The Shakespearean Moment in China

Abstract

China’s first encounter with Shakespeare—an old civilization with a long, many-faceted dramatic tradition all its own confronting the foremost exponent of poetic drama from a European tradition—should have been a tremendous event, yet it turned out to be a rather muted affair. First recorded mention of Shakespeare’s name was by a British missionary in Shanghai in 1856, in a Chinese translation he made of a book by Thomas Milner, a geography of Great Britain. Nearly thirty years had to pass before Shakespeare was mentioned again, this time in a Chinese work by an American missionary, published in Tongzhou in 1882, in which Shakespeare was spoken of as “a poet noted for his plays which express man’s joys and sorrows with a penetration unequalled since Homer”. (“英国骚客沙斯皮耳者, 善作戏文, 哀乐罔不尽致, 自候美尔之后, 无人几及也。”) Soon there were other references to Shakespeare in the histories of Western European countries and biographies of famous men in the world which were then appearing in the book market in Shanghai and elsewhere. The Chinese literati began to take notice. That was the time when they were discovering European literature as earlier they had discovered European technology. Shakespeare came in at the right psychological moment.