“Hamlet in China : translation, interpretation and performance” (Web, 2010)
Year
2010
Text
Li, Ruru. Hamlet in China : translation, interpretation and performance : http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/essays/RuruLi.html. (Shak13)
Type
Web
Mentioned People (1)
Shakespeare, William
(Stratford-upon-Avon 1564-1616 Stratford-upon-Avon) : Dramatiker, Dichter
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Great Britain
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References / Sources
Chronology Entries (21)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1916 |
Aufführung von Qie guo zei = The usurper of state power = eine chinesische Adaptation von Hamlet und Macbeth von William Shakespeare durch die Yao feng xin ju she (Yaofeng New Drama Group) mit dem Schauspieler Gu Wuwei in Shanghai. Die Aufführung ist eine Atacke gegen Yuan Shikai. Die Zeitung Min guo ri bao schreibt : "He [Claudius] is the minister of the court but he usurps the power of the king and the country, and also commits adultery with the queen. He is the brother of the king but he steals his sister-in-law from her husband and seizes state power. To avenge his father's death, the hero has no choice but to sham insanity. In the end death spares no one. What a ruthless tragedy this is !" Li Ruru : Gu Wuwei, a popular actor who was involved in the production, was arrested and sentenced to death by the authorities on the charge of using drama to incite local disorder. He was not released from prison until Yuan Shikai was overthrown. |
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| 2 | 1916 | Die Zeitung Min guo ri bao schreibt über Nü lü shi = The female lawyer = The merchant of Venice : "…one of Shakespeare's famous plays. It involves cutting off a piece of one's own flesh to borrow money, while the heroine, though a women, nevertheless becomes a lawyer. Ecxellent literary style ; a wonderful story full of fun. It is a masterpiece performed by Wang Youyou, Zha Tianying, Li Beishi and Xu Banmei." | |
| 3 | 1917-1918 |
Dong, Run [Zhu, Dongrun]. Sha shi yue fu tan. [ID D23859]. Murray J. Levith : Dong suggests that his observations about the playwright might help people in conversation with English speakers, since Shakespeare is a subject that inevitability arises in such exchanges. He hotes Lin Shu's translations from the Lambs, and reviews details of Shakespeare's life. He considers Shakespeare 'liberal' because he marries an older woman. Dong also compares the dramatist with the Chinese poet Li Bo : Li Bo's poems are subjective while Shakespeare's plays present dramatic characters. Shakespeare's techniques of stagecraft interest him as well, as do devices such as cross-dressing. Dong's other essays focus on specific plays, for example Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. |
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| 4 | 1922 |
[Shakespeare, William]. Hamuleite. Tian Han yi. [ID D13674]. Es ist die erste vollständige chinesische Übersetzung aus dem englischen Original von Shakespeare. Er schreibt : "Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most stirring and moving tragedies. Today we have a lot of young people of the Hamlet type. What will they think about their society after reading this great tragedy ?" Li Ruru : Tian was motivated to translate Hamlet by the greatness of the play's reputation and by his strong personal empathy with the protagonist which enabled Tian to use the work of translation to vent his own emotions, although he admitted a few years later that he had made mistakes in his translation because he had been 'too young and too ambitious' to deal with such a profound piece of English literature. Spoken drama was thus dominated for a significant period by Western models of realistic and naturalistic theater. Tian Han used his translation of Hamlet as a reaction against this trend. Yet this translation was important both as marking the first publication of an entire Shakespeare in Chinese and as a personal landmark for Tian in entering Shakespeare's world, or rather the world of theater. Shakespeare made him a playwright and a poet, and Shakespeare's influence is evident in aspects of the characters, plots and language of Tian's own plays. |
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| 5 | 1930 |
[Shakespeare, William]. Tian chou ji. Shao Ting yi. [ID D23854]. Li Ruru : In Shao's interpretation of the play, the focus lay on Hamlet's revenge for both his father and mother, since marriage to Gertrude was a further crime committed by Claudius. The translation followed the style of the classical Chinese poetry, paying much attention to prosody, although sometimes this led Shao to distort the original meaning. |
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| 6 | 1934 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Hamuleite wen ti [ID D23875]. Li Ruru : Liang began by analyzing the various arguments put forward by writers in the West on the subject of Hamlet’s indecision and distinguished three schools of thought. He represented Romantic criticism by T. Hammer, H. Mackenzie, Goethe, S.T. Coleridge and W. Hazlitt who were all obsessed by Hamlet’s character. Liang's second group was represented by C. Lamb and K. Werder who, having dismissed the alleged flaw in Hamlet's character as deriving from the critics’ own imaginations, considered instead the world surrounding Hamlet and concluded that the delay in his taking action was necessitated by the external conditions. Liang rejected the arguments of both of the above groups because their interpretations were based on the subjective opinions of the essayists rather than an objective study of the text. Liang was more convinced by the contribution of critics who examined the theatrical conventions and applied textual analysis to expose the possible errors that Shakespeare made when he wrote the play. In his conclusion, Liang commented that the research on Hamlet was not only fascinating but also revealed the important points that literary criticism must be founded on detailed textual research and that Shakespeare should not be idolized since even the greatest writer's masterpiece could have errors. |
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| 7 | 1948 |
[Shakespeare, William]. Liya wang. Sun Dayu yi. [King Lear. ID D23593]. Li Ruru : The question of how to translate Shakespeare's blank verse into Chinese fascinated Sun Dayu. Sun had been seeking a new style of Chinese poetry written in the vernacular. His ideal form would "consist of rhythm and must have rhythm, but it should neither rely on rhymes nor should it follow the strict prosodic rule of exact numbers of character in each line". He invented a new concept of 'yin zu' (sound group) for modern Chinese poetry, which was much inspired by the style of the Italian sonnet. Murray J. Levith : Sun's 'Preface' discusses the almost insurmountable difficulty of translating Shakespeare into vernacular Chinese verse due to the vast differences between the English and Chinese languages. He states that accomplishing a 'perfect translation' would indeed be a 'miracle'. Sun invents a Chinese equivalent for Shakespeare's blank vers, 'yin zu' or 'sound unit', based upon phoneme groupings. His idea is that because vernacular Chinese words are often composed of two or three characters, which may be seen as akin to syllables, something approximating a five beat blank verse line can be suggested. Sun's desire is that his King Lear recreates the 'spirit' of the original play, which he feels is what Schlegel-Tieck accomplished with their famous German version. |
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| 8 | 1957 |
Bian, Zhilin. Shashibiya de bei ju "Hamuleite" [ID D23925]. Er schreibt : "Hamlet : Shakespeare had written for the people, not for the ruling class, and that Shakespeare opposed the feudal system in the early part of his career and exposed the evils of capitalism in the later part." After the ending of the Cultural revolution, Bian Zhilin came to realize his mistake in analysing Shakespeare and his plays only from the point of view of class struggle and then admitted Shakespeare's great contributions to the literature of Romanticism, breaking away from the strong in influence of the Soviet Marxist criticism. Li Ruru : Bian Zhilin was concerned with the ideological aspect of Shakespeare interpretation. He started translating Hamlet in 1954 as part of his overarching research project "to apply the standpoint, concepts and methods of marxism to the exploration of the thought and art in Shakespeare's works". Bian Zhilin's famous essay on Hamlet was the first Chinese work that attempted to interpret a Shakespeare play by applying the Marxist "dialectical and historical materialist point of view". First of all, Bian considered the idea Shakespeare expressed through Hamlet that "the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first, and novve, was and is, to holde as twere the Mirrour vp to nature, to shew vertue her feature ; scorne her own Image, and the very age and body of the time his forme and pressure". According to Bian, the word 'playing' here covers both theater and all creative literature. Thus Shakespeare's works are intended to be the reflection of his times and must be interpreted in the context of the period of history in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. "As the 'soul of his time' (not merely skin or hair), [Shakespeare] used his outstanding realistic art and expressed his eternal affinity to the people". Even when Hamlet meditates on the deeply personal question "To be, or not to be", Bian claims that "he hardly thinks of himself but inequality in society" as exemplified in the lines "For who would beare the whips and scornes of time, The oppressors wrong, the proude mans contumely,... who would fardels beare, To grunt and sweat vnder a wearie life" (1724-31). To Bian, Hamlet aligns himself with those who have been exploited by society when he describes himself as "a rogue and pesant slaue" and only finds true companionship with the players who belong to the lowest strata of society. "Through his bitter thinking (i.e. his soliloquies) and his mad words, Hamlet realizes the social inequality and the suffering that the masses have borne. Such an experience not only makes Hamlet hate his enemies more but also gives him more strength to carry on his fight. The bright color of his idealism is shown in Hamlet's accusation of the whole world". Before Hamlet dies, he still maintains his responsibility for his people by arranging for a successor. From this detailed analysis Bian concludes: "The theme of this tragedy should be the conflicts between the ideal and the reality. Human beings fight for the ideal. Even if they fail at the time, their fight illuminates the glory of the ideal. This therefore strengthens and consolidates human beings' confidence in their ability to reform the reality". In further support of Engels's view of Shakespeare as a 'realistic' dramatist, Bian interprets Hamlet's comments on playing as proving that Shakespeare advocated the realistic style of theater and acting. He Qixin : Bian Zhilin discussed English society in Shakespeare's age and concluded that Shakespeare had written for the people, not for the ruling class, and that Shakespeare opposed the feudal system in the early part of his career and exposed the evils of capitalism in the later part. Shakespeare's affinity to the people was the central theme of his plays and was also the key to his great success in subsequent centuries. |
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| 9 | 1957 |
Xu, Banmei. Hua ju chang shi qi hui yi lu [ID D23926]. Er schreibt : "We werde doing a run of Shakespeare's Hamlet one spring when it began to rain. The rain lasted for more than one week. So the title of the advertisement for Hamlet we chose was a folks proverb : 'Just as the rain is bound to fall, so is a woman bound to get married'. The cause of the tragedy of prince Hamlet was the fact that his mother insisted on remarrying." Li Ruru : Xu Banmei said that "the cause of the tragedy of Prince Hamlet was the fact that his mother insisted on remarrying". He assumed that Hamlet's tragedy was caused by the moral lapse of a women. However, the theme of remarriage was also topical at that time, since it was linked with the new and fashionable movement for women's rights. This extract offers us some idea of what the new drama people thought of Shakespeare and his play. It would appear, therefore, that this Chinese Hamlet was either an inevitable victim of his mother's decision to remarry or a fierce defender of her honor. |
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| 10 | 1963 |
Zhu, Hong. Xi fang guan yu Hamuleite dian xing de yi xie pin lun [ID D23929]. Li Ruru : Zhu Hong wrote an essay on the Western interpretation of Hamlet. Having surveyed the important critics of the first half of the twentieth century, A.C. Bradley, E.E. Stoll, T.S. Eliot, G.W. Knight and J.D. Wilson, she asserted the "he commentaries on Hamlet in the twentieth century in general cannot help us understand the characterization of Hamlet" because "the twentieth century is the century when the bourgeoisie has declined and decayed. This is also the centry when all the decadent and rotten 'new schools' have emerged in bourgeois concepts of literature and art as well as in criticism". |
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| 11 | 1966-1976 |
William Shakespeare während der Kulturrevolution. Li Ruru : During the Cultural revolution Shakespeare's plays were branded as 'feudal, capitalist and revisionist works' and were not performed or studied. The Cultural revolution destroyed Sun Dayu's haven, as thirty Red guards occupied his home and took away all his books, research materials and personal possessions. His son-in-law had removed all the manuscripts of his Sheakespeare translations before the arrival of the Red guards, and these papers survived to be published in 1988. Shen Fan : The Chinese stage was completely dominated by the modern revolutionary plays known as the 'Eight model plays', and literary scholarship concerning Western writers, including Shakespeare, was forbidden. Shakespearen scholars, like all other intellectuals in China, were sent to reeducated either in the countryside or the factories, and Shakespeare was occsionally mentioned only in political newspaper articles as representative of bourgeois writer. |
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| 12 | 1980 |
Bian, Zhilin. Guan yu wo yi de Shashibiya 'Hamuleite' : wu shu you xu [ID D23955]. Li Ruru : Bian Zhilin began candidly and self-critically to re-examine what they had written about William Shakespeare and to apply new concepts in their interpretations. |
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| 13 | 1980 | Aufführung von Orphée von Jean Cocteau in Beijing unter der Regie von Xiong Yuanwei. | |
| 14 | 1984 |
Aufführung von Hamlet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Zhu Shenghao durch Studenten der Shanghai xi ju xue yuan (Shanghai Theatre Academy) unter der Regie von Chen Mingzheng und An Zhenji. Li Ruru : Chen's production displays certain influences from two Western versions of Hamlet : Laurence Oliver's 1948 film which was dubbed into Chinese in 1958 and the English stage production from the Old Vic in London which visited Beijing and Shanghai in 1979. |
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| 15 | 1989 |
Aufführung von Hamlet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Li Jianming durch das Beijing ren min yi shu ju yuan (Beijing People's Art Theatre) unter der Regie von Lin Zhaohua und Ren Ming. Lin Zhaohua schreibt 1994 in seinen Program notes : "Hamlet is one of us. In the street, we may pass him without knowing who he is. The thoughts that torture him also torture us everyday. The choice he needs to make is also the one we face every day. 'To be or not to be' is a question of philosophy, but is also a concrete matter, big or small, in our everyday life. 'To be or not to be' : you can choose only one of these alternatives." Er sagt in einem Interview 1997 : "I was always hoping to put Hamlet on the stage ; I liked the loneliness of Hamlet. Moreover, during that period, people lost their vitality completely. Everybody now wanted to make money or to win prizes or lotteries. Only those who can think feel lonely. The lonely Chinese Hamlet was neither a prince who seeks revenge for the sake of justice nor a hero of humanism. What we are facing is ourselves. To face oneself is the most active and braves attitude modern people can possibly assume." Li Ruru : Deeply depressed by the consequences of the June 1989 student demonstration in Tiananmen Square, Lin Zhaohua channeled his reflections on those tragic events and the realities they exposed about contemporary China into an experimental production of Hamlet which he presented in Beijing later that year. Lin's Hamlet was not a Renaissance giant with the sublime mission of rescuing his country and his people from a feudal tyrant. There were no longer heroes or villains in the play, just ordinary Beijing people in the late-twentieth century. |
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| 16 | 1994 |
Aufführung von Shamuleite = Shamlet = 莎 姆雷特. An apology for the life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, eine Parodie von Hamlet von William Shakespeare und eine Satire von Henry Fielding auf Samuel Richardson's Novelle Pamela in der Adpation von Li Guoxiu durch das Shanghai xian dai ren ju she und Taiwan ping feng biao yan han (Shanghai Modern People's Theatre und Taiwan Ping feng Workshop) unter der Regie von Liu Yun. Li Ruru : There are three levels at which Shamlet tries to communicate with the audience. The first level is a satire on Shakespeare himself together with a parody of Hamlet in which a few episodes from the original texte are performed in a low comedy style. On the second level is a portrayal of a troupe of Taiwanese actors attempting to stage a performance of Hamlet, or Shamlet as it is called by the director of the troupe who has misread the title of the play. The thoughts, emotions and behavior of Hamlet and other characters in the original play are apralleled, in a trivialized and satirical style, with the personalities of the actors, their lives in contemporary Taiwanese society and the difficulties they face in playing Hamlet. The production of 'Shamlet' did not go well. The audience simply could not understand what the play was about. Critics at the forum pointed out some of the problems : too many repetitious episodes and some events lasting too long and becoming boring. Murray J. Levith : The play's intention is to make a commentary on the absurdity of modern life with ist lack of meaningful order and confused identities.This self-reflexive theme suggests both the complexity and emptiness of contemporary society where all the world seems a stage. |
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| 17 | 1994 |
Aufführung von Wang zi fu chou ji = [The prince revenge] = 王 子复仇记 = Yue ju Adaptation von Hamlet von William Shakespeare durch die Shanghai xi ju xue ju yuan (Shanghai Theatre Academy) nach dem Drehbuch von Xue Yunhuang unter der Regie von Su Leci, Wu Xiaolou und Liu Jue ; mit Zhao Zhigang als Halmet und Lei Liya als Ophelia. Li Ruru : The yue yu Hamlet was a fully sinicized adaptation transposing the original work into an entirely Chinese setting with Chinese characters. |
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| 18 | 1997 |
Chen, Guohua. Lun sha ju chong yi. In : Wai yu jiao xue yu yan jiu ; no 2-3 (1997). [On re-translating Shakepseare's plays]. Li Ruru : Chen argued that the best translation should be evaluated on the accurate understanding and full expression of the original taking account of Shakespeare's varied use of stye and language. From his analysis Chen concluded that translations should be based on the First Folio, with modern editions being consulted merely for reference. |
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| 19 | 2000 |
Aufführung von Hamuleite, Hamuleite = Hamlet, Hamlet unter der Regie von Xiong Yuanwei mit der Sha Tin Theatre Company, Amity Theatre Company und Horizonte Theatre Company, Hong Kong. Dramaturg ist Zhang Bingquan, Bühnenbildner ist He Yingfeng. Li Ruru : The main themes Xiong chose to explore in Hamlet were foreignness and uncertainty, as these seemed especially relevant to the current situation in Hong Kong, and his method for illustrating these concepts was to present the live ation on the stage in parallel with Laurence Olivier's film of Hamlet. The title pointed to the presence of two Hamlets before the audience : the classical image in the film speaking in English, and the live actor on stage speaking in Cantonese. Xion, Yuanwei. Hamuleite, Hamuleite shuo ming shu. (Hong Kong 2000). [Programm Notizen zu Hamlet]. Er schreibt : Today we put on Shakespeare and no doubt we need some of our own interpretation, modern interpretation. I want our performance first of all to be perceived as Shakespeare, but at the same time the stage is full of uncertainty. Uncertainty is the defining characteristic of today's eclectic world. Value nowadays is ambiguous and uncertain. People uncertain about what to do take the simplest way and turn to 'screen worship'. Contemporary behavior and fashion are deeply influenced and controlled by the electronic media. Reality needs to be confirmed by the screen, or even worse that reality disappears in the screen. In our performance, we let our modern Hamlet on the stage see a classical Hamlet in the videotape, and the former reflects his own life and fate in the light of the latter on the screen. |
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| 20 | 2000 |
Aufführung von Shei sha si le gua wang = Adaptation von Hamlet von William Shakespeare durch die Shanghai Thatre Academy nach dem Drehbuch von Cao Lusheng unter der Regie von Gu Yian. Li Ruru : The focus of this production was passion : the passion between man and woman, and the passion for power. The adapters drew their inspiration from Hamlet's phrase "To be, or not to be", but because there is no exact equivalent for "to be" in Chinese, they decided on a more sensational Chinese title with the literal meaning "Who kills the king". The king at the center of the story is Hamlet's father, but in this adaptation the king's three closest relatives, his brother, wife and son, are each planning to poison him. |
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| 21 | 2010 |
Xu, Shulun. Qing chu Shashibiya jie shao zhong de zi chan jie ji si xiang [ID D23910]. Li Ruru : Xu Shulun set the criteria for Shakespeare interpretation in the new China. He stated that "Shakespeare studies has long been controlled by bourgeois thought", citing the example of Hamlet where despite voluminous essays on the play "none of the critics could successfully solve the puzzles of the character. The essential reasons for not being able to do so are first of all, [those critics] ignored the spirit of the time when the English bourgeois revolution was under way ; in addition, they abandoned the humanism in the English Renaissance. They thus could not see where the composition [of Shakespeare's works] was based". Having quoted Marx, Engels, Pushkin, Belinsky and Morozov, Xu asserted that the USSR, the "second motherland of Shakespeare", had already eliminated bourgeois thought from Shakespearean scholarship, and the Soviet Shakespeareans had thus established an ideal model for the Chinese scholars. He further insisted that "the most urgent task for us Shakespeareans in the Chinese cultural realm is to apply Marxism to the correct interpretation and introduction of Shakespeare ; to eliminate the influence of European and American schools and their theories on our Shakespeare studies". |
Sources (6)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1917 | Dong, Run [Zhu, Dongrun]. Sha shi yue fu tan. In : Tai ping yang ; vol. 1, no 5-6, 8-9 (1917-1918). [Talks on Shakespeare's works]. | Publication / ZhuD1 | |
| 2 | 1934 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Hamuleite wen ti. In : Wen yi yu kan ; vol. 5, no 1 (1934). [The problems of Hamlet]. 哈 姆雷特问题 |
Publication / Shak212 | |
| 3 | 1955 | Xu, Shulun. Qing chu Shashibiya jie shao zhong de zi chan jie ji si xiang. In : Xi ju bao ; no 4 (1955). [Eliminate bourgeois thoughts in the introduction of Shakespeare]. | Publication / Shak246 | |
| 4 | 1957 |
Bian, Zhilin. Shashibiya de bei ju "Hamuleite". In : Wen xue yan jiu ji kan ; no 2 (Dec. 1957). 莎 士比亞 大悲剧 哈姆雷特 |
Publication / Shak260 | |
| 5 | 1963 | Zhu, Hong. Xi fang guan yu Hamuleite dian xing de yi xie pin lun. In : Wen xue ping lun ; no 4 (1963). [Western commentaries on typical character of Hamlet]. | Publication / Shak264 | |
| 6 | 1980 | Bian, Zhilin. Guan yu wo yi de Shashibiya 'Hamuleite' : wu shu you xu. In : Wai guo wen xue yan jiu ; no 1 (1980). [Re-introducing Shakespeare's Hamlet : an old preface with a new note]. | Publication / Shak291 |
Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2007- | Worldcat/OCLC | Web / WC |
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