Xinhua Insight: Decoding Shakespeare in China

Zhu Biaojun cannot forget the dark night more than two decades ago, when he stood in the rain to watch the movie Hamlet in an open-air cinema.

The middle school student from a village in east China's Anhui province had no idea who wrote the story, and had never heard of William Shakespeare.

"But I was deeply impressed by the story," he said, adding that he could still recall the scent of the air: machine oil from a nearby factory mixed with the fragrance of grass.

Zhu is now a poet and literary critic.

Born in the late 1960s, Zhu is among the hundreds of thousands of Chinese people moved by Shakespeare, although some of them might not have read any his works.

Saturday is the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, arguably the most influential Western playwright in China.

From the line "to be or not to be", to the excerpt from The Merchant of Venice in middle school textbooks, to some traditional operas and blockbusters adapted from his plays, "Shakespeare has been assimilated into our daily life," said Zhu.

The name Shakespeare appeared in a Chinese book in 1839.

Lin Shu is a notable figure in popularizing Shakespeare's works. According to Cheng Zhaoxiang, former headmaster of the Foreign Language School of the Beijing University, Lin Shu didn't speak any English.

"He had someone else do the translation, and he wrote down the story," Cheng said. In fact, the book Lin translated was not Shakespeare's, but Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. But even so, more people in China at that time got to know the playwright.

Zhu Shenghao made his name as the first Chinese to finish translation of 31 of Shakespeare's plays.

"He started doing the task in 1935," Cheng said. "To escape bombing by the Japanese invaders, he took shelter in the countryside."

At that time, Zhu was in poor health, and lost his transcripts twice in the flame of warfare. He died in 1944, leaving five and a half plays to be translated.

China published the complete works of William Shakespeare in 1978, when Wang Xiaoying was 21 years old. He started reading the books in that year.

In the 1980s, Wang studied in the Central Academy of Drama, where he played Hamlet, and directed Othello.

Wang, 59, is now vice head of the National Theater of China. His version of Richard III was performed more than 50 times across the globe.

In the play he added some elements of Beijing Opera. All the characters wore traditional Chinese robes. The performer who acted as Lady Ann sang the opera to show her grief and hesitation, while the assassins showed martial arts in their performance.

The play was taken to the Globe, a playhouse by the River Thames in London originally built in Shakespeare's time.

"The stage resembles traditional Chinese theater," Wang said. "And some of the plays also bear a resemblance to Chinese stories. With an emperor, some officials, conspiracy and warfare, the story of Richard III could be Chinese."

Many have attempted Chinese versions of the Shakespeare. The movie Prince of the Himalayas is an adaptation of the Hamlet story in Tibet. In Anhui, Li Longbin of the provincial theater for Anhui opera retold Macbeth story with a fictional figure in the Spring and Autumn Period.

"It is our hope that foreign audiences will see the charm of Anhui Opera through a story they are familiar with," Li told Xinhua.

Wang Xiaoying believes that Shakespeare plays can attract audiences from all cultures. "From his stories you can see complicated human nature, different emotions, contemplation of life, as well as criticism of the society, which people could always develop empathy," he said.

Zhu the poet marveled at the language of Shakespeare. "Four hundred years after the lines were written, they are still enlightening," he said.

The sentence "there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes" has become a proverb in China. In his speech in Britain, Chinese President Xi Jinping quoted the line "what's past is prologue" from the Tempest.

"Even after a thousand years, we will still be reading Shakespeare," said Yang Qingxiang, associate professor with Renmin University of China who was among the jury of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, one of China's most prestigious literary awards.

A latest collection of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies translated by Zhu Shenghao, published in 2013, has sold 8,980 copies, 10,123 copies and 11,976 copies in the three consecutive years on Dangdang.com, a bookselling online platform.

"If you would like to gain a deeper understanding of the world, or understand how complicated human nature can be, read Shakespeare," he said. Endi