Helping David Out: The Merchant of Venice in Asia

I'm excited to have David be my paper-development partner, especially since there are so many avenues he could pursue in writing about The Merchant of Venice. Because the entry from David's bibliography I was most interested in was Maobingi, and because I've been watching a lot of anime recently (how did I not know about Fullmetal Alchemist before now?), I wanted to see what the Asian world was doing with Merchant.

Shylock in Japan?

First, I just did a simple Google search of "shylock japan" and came up with this book about Jewish relations in Japan. I was really fascinated that "counting the documented productions alone, by 1974, The Merchant had been staged [in Japan] fifty-six times, ten times more than the second-place Hamlet" (31). (I assume this means that Hamlet was produced forty-six times, but it's hard to tell.) The book talked about how a kabuki version of Merchant took out many of his Western features, like his Jewishness, and it attributed the popularity of the play more to how the themes resonated in Japanese culture than to Japanese relations with the Jews. So I didn't find that route to be particularly interesting in the end.

Asian Shakespeare Productions

I decided to do a broader search on Google: "asian Shakespeare." One of the first sites that came up was this Shakespeare Performance in Asia, a database of Asian Shakespeare productions. It has a lot of clips—and sometimes full videos—of different productions, but unfortunately no clips from The Merchant of Venice. Of course, these clips could still be helpful in understanding how Shakespeare is interpreted in Asia in the first place.

I did check the catalog of performances, however, and came up with these four results for Merchant:

Courtesy of SPIA.

David had already found the Maori production, but I was particularly interested in the Beijing performance. When I searched for "Zhang Qihong Merchant of Venice," I came up with a pretty promising path.

Merchant and the Cultural Revolution

I didn't know much about the Cultural Revolution in China when I was doing this research, but it came up in several of the articles I encountered. So, just to get a bit familiar with the term, I went to the Wikipedia page and learned that the Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's way of promoting communism and excluding capitalism from China. In a simple summation, the arts in China were to support communism and denigrate capitalism during this time period.

Though I haven't read Merchant, I thought perhaps during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese productions would have presented Shylock as a representation of capitalism and removed any scenes that would make him sympathetic. But, in fact, most of the scholarship I found on The Merchant of Venice in China looked at the play as part of the backlash to the Cultural Revolution.

Xiomei Chen's Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse of Post-Mao China discusses The Merchant of Venice in two ways: as escapist theater and as a microcosm of capitalism, where Shylock was only disparaged because of Chinese views of different professions. In other words, in some interpretations, the play actually endorsed capitalism in Post-Mao China.

Murray Levin's Shakespeare in China discusses the idea of Merchant serving as a Confucian allegory of the conflict between yi, "loyalty to one's friends," and li, "personal profit or gain" (121), which may or may not be a helpful reading, but Huang and Ross's Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace has a great timeline of Asian Shakespeare performances. Perhaps the most helpful articles I encountered are "Shakespeare in China: The Merchant of Venice" and "Theatre in Post Cultural Revolution China." And though these newspaper articles do not present a lot of information on the importance of Shakespeare to China, these Guardian and Telegraph pieces show that the topic certainly has relevance today.

So, David, I hope that was a good start to looking at The Merchant of Venice in China! Good luck on your paper!