macbeth. The Nurse had clearly taken a shine to Othello.
It seemed a good way to spend the penultimate day of my trip, and only partly because this free-associating parade of Shakespearian characters resembled the mangled state of my brain. The Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival was the largest and longest-running event of its kind in China. Over the ten years of its existence, hundreds of students had taken part, from 92 universities in 27 provinces. Theoretically it was all about cooperation, but no one was fooled. In the best Chinese traditions it was ferociously competitive: 44 universities had applied this year, only 12 making it to the finals. Students had been rehearsing for months, had taken days off class and all-night coach journeys to get here.
Despite the smiles and the selfies, the atmosphere was jittery. Professors were huddled in corners, with the hunched air of professional sports coaches. There was much trading of tips: would it be CUHK’s year, or was being the home team a handicap? Might Nanjing regain the glory days of its past?
After a few minutes’ speechifying and applause, we were introduced to the judging panel: the former head of the Australian National University drama department, the artistic director of Shakespeare Western Australia and the dramaturg at the California Shakespeare theatre. A strange coincidence, re-encountering Cal Shakes: it was where I’d watched Hamlet many months before. It seemed peculiar after everything I’d learned about colonial history that the students were Chinese and the judges white, but I kept the thought to myself.
The head of the CUHK English department said something about art being a bridge to our shared world. There was warm applause. Global Shakespeare in action. More warm applause. The sponsor, an oleaginous businessman who had taken a gallant interest in the female students, tapped the microphone. ‘There is a saying in Chinese, it takes ten years to plant a tree …’ I doubted it, but it was a noble thought.
As the teams streamed backstage to take their places, the head of department gave me a lowdown on the rules. Each team would perform a handful of scenes from the play of their choice, not exceeding twenty minutes. Only three actors were allowed per team. The scripts had been edited, but all were in Shakespearian English. This was as much a test of comprehension and diction as it was of acting.
I said I found it an odd idea, Shakespeare being used competitively, like college football.
The head’s eyes were on his phone, searching for the festival’s Twitter hashtag. ‘That’s China for you. Survival of the fittest. Work here for long enough and you don’t notice it.’
First out of the blocks were CUHK, with an all-female cast tackling early scenes from Romeo and Juliet: the tussle between Juliet and her mother over plans for Juliet’s arranged marriage, followed by a silent tableau of the ball scene. It was a well-mannered performance that put me in mind of Disney’s Cinderella. Juliet wore a ball dress and pouted like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless; Lady Capulet was nicely haughty, with an excellent line in eye-rolling at her teenage daughter’s capricious recalcitrance. Romeo was nowhere to be seen, invoked only by name: a nicely feminist take on a play somewhat over-stuffed with brawling young men.
Trying to get into the judging spirit, I looked for demerits – their pronunciation was pitch-perfect, to be sure, but was there more than a hint of finishing school? All were Hongkongers, but one would have had a hard time telling it; with their American high-school vowels and their prom-queen sheen, there seemed nothing remotely Chinese in what they were doing. But maybe that was a western way of looking at it. Maybe it was authentically Hong Kong to pretend you weren’t from Hong Kong.
The letter scene from Twelfth Night, performed by Tsinghua University, was more enjoyable. Setting the play in the early-twentieth-century Republic of China, the student director and creative team had gone in for vaguely P. G. Wodehouse-ish outfits, with the striking exception of Malvolio, clad in gown and tights of a vibrant yellow hue (traditionally indicating high office as well as the colour of lust, it was explained afterwards). The tights were deployed repeatedly and with great vigour, which generated much audience excitement – at least more than Shakes
peare’s wordplay, which (unwisely, I thought) had mostly been retained. It was the first time I’d ever heard Malvolio’s normally reliable line, ‘these be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s’ – exclaiming at what he believes to be Olivia’s handwriting – fall flat. I glanced at the ninth-grader next to me: not a titter. Cunt jokes presumably worked better in Cantonese.
Macau University’s Othello came and went. My mind wasn’t entirely on the task in hand. The storm had eventually blown in the night before, and I had been woken at 3.30 a.m. by a window-rattling crash so violent I thought at first it was a car bomb in the street. Disorientated, heart thudding, I had lain there for what felt like minutes, looking at the pale glare of the streetlights on the ceiling and trying to remember which country I was in. China? India? I had eventually concluded it was Taiwan. As I fell asleep, an image had swum into my head of London painfully clear and sharp: drizzle, cloud, the soft smell of charcoal smoke over Victorian back-to-backs, the green shimmer of trees in the park …
I sat up in my seat and tried to keep hold of the present. Xiamen University of Technology had taken the stage. They were regarded as a long shot, coming from a new-ish university in Fujian province whose strengths lay in engineering and science rather than the liberal arts. They were underdogs. I decided to root for them.
I needn’t have bothered; their version of Cymbeline was by far the best performance, thoughtful and emotional, portraying two pivotal scenes – Posthumus’s banishment and separation from Imogen, followed by the grimly insinuating dialogue in which the dastardly Giacomo implies that Posthumus has been unfaithful to his wife while away. Their English was precise and believable, expertly navigating the whirlpools and eddies of late-Shakespearian verse, but the action had been directed in the style of Chinese opera. The cast were garbed in white facepaint and silken gowns the colour of icing; there was much coy fluttering of fans. I had no idea how authentic this jingju was, but for once that didn’t seem the point. The production captured the play’s fragile beauty and poise, how so much of its language was about the way things were seen, or not seen:
Worlds Elsewhere Page 56
