Snapshots of a Shakespearean in China.

I. An Invitation

"My father, who is old, likes Shakespeare" These were Shalang's--Sharon in its English form--words just before she left my office in the fall of 1985, at the end of a charming conversation set up by a colleague who had sent her exchange student in linguistics to pass an hour with me. Sharon was a slender woman, with long dark hair framing her oval face. She had a quick mind, was already well-versed in American idioms, and after nine months of study in Florida missed her husband and child very much.

"My father, who is old, likes Shakespeare:' For the next few days the curious statement remained with me. With the eternal present tense of Chinese grammar, for me it was a complex, albeit brief text enfolding a mystery. What to make of the deceptively simple "likes"; the adjective "old" a sign of the daughter's reverence; most of all, the curious link between the father and the playwright, as if they were twin members of an equation. We had not talked about her father, nor about Shakespeare, though surely she knew I was a Shakespearean, a title that, to me, always sounds so pretentious, so odd. In English departments one can be an eighteenth-century scholar, or someone whose field is critical theory, or the medieval period. But only those foolhardy enough to take that exhilarating voyage into the cosmos of the playwright arc stereotyped by the name of their study and idolatry--Shakespearean.

Three days later, giving way to impulse, I packed up two large boxes of books on Shakespeare, books I had read and reread since graduate school days and no longer needed, and mailed them to the old man in Changchun City who likes Shakespeare. I relished the idea of these well-worn old friends traveling to the other side of the world, a chronicle of my graduate student years, through my first teaching position at Illinois, then Boston University, and to the present, a full professor at Florida who has himself written books about the playwright. There, they would be received and--better yet--read and cherished by an old man who "likes Shakespeare."

And that was that, or so I thought, until a month later she paid a second visit to my office, bearing presents from her father--a silk scarf for my wife Norma, a fan for me, two plastic rulers decorated with a Chinese facsimile of the Emperor's Palace for our boys, then ages two and four.

At the end of our conversation, as I walked her to the door, she asked, "Homan, would you like to visit the People's Republic of China?" I took the question as an instance of social etiquette, a polite closure to a good hour, the equivalent to our suggesting, as we say good-bye, "Hey, if you're ever in our neck of the woods, drop in for a drink--okay?"

I would learn later that there is no such shallow invitation in Chinese culture. I would also learn that their custom is often to place the most important object or issue of a conversation last, as Shalang had done earlier with that reference to her father.

A short time later, we received an official invitation from Beijing for the family to spend a summer in Changchun City, where I was asked to direct the resident company, the Changchun Modern Drama Players, in a production "of any one of Shakespeare's plays" and to teach a course in Shakespeare and the modern playwrights at Jilin University. Zhang Siyang was one of the most eminent Shakespeareans in China, yet out of modesty his daughter had not mentioned that in our two conversations. As President Deng's way of apologizing for the cruel treatment accorded university intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Siyang was offered the seat of honor next to Deng during his inauguration in the People's Palace, located diagonally across Tiananmen Square from the mausoleum where the Chairman is buried. This old man who likes Shakespeare would be our host.

I accepted at once.

II. A Choice of Shakespeares

The Chinese company asked which of Shakespeare's plays I wished to direct, and, wanting to meet them halfway, I suggested they pick the play, or at least make a list from which I could choose. They asked for Twelfth Night, Macbeth, or The Comedy of Errors. Having just done the latter play at the Hippodrome, our Equity theater in Gainesville, and anticipating the difficulties of directing a production in Chinese, with the necessity of a translator and a cast who, I was informed, spoke very little English, I considered Errors the safest bet. Besides, I could ship over costumes and props from our production.

Before we left, however, I received a very apologetic letter from the company asking, instead, whether I would do Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Merry Wives--a play I had never done, never taught or written about, a comedy often dismissed by scholars as an incidental piece written, so the legend goes, because Queen Elizabeth wanted to see the fat knight of the Henry IV plays, Sir John Falstaff, in love. Still, determined to accommodate my hosts, I told them I would indeed "be honored" to direct The Merry Wives, and so, over the next two weeks, plunged into the work, calling around the country to friends who had directed it, inserting the play in the syllabus of my spring-term courses for my sake as much as that of my students. When we boarded the plane I took along a notebook with my director's concept, blocking, suggestions for set and costumes, and a rehearsal schedule.

I had also been asked to mail copies of my lectures to be translated. Never having relied on written lectures, let alone notes, yet again determined to be accommodating, I sent over twenty lectures, ten on Shakespeare's plays and ten on modern playwrights. I promptly received a very effusive "thank you" from a young scholar, Chen Yong-guo, who informed me that he was now busy with the translations and that, during our stay, he would serve as my official translator, both at the university and with the acting company.

On the flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, ! had some time to speculate on why my hosts might have chosen The Merry Wives, of all Shakespeare's plays. Did the plot hold a clue? Down on his luck, Sir John goes to Windsor, a simple country town. With an aristocrat's sense of superiority, he tries to trick the middle-class husbands out of their money and two of the wives of their virtue. But the women see through him and, after twice humiliating the lecherous knight, join with their husbands in Falstaff's third and final punishment. With men and women now united, having taken the law into their own hands, the villagers restore order and, in the prototypical comic ending, conclude the play with a public feast.

Why would they pick this play, Shakespeare's only rural comedy, set in middle-class Windsor and so distant from London? How might the Chinese interpret The Merry Wives? As we crossed the Pacific, I thought of an aristocrat, albeit a false one, a middle-class society, the power of the people, translated for The People's Republic. I had been told that since the Cultural Revolution, disputes were generally settled by town meetings, communal action against the violator being preferred to a formal court trial. A city of two million, Changchun was still rural by Chinese standards, an obscure town in the Northeastern region of the country, just below Manchuria, with North Korea to the South and the China Sea to the Southeast. Changchun City, the guidebooks warned, was no Beijing, let alone Shanghai. Windsor--Changchun. Might the Chinese be reading The Merry Wives as an allegory of the triumph of the people in a rural town over the decadent aristocracy represented by Falstaff or as an affirmation of the virtues of the countryside--Mao's virtues--over those of the city? China was debating how to become modernized yet avoid what they saw as the cultural and ethical corruption of capitalistic nations. Few Western Shakespeareans would have wanted to make a heavy political allegory out of an incidental piece like The Merry Wives. But might the Chinese be reading the play in this very fashion?

As things turned out, I only had a chance to lecture on The Merry Wives, do some preliminary work with the actors, and then present the company with my director's notes and suggestions for the staging. (1) But this disappointment was more than compensated for by what I learned about Shakespeare from a people whose own theater, of course, predated his by thousands of years. And my speculations about the choice of The Merry Wives would come true.

III. Shakespeare in the Classroom

Waiting for me outside the classroom door at Jilin University were five young women writing dissertations on Shakespeare under Professor Zhang's direction, "The Gang of Five" as I would lovingly call the graduate students who, during our stay, would become my students. After hasty introductions, I was ushered into the class, where two hundred people were waiting, a mixture of undergraduates and graduate students, faculty, actors, various artists, party members, workers, and interested townspeople.

Chen and I sat at a table in the front, cups of hot tea always before us. For two days the class was conducted in the style university officials had told me was "[their] practice with foreign experts" I would read a paragraph of my lecture in English, followed by Chen's translation. "Professors do not stand; they sit, talk, and sip tea while we listen" one of the Gang told me with a glint in her eye.

"Chen, we must change things" I exclaimed at tea after the second day of class, just before my ride back to the hotel.

"Change, Homan?"

"Yes, Chen. I can't go on like this, just reading my lectures."

"You mean one paragraph of English, one of Chinese?"

"Oh, you don't like it either."

"It's the way we do it."

"Chen, let's throw the lectures away."

"Away?"

"Yes, out ... away. Tomorrow, I'll just make up my remarks on the spot, the way I do it back home. And I'll ask questions of the students, and we can even stage scenes from the plays."

"But, Homan, this will mean I'll have to translate on the spot!"

"But, Chen, since I'll know that, I'm making allowances."

"Allowances?"

"I'll go slower ... I'll watch you. We'll pass signals back and forth.

Okay?"

"Okay."

The next morning there was a stir in the classroom when Chen and I did not take our usual places behind the table. Instead, I walked to the front row of seats and purposely sat on the edge of the desk of one of the graduate students, "the most liberated," as her roommates called her, of the Gang of Five. Chen took up a parallel position on a nearby desk, and as I explained that we were going to do things differently this morning, that I would no longer be reading from a prepared text, that I was going to pretend I was back at my own university, Chen imitated me down to the smallest gesture: shadow-acting, we would call it in the theater. The older faculty standing in the back, distinguished by a single strand of Confucius-styled beards hanging from the center of their chins, seemed upset. One made a sudden exit, on his way to inform the university president, as I would learn later. At first the students were confused, and began patting the back of their heads, or twirling a cowlick--a common Chinese sign for dismay or alarm. Soon, those gestures gave way to shy smiles. The tallest and most elegant student of the Gang even forgot the billboard's reminder of politically correct decorum and spit discretely on the floor by her desk. When the president arrived, as one of the students later reported to me, he mumbled to a colleague, "He is Western. We should have expected this."

With each day Chen and I became more confident. Hesitant at first, trying so desperately to work as a team, soon we were like jazz musicians, old musical partners playing without a conductor, feeling each other's rhythms, passing solos back and forth, communicating with our eyes. When I played Shakespeare's Lear, holding in my arms the body of my dead daughter Cordelia, crying out to the indifferent air, "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?" and from the dark vacuum before me receiving only "Never, never, never, never, never" Chen, standing inches from me, adopted my very posture, holding in his arms an invisible Chinese Cordelia and punctuating the air with Chinese "nevers."

Knowing that Chinese is a very concrete language that, like cuneiform or hieroglyphics, avoids abstractions, I found it helpful to substitute metaphors for abstract words or concepts. Far too general a term and hence presenting Chen with problems in translation, "serenity" was metamorphosed to "mist rising lazily over a slow-moving stream"; "freedom" became "the un-caged bird." Forced, in effect, to strip my own language back to its roots in pictures, I began hearing English as if it had been washed clean. After all, if a fellow adult says to us, "It's raining cats and dogs" the metaphor is so ingrained, so cliched, that we don't process the comic absurdity of the picture, the "lie" as a poet friend calls it, "by which we get at the truth." But say "It's raining cats and dogs" to a child and he or she will race to the window, expecting to see animals tumbling from the sky. Given the need for such picture-making, each day in class I began more and more to hear Shakespeare's language, my language, as I had never heard it before, anchored not in abstractions but in objects, the physical world, the source of metaphors, the very metaphors distinguishing rich poetry from pedestrian prose. And there was more.

The metaphoric, even the conceptual base of Chinese depended, by definition, on what already existed in the culture. In a country where, say, no roses grow, the metaphor "my love is a wild, wild rose" will not work for its listeners, cannot be received. Therefore, whenever I came to an image or idea for which there was no clear Chinese equivalent, I would have to rethink or refashion Shakespeare's meaning. One day we were looking at Sonnet 74 where the poet compares death to a surly officer who drags you away from life to his jail, without allowing bail: "When that fell arrest without all bail shall carry me away." Now, at the time the Chinese criminal justice system did not recognize the concept of bail. Inferior as I was to the master poet, I would, on the spot, have to refashion the metaphor. Otherwise, even the most careful translation from my partner would fall on deaf ears. Having to make such allowances for cultural or historical differences forced me to rethink everything. I couldn't depend on that automatic pilot by which, after decades of teaching, I could give a lecture to my students in Florida without reexamining what I was saying. If by throwing away the Chinese translations of my lectures I had rediscovered the child's sensitivity to the pictures of our language, now, having to rethink what I assumed I "knew" about Shakespeare, I was becoming a student all over again. It was exhilarating.

IV. "Why, Sir, Is Shakespeare Eternal?"

One afternoon at what was billed as a "public lecture" Chen announced that I was "the foreign expert, an actor and director, and the first Shakespearean from the United States to visit Changchun ... interested in the theater, sports, politics, jazz music, automobiles, and universities." There was a stir when he added "the father of not one but four children." He then told the crowd I would respond to any questions they might have.

For a moment the audience was silent, without any questions for the foreign expert. At last a young actor stood up, looked at me intently, coughed politely, and then asked, "Homan, in your opinion, why is Shakespeare eternal?"

I thought to myself: what an impossible, what an absurd question! If anyone is eternal, surely Shakespeare is. But, having never bothered to question why, how could I define the master's eternality? More accustomed to being asked about a character's motivation or to explicate a line, I was thrown by this question that seemed at once obvious and--well--cosmic. Yet the actor was so earnest. When he turned around to gain confidence from his companions, they gave him a look that said, "Well done! Congratulations!"

He filled in the vacuum I had created. "I have often wondered why, Homan. You must know."

What could I do? How could I not reply to this earnest fellow? Slowly, hesitantly, I began to answer, like a man who, taking a strange path, first throws down a marker.

"I think Shakespeare is eternal for seven reasons."

"Ah, seven!" the actor echoed with a deep sense of satisfaction.

Seven, the mystical number--seven virtues, seven vices, seven come eleven. A reasonable sum for eternity. Chen winked at me, as if to say this would be our finest moment of improvisation. From nowhere, from everywhere came those seven reasons, fortified with examples, embellished with lines from the master, cast in metaphors so clarion clear that Chen's own translation fell as easily as those leaves falling from trees of which the poet Keats speaks.

"Shakespeare is eternal because his deep humanity allows him to understand the villain without rushing to judgment."

"Shakespeare is eternal because even the most insignificant of his characters have such individual voices that each carries with him or her a potential play."

"Shakespeare is eternal because as author he remains invisible behind the illusory men and women of his stage."

"Shakespeare is eternal because ..." (2)

Two hours later, after the last of the seven reasons, Chen, the Gang of Five, and I retired to a back room for a cup of tea.

"Homan, I must correct you," my friend said.

One of the Gang of Five jumped in. "Yes. You see, when a student asks a teacher a question, the teacher--this is our custom--gives the student a brief answer, perhaps only a few words." Another added, "The student goes home, thinks about the answer, and comes back a few days later with a second question."

"We do not give two-hour answers," Chen said solemnly.

With a flourish worthy of Noel Coward, I replied, "My dear friends, have I not tried to be the perfect guest?" After all agreed, I continued,

"Today you are lucky. Given the nature of the question, I had planned to speak for four hours. But I thought you needed a break." Chen put his arm around me and said, "Homan, we Chinese, we Children of the Middle Earth will strive to understand you!"

V. A Chinese King Lear

Two days later at the local theater I had another formative experience with a most unusual staging and translation of King Lear. There were just three characters--Lear, Cordelia, and the Fool. The plot had been changed radically, but not unlike what Nahum Tate and others did during the English Restoration when they sought to "improve" on Shakespeare, make him a "contemporary." In the Tate reworking of Lear the king is rescued by Cordelia, Lear's one good daughter, does not die at the end, and--wonder of wonders!--Cordelia marries Edgar, Gloucester's good son. With Charles Lamb and others objecting to seeing an old man suffer onstage, violating the respect due to elders, Tate dutifully converted a tragedy into a comedy. I also recall Arthur Miller's experience, recounted in his A Salesman in Beijing, staging Death of a Salesman in China and having to deal with the objection that a good salesman would have been a better father, nor would he have cheated on his wife. (3)

Similar wholesale changes had been made in this Chinese Lear I saw. Lear was desperate to get Cordelia back, his strategies ranging from tricks and force to feigning his own death. In effect, he makes a fool of himself, trying to right the injustice of his following after the two bad daughters, Goneril and Regan, and rejecting Cordelia. His efforts are pathetic and self-serving, and the Fool who, in the tradition of Shakespeare's own theater had complete run of the stage, spent his time mocking Lear, encouraging the audience to laugh with him at this "child-changed" old man. At the end, Lear, realizing how absurd he has been, begs his daughter's forgiveness; this late act of self-discovery alone restores her to him.

There was also an ensemble of five musicians on stage-left who played continually during the production, not background music but rather a score that functioned as something of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action, anticipating events, sometimes underscoring the dialogue, at other times offering an ironic countermelody. The musicians, as I learned later, had a basic score, but were also at liberty to improvise when the mood struck them. This ensemble gave the director an added degree of control, for he could channel or reaffirm the audience's reception with music as well as with the Fool, the intermediary between those onstage and those in the house. On my return to the United States, I would experiment with this heightened use ofon stage music in a series of Shakespeare productions--Lear, Hamlet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, even Tom Stoppard's reworking of Hamlet in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

VI. A Production of The Green Fields Return

The night before I was to present my plans for The Merry Wives to the Changchun Modern Drama Players, the company invited us to see their production of the play The Green Fields Return, winner of the annual Marxist Prize. It focused on a young man from a provincial town like Changchun who had gone to Shanghai, where he had become corrupted, and, having returned home when his luck failed, at first scorned his fellow citizens and then redeemed himself by joining with his teacher and an honest party member in rooting out corrupt officials who had collaborated with the Japanese during the war.

We were asked to arrive an hour before curtain. The theater itself was part of a commune, where actors, directors, designers, technicians, and playwrights both lived and worked. Ushered into a back room, just off the house, there we saw seated in formal style all the members of the company, arranged in a horseshoe around a large table where I was to sit with the company's director. While everyone else listened and a secretary took notes, the director and I sipped tea and chatted about the theater, swapping anecdotes and making comparisons between our two systems.

At eight, a bell rang and we were ushered into the theater. The house was packed, and as we entered they rose and, applauding, cried out, "Homan! Homan!" An egoist would have overdosed from the greeting. We sat in the first row, the playwright to my right, and Chen behind us to provide translations when necessary.

The stage was very long and also shallow, with three distinct sets, one merging with the other, no attempt at realism being made. Actors who would appear in a subsequent scene mingled on one set, waiting their turn while other actors performed the scene at hand, oblivious to their presence. Here was a theater Bertolt Brecht would have loved. Characters were defined in terms of their public or political roles. There were no monologues, soliloquies, let alone asides, no private moments when a character spoke to some inner self, overheard only by the audience. Relationships were open, social. Within a single scene dialogue would jump from one set of speakers to the next, as if a camera were randomly picking out pockets of conversation. Their delivery was what we would call mannered, stylized--no method acting here.

The one touch of realism was a curious one. Almost everyone onstage smoked, yet that smoking seemed to have no relation to character. In the midst of a furious argument, for example, one character would offer a cigarette to an opponent, even light it, as if the two actors were in rehearsal and had dropped character to take a break.

The playwright, whispering in my ear, was eager to point out moments when, having satisfied the party line, he indulged himself in crafting a particular section of dialogue or a dimension to a character that, by Western standards, we would call individual or inner. Clearly, he had written two plays. One was the prize-winning drama stressing the public values of the wise teacher (who carried an umbrella as a sign of his prudence) and the honest party member (a thinly disguised Chairman Mao). These public values were threatened by the cult of personality (vested in the corrupt politicians) and the cruelty of the foreign occupiers. In effect, the play was an allegory of good battling evil through which the main character, like an Everyman, made his difficult way, complete with a red Honda motorcycle he had bought in Shanghai and taken back to his hometown to impress a former girlfriend. She remained unimpressed, until he joined in the fight against those who had subverted the simple country ethics of the people.

But there was another play, an unofficial play in which the playwright took special pride. Here the story was one of feelings, of relationships among friends, the young man and his various father figures, a Chinese equivalent to the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Here even the most minor character was revealed to have some secret ambition, a wish, even an obsession that had very little, if anything, to do with the propaganda so obvious, even intrusive, in its allegorical twin. This was the play its author wanted me to see, and with his help I did. It was this half of The Green Fields Return that had a touch of such eternity as I had earlier so lavishly bestowed on Shakespeare.

It was also a very long play. In fact, every play we saw in China was very long--three, even four hours was not uncommon. Without intermissions, The Green Fields Return ran almost four hours. However, it was considered proper to get up, leave for a while and then return.

After the performance, we were escorted to the room where we had met earlier. The entire Changchun Modern Drama Company was arranged in formal fashion.

After some perfunctory picture taking, the director announced, "And now, Homan, would you be so kind as to give us a one-hour critique of the production you saw?"

I was shocked. In this country adjudicators of productions are given notice well in advance. Moreover, what credentials did I have to evaluate a performance in Chinese, from a company often operating under different theatrical principles, not to mention traditions? But here they were with notebooks in hand, waiting for me.

Two hours later, after giving a critique more detailed than I ever thought possible, I got into a van with my family for the trip back to the hotel. Chen, as usual, accompanied us, and the playwright asked if he could come along. The company, all of them, insisted on walking us to the van and waiting at attention until it had disappeared around the corner.

As we drove back to the hotel, Chen told me, "The playwright says that he was greatly honored by your presence at the production, that your seeing his work meant more to him than winning the Marxist Prize. He says that he knows it was, as you would say, 'putting you on the spot' when the director asked you to critique the play. But he is most grateful for your criticism."

"Would you tell him, Chen, that I think he is a talented playwright, and that this made my job a pleasant one?"

This time Chen translated a very agitated response from the playwright. "He says that you will please understand that such a critique has two sources in our culture and our history. One is that we Chinese value the opinion of others above our own. The other is the Communist principle of corrective criticism."

With that, the playwright grabbed my hand, and did not relinquish it until we got out of the van.

"He says that you would make a good Chinese as well as a good Communist."

"Would you tell him, Chen, that I am greatly honored?"

VII. An Influence That Works Both Ways

I was honored, honored to have been exposed to a theater, to its directors, actors, and playwrights who had so much to teach me. Especially this sense of the theater as a communal enterprise, as an art form having social and political obligations, offering a portrait of a society and not just of individuals. The young man in The Green Fields Return was a younger Falstaff, corrupted by the city, by his newfound wealth manifest in the Honda motorcycle. His self-pride threatens his relationship with the young girl and with his former neighbors. But the community bands together to "correct" him, the way the husbands in Shakespeare's comedy do once they are reunited with their faithful wives. In the final scene of The Merry Wives, Falstaff is similarly "corrected" in the forest, when adults and children disguised as fairies, led by Mistress Quickly playing the Fairy Queen, dance around him, taunting him, pinching the fat knight and burning him with tapers. In The Green Fields Return, the errant young man is exposed, humiliated, then restored to his better self by the professor, honest party officials, and the townspeople. I now realized that my speculations about how the Chinese might interpret The Merry Wives of Windsor, why they had chosen it in the first place, were not that far off base.

Of course, the influence worked both ways. The actors, both in conversations about The Merry Wives and in a public performance we gave of Samuel Beckett's little play Come and Go, were intrigued by our concept of subtext: what the character is thinking, feeling beneath the actual dialogue, those conscious and also unconscious thoughts and objectives that influence the actor's delivery. This "individual, unvoiced inner life" as I called it, complemented, sometimes contrasted with their theater's emphasis on a character's being defined by his or her social role. In Come and Go each of the three women whispers a line, unheard by the audience, to her companion about the woman who just exited: something so terrible has happened to her that the character hearing the news is "appalled" When she asks if the subject knows or has been told, the response of the woman who has revealed the news is "God grant not" or variations on it. This vital whispered line takes the concept of subtext to an extreme. When I told my actors to think of something horrible, tragic, perhaps a real-life experience, they leaped to the assignment, fascinated by this notion that an actor could invent a dialogue beneath the script, a subtext shaping his or her delivery of the playwright's actual script. In this instance, that "inner life" was mostly confined to the actor, albeit registered by that "appalled" look from the person receiving the news and then dissipating as both speakers express concern as to whether the absent character knows what has befallen her.

Creating their own parallel, unvoiced script, the actors took to this idea of collaborating with the playwright. No less, I was eager to rethink Shakespeare and modern playwrights in light of their emphasis on the theater's public, social, and political dimensions. (4)

VIII. Thoughts on Returning Home

One night, as we were sailing from Shanghai to Hong Kong, where we would catch a flight home, I couldn't sleep and so wandered the deck of the ship making its way along the dark coast of China.

The sun was just rising. In Changchun, Professor Zhang was having breakfast and preparing for his classes. All over Changchun the Children of the Middle Earth anticipated a new day. Chen, no longer needed as translator for the visiting Shakespearean, would return to teaching in Jilin's Foreign Language Institute. My precious Gang of Five, in between their studies, would be plotting with fellow students for the protests that would erupt the next year.

I had gone to China as "the foreign expert," but in reality I had become the student of Professor Zhang, of my dear friend Chen, of the Gang of Five, of the actors, the faculty and students at Jilin University, the young man who had asked me why Shakespeare was eternal, The Changchun Modern Drama Company, the playwright who held my hand after we left the production of his The Green Field Returns.

And I heard again Shalang's deceptively simple words: "My father, who is old, likes Shakespeare."

University of Florida

NOTES

(1) For a more detailed account of my director's concept for The Merry Wives of Windsor, as influenced by Chinese theater, see: "The Merry Wives of Windsor in the People's Republic of China: A Director's Notebook," in Shakespeare and the Triple Play: From Study to Stage to Classroom, ed. Sidney Homan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1988): 116-37. In that same volume Zhang Siyang has an essay, "Hamlet's Melancholy" 76-81.

(2) I offer more details about my response to this question in "Why, Sir, Is Shakespeare Eternal?" in Directing Shakespeare: A Scholar Onstage (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 107-33.

(3) Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking, 1984). And see Norris Houghton's commentary on the book, "Understanding Willy," in The New York Times (24 June 1984): <http:// www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-beijing.htm1> (accessed 10 July 2012).

(4) I discuss Come and Go from a feminist perspective and staging it before a variety of audiences in "Come and Go: Samuel Beckett's Play for Women" Women's Studies 39 (2010): 304-18.

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Author:	Homan, Sidney
Publication:	Comparative Drama
Article Type:	Travel narrative
Geographic Code:	9CHIN
Date:	Sep 22, 2012
Words:	5668
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