I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them, but
To look upon him till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay, followed him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air, and then
Have turned mine eye and wept.
Imogen was here describing a leave-taking she had not, in reality, been permitted to observe: Posthumus was long gone, the lovers already separated, and would not be reunited for nearly the duration of the play.
Cymbeline is one of the last scripts Shakespeare wrote on his own: the astrologer Simon Forman saw it in 1611, which places it alongside The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Deeply influenced by the Stuart masques its author must have witnessed at court, the play suited translation into another courtly form, Chinese opera. Imogen’s speech had a haunting, evanescent beauty that matched the elegance and composure of jingju, its balance between constrained poetic formality and something much more pregnant with meaning.
Though the word is now unfashionable, Cymbeline is sometimes still called a ‘romance’, and of all the late plays it most deserves the term. It is a narrative of quest, or quests: Cymbeline’s journey towards becoming a better father, Posthumus’s limping progress towards self-knowledge, Imogen’s odyssey to find her brothers, through what looks very much like death – she drinks a sleeping draught and falls into a deathlike slumber – and then into mythic rebirth. Xiamen’s director, a tutor going under the equally romantic name of Ballet Liu, had wisely made this abbreviated version more or less Imogen’s drama, dominated by an intense central performance from a student called Zhang Peipei.
As Zhang took her bow, I realised with a start that behind her trembling fan real tears were in her eyes. They weren’t far from mine.
In the raucous rush of a wood-panelled French wine bar, surrounded by braying Brits and Aussies, I spent a final evening in Hong Kong. It was a Tuesday evening, but felt later in the week. The suits and shirtsleeves were spilling outside; through the open windows the sound of the city was loud. Competing with the yowling sirens and the squealing of brakes were the low roar of air-conditioning units and the strident, angular intonations of Cantonese businessmen gossiping on the street. In the humid, dog’s-breath air, the city itself felt like a living creature, one possessed of its own jittery, jumped-up energy.
I realised there was another reason I’d found Cymbeline so unexpectedly poignant that afternoon. I had seen the play at the Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia, eighteen months before, near the beginning of my journeys. Cymbeline had also been the play read by Solomon Plaatje while he was romancing his wife, and it was a Cymbeline in Vadodara in 1880 that had convinced a previous traveller, Harold Littledale, of the strange beauties of Indian theatre. He, too, had been bowled over by Imogen (played, as she would have been in Shakespeare’s day, by a male actor). Head deep in Chinese Shakespeares, I’d wiped these rival Cymbelines from my brain.
Were they rivals? The two productions I’d seen in the theatre couldn’t have been more different. The Staunton Cymbeline was melodramatic, a rollicking tale with a loud twang of the American frontier, acted in a theatre Shakespeare would have recognised the moment he stepped inside. Here in Hong Kong the play seemed much more delicate, performed in a cultural context that would have left its author bemused, but which contained an aristocratic grace he might perhaps have understood. The famous thing about Cymbeline, of course, was that it was an incomprehensible mishmash: Dr Johnson called its plot ‘unresisting imbecility’. An amalgam of sources from a typically eclectic variety of places – Holinshed’s Chronicles, Boccaccio’s Decameron in a version translated via Dutch, Elizabethan prose romances and a number of others – it was a melting pot. It was also a compendium of motifs from two and a half decades of writing and the final play to be printed in the First Folio. That the Cymbelines I’d seen were both the same play and utterly different, a world away from each other and not, seemed entirely appropriate.
Globalisation theory was all very well, but was there something in the works themselves that explained how they had come to be reinterpreted so many times, all across the world? It was a tantalising – and tantalisingly hard – question. Shakespeare’s own porousness and receptiveness to the world that surrounded him was certainly part of the answer, his nimble curiosity about what Prospero in The Tempest calls ‘the great globe itself’ (and his interest in putting that globe on stage at the Globe). I also liked the theory, acquired in Taipei, that his very language was alive with quickness and mutability, movement and change. If the plays and poems provoke us to do anything, it is surely to think more rapidly, to be light on our feet, to see things three-dimensionally and from many different angles – not one thing, many things. One thinks of the Prologue to Henry V, with its stirring call to make ‘imaginary puissance’, to combine in a shared effort of will to transform the invented scenes in front of us on stage into embodied reality. One thinks, too, that for Shakespeare and his company theatre was a lively, collaborative art – the creation of wigmakers as well as writers, stagehands alongside dancing masters, audience as well as actors.
Equally pragmatic, and no less important, is the fact that Shakespeare’s scripts are unusually flexible, open to adaptation and possible to stage in any number of different forms. How many Hamlets had I encountered en route? Seven or eight, on stage and on screen? More, when one factored in scripts or narrative versions I’d read. For the same play – and a notoriously complex play at that – to work equally well as a Goethean Bildungsroman as a Parsi-influenced Hindi movie, a Wild West swashbuckler as well as a deconstructed, postmodern piece of Regietheater was an achievement so rare I felt it must be unique. For the multilingual, semi-improvised Julius Caesar I’d seen in Johannesburg still to be Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – just about – said much about how far his texts could be stretched and twisted before they began to buckle.
Was there something more, too? I’d been searching for an answer almost from the moment I’d watched that Afghan Comedy of Errors. There the play struck me as an exploration of travel, not just because of the arduous journeys, physical and emotional, taken by its cast; but in the way joyous confusions and jumbled identities went to the very core of what the drama was about. In two years of travel, I’d experienced a fair degree of comedy myself, and embarked on errors and wild goose chases too numerous to mention. Sometimes I, too, had run into myself coming the other way.
But then one could argue that travel and migration were ideas that occupied Shakespeare through the length of his writing career – more consistently perhaps than any other. Before I began travelling, I’d never fully appreciated how the motif infiltrates so much of his writing. From The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.1590) to The Two Noble Kinsmen (c.1614), there is barely a work in which journeying doesn’t underpin the wider movement of the action.
One could say this is unsurprising, given that the quest narrative is one of the most ancient in all literature. But it did seem inescapable how obsessively Shakespeare encircled and returned to the theme. The storms and shipwrecks are alarmingly, and famously, frequent (The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Tempest). So too are the exilic journeys on which he repeatedly sends his characters – the disguised Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It and the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, alike banished to forests; Viola in Twelfth Night, saved from drowning and washed ashore in Illyria (‘What country, friends, is this?’); Hamlet and his escapades with pirates in the frigid seas between Denmark and England. To these can be added Othello and Desdemona, dispatched from Venice to Cyprus on a voyage from which they will never return; Lear and his journey into the wilderness; and Imogen, with her own solitary quest through the wilds of Wales.
The sonnets resound to the theme:
O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify—
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul
, which in thy breast doth lie.
That is my home of love. If I have ranged,
Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
For nothing this wide universe I call
Save thou my rose; in it thou art my all.
Sonnet 109 is characteristic of this portion of the sequence, in which the poet describes what seems to be an extended absence from his beloved (perhaps the ‘lovely boy’ of Sonnet 126), with the barbed hint that he has been unfaithful somewhere on his ‘travels’. Dangerous though it is to associate that poetic ‘I’ with Shakespeare himself, it occurred to me that a man who spent nearly all his working life away from his family and his home town must have had plentiful opportunity to ponder what it feels like to be separated. He might never have left England; but did he need to?
Not always is the theme tragic. Pericles, which went on stage in 1608, the year before the sonnets were published, is especially fraught with journeys. The hero for whom it is named is sent, Odysseus-like, from ‘bourn to bourn, region to region’ across the ancient eastern Mediterranean – Antioch, Pentapolis, Tyre, Mytilene, Tarsus – suffering misadventure after misadventure, shipwreck after shipwreck, losing his wife in childbirth on board, then becoming separated from his daughter, named Marina for the sea on which she is born.
Against every apparent likelihood – and against everything Shakespeare’s audience must have expected after the great run of tragedies that occupied him in the early 1600s – husband, wife and daughter are eventually, mystically, united. The scene is one of the most heart-stopping in all Shakespeare. ‘Give me a gash,’ Pericles pleads with his friend Helicanus:
put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness! [To Marina] O, come hither,
Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget,
Thou that was born at sea, buried at Tarsus,
And found at sea again!
The first of the romances and the beginning of Shakespeare’s great last phase, Pericles returns to themes – migration, separation – he had touched on in The Comedy of Errors, over a decade and a world earlier. A late voyage, even before The Tempest, in a lifetime of imaginative voyaging.
I looked down at my notes. My handwriting curled away on the page, black and cumbrous, looking like the product of someone else’s brain. Two fat notebooks for China alone. The thought of reading them back made me want to cry.
Suddenly exhausted, I flicked a wad of Hong Kong dollars on to the counter and slid, somewhat unsteadily, off my stool. Time to think about going home.
In the departure terminal at Hong Kong airport, in the snug darkness of an evening that would go on for sixteen hours yet, I sat drinking vinegary Malbec and watching a British Airways 747 slide in to land. A band was playing, two teenage boys on piano and guitar. Their Adam’s apples bobbed in time to the music.
For once, I didn’t mind the wine, or the band. I was basking in the unrighteous glow of a misspent final day. There were still phone numbers to call, at least one interview I could have chased. I should really have gone back to the second session of the Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival, and found out whether Xiamen were in with a chance. I hadn’t. At 7 a.m., I’d opened the blind to find the harbour winking in the sunlight and a sky as clear and iridescent as polished crystal. I’d abandoned the city altogether and gone to the beach. It was early, a Wednesday morning, and for ten minutes I had the run of the place. The warm sand was the colour of fresh breadcrumbs, the water a delirious green-blue. I’d left my notebooks at home.
In the afternoon, I’d retreated further into type by going bargain-hunting in the antique shops on Hollywood Road. In my mind’s eye was the celadon glaze of ceramics I’d glimpsed in museums in Beijing and Taipei: that unearthly, luminous milky green one sees on dishes, basins, lotus bowls. That was Ru ware and impossibly rare, but celadon was a mass export from China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are plenty of surviving examples.
I found one promisingly dusty shop, lacking air conditioning and with an owner who resembled a bullfrog in slacks, and installed myself for a sweaty two hours, disdaining the Revolutionary Opera figurines he fished out of the back and lifting pieces of porcelain to the light with what I hoped was connoisseurship.
Eventually I chose one bowl, inscribed inside with gentle swirls, like the marks left in water by the tails of fish. There were no identifying symbols. Fourteenth-century, he insisted: late Yuan, early Ming. Without the faint flaw on the rim – the tiniest of nicks – it would be ten times the price. We settled on 1,200 Hong Kong dollars, about £100. I thought it was as likely to hail from the porcelain section of the Shenzhen Export Processing Zone, but I didn’t care. Being fleeced in an antique shop was surely as traditional in Hong Kong as a detailed knowledge of feng shui and a conviction or two for insider trading.
It wasn’t the only thing I bought. Heading back into town via Tsim Sha Tsui, I had passed a Japanese bookshop on Chatham Road. On a whim, I went in: I was curious to see if they had any Shakespeare manga, which I’d tried and failed to get hold of on the mainland. The students at CUHK had said they read it as a way of preparing their performances; other people I’d met had talked about its astonishing popularity across Asia. A British publisher had produced an English-language manga series, but I was after the hard stuff: Japanese originals. I half-suspected my sources of exaggerating: Shakespeare had permeated many aspects of pop culture, but Asian comic magazines?
At the counter, planting myself next to a waist-high pile of Hello Kittys, I did my best to sign-language what I wanted, mouthing every Asiatic variant of ‘Shakespeare’ I could think of: Shashibiya, Sheshibiru, Shaykuspiru?
At last the assistant decoded my tongue-tied pronunciation. ‘Sheykusupia!’ he exclaimed. I nodded gratefully.
He darted across to the other side of the store, and came back proffering a tiny green-and-yellow book, ten or so centimetres tall, printed in what I recognised as katakana characters. On the cover, in yellow and pale green, was a series of stylised manga images, faces in close-up: faces yelling, screaming, weeping. I didn’t recognise the play. But inside the dustjacket was a reproduction of the Chandos portrait, and dates in western format, 1564–1616. I bought it on the spot.
At the airport, as the jazz band eased into a soft-focus version of ‘Bewitched’, I pulled the book from my satchel and opened the covers, remembering to start back to front, right to left. The cells, four or five to each page, looked stark – black, white and grey, with small, precise speech bubbles in Japanese. The drawing was wonderfully sharp and sculptural. After an illustrated list of characters, the story commenced. There were scenes of devastation, halting beggars in the shadows. Raptors circled lazily beneath a woozy, feverous sun. In the distance, a medieval castle. One of the history plays? Richard III? Hamlet?
It was page five before I knew where I was – a severe stone chamber, a king enthroned high on a dais, tiny beneath the weight of his crown. Before him, flanked by rows of robed, stiff-backed knights, knelt three sons. I looked closer: long hair. Daughters.
Outside the curved glass windows of the airport, lights pulsed and shimmered, scattering colours into the black night: crimson, amber, emerald, pearl. Every so often there was the roar of a take-off, almost imperceptible. It sounded like the distant rumble of a storm. The wine in my glass barely trembled. Someone else’s storm.
I looked back down at the book. Japanese Shakespeare, now this seemed interesting …
I turned the page and started to read.
Select bibliograph
y
The books, articles and films I have been inspired by, dipped into or borrowed from while researching and writing this book are too numerous and varied to list, and that list would certainly be too vast to read. Instead I have compiled a compendium of suggested reading that acknowledges my debts to key sources, but which also – I hope – points the way for anyone making their own journeys into the rich and ever-expanding field of global Shakespeare.
Where possible titles are listed geographically, in the chapter order in which I employed them; I have prioritised works that have been translated into English. The opening section includes books and articles that range across more than one geographical area (as many do), and the final section lists works of general reference. Books and essays I found particularly helpful are marked with an asterisk. Many of the films listed are available on DVD or YouTube.
Anyone looking to orientate themselves country by country would do well to start with the excellent (and free) ‘Shakespeare in …’ online essays published by the University of Victoria in Canada, at: internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein
Citations from Shakespeare in the main text are keyed to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds), The Complete Works, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2005).
Full academic endnotes would make a bulky book even bulkier, but I have printed more detailed references to sources at: worldselsewhere.com/notes
Worlds Elsewhere Page 57
