Worlds Elsewhere (65 page)

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:

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'.

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':

‘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'.