This work concentrates on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare's appearance in Sinophone culture in relation to the postcolonial question.

For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun's search for a Chinese "Shakespeare," and from Feng Xiaogang's martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater, Chinese opera in Europe, and silent film, Shakespeare has been put to work in unexpected places, yielding a rich trove of transnational imagery and paradoxical citations in popular and political culture. Chinese Shakespeares is the first book to concentrate on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare's appearance in Sinophone culture and their ambiguous relationship to the postcolonial question. Substantiated by case studies of major cultural events and texts from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times, Chinese Shakespeares theorizes competing visions of "China" and "Shakespeare" in the global cultural marketplace and challenges the logic of fidelity-based criticism and the myth of cultural exclusivity. In her critique of the locality and ideological investments of authenticity in nationalism, modernity, Marxism, and personal identities, Huang reveals the truly transformative power of Chinese Shakespeares.

The value of the book is not limited to the scope of Shakespeare studies and comparative literature. With the combination of the literary criticism and sociological approach, it describes and investigates a variety of social and psychological phenomena in the process of cultural exchange between the West and the East. The book also provides a brief view of the social, political, and historical changes in modern China for Western readers.

Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe. Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.

Shakespeare in China provides English language readers with a comprehensive sense of China's past and on-going encounter with Shakespeare. It offers a detailed history of twentieth-century Sino-Shakespeare from the beginnings to 1949, followed by more recent accounts of the playwright in the People's Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The study pays particular attention to translation, criticism and theatrical productions and highlights Shakespeare's fate during the turbulent political times of modern China. Chapters on Shakespeare and Confucius and The Paradox of Shakespeare in the New China consider the playwright in the context of 'old' and 'new' Chinese ideologies. Bringing together hard to find materials in both English and Chinese, it builds upon and extends past research on its subject.

This book offers fresh, critical insights into Shakespeare in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan. It recognises that Shakespeare in East Asian education is not confined to the classroom or lecture hall but occurs on diverse stages. It covers multiple aspects of education: policy, pedagogy, practice, and performance. Beyond researchers in these areas, this book is for those teaching and learning Shakespeare in the region, those teaching and learning English as an Additional Language anywhere in the world, and those making educational policies, resources, or theatre productions with young people in East Asia.

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the ‘global bard’ as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard’s plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the ‘local’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of ‘West’ and ‘East’, the evolving markers of the ‘Asian’ and the equation of the ‘glocal’ with the ‘Asian’; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

This is a reference text on Shakespeare's works, times, life, and afterlives. It offers stimulating and authoritative coverage of every aspect of Shakespeare and his writings, including their reinterpretation in the theatre, in criticism, and in film.

Shashibiya is an intriguing discussion of the levels of 'filtering' that any Shakespeare performance in China undergoes, and a close examination of how these filters reflect the continually-changing political, social and cultural practices. The study traces the history of Shakespeare performance in China over the past hundred years, focussing in detail on eleven productions in mainstream, operatic and experimental forms in the post-Mao era. Li Ruru's intimate knowledge of her subject makes this the most up-to-date research available on staging Shakespeare in China.

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace shows readers how ideas of Asia operate in Shakespeare performances and how Asian and Anglo-European forms of cultural production combine to transcend the mode of inquiry that focuses on fidelity. The result is a new creativity that finds expression in different cultural and virtual locations, including recent films and massively multiplayer online games such as Arden: The World of Shakespeare. The papers in this volume provide a background for these modern developments showing the history of how Shakespeare became a signifier against which Asian and Western cultures definedand continue to definethemselves. Hollywood films, and a century of Asian readings of plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth, are now conjoining in cyberspace making a world of difference in how we experience Shakespeare. The papers, written by experts in the field, provide an introduction to the diverse incarnations and bold sequences of screen and stage that in recent decades have produced new versions of Shakespeare's great comedies and tragedies and new ways of experiencing them. Authors, in the first part of the collection, examine body politics and race in Hollywood Shakespearean films andfilm techniques. It complements the second part of the book, in which the history of Shakespearean readings and stagings in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Malaya, Korea, and Hong Kong are discussed. Papers in the third part of the volume contain analyses of the transformation of the idea of Shakespeare in cyberspace, a rapidly expanding world of new rewritings of both Shakespeare and Asia. Together, the three sections of this comparative study show how Asian cultures and Shakespeare affect each other, how one culture is translated to anoth