In Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, I offer readers a diagram (Li Ruru, 2003, 116) illustrating that when foreign plays are introduced to China the translators, adapters, scholars and theater practitioners all bring their own personal and societal history as well as a shared cultural legacy into the composition of the works that are performed on stage. I contend that Shakespeare in China is as much a story about China as about Shakespeare. This experience is evident in the translation, interpretation and performance of Hamlet, the history of which not only highlights the influence of the politically sanctioned literary theory on the Chinese understanding of this great tragedy, but also reflects the complex responses of Chinese people towards a century of radical changes in their society and culture.

The first full-length translation of Hamlet into Chinese was by Tian Han (pen name of Tian Shouchang, 1898-1968) while he was a student in Tokyo on a pre-session course before entering university. Tian’s studies in Japan from 1916 to 1922 were originally aimed toward a prospective career in the Chinese military or politics but, being exceedingly fond of drama, he abandoned such plans and turned instead to the theater. Tian was motivated to translate Hamlet by the greatness of the play’s reputation and, more importantly, 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 (2000, 16:291).

The year 1920 was of crucial significance for Tian. His uncle, who was also his guardian and father-in-law, was assassinated while working for Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary founder of the Republic of China. Overcome by grief and indignation Tian Han began his translation of Hamlet. The first three scenes appeared in Shaonian Zhongguo ([The Journal of] the Young China Association) Vol. 2, Issue 12 in 1921,² where Tian’s preface reveals how he sought relief from his private anguish by throwing himself into this translation, quoting Hamlet's lines: “I haue of late, but wherefore I knowe not, lost all my mirth, forgon all custome of exercises: and indeede it goes so heauily with my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth, seemes to mee a sterill promontorie” (1342-7). Tian Han's personal experience and the assassination of his beloved uncle seemed to echo Hamlet's sufferings and impelled Tian to identify with the protagonist on whom “the clowdes still hang” (246). Hamlet's remark that the world is a prison, “A goodly one, in which there are many Confines, Wards, and Dungeons; Denmarke being one o'th' worst.” (1291-3) was precisely what Tian Han had come to feel about China.

A year later, in November 1922, the finished translation was published in book form in the Shaonian Zhongguo congshu (Young China Association Series) for which Tian wrote a new preface expanding his interest in Hamlet from personal experience to a more general concern about modern theater in China. Modern Chinese theater–– huaju or spoken drama––was instituted at the beginning of the twentieth century to be a new theater based on the spoken language in contradistinction to the traditional theater––xiqu or theater melody (a generic term for over three hundred varieties of indigenous theater)––which is a total theater of singing, reciting, acting and dance including martial arts. The emergence of the new genre was closely associated with the political and social issues at the turn of the century, for young radical intellectuals regarded the traditional Chinese theater as mere “ornament” devoid of any educational function. Around the beginning of the 1920s modern drama developed quickly, and activists were keen to write their own plays dealing with social problems since most of them believed that drama was a “useful tool to instruct society and to enlighten people’s minds” (Wang Shouyue, 1914, 1). Among the few foreign plays staged at this time were those of Ibsen, Shaw, Gorky and other nineteenth and twentieth century playwrights espousing realism and naturalism. To become a Chinese Ibsen was the aspiration of many young dramatists.

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, and three years later he published his translation of Romeo and Juliet in a journal he edited. He thought there were too many Ibsen-style works and wanted to present readers and audiences with something different. In the preface to his translation of Hamengleite (Hamlet) in 1922, he used the image of oil painting to refer to Shakespeare’s works and marble sculpture to Ibsen’s. While he accepted that the accurate detailing of sculpture could be more realistic than oil painting, Tian argued: “Nowadays, there are plenty of sculptures in the museum, and if we can display some oil paintings, wouldn’t it make the display richer?” (1922, 1). As will be seen, the modern theater did subsequently include Shakespeare in its repertoire and most Chinese productions of Shakespeare over the rest of the twentieth century were staged in the huaju style.

As a poet (one of his poems written at the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War [1937-1945] provides the lyrics for the Chinese national anthem), Tian Han was much concerned about the rhythm and words he chose for his prose translation. In order to convey Shakespeare’s poetry, Tian often used the traditional Chinese style of antithesis and borrowed expressions from classical Chinese poems. For example, in translating “this braue orehanging firmament” (1347-8) Tian avoided using a common Chinese word for “brave”, instead he chose “jiujiu”: an expression describing a brave warrior in a classical poem from Shi jing (The Book of Songs, 3000 BC). The repetitive sound of this adjective also brought out a particular resonance. His translations were thus beautiful to read and replete with significant connotations, but they could also be difficult for the ear to catch immediately while his use of extended sentences with Western syntax might be problematic. Such features explain why his translation of Hamlet has never been fully used for the stage. Yet this translation was important both as marking the first publication of an entire Shakespeare play 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. Over his lifetime, Tian Han wrote more than eighty plays––for the traditional theater as well as spoken drama––in addition to over eight hundred poems. He died in prison during the Cultural Revolution.

Most Chinese translations of Hamlet (excluding adaptations) have used for their titles either a transliteration of the name “Hamlet” or a translation of the original title of Shakespeare’s tragedy. By contrast, Shao Ting followed the traditional practice of Chinese playwrights in using three syllables—meaning “story of...”—when he composed the title Tian (sky/Heaven) chou (hatred/wrath) ji (record/story) for his translation of Hamlet published in 1930. Unlike most Chinese play titles, however, that of Shao’s translation is intriguingly ambiguous since “tian” has many connotations in classical Chinese: sky, Heaven, nature or even father/husband. Thus there are several ways of understanding this title’s meaning. It could be a story about a person’s hatred which is so great as to reach the sky; or the wrath of Heaven. It could mean to avenge one’s father; or it may allude to the saying “fumu zhi chou, bu gong dai tian” taken from Li ji (Book of Rites), an important work of the Confucian School, where in the chapter “Tan gong” Confucius declared “One cannot live under the same sky [as those who have insulted one’s parents]”
(http://www.cnread.net/cnread1/gdwx/k/kongzi/lj/002.htm) [accessed: September 19, 2005]. 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.

Liang Shiqiu started translating Shakespeare in the 1930s, and his translation of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was the only edition available in Taiwan for decades. In his writings about his intentions and methodology for this work, Liang defended his prose style of translation: “To be honest I was not able to take the rhythm of Shakespeare's poetry into account. I felt that it was already difficult enough if I could try to express the full and accurate meaning of the original” (1971, 58). Nonetheless, in Liang’s translation of the Complete Works most couplets are kept in rhyme. His approach to Shakespeare’s text was inspired by Percy Simpson’s Shakespeare Punctuation (Liang Shiqiu, 1971, 58). Liang argued that instead of following contemporary usage regarding punctuation Shakespeare had created his own system to “help actors in recitation of their lines and enable them to reproduce these lines with the right cadence.” Liang claimed that in his translation he would “keep Shakespeare’s original punctuation intact” and would “take sentences as translation units” (1971, 59).

The question of how to translate Shakespeare’s blank verse into Chinese fascinated the poet and translator Sun Dayu. Since the mid-1920s, 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” (1988, XIII). He invented a new concept of “yinzu” (sound group) for modern Chinese poetry, which was much inspired by the style of the Italian sonnet. His first translation of a Shakespeare play was King Lear which he finished in 1935; but it was not until 1962, five years after he had been labeled as a rightist, purged and imprisoned, that Sun began translating H.H. Furness’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Like Tian Han in the 1920s, Sun channeled his feelings of indignation into his translation, and regarded Shakespeare, a foreign poet born four centuries earlier, as his only soul mate in this ominous political climate. Not surprisingly, Sun concentrated on the tragedies, and by the end of 1965 he had completed the four great tragedies as well as The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. Sun employed his idea of the “sound group” in all these translations. “It is more or less the same as the original: the five iambic feet have transformed into five sound groups in my translation” (Sun Dayu, 1988, XIV). The political storm of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 abruptly destroyed Sun’s haven, as thirty Red Guards occupied his home for twenty-four days and took away all his books, research materials and personal possessions. Fortunately, his son-in-law, a medical doctor, had removed all the manuscripts of his translations before the arrival of the Red Guards, and these papers survived to be published in 1988.

Scholars have expressed differing opinions as to how Shakespeare should be rendered into Chinese. Many issues have been debated: which edition should be used; whether or not to include stage directions (most of which do not appear in the First Folio); whether Chinese dialects should be used to express Shakespeare’s slang; whether it is necessary to translate Shakespeare into verse; and, furthermore, how to define “verse” in the Chinese language. Shakespeare’s lines are notoriously difficult to translate. While it is not impossible to capture some of the power of Shakespeare and the evocative imagery of his poetry in sonorous Chinese prose, this may involve some distortion or lengthy presentation. The following two examples are from Zhu Shenghao’s translation of Hamlet. In Hamlet’s “Let me be cruell, not vnnaturall” (2266), Zhu translates “unnatural” as “unfilial.” The next line, “I will speake dagger to her” (2267), is spelt out ponderously: “My words which are as sharp as a dagger will pierce her heart” (Zhu Shenghao, 1984, 8:83).

Of the twenty or so published translators of Shakespeare, Zhu Shenghao (1912-1944) is probably the most remarkable. In 1935, two years after his graduation from the Department of English Literature at Zhijiang University, Zhu started work on The Tempest, and over the next nine years he translated a further thirty of Shakespeare’s plays. This achievement was despite the poverty and poor health Zhu suffered before his tragically early death at the age of 32. His manuscripts were destroyed twice during the Sino-Japanese War and he had to repeat much of his effort, but Zhu did not relinquish his project until he was very ill and bedridden. The value of Zhu’s work is demonstrated by the fact that his translations formed the principal contribution to the sole version of The Complete Works published in mainland China prior to 2001, and most spoken drama productions of Shakespeare since 1949 have employed Zhu’s translations.

For several of the above-mentioned translators the main focus of discussion had been the linguistic challenges of translating Shakespeare; Bian Zhilin, however, was more concerned with the ideological aspect of Shakespeare interpretation. Bian Zhilin 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” (1980, 1:38). In 1957 Bian wrote a long essay about this play analyzing the historical background to Shakespeare’s writing and the characterization of Hamlet as an individual and in relation to the other characters in the tragedy. This essay will be discussed in the following section on the understanding and criticism of Hamlet because it influenced the Chinese interpretation of the play for decades thereafter. Bian’s translation was used as the dubbing script for the most influential film version screened in mainland China: Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.

A few articles about Chinese translations of Shakespeare have been published, among which Chen Guohua’s “On Re-translating Shakespeare” (1997) is the most detailed and deals with translation techniques. Taking six different versions of Hamlet, he compared translations of two speeches: “What peece of worke is a man” (1350-1); and “To be, or not to be, that is the question” (1710). 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 style and language. From his analysis Chen concluded that translations should be based on the First Folio, with modern editions being consulted merely for reference.

When foreign literature is introduced to any target culture, translation will necessarily play an important role. Translations of Shakespeare’s works occupy a more crucial position in China because they are not only read by general readers and used by theater companies, they are also taught in Chinese departments at universities and are essential research materials for those who have no access to the English language––a number of Chinese Shakespeareans cannot read Shakespeare’s texts or any related criticism in English. In compliance with the strict regulations imposed on higher education around the late 1950s English departments stopped teaching literature and their “task” was limited to teaching the language. Foreign literature could be taught in Chinese departments only in the form of translations, and this rule applied to Shakespeare despite his status as a canonical figure of world literature and the “giant” of the Renaissance (Engels, 1960, 2-3). The situation changed again following the end of the Cultural Revolution when the higher education system was re-established, and Hamlet does now appear on the curriculum in departments of English. However, due to difficulties with the language and length of the play, students only study selected scenes (see Luo Zhiye, 2001, 223-24). Chinese departments still teach Shakespeare through translation.

Complete dependence on translations may give rise to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. An example noted by Bian Zhilin (1980, 41) concerned the course materials for Foreign Literature at a teacher training college in northern China in which Shakespeare was praised for advocating equality in his works: the illustration cited was the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius about how to treat the players where the phrase “according to their desert” (1568-9) was translated in Chinese as “according to their social status”, and thus “Gods bodkin man, much better,...” (1570-4) was interpreted as Hamlet telling Polonius to treat the players—who had low social status—in the same way as courtiers.

As mentioned above, no proper Chinese translation of any Shakespeare play existed before the 1920s. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s reputation had been known in China since the late nineteenth century and his name was freely invoked both by attackers and by defenders of the traditional Chinese culture and establishment. In the early twentieth century, the story of Hamlet could be read in two Chinese versions derived from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare: one by an anonymous writer was entitled Bao dachou Hanlide shashu (Hamlet Revenges by Slaying His Uncle); the other was Gui zhao (The Ghost’s Command) by Lin Shu (1852-1924).

Lin Shu, who knew no foreign language, employed a team of assistants to translate numerous foreign novels and plays which then circulated widely across China. His semi-classical rendition of Tales from Shakespeare was first published in 1904 and proved so popular that it was reprinted a number of times even after complete translations of Shakespeare’s original plays had become available. Thus Lin Shu had a major impact on the Chinese understanding of Shakespeare’s works. For two decades, his was the only version of Shakespeare known to the Chinese-speaking readership and all early stage performances of Shakespeare were adapted from Lin Shu’s Tales. Moreover, he promoted the view that Shakespeare wrote “shenguai xiaoshuo”—stories of gods and spirits—a category very familiar to Chinese readers. Lin cited Shakespeare to argue with his more radical contemporaries who had used Western culture to censure the Chinese mentality. Opposing the idea that China was weak and backward because its tradition preferred the old to the new and dwelled on talk of gods and spirits, Lin claimed that even the canonical Western figure worshiped by the Chinese reformers had also “looked to ‘fairies and monsters’ for his inspiration, themes and language” (1904, 2).

Based on Lin’s version of Hamlet (Gui zhao) various stage adaptations appeared including a Sichuan operatic version (Cao Shujun & Sun Fuliang, 1999, 210). A glance at the titles of some of these productions may provide some insight into the Chinese understanding of the play. Apart from the direct translation Prince Hamlet and Lin’s title, there were also: The Arch-careerist Brings Calamity on the Country; The Usurper of State Power; Usurps Supreme Power and Snatches the Sister-in-law; Deep Hatred; Kills the Elder Brother and Snatches the Sister-in-law. They demonstrate that the Chinese focus was on usurpation, adultery, hatred and revenge, all of which were staple themes of traditional Chinese literature and theater. In an article “Hamlet Across Space and Time,” Lu Gu-sun pointed out: “Chinese civilization, it is generally observed, is characteristically homogeneous, and its intrinsic processes are capable of assimilating and eventually incorporating alien influences. Therefore, to some of the early Chinese readers and critics of Hamlet the surface theme of the play—the murder of a king revenged by his dutiful prince and the violent death of the usurper together with his sometime sister now his queen—was aesthetically welcome, being conveniently in compliance with the Confucian ethical code demanding filial piety, unquestioning allegiance to the monarch, and constant chastity, and with Buddhist tenets of karma” (1988, 36:54).

Such attitudes were also apparent in practitioners’ comments and newspaper advertisements. Xu Banmei, who staged an adaptation in the 1910s, said that “the cause of the tragedy of Prince Hamlet was the fact that his mother insisted on remarrying” (1957, 88). Xu assumed that Hamlet’s tragedy was caused by the moral lapse of a woman. 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. It would seem therefore that this Chinese Hamlet was either an inevitable victim of his mother’s decision to remarry or a fierce defender of her honor. Chinese newspaper advertisements used sensational language to underscore these stereotypes: “... 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!” (Minguo ri bao, 1916, 5).

Zeng Jize, the Chinese ambassador to Britain, recorded in his diary in 1880 the experience of seeing a London production of Hamlet. The very brief description showed that what struck him most was neither the language, nor the scenery, nor even the performance itself, but the plot: a tale of murder, adultery and revenge. Clearly, Zeng, Xu and the advertisement writers were presented with different versions of Hamlet (an original English production and Chinese adaptations of the story) at different times and in different places. Nonetheless, their essentially similar reactions demonstrate how much the receiver’s own indigenous conventions affect the process of reception.

Conversely, the same foreign work could be put in a completely different perspective from the standpoint of those radical intellectuals who advocated the adoption of Western learning for “bloodless destruction” to eradicate the decadence and backwardness in society and to build up a new Chinese mentality (Liang Qichao, 1973, 67). Such reformers categorized Shakespeare and other literary figures as “fighters in the spiritual realm” (Lu Xun, 1981, 1:100) who were sorely needed at a time when a succession of military defeats and the “unequal treaties” had humiliated China. On this view, Hamlet was idealized as a hero amongst Shakespeare’s numerous protagonists who fought for their ideals.

With the passage of time and the emergence of full translations of Shakespeare’s plays Chinese understanding of Shakespeare and Hamlet also progressed, although the insights gained might still be very slight. Those who had studied English literature abroad came back to China and started helping the wider Chinese readership become better informed. From about the mid-1920s, Shakespeare gradually lost his early resplendence as a “fighter in the spiritual realm,” while his reputation as “a writer about gods and spirits” was no longer mentioned. Chinese people paid more attention to Shakespeare’s artistry and language, and Shakespearean criticism began to emerge in China. Perhaps Lin Shu’s “Introduction” to Tales, Dong Run’s four articles “Shashi yuefu tan” (Talks on Shakespeare’s Works) published in Taipingyang (The Pacific Ocean Journal) journal in 1917, and Tian Han’s two prefaces to his translation of Hamlet in 1921 and 1922 could be regarded as the preliminary steps in Chinese Shakespearean scholarship.

The first half of the 1930s, which was a fruitful period for Shakespeare translation in China, also saw the publication of articles on Shakespeare mainly by the translators themselves. Liang Shiqiu wrote a series of essays about the playwright, his plays and their history, as well as the theater and audiences in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In “The Problems of Hamlet,” 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. To represent this third strand of criticism Liang quoted works by A.C. Bradley and E.E. Stoll. 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 (1934, 61-70).

Chinese Shakespearean criticism was from the outset split between radical and conservative factions, and between left-wing and right-wing literati, mirroring the contemporary debates on general literary theory in China. Liang Shiqiu had posited in 1927 that literature expressed eternal human nature, and this made Shakespeare and other Western canonical figures universal (1978, 105). Therefore Hamlet reflected Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the human species as a whole. Liang’s opinion was representative of a group of scholars who had been educated in Europe or America. For the left-wing, by contrast, the very essence of literature was the nature of class, because “without using human beings, literature cannot portray the nature of the world. ... If literature uses human beings who live in a society with different classes then the nature of class can never be avoided” (Lu Xun, 1979, 87). Liang Shiqiu and Lu Xun engaged in a famous debate on modern Chinese literature in which they often mentioned Shakespeare. However, it can be questioned whether Shakespeare was really the subject or was merely being invoked as a convenient banner as he had been in the disputes over traditional Chinese culture at the beginning of the century. It should be observed that nobody in the Chinese literary sphere, either on the left or right, denied Shakespeare’s canonical status. (By the late 1920s, the usual Chinese transliteration of his name, “Shashibiya,” seemed not to sound respectful enough, and more and more people started to use the term “Sha Weng” or “Old Man Sha” to refer to the playwright since, in Chinese culture, age is associated with wisdom and experience.) The rival factions—divided not only according to their political, social and literary views but also according to their ability to read the texts in the original English—continually raised the questions of “who has the right to talk about Shakespeare” and “to whom does Shakespeare belong” (Meng Xianqiang, 1991, 15-17).

A more global perspective was gradually introduced to these Chinese debates as people became more aware of Western and Japanese Shakespearean criticism, and Russian Shakespearean scholarship brought the literary theory of Marx and Engels and their writings on Shakespeare to the attention of China. It is evident from the publishing and theater records for mainland China that most essays in Chinese Shakespearean criticism and most Chinese stage productions of Shakespeare appeared after the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. Therefore, in China “much of Shakespeare’s history is in fact the history of his assimilation within the People’s Republic” (Gillies et.al., 266). During the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese interpretation of Shakespeare’s works in general, and Hamlet in particular, mainly followed the Russian Shakespeareans and Marx’s and Engels’s commentaries on literature and art. This preponderance of Soviet scholarship can be seen in the following data. In the ten years from 1949 to 1958, 65.8% of all foreign literature translations were works from the USSR and Russia (Bian Zhilin et.al., 1959, 47). In 1953, Mikhail M. Morozov’s Shakespeare in the USSR was published in two Chinese versions, one being translated by Wu Ningkun, and the other by Wu Yishan. In 1957 Alexander Anikst’s Shakespeare and his Plays was translated and published, and two years later, the Chinese version of his Concise History of British Literature appeared (Meng Xianqiang, 1994, 35).

In April 1955 the official national journal on theater, The Drama Bulletin (Xiju bao), published Xu Shulun’s article “Eliminate Bourgeois Thought in the Introduction of Shakespeare” which set the criteria for Shakespeare interpretation in the new China. Xu stated that “Shakespeare Studies has long been controlled by bourgeois thought” (44), 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” (45). 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” (45).

Indeed, two distinct Chinese editions of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on Shakespeare were compiled separately by Sun Jiaxiu and by Meng Xianqiang. For nearly half a century, the commentaries of Marx and Engels provided the guidelines observed by most Chinese writers and stage performers. However, the use of Marxism by some Chinese intellectuals reflected a pragmatic strategy for survival in the hazardous political climate, since Marx’s and Engels’s approbation of Shakespeare could be held up as a red banner offering a degree of protection to those who tried not to conform with Party propaganda in literature and the arts. In respect of different Shakespeare plays it might be necessary to seek out specific quotations to fit the prescribed literary doctrine. But Hamlet was exceptional because “it is the center of Shakespeare plays” (Bian Zhilin, 1957, 70): most commentaries of Marx and Engels could be applied to this play, and whenever Chinese scholars elaborated the ideas of Marx and Engels, Hamlet would always be taken as the prime example.

The label of “a Renaissance giant” that is customarily attached to Shakespeare in China is quoted from Engels’s “Introduction” to Dialectics of Nature. Engels maintained that the Renaissance “was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants—iants in power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and learning” (1960, 2-3). Furthermore, Shakespeare was “a realistic playwright” because he presented “the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (Engels, 2001, 48:167). In their writings, Marx and Engels criticized Ferdinand Lassalle for turning the historical characters in his tragedy Franz von Sickingen into mouthpieces for the playwright’s revolutionary ideas. “In my view of drama, the realistic should not be neglected in favor of the intellectual elements, nor Shakespeare in favor of Schiller” (Engels in Baxandall & Morawski, 1974, 110). Shakespeare offered a model for future drama since he achieved the unique “Shakespearean vivacity and wealth of action” (Engels in Baxandall & Morawski, 1974, 145). Thus literature and arts should be “Shakespearized more” and involve less “Schillerism” (Marx in Baxandall & Morawski, 1974, 108).

Bian Zhilin’s famous 50000-word essay on Hamlet, published in 1957, was the first Chinese work that attempted to interpret a Shakespeare play by applying the Marxist “dialectical and historical materialist point of view” (Bian Zhilin, 1957, 70). 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” (1868-72). 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” (76). 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” (89) as exemplified in the lines “For who would beare the whips and scornes of time, Th'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” (1590) 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” (91). 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” (98). 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.

This outline of Bian’s essay summarizes most writings on Shakespeare and Hamlet in the period before the eruption of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Despite the fact that very little contemporary Western Shakespearean criticism could be read in China, Chinese writers would frequently condemn the “reactionary standpoint” of critics in the West. For instance, in 1963 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 that “the 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 century when all the decadent and rotten ‘new schools’ have emerged in bourgeois concepts of literature and art as well as in criticism” (Zhu Hong, 1963, 122-3). If, in the West, Claudius was no longer stereotyped as a representation of evil but was perceived as a more complex character, Zhu declared that this should be seen as a “reflection of the critics’ own reactionary standpoint” since Western critics always “impose their own dark and decadent feelings arbitrarily onto Hamlet” (123).

During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the Red Guards refrained from publicly denouncing Shakespeare in consequence of the approbatory comments of Marx and Engels. Nevertheless, together with other Western literature and China’s own cultural heritage, Shakespeare’s plays were branded as “feudal, capitalist and revisionist works” and were not performed or studied. Conversely, in the freer atmosphere of the 1980s, when the whole nation was avid for a sense of connection to the world beyond Maoist China’s borders, there was a remarkable upsurge in Chinese Shakespeare studies and performance. Indeed, by virtue of being a representative of the Western canon who enjoyed Marxist approval, Shakespeare appeared to be the ideal choice at that time for literary and theater practitioners who felt they needed to remain cautious regarding what could safely be written or put on the stage.

Shakespeareans such as Bian Zhilin began candidly and self-critically to re-examine what they had written about Shakespeare and to apply new concepts in their interpretations. Hamlet was once again the play on which Chinese Shakespeareans tended to focus, but where the analyses used mainly to concentrate on the issues of theme, characterization and historical background, the scope now widened to include language, imagery, the association with the medieval theatrical tradition and the play’s relevance to modern theatrical practices. Chinese critics abandoned the notion of the “Renaissance giant” and started discussing Hamlet’s character from a broader perspective, introducing various Western methods of the mid-twentieth century such as Freudian psychology. However, after decades of indoctrination in Marxist literary theories, most Chinese Shakespearean criticism still betrays the stamp of Soviet orthodoxy. For example, Zhang Junchuan, the vice chairman of the Chinese Association of Shakespeare Studies from 1984 to 1995, asserted in his article “The Internal Conflicts of Hamlet” that Hamlet “devotes his whole life to the fight for his ideal” (1994, 152), and therefore “his revenge, different from [that of] Laertes and Fortinbras, consists of the principle of humanism” (148). The fatal problem facing Hamlet is that as a “feudal prince” he fights on his own: as “a lonely ghost wandering around the world” he fails to understand that he should rely on his people and unite with potential allies at Elsinore (147).

Chinese performances of Hamlet have employed a diversity of approaches, styles and techniques over the course of the past hundred years, affording further insights into the general understanding of the play in China and its reception by Chinese-speaking audiences. Like other Shakespeare plays, Hamlet has been staged both in the huaju style (spoken drama or modern theater) and in xiqu (the traditional singing theater).

Wenmingxi or civilized drama (for civilized read “modern”) was a new theatrical genre with a clear ideological commitment when it first appeared on the stage at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was the embryo of the later huaju, the modern Chinese theater.

Hamlet together with other Shakespearean adaptations from Lin Shu’s semi-classical translation of Tales from Shakespeare constituted a vital part of the wenmingxi repertoire, although it is questionable whether these versions of storyline summaries should be regarded as true productions of Shakespeare. All the performances were scripted in the form of mubiao or scenarios where actors were only given an outline of the plot and were expected to expand these scenarios on the stage through improvisation (somewhat similar to commedia dell’arte). Influenced by the indigenous operatic theater, the acting parts were categorized according to their role types. For example, the male orator role (yanlun zheng sheng) would always play the protagonist in the production and give improvised speeches commenting on current affairs. As mentioned earlier, a number of companies put on Hamlet under different titles. The 1916 newspaper advertisement for The Usurper of State Power (Qie guo zei) revealed some features of how Hamlet was adapted and performed: Although these performances highlighted the sensational side of the play, they were not without social relevance. The Usurper of State Power was a veiled attack on the recent attempt by Yuan Shikai to abolish the Republic and to install himself as Emperor. In 1916, Gu Wuwei, a popular actor at that time who was involved in the production, was arrested, imprisoned, 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.

Most Shakespeare performances have been staged in the huaju or spoken drama style, a form of theater devised at the beginning of the twentieth century to emulate Western theatrical practices. The term huaju indicates that the spoken language is the centerpiece of this theater in contrast to the operatic style of the traditional Chinese theater xiqu (literal meaning “theater melody”). It is customary for huaju Shakespeare performances to use straight translations of the English texts. However, some recent productions show that practitioners are now prepared to manipulate the original dramatic structure by cutting, moving or even rewriting scenes in order to express their own interpretations of the issues they perceive in the plays.