Teaching Shakespeare in China

Abstract

My title makes too large a claim. To be precise, I taught Shakespeare to two classes of postgraduates during the spring term of 1987 at Hunan Normal University in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. Except for a brief visit to Beijing Foreign Studies University (formerly Beijing Foreign Languages Institute) to give a lecture and seminar, I taught only in Changsha. All travellers become instant experts, however, and I hope I may be forgiven not only the irresistible desire to tell my tale but its inevitable superficiality. My only excuses are that the experience is still rare; that it may well become commonplace, if China's open door policy continues; and that Shakespeareans of all kinds might take some interest in the fortunes of their subject abroad. The Chinese have had an interest in Shakespeare since the early years of this century. In 1.904 Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare was translated by Lin Shu and Wei Yi. Between 1920 and 1949 many of the plays were translated, most notably by Zhu Shenghao, who died in 1944, at the age of thirty-three, having finished thirty-one and a half plays. A revised version of his translations, with the addition of six new plays, was published in 1978 as the Complete Works. Criticism of the plays, following Russian models, developed rapidly during the nineteen-fifties but was curtailed by the break with Russia and, from 1966 to 1976, by the Cultural Revolution, which forced all reading of Western authors underground. Since 1976, criticism, translation, and production have flourished. The first issue of Shakespeare Studies (China) appeared in 1983, and in April 1986 the first Chinese Shakespeare Festival, featuring productions and adaptations of more than twenty plays, took place in Beijing and Shanghai.' The current and widespread enthusiasm for Shakespeare came home to me forcefully when I discovered the familiar face (with earring) in a Changsha poster shop, by no means an academic establishment. The lengthy caption, in Chinese, included a list of all the works and such sentiments as, He upheld the liberation of individuality, opposed the bondage of feudalism and religion, reflected humanist ideas in an age of rising capitalism. The same shop, I noticed, had no posters of Chairman Mao in stock, for what reason I am not sure; my students claimed that there was no call for them anymore. I taught at Hunan Normal University because an instructor there became my own student in Canada. The arrangement appealed to me not only because of the personal connections and minimum of bureaucratic fuss but also because the experience might be more interesting and perhaps more informative, more representative of Chinese university education, than a term at a key national university, such as the Beijing Foreign Studies University, which attracts the best students throughout China and many distinguished scholars from abroad. Although not a national institution, Hunan Normal University is well respected, the key provincial university for training teachers of secondary schools, colleges, and universities.