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SHASHIBIYA: STAGING SHAKESPEARE IN CHINA. By Li Ruru. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. xi + 305 pp. Hardcover $49.50; paper $29.95.
The Britain-based Chinese theater practitioner and scholar Li Ruru's highly readable Shashibiya is a welcome contribution to the fields of Chinese theater history and contemporary global Shakespearean performance. Li's book lives up to its promise of offering us an anthropologically thick description of modern and contemporary Chinese theater scenes through case studies of Shakespearean performance. Shashibiya asks and answers questions such as why the Chinese should concern themselves with Shakespeare while there is such a rich legacy of theater in China, how the Chinese people understand Shakespeare, why most Chinese audiences favor Westernized productions, and why the Chinese are so worried about authenticity and being faithful to Shakespeare's original works. This is a significant contribution to the growing literature on Shakespeare on the global stage and the meaning of the phenomena.
The idea that Shakespeare belongs to the world has become a cliché. It remained an un examined assumption until a boom, in the years after 1993, of scholarly works that began to analyze the politics of such claims of possession. In recent years, Shakespeare in non-Western cultures, especially Asia, has emerged as an important cultural phenomenon and a hot topic for scholarly inquiry. Although it is one of these global Shakespeares, China's "Shakespeare" has a career and character of its own. The inception of modern Chinese huaju (spoken drama) and xiqu (stylized) theaters is shaped by the modalities and themes of foreign dramas. Each year, hundreds of Shakespeare adaptations are staged in a wide range of performing styles in the Chinese-speaking world. Dramatic adaptations of foreign works, especially Shakespeare, are important forces in the formation of modern theatres in Taiwan and China. Many of these adaptations have become new classics for the Chinese stage or have expanded the repertoire of Chinese opera, yet Shakespeare in Chinese is still significantly understudied from the point of view of both Chinese studies and Shakespeare studies. Despite the increased awareness of such critical adaptations of Shakespeare in China along with a rise in scholarly interest in the phenomenon and its history, very little is known about the topic in both the Chinese- and English-speaking communities,...