Shakespeare still lives on in Chinese hearts
Print Edition
ZHU Biaojun can’t forget the night some 20 years ago when he stood in the rain at an open-air cinema to watch a movie version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
The middle school student from a village in east China’s Anhui province had never heard of the English playwright but was deeply impressed by the story.
Zhu, now a poet and literary critic, is among hundreds of thousands of Chinese people to have been moved by William Shakespeare’s works.
Saturday marked the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
From the line “to be or not to be,” to an excerpt from “The Merchant of Venice” in middle school textbooks, to traditional operas and popular movies adapted from his plays, “Shakespeare has been assimilated into our daily life,” said Zhu.
Shakespeare’s name is thought to have appeared in a Chinese book for the first time in 1839 when Lin Shu issued a translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare.”
In 1935, Zhu Shenghao began work on translating Shakespeare’s plays.
“To escape bombing by the Japanese invaders, he took shelter in the countryside,” said Cheng Zhaoxiang, former headmaster of the Foreign Language School at Beijing University.
Zhu, who was in poor health, died in 1944, having completed the bulk of the bard’s work.
Wang Xiaoying was 21 years old in 1978, when China published the complete works in 1978, and he started reading them right away.
In the 1980s, he studied in the Central Academy of Drama, where he played the leading role in “Hamlet” and directed “Othello.”
Today, he is vice head of the National Theater of China and his version of “Richard III” has been performed more than 50 times around the world.
In his version, he added some elements of Beijing Opera and the cast were dressed in traditional Chinese robes. The actors playing the assassins used martial arts in their performance.
In 2012, the play made its debut at The Globe, a theater in London originally built in Shakespeare’s time.
“The stage resembles traditional Chinese theater,” Wang said. “And some of the plays also bear a resemblance to Chinese stories. With an emperor, some officials, conspiracy and warfare, the story of Richard III could be Chinese.”
There have been many Chinese versions of Shakespeare’s work.
Among them, movie “Prince of the Himalayas” is an adaptation of “Hamlet” set in Tibet. In east China’s Anhui Province, Li Longbin retold “Macbeth” in the style of Anhui Opera.
“It is our hope that foreign audiences will see the charm of Anhui Opera through a story they are familiar with,” Li said.
Universal appeal
Wang says Shakespeare’s plays have universal appeal.
“From his stories you can see complicated human nature, different emotions, contemplation of life, as well as criticism of society, with which people could always develop an empathy,” he said.
Zhu marvels at the language. “Four hundred years after the lines were written, they are still enlightening,” he said.
The sentence “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes” has become a proverb in China. In a speech in Britain, Chinese President Xi Jinping quoted the line “what’s past is prologue” from “The Tempest.”
“Even after a thousand years, we will still be reading Shakespeare,” said Yang Qingxiang, an associate professor at Renmin University of China.
“If you would like to gain a deeper understanding of the world, or understand how complicated human nature can be, read Shakespeare,” he said.
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