“Shakepseare in China : a comparative study of two traditions and cultures” (Publication, 1996)

Muirhead, William. Da Yingguo zhi [ID D2152].
Erwähnung von William Shakespeare unter dem Namen 'Shekesibi' = 舌克斯畢 in China. Muirhead erwähnt auch Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Francis Bacon und Richard Hooker.
Er schreibt : "Shakespeare was a well-know public figure in the Elizabethan age. His brilliant works represent both beauty and virtue. No one has outshone him so far".

Guo Songtao wird zu einer Ausstellung von englischen Druckmaschinen eingeladen.
Er schreibt im Tagebuch : "Among all the books on display, Shakespeare's was the most well known. He was an outstanding English playwright about two hundred years ago, enjoying equal popularity with the Greek writer Homer."

Guo Songtao besucht am 30. Dez. 1878 als erster Chinese ein Theaterstück von William Shakespeare : Hamlet : a tragedy in five acts as arragned for the stage by Henry Irving im Lyceum Theatre in London.
Er schreibt im Tagebuch (Jan. 1879) : "In the evening, I was invited to go to London Lyceum Theatre to see a Shakespeare production. Emphasis was placed on the lively and attractive plot design of the play, and not on florid language and ornate style".

William Shakespeare und chinesisches Theater = Shakespeare and Chinese theatre.
Zhang Xiao Yang : The differences and affinities between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama are especially obvious in their tragedies and comedies. Shakespearean political tragedies are linked by the theme of a struggle for power in a royal family or among the leading figures in the political arena, while most traditional Chinese political tragedies recount the conflict between virtuous ministers and treacherous minister. The themes of traditional Chinese love-political tragedies are more complex than those in Shakespeare's tragedies. These plays deal with not only the incompatibility of the desire for love and the desire for power, but also with the way the pleasures of love are destroyed by the great turbulence of Chinese history. Thus in the plays the lovers encounter desperate situations caused by domestic troubles and foreign invasions.
A striking contrast between Shakespearean and traditional Chinese tragedy lies in the treatment of the protagonists. In Shakespearean tragedies the chief characters are mainly great heroes of high degree such as kings, princes, or the leaders of states. They need not obey anyone nor follow any conventional moral doctrine. Since they are their own masters and can exercise great freedom of choice, they are unlikely to become victims of other people's wills. By contrast, Traditional Chinese tragedy is concerned with people in relatively lower social position. These are people who cannot decide their own actions, who are not the rulers but the ruled. They have to submit to the authority of a monarch or comply with the moral doctrine of Confucianism. Another phenomenon in the tratment of the protagonists is that Shakespeare's tragedies revolve around men and traditional Chinese tragedies encompass women. The tragic effects of Shakespeare's tragedies come from the death of the male protagonists, but the tgragic mood in the Chinese plays is created by the suffering and destruction of the women, which appeals strongly to the audience's sympathy and pity.
Shakespearean tragedy represents a general trend of the Renaissance in which people began to criticize conventional ideas and establish new ideological and value systems. To some extent, Shakespearean and Chinese tragedies demonstrate one of the main differences between modern Western and traditional Chinese cultures. Since the European Renaissance Western culture has become a dynamic 'culture of regeneration' with the ability to constantly produce new ideas. On the other hand, Chinese tragedy clearly shows that although unique and rich, Chinese culture had become a static and closed system, since Buddhism was mingled with Confucianism and Taoism during the Song and Ming dynasties.
Most Shakespeare critics classify Shakespearean comedies into three categories : romantic, problem and tragicomedy. Traditional Chinese comedies are usually classified according to two general types : they either attack vice, folly, or foolish behavior, or they describe the achievement of happiness or praise virtuous action. Most critics agree, that the major themes of Shekespearean comedy are love and friendship. Similarly almost all the Chinese laudatory comedies are concerned with love and marriage and some of them with friendship.
There is a striking similarity between Shakespearean and traditional Chinese drama in dramatic techniques. That is, both have a very free deployment of time and space. There is no fixed time limit in Shakespeare’s plays because his plays cover a time period much longer than twenty-four hours. Sometimes the events in his plays last for many years, particularly in his romances. Like Shakespeare, Chinese playwrights always felt free to determine the time length of their plots. In traditional Chinese drama, very few plays take place within twenty-four hours. Most plots proceed for several days, weeks, or months, and sometimes even for many years. The deployment of place in traditional Chinese drama is absolutly free.
Unlike Shakespeare, Chinese dramatists did not concentrate on human nature as a whole. Rather, they paid special attention to the moral and social sides of their characters. In traditional Chinese drama, the two sides of humans are presented separately. The positive characters are always perfect and the negative characters are totally vicious. Neigher resemble people in real life. While Shakespeare's characters are not immoral, representing moral principles was not his main purpose. In traditional Chinese drama, the moral virtues of the characters are emphasized and heightened. Most of the characters tend to be moral types such as loyal subjects, patriotic generals, dutiful sons, chaste wives, and faithful friends. In Shakespeare's plays we often find admiration for the nobility of humanity. Classical Chinese playwrights followed the general rule of dramatic creation, trying to mix beauty with goodness.
The colorfulness and complexity of his characters provide one of the major artistic distinctions of Shakespeare's plays. By contrast, the characters of traditional Chinese drama are relatively monochromatic and simple, having protagonists that represent certain social classes in ancient Chinese society. Shakespeare's characters are complex and the Chinese characters are comparatively simple. The main reason for this is, that Shakespeare tried to explore the depth and range of humanity's inner world, while classical Chinese playwrights were generally content to describe only the outer actions and certain emotions of human beings.
The comparison between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama suggests that the type of characterization found in traditional Chinese drama may not satisfy Western audiences since they are used to Western dramatists, including Shakespeare, who emphasize complex psychological depth in character portrayal in the belief that the many-sided attributes of the subject help to round out their characters and make them seem real. Yet characterization in traditional Chinese drama has its own distinctive dramatic and aesthetic merit, considering that traditional Chinese drama and Shakepseare's plays belong to different modes of dramatic art.
In any comparison between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama one aspect constantly commands scholarly interest : both are examples of poetic drama and both show great richness in poetic presentation and the use of imagery. Like Shakespeare's plays, the text of traditional Chinese drama consists of two parts, verse (qu) and prose (bai). Verse generally expresses emotion or depicts scenery while prose recounts stories or develops dialogue. Most classical Chinese playwrights concentrated on using verse, so that prose is frequently interspersed with short poems.
The animal images used in traditional Chinese drama and Shakespeare's plays are a good way to illustrate such a difference. Traditional Chinese plays have far fewer of these images than do Shakespeare's works. Usually only animals having conventional symbolic meaning could be used as poetic images in traditional Chinese plays. By contrast, Shakespeare used many more kinds of animals as poetic images than did classical Chinese dramatists. He seemed to be familiar with their habits and characteristics. Hence he can accommodate them properly into his metaphorical visions. When Shakespeare chooses poetic images, he shows a special interest in domestic animals such as sheep, horses, dogs, and pigs, which are rarely used by classical Chinese plawrights as poetical images. The tendency of classical Chinese playwrights to choose beautiful and graceful poetic images was so strong that they could fill their descriptions with such images even when they wrote of intimate subjects such as sexual intercourse.
Traditional Chinese writers used a very beautiful and explicit image of clouds and rain as a symbol of lovemaking. Shakespeare's bias in favor of strong and vigorous images is evident even in his description of love affairs. His plays have many symbolic images that vividly illustrate abstract concepts.
Shakespeare's plays and traditional Chinese drama stem from different geographical circumstances and cultural backgrounds. England is a country noted for its navigation tradition, so it is easy to understand why the sea, ships, and sailing became traditional poetic images and affected Shakespeare's use of imagery. By contrast, China is mainly a large landlocked and mountainous country. Chinese civilization originated drom the Yellow River Basin, thus mountains and rivers were closely associated with the cultural thinking of the ancient Chinese.
In both Shakespeare's plays and traditional Chinese drama, two opposing images are very obvious, the sun and the moon. This is not merely because the image of the sun is frequently used in Shakespeare's plays while that of the moon is employed in traditional Chinese drama ; it is mainly because these two images are profoundly associated with Western and traditional Chinese cultures.
An examination of Shakespeare's plays and traditional Chinese drama shows that the former tends toward romanticism and the latter toward classicism.

Liang, Qichao. Yin bing shi shi hua. In : Xin min cong bao ; no 5 (1902). [On poetry].
饮冰室诗话
Liang Qichao entscheidet sich für Shashibiya als chinesischer Name für William Shakespeare.
Er schreibt : "Homer, the Greek poet, was the greatest poet in ancient times ; as for later poets, such as Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson, their poems usually contain several thousand lines. How wonderful ! Just the sublime style is brilliant enough to overwhelm you, so you no longer need to comment on the language of their poems."

Lu, Xun. Moluo shi li shou [ID D23841].
Er schreibt : "Therefore, what a society needs is not only Newton but also Shakespeare… a writer like Shakespeare can make people have a sound and perfect human nature and avoid an odd and partial humanity, making them the very people a modern civilized society needs."

Mule [Mill, John Stuart]. Mule ming xue. Yan Fu yi [ID D2763].
Yan Fu schreibt : "Shakespeare wrote a play recounting the murder of Caesar. When Antony delivers a speech to the citizens while showing the body of Caesar to the public, he uses logic to stir up the citizens cleverly because Brutus warned him that he would not be allowed to redress a grievance for Caesar and blame the murderers. The citizens are greatly agitated by the speech and their resentment against Brutus and his comrades is running high. We should attribute Antony's success to the function of logic."

Aufführung Sha xiong duo sao = Killing elder brother and marring sister-in-law = Hamlet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Lin Shu durch die Sichuan Oper Ya’an Chuang Theatre Company unter der Regie von Wang Guoren.

[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.

William Shakespeare's Dramen in China.
Yanna Sun : Chinese performances of William Shakespeare can be assigned to one of three categories : the first contains those stagings that preserve the original Shakespearean spirit ; the second are those that sinicize the plays by transplanting Shakespeare into the Chinese culture and society, adopting the traditional Chinese operatic styles ; the third group comprises those that synthesize both Chinese and Western elements in terms of textual interpretations and theatrical techniques, a hybrid of the Western and the Chinese style.
Lu Gusun : When seeing an actor wearing an ancient Chinese costume perform Shakespeare's plays some people feel that it looks like a square peg in a round hole. Actually, to wear different costumes is merely a matter of form. If English actors, when performing Shakespeare's plays, can wear Cossack uniforms and modern German steel helmets, if American players can wear Indian clothes and the Canadian performers Eskimo clothes, why can't Chinese performers put on ancient Chinese costumes ? There can be no doubt that so long as we preserve the Shakespearean spirit, the adaptation of Shakespeare's plays into traditional Chinese drama will further prove the universal appeal of Shakespeare and add extraordinary splendor to the Shakespearean theater of the world.

Erste vollständige Aufführung des Weinishi shang ren = The merchant of Venice von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Gu Zhongyi [ID D23505] durch die Shanghai xi ju xie she (Shanghai Drama Association) unter der Regie von Ying Yunwei und Meng Junmou als Bühnenbildner.
Zhang Xiao Yang : It was the first time that the Chinese saw a real stage representation of a Shakespearean play given in a mature form of modern spoken drama and with Shakespeare’s original text.
Murray J. Lewitt : This production is considered the first original-text performance of Shakespeare in China. It featured 16th and 17th century period costumes and scenery suggested by Renaissance Italian paintings.

Aufführung von = Weinishi shang ren [ID D14427] = The merchant of Venice von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Liang Shiqiu durch die Guo li xi ju zhuan ke xue xiao (The National Drama School) unter der Regie von Yu Shangyuan in Nanjing.
Yu Shangyuan schreibt einen Artikel in Zhong yang ri bao ; June 18 (1937) : He explains why the first graduating class of his school would perform a public Shakespearean production. He held what it was of great significance to use Shakespeare's plays for drama training because they had been universally accepted as one of the most important theatrical activities in the world and even as the highest standard of stage representation.

Aufführung von Hamuleite = Hamlet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Liang Shiqiu durch die Guo li xi ju zhuan ke xue xiao (National Drama School), unter der Regie von Jiao Juyin. Wen Xiying spielt Hamlet, Lu Shui Ophelia in einem konfuzianischen Tempel in Jiang'an.
Jiao Juyin hält eine Rede vor der Schauspieltruppe : "The character of Hamlet is like a mirror, a lesson to us people who are living the the period of the Anti-Japanese war... So, the conclusion we can draw from the tragedy of Hamlet is that victory in our Anti-Japanese war will depend on the joint action taken by the people all over the country, and also more on immediate actions taken by the people without any hesitation. Today this sounds more correct than ever as triumphant reports pour in from battlefields on the anti-Nazi front all over the world, and we can foresee our victory against the Japanese invaders as well. This is the significance underlying our introduction of Hamlet to Chinese audiences. As to the skills or techniques of the performance, this is less significant, and it is quite unnecessary to bother too much about where it succeeds or fails."
Yu Shangyuan, Leiter der National Drama School in 1942 sagt : "The social significance of Hamlet [to us] is Hamlet's progressive and revolutionary spirit, which is what the Chinese people need during the Anti-Japanese war. Prince Hamlet resisted the destiny arranged by fate, countered feudal oppressions, and sought liberation from an environment filled with licentious and corrupt individuals. Those countries that produce the most high-quality Shakespearean productions are the countries with the highest cultural prestige. Performing Shakespeare is a crucial step for our country to catch up and to join the countries with world-class cultural achievements".

Aufführung von Roumiou yu Youliye [ID D23516] = Romeo and Juliet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Cao Yu durch das Shen ying ju tuan (The Divine Eagle Theatre) mit Jin Yan als Romeo und Bai Yang als Juliet ; unter der Regie von Zhang Junxiang in Chongqing.
Cao Yu : "One of my favourite Western playwrights is Shakespeare, and my fondness of Shakespeare's plays started from reading Lin Shu's Tales when I was a little boy. As soon as I was able to read the original English, I was eager to get hold of a Shakespeare play because Lin’s translation of Shakespeare's fantasy world was so fresh in my own mind.”
Li Ruru : Cao Yu's translation, rendered in an elegant style of verse and prose, plays with the tones of Mandarin as well that the combination of rise and fall gives actors an excellent opportunity to deliver the poetry in the text. Cao Yu himself was undergoing an emotional turmoil during this period, and the feelings and passions Shakespeare wrote beautifully for Romeo and Juliet best expressed his own inner world.

Aufführung von Xiao nü xin = The filial piety of the daughter = Adaptation von King Lear von William Shakespeare mit der Shaoxing Opera Troupe unter der Regie von Fu Jinxiang im Shanghai Long Men Grand Theater

William Shakespeare und Marxismus / Leninismus / Maoismus in China
Yanna Sun : The Soviet model of Shakespearean criticism exerted a great influence on Chinese scholars of Shakespearean Studies. In the Soviet Union, Shakespeare was regarded as an important Western writer for the Soviet critic and Soviet theatre ; accordingly, more and more Chinese academics were encouraged to study his works through translating Russian critical essays on him. As a result, these Chinese renditions developed into compulsory reference books for teaching foreign literature and Shakespearean plays at the Department of Foreign Languages and Chinese language. Basing their works on the theory of Soviet criticism, many Chinese scholars analysed Shakespeare’s plays from such aspects as the historical and social backgrounds for creating these plays, the class struggle and social conflicts in them, always leading to the conclusion that Shakespeare plays balonged to realism rather than romanticism.
Theatre companies, both hua ju and local genres, were organized under the leadership of the party and the government in each region at different administrative levels. State-run theatres quickly replaced most of the private companies.
Three plays were chosen by the Soviet experts : Much ado about nothing, Twelfth night and Romeo and Juliet. Following the Soviet experts' models, the majority of hua ju Shakespeare performances werde dominated by an intricately realistic but cumbersome scenography : grand scenery set in the Renaissance style with high pillars and broad arches, artificial make-up with prosthetic noses and wigs, and luxurious costumes. Stage presentation was guided by commentaries of Marx and Engels, and interpretation had to follow the same track.

Zhang Xiao Yang : As China's dominating ideology since 1949, Marxism has greatly influenced the social and cultural practices of the Chinese. The socialist revolution took place under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism because Chinese culture has elements in common with the principles of Marxism such as advocating active participation in state and local government and sharing similar moral and social values. While Marx himself tended to approach Shakespeare from a literary and artistic standpoint, his successors, especially in Russia, often interpret the playwright historically and politically to illustrate the Marxist theory of dialectical and historical materialism. The Chinese appreciation was mainly influenced by Russian Shakespearean studies, as can be easily discovered by persuing Shakespeare criticism in China from this period.
There had been a tendency in Chinese Shakespeare studies to link the plays with their Elizabethan and Jacobean historical contexts. Marxist theory states that people are the real motivating force of history. Influenced by Marxism, Chinese critics believed that all writers wrote for a particular social class, most likely their own.
Using the Marxist method of class analysis, some Chinese critics believed that in hist works Shakespeare described the conflict between the declining feudal system and the ascendant bourgeois force.
The studies of Shakespeare's philosophical ideas in China, ranging from his concept of nature to his views of history, are greatly affected by Marxist philosophy, especially its materialism and dialectics.
Engel's theory of literary typification has often been used by Chinese Shakespeare scholars to analyze Shakespeare's characters. Following this theory they tried to find how Shakespeare reproduced 'typical characters under typical circumstances', which was actually an endeavor to relate the qualities of Shakespeare's characters to the relevant social contexts shaping such qualities.
The universal appeal of Shakespeare helped him to easily adapt to the taste of the proletarian revolutionaries, even if he wrote mainly for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Marxism has contributed to the positive reception of Shakespeare by the Chinese. Marx's historically and socially analytical method was commonly employed. This continued Marxist influence on Shakespeare studies in China is partly due to the fact that the impact of Marxism on the Chinese is so deep that some of his principles, particularly dialectic and historic materialism, habe become ingrained in the thinking of the people.

Murray J. Levith : The Chinese have mostly appropriated and adapted the playwright for their own purposes. They have dressed the Bard in various Chinese opera styles, forced him to be an apologist for Marxism-Leninism, celebrated his clunkers, neglected several of his masterpieces, excised sex, religion and contrary politics from his texts, added to them, and at times simplified, corrupted, or misunderstood his characters and themes. Perhaps more than any other nation, China has used a great artist to forward its own ideology rather than meet him on his ground.

Shen Fan : The study and criticism of Shakespeare was based on a few simple Marxist-Maoist theories of art and culture : 1. All societies – feudal, capitalist, and socialist – are divided into classes save for the primitive communist society and the final communist society of the future. 2. Each writer writes from the point of view of his class, consciously or unconsciously using his writing to serve his class's goals while reflecting society from its point of view. 3. All literature and art should be analyzed from a class perspective as a product of class struggle.
The merchant of Venice, which has been produced more frequently in China than almost any other Shakespearen play, deals with merchants, trade, banking, and love – all major concerns of Marxist Chinese interpretation – and presents spectacle qhich requires peculiar adaptations to fit the concentions of traditional Chinese theatre.

Aufführung von Romeo and Juliet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Zhu Shenghao durch die Zhong yang xi ju xue yuan (Central Academy of Drama) unter der Regie von Dan Ni = Danni und A.V. Raikov in Beijing. Es ist die erste Shakespeare-Aufführung seit 1949. Ji Qiming spielt Romeo und Tian Hua spielt Juliet.