“GIS allows data from different formats to be integrated and enables humanities scholars to discover the relationship of ‘memory, artifact, and experience that exists in a particular space’ and across time” (Bodenhamer viii).1
Reception of Shakespeare in Asia
Shakespeare’s plays began to be accepted, translated, read, and performed in Asia, Japan (1885), China (1913), and Korea (1925). The different routes for each country’s reception of Shakespeare are associated with their own historical, social, and political circumstances, especially, the modernization movements and the rise of colonialism in the Asian region. The map presented below shows how Shakespeare’s works were introduced and accepted by each Asian country and the international relationships between not only Britain and Asian countries but also between/among Asian countries.
Japan was the first Asian country to accept Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Shakespeare was firstly mentioned in a Dutch translation of an English grammar book in 1841 and introduced in 1868 as one of the threads for modernization movements during the Meiji period (1868-1912). Shakespeare’s plays were performed in front of public audiences in 1866 and 1869 through public reading in Yokohama, one of the port cities in Japan, where the excerpt from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet were read. Later, a scene from The Taming of the Shrew was performed in English in the Gaiety Theatre in Yokohama in 1879.
As the map shows, Japan’s reception of Shakespeare brought about not only cultural revolution and westernization in Japanese society but also impacted other Asian countries under Japan’s colonialist movement. In 1903, Othello was performed as the outpost of the Japanese empire in Taiwan, and Hamlet was conducted in Korea by a Japanese theatre company in 1909. It shows Japan’s role as a cultural agency and its political status in Asia. Japan, once a geographically marginalized and politically turbulent country in Asia, established one powerful unified government and became a nation politically and culturally powerful enough to reintroduce what it had accepted to its nearby countries.
Shakespeare was mentioned earlier in China, during Opium Wars (1839-42), in Lin Zexu’s Annals of the Four Continent and introduced into Hong Kong’s school curriculum in 1882. The First Chinese-language performance of Shakespeare took place in Shanghai Eastern Girl’s Highschool, where Woman Lawyer, an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice was staged in 1913. From 1927, cinematic Shakespearean adaptations, The Woman Lawyer (Merchant of Venice) and A Spray of Plum Blossom (The Two Gentlemen from Verona), were produced.
The introduction of Shakespeare in Korea began with the Japan-Korea annexation and Japanese domination over the Korean peninsular. While the first Korean-language production of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar was performed in 1925, under Japanese colonization, Shakespeare’s works were rarely performed compared to the former two countries. However, Korea becomes the place with prolific “Koreanized” Shakespearean adaptations in the stage-play and film modes.
Reimagined and recreated Shakespeare in Asia
A Chronology of Shakespeare in East Asia Dataset
Although many of Shakespeare’s plays have been performed following early modern performance styles, early Asian adaptations of Shakespeare were colored with “nationalist appropriation” (Kennedy and Yong 7).2 Numerous Shakespeare’s plays staged in Asian countries appropriated national cultural aspects and presented social and political allegories. Japanese early reception of Shakespeare was driven by the national modernization project, such as the reformation of theatre movements, and Shakespeare worked as a political and social gear as novelist Dazia Osamu employed Shakespeare’s work to criticize the country’s militarism. Many adaptations share a common feature of using traditional Japanese performances. One of the best examples is Akira Kurosawa, a Japanese director whose Shakespearean adaptations have been highly esteemed both in the East and the West. In his adaptation films, Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), Kurosawa employed traditional Japanese cultures, Noh and Kabuki, into Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear. In spite of several examples of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare in China, Shakespeare and his works were ignored after the Communist Revolution of 1949 until his works were established as a projection with socialist approaches. Hamlet performed in early twentieth-century Korea implicated Korean nationalism, recalling the turbulent history of colonization and the Korean War and the political and ideological division of the nation that ensued.
This regional-focused tendency began to change, and producers’ creative and imaginative interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays have occurred since the 1990s, many of which aim to attract worldwide audiences, along with globalization. Rather than (re)presenting each Asian nation’s unique historical moments or national and cultural aspects, theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays pursue the modes of interculturalism, universalism, cultural hybridity, and theatrical defamiliarization. Following this tendency, the adaptation works become more estranged from Shakespeare’s original plays. For instance, Xiaogang Feng’s The Banquet (2006), based on Hamlet, presents the Gertrude figure as a power-desiring woman who uses her (step)son to take a throne; in the Korean adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Jung-Ung Yang, Bottom is presented as a mythical female figure, rather than a naive clown-like male character who is taunted by Oberon and Puck, the male fairies. The adaptation works with intercultural and cultural-universalistic features have appealed to international audiences, so as new forms of theatrical and cinematic artwork geared with their own aesthetics, they have been accepted and reimported to various non-East countries.
A Chronology of Shakespeare in East Asia dataset shows a list of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare in East Asia from 1879 and the changed tendencies of Asian adaptation from local-based to globalization.
Here are cultural maps showing how new adaptations have been world-widely accepted. The signs marked on the maps indicates the locations where the adaptation works were performed.
Kingdom of Desire, directed by Hsing-Kuo Wu (Taiwan, 1986-2010)
Romeo and Juliet, directed by Tae-suk Oh (South Korea, 1996- )
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Jung-Ung Yang (South Korea, 2009- )
These three maps of adaptations share several commonalities. While those recreated Shakespearean works with Asian cultural colors have been world-widely performed, most locations are limited to countries in Asian, European, and American regions where Shakespeare and his works have been a part of cultures, and the Middle East and Africa continent, the West’s former colonies, are excluded from this cultural exchange between the East and the West. This mode poses a question regarding cultural and thematic universalism in aesthetics. Those maps visualize the cultural division between Global North/South and East/West, and furthermore, they can signify that Asia’s reception and adaptation of Shakespeare still can be a part of cultural imperialism and the West’s dominant position in cultural exchanges, with the danger of falling into another Orientalism in the West’s reception of Asia’s Shakespearean adaptation. As Sen contends that globalization brings “inequality,” despite its consequence as a blessing to humankind, these maps indicate cultural inequality both between and within countries. At the same time, however, these maps can be read in an opposite way that Asia’s cultural occupation over the West and the potential of the West’s adaptation of Asian culture, as in Kenneth Branagh’s Japanese-styled film, As You Like It (2006). Of course, Branangh’s film still has possibilities to raise questions regarding the West’s employing the Eastern cultures. The mapping project with Shakespearean adaptations, therefore, allows to rethink interculturalism and globalization, and even warns of having a rosy vision from the East-to-West cultural transmission, which could be easily believed as the traditional hierarchy change between two regions.