The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

Department of Comparative Literature

LITERARY HUMOR AND CHINESE MODERNITY:

THE ADAPTATION AND TRANSLATION OF SHAKESPEARE, WILDE, AND SHAW

A Dissertation in

Comparative Literature

by

Yuk Sunny Tien

© 2012 Yuk Sunny Tien

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2012

The dissertation of Yuk Sunny Tien was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Thomas O. Beebee Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German Dissertation Co-Adviser Chair of Committee

Alexander C.Y. Huang Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Dissertation Co-Adviser Co-chair of Committee

Shuang Shen Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese

Martina Kolb Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature

On-cho Ng Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies

Linda Woodbridge Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s Studies

Caroline D. Eckhardt Professor of Comparative Literature and English Head of the Department of Comparative Literature

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

ii

ABSTRACT

This study explores how English humor has manifested itself in modern Chinese culture,

by focusing on Chinese adaptations and translations of the works of William Shakespeare, Oscar

Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. Issuing from contemporary time and space, adaptation

demonstrates an emerging new sense of self in its negotiation of identity in the translational

process. There are plays that fuse comedy and tragedy, or laughter and tears, but adaptation

allows us to see how comedy can be transformed from tragedy, through changing perspectives

and the distance or detachment created by time and culture. The adaptation and translation of

bawdy humor represents a site of implicit censorship. New constraints, however, also bring new

comic creativity and encourage different ways of thinking and speaking about what is supposed

to be “forbidden.” The employment of specific local and provincial dialects has also become an

important marker of the comic imaginary. Different dialectal strands that make up literary texts

and film or stage productions offer a new perspective from which to look into the formation of

identity at various levels. Further, when the translation of a comedy is adapted to be performed,

what is involved is the intersection and collaboration of verbal and visual humor, as well as the

dynamic between the character in a text and the role actualized by an actor on stage.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 The Comic Transformation of Shakespeare’s Plays ...... 21

CHAPTER 2 Humor, Translation, and the (In)visibility of Bawdy Puns ...... 67

CHAPTER 3 Pygmalion, Comedy, and the Adaptation of Speech Variety ...... 109

CHAPTER 4 Translating Society Comedies: The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan ...... 144

EPILOGUE ...... 187

WORKS CITED ...... 190

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to express my gratitude to my academic advisors, Professor Thomas

Beebee and Professor Alexander Huang, who have supported me in so many ways over the past

seven years. I am immeasurably grateful to Professor Huang, who has provided me with

guidance and expertise and has expanded my vision to new facets of literary and performance

studies. I am also deeply thankful for Professor Beebee for his advice and encouragement, as

well as his insightful comments on my dissertation chapters.

Many thanks to my dissertation committee members, Professors Martina Kolb, Shuang

Shen, On-cho Ng, and Linda Woodbridge, who have been extremely supportive and have helped

this project reach completion. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the teachers in the Department

of Comparative Literature, who gave me inspiration and offered their valuable time to the

discussion of my research.

This dissertation would not have been completed without the encouragement of my friends and the love of my family. I thank my parents and my three sisters for their patience and understanding. A special thank to Siu-pong Cheng for his wonderful sense of humor, which has

helped me overcome numerous difficulties.

Lastly, my thanks for the support of the Department of Comparative Literature and the

financial support of The Pennsylvania State University, which has made this research possible.

v

INTRODUCTION

The first part of this introductory section includes a description of the background and

themes of the present study, followed by an evaluation of issues surrounding the field of

adaptation theory in connection with fidelity, intertextuality, and subjectivity. The second part

provides a brief description of the four chapters and outlines the specific research questions to be

discussed in regard to the negotiation of literary humor between the Chinese and Western

cultures through adaptation and translation. The study of adaptations could help us to consider

the concept of “original” from a different perspective, or to account for the idea in a more precise

manner. What kind of intertextual links can be traced to the previous practices and events? How

and why are they related in certain ways?

The identity of modern China has been constructed in terms of its sufferings and

reformation.1 According to C. T. Hsia, what distinguishes the country’s modern literature from

its traditional canon is its obsession with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease.2 The

initiatives of modern Chinese theatre were also marked by a strong interest in tragedy. Tragedy

was privileged over comedy, because the task of the New Chinese Theatre is to strengthen the

Chinese mind, and the way to achieve this goal is the creation of a tragic theatre.3 This preoccupation of Chinese literary and theatrical conventions with national suffering has marginalized the humor in the culture, an equally important force in the formation of modern

Chinese identity. The argument goes that political development in modern China appears to be a serious subject and thus its literature is devoid of humor.

1 Alexander Huang, A History of Modern Chinese Humor (Book Proposal Manuscript, 2009), 1. 2 Hsia Chih-tsing, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999), 533-534. 3 Wang Ban, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 66. 1

It is a one-sided view, however, to assume that comic narrative is an insignificant or

minor genre in modern Chinese fiction and drama. The neologism “幽默” Youmo (“Humor”), a

homophonous translation of the English word “humor,” which emerged in the May Fourth period

(1919-1930s), was emblematic of a progressive modernity. It gained greater currency and

became popular after Lin Yutang started his humor magazine “論語” Lun yü (“Analects”), in

1932, which featured a regular youmo column.4 Lin and others valued youmo in the respect that

the Chinese word “滑稽” Huaji, which means merely “trying to be funny,” was inadequate in

modern times.5 To Lin Yutang, the introduction of humor is beneficial, if not crucial, to the

modern spirit of the Chinese, and it functions as a means of constructing Chinese modernity.6

The large-scale rewriting, translation, and circulation of foreign comic writings, films, and

dramas throughout the first half of the twentieth century occasioned an unprecedented

internationalization of Chinese comic discourse. Comic works from the Chinese literary heritage

were reinterpreted in relation to foreign ideas and sensibilities, notably those of English literature,

which was sometimes filtered through Japanese renditions. Creating and defining China’s comic

cultures became a transnational and comparative enterprise. Recently there has been increasing

effort to chart the processes of how Western literature expanded the vocabulary and grammar of

literary humor in the context of Chinese modernity. For instance, Christopher Rea’s dissertation

A History of Laughter: Comic Culture in Early Twentieth-century China (2008) reconstructs how

comic cultures flourished in China during the first half of the twentieth century and shows how

these cultures have been integral to the affective, aesthetic, and political dimensions of modern

4 Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974), 95. 5 John Diran Sohigian, “Contagion of Laughter: The Rise of the Humor Phenomenon in Shanghai in the 1930s,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 15 (2007): 139. 6 Qian Suoqiao, “‘Youmo’ (‘Humor’) As an Aesthetic Attitude,” Liberal Cosmopolitan: Lin Yutang and Middling Chinese Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 148-159. 2

Chinese literary and cultural practice. Drawing on different primary sources such as cartoons,

stage plays, films and advertisements, the topics he covered include the late Qing mass media

culture of joking, the visual turn of Chinese modern culture in the 1930s, the laughter of Qian

Zhongshu, etc.7 John Weinstein’s dissertation Directing Laughter: Modes of Modern Chinese

Comedy, 1907-1997 (2002) identifies the key role that comedy plays in the development and expression of ideas of modern Chinese spoken drama. Drawing attention to ten major figures in

modern comic drama, including Lao She, Ding Xilin, Chen Baichen, Gao Xingjian and others,

Weinstein points out that “comedy is an instrumental building block of drama, without which

dramatists could never have created a 戲劇 Xiju (drama) that could grapple with the established

glory of 戲曲 Xiqu (opera).”8 Whereas these and other previous studies have focused on China’s

indigenous comic culture, the following dissertation explores how English humor has also

manifested itself in modern Chinese culture by focusing on the post-1980s Chinese adaptations

and translations of the works of three writers who have figured prominently in the Chinese-

speaking world: William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. References will

also be made to earlier translations and their engagements with the Western texts. Through the

study of adaptations and translations in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the present

research attempts to trace the web of relations that are involved in the Chinese interaction with

the Western literary works through adaptations.

Chinese interpretations of Western literary humor not only reveal that adaptations and

translations are shaped by the history and evolving generic conventions of the target culture (i.e.

the Chinese tradition of literary humor), but also that they constitute a rethinking of the nature of

7 Christopher Gordon Rea, “A History of Laughter: Comic Culture in Early Twentieth-Century China” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2008). 8 John Benjamin Weinstein, “Directing Laughter: Modes of Modern Chinese Comedy, 1907-1997” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2002), 333-334. 3

adaptation and other related concepts. The rewritings have also challenged assumptions and

existing notions in literary and cultural studies and have expanded the realm of literary humor in

Chinese modernity. The concept of “modernity” itself requires an alternative Chinese modernity

in literature that recognizes the differences from both Western literature and traditional Chinese

literature. Translated literature, in this case, offers an important category to view modernity as

the transformation of human understanding. The relation and differentiation of the Subject and

the Other, as well as the negotiation of certain cultural practices and mores, have remained

central to the description and elaboration of the notion of modernity.9

The metamorphosis of Western humor into modern Chinese practice also constitutes an

alternative perspective for viewing the relationship between a literary work and an adaptation in

general. The adaptation can be defined not in terms of a tension between text and performance,

but rather as a reciprocal relation to the source (e.g., to the Shakespearean or Wildean) theatrical work.10 Adaptations and literary texts, as they reflect and resonate with each other, encompass a

multiplicity of meanings. Rich layers of meaning embedded in the literary text are revealed by a

close analysis of the adaptation. Adaptation has the capacity to enhance and illuminate the

understanding of the texts, or in Huang’s words, “it activates certain aspects of a text or cultural

experience that would otherwise remain dormant or hidden from view.”11

Fidelity, Intertextuality, and the Distance of Adapting

Scholars who study adaptation have continued to focus on the issue of “fidelity” to a precursor text as a means of understanding an adaptation, and presume some sort of transposable

9 See Harvie Ferguson, Modernity and Subjectivity: Body, Soul, Spirit (London: UP of Virginia, 2000), 1-19. 10 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2009), 5. 11 Alexander Huang, “Shakespeare and Translation,” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011), 68. 4

or extractable essence in the literary text that can be preserved in various modes of adaptation.

The translator believes that something at the core of the text to be translated can be sent across.

This operative assumption in adaptation studies is closely related to “a tradition of sameness”

and the portrayal of faithful translators or adapters that has been presented consistently

throughout the ages.12 This conception has been reiterated and has become an expectation of

certain codes of ethics. In recent debates on the notion of subjectivity in flux, some critics

hesitate to believe that the subject in fact keeps changing and that the “essence” of a text is

absent, because they believe this would lead to a problem of ethics and responsibility. The

ethical issue in adaptation studies reveals a certain anxiety in the relationship between the

precursor text and the adapted work concerning the degree of dependence (or independence) that

the adaptation should have in order to claim a relationship to its precursor text. There is, of

course, no consensus as to what exactly it means to be “ethical,” which foments ongoing debate

on this topic.

A recent wave of adaptation studies dismisses or denounces the notions of fidelity and faithfulness as “moralistic” and as an affront to the unstable nature of meaning itself. The

“imagined essence” of a text is conceived to be elusive and ambiguous.13 In Windle’s words,

“the concept of fidelity—another highly elusive term—has been increasingly challenged in

recent times, especially when applied to the translation of drama.”14 This allows us to rethink the many and varied motives behind adaptations. Adapters cannot really transpose or transfer a text.

Instead they interpret, rework the precursor text, and choose the various meanings and sensations

12 Ben van Wyke, “Ethics and Translation,” Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010), 111. 13 Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins, “Introduction: New Beginnings for Adaptation Studies,” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, ed. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010), 17. 14 See Kevin Windle, “The Translation of Drama,” The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 162. 5

they find most compelling. These very relationships are the subject matter that adaptation theory

seeks to explore. On the other hand, other studies seek to put the whole idea of fidelity back into

play, and to explore new approaches to fidelity that can encompass two or more texts without

holding to untenable distinctions between “original” and “copy/reproduction.” In other words,

these studies still seek to account for fidelity’s cultural currency no matter how impossible

fidelity might be in a literal sense. For instance, they may claim that adaptations are “true to the

spirit” of the literary work, and that some non-conforming, creative versions and interpretations

of the work may end up revealing its core “spirit.” Such a literary text may have undergone a

profound revision with the aim of achieving an adaptation to the target culture, and may embody

great structural changes. But it is said to capture the spirit of the source text—the form changes,

but the spirit remains constant. The spirit of the text, in formless consciousness, thus maintains a

life beyond form, and so is neither constrained by, nor dependent on, form. What, however, is the

quality of such fidelity to the spirit? Does this fidelity refer to the ideas and meaning of the

source text (instead of the form), or to the spirit of the author, or to something else?15

The question of fidelity in its expanded focus is also closely related to the types of translated products. The fidelity issue in theatre translation, for instance, is a very complex one, since it must first be established whether the translator is “faithful” to the written text, the cultural elements, the mise en scène, etc. The genre and the purpose of the translation imply that

“equivalences” vary, and that rewriters use different strategies in each case, reaching solutions that might be appropriate on certain occasions but not on others.16 The term “adaptive

translation” is similar to the notion of “paraphrase” as proposed by John Dryden—“translation

15 Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 138. 16 Jorge Braga Riera, Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660-1700) (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009), 3. 6

with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his

words are not so strictly followed as his sense.”17 There are also films and stage performances

“based on” or “inspired by” literary texts, and many ways to demonstrate and investigate the

potential relationships between sources and adaptations, including parody, pastiche, allusion and

so on, all suggesting how adapted texts respond to the exigencies of a time period, a particular

audience, and a different medium.

Furthermore, a focus on the concept of intertextuality has been developed as a

methodological challenge to the model of fidelity.18 Increasing attention has been given to the

intertextual and intermedial influences in adaptation over the last two decades, which not only

illuminates the evolution of ideas that determine the adaptation’s relationship to its literary

source, but also leads to new interpretations of issues in the shifting landscape of adaptation

theory. Robert Stam, for example, argues that “it is questionable whether strict fidelity is even

possible,” because “an adaptation is automatically different and original due to the change of

medium.”19 The shift from verbal medium to film, the latter of which plays not only with words, but also with music, sound effects, and photographic images, explains the unlikelihood and undesirability of literal fidelity. He therefore proposed that he would rather focus on the twists and turns of intertextual dialogism. The central aspect of intermediality, the relations between different media, which Shakespeare’s work has been transferred to, influence each other and seem increasingly interdependent.

17 John Dryden, “On Translation,” Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 17. 18 Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 193. 19 Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 3-5. 7

Hamlet b., for example, is a play which interweaves Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Heiner

Müller’s Hamletmachine (1978), and consumer culture in Chinese society. The play was co-

produced by Taiwan Mobius Strip Theatre and Hong Kong On & On Theatre Workshop in 2010.

Concerned about the future of global cultural industries, the two directors Chan Ping-chiu and

Alex Cheung suggest that globalization has caused the arts, theatre, and the cultural industry to

become “machine-like.”

This rewriting of Hamlet incorporates Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong into the

play’s context and provides different perspectives on the cultural industry—such as “Hamlet as

cultural workers,” “Ophelia as consumers,” “Heiner Müller as critical observer.” For example,

Ophelia becomes a theatre consumer who watches 1677 performances over three years. She even travels to little-known small cities in Mainland China to follow the shadows of Hamlet. The intrusion of cultural consumption into the art circle is represented by her blood-red “hamlet b.” handbag, and also by the reservation of tickets through an online booking system, which reveals how art really becomes the product of cultural consumption. The different perspectives interact

with each other, with the same existential question in mind—“Is cultural consumption a way out

or a dead end?” The dialogic performance presents the struggle in capitalist society, as people are

covered by ice melted by global warming, and reveals how they react to Hamlet’s question, “To

be or not to be.” Shakespeare’s classic soliloquy has evoked controversies in the postmodern era,

as the Hamlet figure, almost in a state of insanity, speaks the lines: “to b or not to b, that’s a

question…I am a, I am b, I am c…I am hamlet b, one among the 26 hamlets. My character code

is b, hamlet b.” The new elucidation of Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be” reminds us that

substantial existence has been replaced by labels and codes.

8

The modern age has shifted from production to consumption. As Jean Baudrillard points

out, “we are living in the period of the objects: that is, we live by their rhythm, according to their

incessant cycles.”20 In The System of Objects (1968), he argues that advertising tries to sell by

paradoxically suggesting that a particular product will make us unique even though its

uniqueness involves everyone else buying it at the same time. The system of objects is an

“impoverished” form of language, which speaks through brand names, images, and signs that

impose their meanings through advertising. Consumer society seems to promote a new

humanism, with its products offering us fulfillment and liberation, but it never reaches an end

state, since that would stop us from consuming.21

Responding to Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, written in the 1970s as a reflection on

German history and culture, the directors of Hamlet b. construct their own “Hamletmachine” by

suggesting that the modern theatre and cultural environment have entered into a mechanical era.

It seems that only by coming into the twenty-first century can we perceive, from another culture

and perspective, what Müller envisioned “when Hamlet becomes a machine.” As Stam argues,

each adaptive twist unmasks a facet of the historical time and the discursive culture of the

adaptation, and reveals the ideologies at the moment of the reinterpretation.22 Adaptation can be seen as an alternative “way of seeing,” through a process of mutual illumination. In the complementarity of perspectives, individuals, communities, and media bring out the potential of one another.23

Further, adaptations remain an important category of film productions, adopting dramatic

works as their source material. Very often, audiences become interested in the film version first,

20 Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 32. 21 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 2005), 212. 22 Stam, Literature Through Film, 364. 23 Ibid., 365. 9

before going to the translated text of the foreign literature; and there is a long-standing practice of reissuing the novel after the release of a successful film version. Adaptations have become central links in connecting the “chains of medium.” As Letissier points out, rewriting seems to imply that all art depends on other art.24 This of course brings us to the poststructuralist movement, where for example Barthes proposed that literary texts are crossed by other forms of cultural expression and that texts always appear as traces of other texts. The readers, in this case, play crucial roles, because the intertextual plurality may have stemmed from the activity of reading. The reading subject can also be said to be made up of a plurality of texts whose origins may be obscure.25

The intertextual approach also reminds us that translation itself covers a multitude of possibilities. Roman Jakobson, for example, distinguishes three kinds of translation:

1. “Intralingual translation” refers to the rewording or paraphrasing of a text

within the same language to produce, for example, a new version of

Shakespeare’s text in modern English.

2. “Interlingual translation,” or “translation proper,” is the more familiar act of

rewording between two languages.

3. “Intersemiotic translation,” also known as “transmutation,” refers to the

process whereby the source-text signs appertaining to a verbal system are

converted into the signs of a non-verbal sign system, such as words into

images/sound, or speech into gesture.26

24 Georges Letissier, Rewriting/Reprising: Plural Intertextualities (New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 1. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 See Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 139. 10

The third type, “intersemiotic translation,” refers to a change of medium and suggests that translation refers to more than just the text on the page. The research interest in the interaction of the visual and written codes, has grown over the years, especially in areas such as audiovisual and media translation. Subtitling, for instance, is a form of intersemiotic translation that involves the replacement of spoken verbal codes by written codes with due regard for the visual and other acoustic signs.27 According to Gorlée, in the case of “transmutation,” the target

codes are languages in a metaphorical manner of speaking. Natural languages are not the only

“semiotic systems” which may be translated. Multimedia languages such as cinema and theatre

can also go through interpretative processes similar to those of verbal language.28

The language of the body, presented as a translation mechanism, is just as valid as that of words, and on occasions replaces them, contributing to the meaning of the translation.29 The dimensions of the physical and of visuality are especially important in theatre and film due to the wealth of comic and grotesque possibilities offered by the non-verbal gestural world, which provides, in its contact with the spoken words, the key to the action and the understanding of the literature. Gesture therefore has a function of aiding verbal communication and supplementing, if not replacing, verbal discourse. The adapter may detach himself from the text, form, and cultural parameters and proceed to modify the literary text in such a way that in many respects the resulting product will hardly bear any resemblance to that from which it is derived. In such cases the adapters engage in the translation, not of words, but of styles, gestures and sounds, and this is also how dramatic texts may be transposed into another language and culture. For instance, facial

27 Jeremy Munday, “Issues in Translation Studies,” The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, ed. Jeremy Munday (New York: Routledge, 2009), 6. 28 Dinda L. Gorlée, Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 162. 29 Braga Riera, Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660-1700), 18. 11

expressions and body movements are among the most complex systems of non-verbal

communication and play an important role in the actor’s attempts to achieve a comic effect.

There are humorous devices depending on gestures that are introduced by the translators in the

target text. Translators often enrich the action of the source text with new references to gestures

which accentuate the humor of a particular situation.30

From a temporal perspective, a conterminous existence of past and present is found in the

creative act of adaptation, which negotiates the past and present in the recreating the literary

text.31 There is a significant role played by this temporal perspective, where meanings result

from the confrontation between the old and the new. While looking back on traditions, we reflect on our times, and the present dramatic genre can be revitalized.32 This, of course, can be traced

back to adaptation itself as a form of memory, which has to do with dramatic texts and

performances past and present. Shakespeare’s writing contains and makes available certain kinds

of memories of his sources. The concerns of memory move from the acts of remembering within

the plays to the acts of remembering the plays themselves in adaptation. The role of memory in

performance extends from the ways performances remember each other, to the ways in which

audiences remember what they have seen. The mode of Shakespeare editing in the late twentieth

century also shifted towards requiring the editor to have an awareness of performance and its

history. The editors, as annotators, engage with the forms of memory of the plays in performance.

Further, technologies have also become a means of structuring memory, as reflected in Michael

Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), a film that packs almost every scene with the devices of recording,

photography, security cameras, computer monitors, devices that are themselves the methods of

30 Ibid., 233. 31 Letissier, Rewriting/Reprising, 5. 32 Ibid., 17. 12

modern memory.33 The interplay of remembrance and memory continues in some form in

various contemporary adaptations.

Adaptations, in this way, can therefore be seen as responses to texts that form a necessary

step in the process of understanding. Adaptation studies offer exciting new insights into the ways

texts shape or form each other, and into how adaptation functions as an ongoing dialogical

process. In Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), Elliott argues for a mode of adaptation in

which the film and the novel metamorphose into one another. In such a model, the metamorphic

process of adaptation is cyclical, and there can be no real return to the origin(s) because the

adaptation transforms the literary works.34 New patterns of discourse are formed through the process of adaptation. New meanings emerge through the complex interactions between the texts, the histories of the respective languages, and the concepts as well as the cultural contexts in which the texts are embedded. Antony Tatlow, for example, in his work Shakespeare, Brecht and the Intercultural Sign (2001), tells us how the adapted texts, with the benefit of historical and cultural distance, can present what the characters and the author could not see, because they were too close to their problems. Adaptations therefore, to an extent, serve as “a reading of the cultural unconscious.”35 The encounter of a Western performance with an East Asian aesthetic of

performance enables the spectator to escape the all-too-familiar Western expressive conventions

and to uncover the buried potential of the text—referring with “buried” to what can no longer be so easily seen, as these hidden elements have become “habitual.”36

Here the “distance of adapting” is a crucial concept. When the Critique of Judgment was

published in 1790, Immanuel Kant analyzed the experience of an aesthetic object as a

33 See Peter Holland, Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). 34 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 230-231. 35 Antony Tatlow, Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 34. 36 Ibid., 77. 13

contemplation that is “disinterested” (interessenlos) or “without interest” (ohne Interesse) and

free from reference to the object’s reality and utility. In fact, the idea of disinterested perception

has much to do with the notion of the self, as it constitutes “a major shift in the history of

aesthetics from emphasis on beauty as a property of the object to that of an attitude of the

subject.”37 After Kant’s use of “disinterestedness” to describe aesthetic perception, other

philosophers continued to develop this concept in attempts to distinguish “aesthetic experience”

from the other kinds of experience on the basis of the disinterestedness with which we are said to

contemplate a work of art. Thus the notion of distance was shifted from the physical to the

psychic plane.

Later, in the early twentieth century, British psychologist Edward Bullough wrote about

the theory of “distance” and artistic detachment in his paper “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in

Art and an Aesthetic Principle.”38 He reformulated Kant’s idea of disinterested contemplation

and suggested that the fundamental problem of aesthetics was that of “distancing.” From his

perspective, there is an insertion of distance between the aesthetic object and the personal

feelings of the artist/spectator. In Bullough’s words, the effect of “psychical distance” is obtained

by “separating the object and its appeal from one’s own self, by putting it out of gear with

practical needs and ends […].”39 The transformation by distance is produced in the first instance

by standing outside the context of ourselves, by looking at it “objectively.”40 The tension between personal feelings and the distanced attitude of the aesthetic experience points to a paradoxical condition of artwork: “the antinomy of Distance.” The concept of “distance” not

37 Steve Odin, “Artistic Detachment in Western Aesthetics,” Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2001), 27-28. 38 See Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912), reprinted in Stephen David Ross, Art and its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory (Albany: State U of New York P, 1994), 457-467. 39 Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” 459-460. 40 Ibid., 461. 14

only defines the nature of literary experience in general, but also the devices by which authors

may adjust the degree of the reader’s distance (or detachment) from the world represented in the

work of literature. Further, the detachment theory of art may also be applied to the foreignness or

changing perspectives that readers experience when they read a work of adaptation from a

different culture.

Linda Hutcheon has also argued that adaptations make explicit what is sometimes only implicit in the original books, films, or plays. This explicitness is defined by Christine Geraghty as “recognition of ghostly presences and a shadowing or doubling of what is on the surface by what is glimpsed behind.”41 Instead of merely revealing the ways in which the film adaptations

can be compared to the originals, what can be demonstrated is how the adaptations can be seen

as explorations of ideas that actually depend on the transformation of the classic dramatic works

into modern/postmodern adaptations. This is also a ground for exploring the possibilities of

developing new, empowering ways to talk about different critical concepts. The process of

adaptation and translation, as a site for cross-cultural comparison, allows the discovery of the elements of one’s own culture through listening to the narratives of another. Adaptation studies call for a reflection on the assumptions at work in any critical approach, and the raising of questions concerning the processes of literary creation also encourage revisions of existing literary perspectives and may lead to new emerging theories. Translation studies contribute to the

study of comparative literature, as translation is not only a tool for presenting texts, but

constitutes a critical approach itself. Translation theory, in this context, is a central factor in

providing a focus for the complex negotiations concerning the ways in which ideas and

41 Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture, 195. 15

subjectivities are transformed across cultural boundaries, and the ways in which translation functions as intercultural exchange in the age of globalization.

The Present Study

The four chapters in the dissertation approach the adaptation of literary humor from four perspectives: the negotiation of the comic with the tragic; humor and sexuality; dialect and the comedy of language(s); and disguise and the comedy of manners. Apart from the theory of the comic, other literary approaches covered in the following analysis, in their engagements with specific examples, include notions of aesthetic detachment, implicit censorship, heteroglossia, and subjectivity.

The following main definitions of the central motifs and analytic concepts intend to provide a general sense of some of the key interpretative issues that the dissertation explores.

“Comedy” is often used “with reference to a kind of drama which is intended primarily to entertain the audience, and which ends happily for the characters.”42 In the dissertation, however,

I will look at how some of the comedies or tragic-comedies are adapted from tragedies, which opens our imaginations to new perspectives on the nature of comedy. The notion of “parody” is involved in this case, as it refers to “the comic imitation of a specific work or author, often achieved by mimicking an author’s style and applying it to a ridiculous subject.”43 Adaptations such as Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet, which pokes fun at Hamlet’s “errors” and the nature of his tragic fall, belongs to this genre. The comic imitation draws attention to “artistic detachment,” the sense of “disinterestedness” that is used to describe aesthetic perception and can be applied to the change in perspective when a work is adapted for a different time or by a different culture.

42 Martin Gray, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 62. 43 Ibid., 48. 16

“Bawdy humor,” another focus of the dissertation, pertains to a suggestive and often comical use of sexual language, which appears in both the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare. Certain cultural adaptations and translations of bawdy humor suggest that powerful forms of

“censorship,” though not based on an explicit policy or regulation, are operative. These ambiguous forms of censorship constitute new modes of expression in translation. The discussion of the works of Shaw and Wilde focuses on the “comedy of manners,” which reflects

“the love intrigues of cynical and sophisticated young aristocrats in high society,”44 and relies heavily on verbal wit and the creation of an artificial world. “Dialect humor” plays an important role in the genre, as manners are often associated with speech. The source of this kind of humor concerns how speech varieties become the target of ridicule and derision, for instance, in

Pygmalion. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia” contributes a special perspective to the understanding of the interactions and tensions of voices in adaptation, because it shows that language is not unified in and of itself but is rather constituted by many social languages. The self, for Bakhtin, involves the voices of others, which involve oneself. To achieve subjectivity is therefore to enter via language into dialogue with others.

To introduce the dissertation in a bit more detail, I provide here a brief description of the four chapters. Chapter one, “The Comic Transformation of Shakespeare’s Plays,” examines the negotiation of the comic and the tragic through adaptations. How and why did Chinese directors turn Shakespeare’s tragedies into comedies on stage and on screen? Examples discussed include

Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s 莎姆雷特 Shamuleite (Shamlet) (1996), which undermines the tragedy in

Hamlet. The problem posed by adaptation and translation is not how to choose between the two sides of the tragic-comic coin, but rather how to account for a genre that is formulated both in

44 Ibid., 63. 17

terms of cultural boundaries and capable of transcending them, a transgenred identity which manifests itself as change, and the dynamic process involved. By not focusing on one specific genre of categorization for a given text, the nature of comedy can be more accurately captured. It is probably more productive to think of comedy as a term connoting both closeness and distance, as well as the oscillating process that binds both discursive directions. Due to the constant shifting of contextual referents, it is quite difficult to assign any definition of comedy to a specific historical or cultural moment. Instead, it is even more challenging to define and consider comedy as a process rather than a definitive entity that transforms and adapts to its particular context. In other words, comically (or tragically) reworked, it is the status of this “process” that allows such flexibility.

The second chapter, “Humor, Translation, and the (In)visibility of Bawdy Puns,” focuses on the Chinese translation and adaptation of sexual humor in Shakespeare, and the relationship between comedy and sexuality. What are the dominant presumptions surrounding Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s bawdy puns? How can the “mask” or the disguise of sexual innuendoes be transformed? The focus here is not merely on the (un)translatable humor of the sexual allusions, but rather on how humor thrives through the re-imagining of existing works within the Chinese cultural context, and the characteristics of that humor that arise from interactions between the Chinese and Western languages and cultures. Most often, puns or wordplays produce the comic atmosphere of the entire play. Thus, failure to translate

Shakespeare’s puns could imply a cultural reluctance to presenting the comic meaning in the

Chinese translation. These “softer” forms of censorship in translation involve the construction and negotiation of small and subtle differences that make the text desirable or acceptable within

18

a different cultural context. While Chinese translators may be constrained by their local context, it is also the translator himself who modifies the text in the course of “rewriting” it.

The third chapter, “Pygmalion, Comedy and the Adaptation of Speech Variety,” engages issues of language, dialect and the creation of comic effects in the Chinese adaptations of George

Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, including the film adaptations 公子多情 Gongzi duoqing (The

Greatest Lover, 1988), starring Chow Yun-fat and Anita Mui; 窈窕紳士 Yaotiao shenshi (My

Fair Gentleman, 2009), performed by Sun Honglei and Kelly Lin; and 窈窕淑女/絕世好賓

Yaotiao shunü/Jueshi haobin (My Fair Lady/Driving Miss Wealthy, 2004), performed by Gigi

Leung and Sean Lau. Pygmalion multiplies linguistic varieties, in order to emulate or create multilingual and stratified social worlds. How is Shaw’s linguistic comic world represented in these Chinese adaptations? What happens when, for example, the colorful Cockney dialect of

London, with all its social connotations, is translated and imported by a different theatrical culture such as Chinese? How do the adaptations draw meanings for such a different culture by re-accenting the source texts for their own purposes? This discussion not only concerns the translation from one language to another but also the translation of the inter-relations of the languages used. More specifically, this chapter discusses the translation of the humor in the dialectical variations in Pygmalion, and how it has been carried out in stage and film productions.

The final chapter, “Translating Society Comedies: The Importance of Being Earnest and

Lady Windermere’s Fan,” focuses on the performance and translation of the comedy of manners.

The first section of this chapter explores how the comic elements and the notion of double identity are reconstructed in Yu Guangzhong’s translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of

Being Earnest, published in 1983, and in the stage adaptation of the play directed by Yang

Shipeng and performed in Hong Kong in 2004. The chapter then discusses the notion of idealism 19

in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and how the Chinese translations neutralize the satirical tone of the source text and present a different perspective for understanding the moral vision of the play. Once a play is performed, new interpretations are inevitable. It is, therefore, not only interesting to know how meanings in the source texts are expressed in a new language, but also how translation enables a text to continue life in a new reality. The translation becomes another

“original,” with its continuing existence in the new context, demonstrating how the translation rewrites itself and how translation and performance interact and complement each other. From another perspective, insights from translation practice also have implications for the theory of comedy, and it is therefore also important to integrate observations from the translation of the comic to the theory of comedy.

20

CHAPTER 1

The Comic Transformation of Shakespeare’s Plays

This chapter argues that the adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy reveals the dynamic interaction between the tragic and the comic. While the classicists seek to divide the world into distinct compartments, the interaction and transformation of the styles in adaptation suggests the way which the two can coexist in close proximity. Different historical and cultural contexts influence our tragic or comic perception of a literary product. The comedies or tragi-comic

episodes which are “translated” from tragedies, or have originally meant to be “tragic,” have

marked a specific category that deserve attention as they offer new insights to the cultural

distance involved in the process of transformation that is caught up in adaptations, and further, to

the nature of comedy as a genre.

Comedy and tragedy are traditionally perceived as two different genres, each one

embodying a different vision of the human condition. Comedy does not have a crucial role to

play in tragedy, apart from moments of light relief.1 Tragedy is considered the serious, comedy

the non-serious genre; tragedy focuses on the individual, comedy on society; tragedy operates

within the realm of ethics, comedy within the realm of manners;2 tragedy terminates in death and destruction, comedy in life and reunion.3 In the preface to his verse drama Samson Agonistes

(1671), Milton deplored how modern authors had mixed tragedy and comedy and accounts for

1 The interruption of a serious work by a short humorous episode. Comic relief in a tragedy serves to prevent the spectator from being overcharged with tragic emotion. The inclusion of such comic scenes, characters or speeches can have various effects, ranging from relaxation after moments of tension to sinister ironic brooding. Famous instances are the drunken porter’s speech in Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 3) and the dialogues between Hamlet and the gravediggers in Hamlet (Act 5, Scene l). See Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 63. 2 Paul Grawe, Comedy in Space, Time, and the Imagination (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1983), 6. 3 Conrad Hyers, The Spirituality of Comedy: Comic Heroism in a Tragic World (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 157. 21

the “infamy” of the tragedy as “happening through the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons” into tragedy; while in a famous passage in the Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney records his distaste for the indecorous juxtaposition of high and low characters, criticizes contemporary English dramatists for their violations of decorum and mixing of genres, and advises against “mingling kings and clowns.”4

The demarcation between genres tends to be taken for granted.

While categories are neatly drawn, and comedy and tragedy are defined as opposites, these delineations do not help explain certain aspects of individual comedies. Contrastive definitions of the two genres are moreover ill fitted to the theatre where serious playwrights

create comedies with seemingly tragic overtones and tragedies with comedic characters.5 At the

end of Plato’s Symposium Socrates insists to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comic

dramatist that the genius of comedy is the same as that of tragedy, and that the true artist in

tragedy is also an artist in comedy. Though elsewhere, in the third book of The Republic, he

contends that tragedy and comedy, while “closely allied,” cannot be successfully written by the

same person or even acted by the same performer. It was not until the twentieth century that

critics began to consider comedy and tragedy as equal and complementary. Northrop Frye’s

essay “The Argument of Comedy” presents tragedy or tragic story as having a “comic sequel”

and thus it is really an implicit or uncompleted comedy:

Comedy grows out of the same ritual, for in the ritual the tragic story has a comic

sequel. Divine men do not die: they die and rise again. The ritual pattern behind

4 Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966), 67. 5 Paul Grawe, Comedy in Space, Time, and the Imagination (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1983), 7. 22

the catharsis of comedy is the resurrection that follows the death, the epiphany or

manifestation of the risen hero.6

As such, tragedy and comedy are both parts of a mythic ritual cycle based on the seasons, with comedy representing the resurrection of the god-hero and the triumph of spring over winter.7

Throughout the history of tragedy in literature, there is a close and important relationship

with comedy. The notion “tragicomedy” has been used so variously since it was coined by the

Roman comic dramatist Plautus as a joke in the prologue to Amphitruo.8 In many tragedies and

comedies, one genre seeds the other. Romantic comedy often seems to contain the seeds of

something much darker. The same phenomenon appears in some of Shakespeare’s best known

dramas, in which comedy seems in the end to have implied tragedy. Two groups of plays, the so-

called “problem plays” or “dark comedies” and the “romances,” integrate tragic and comic

effects in such complex ways that the plays’ meanings depend on an understanding of how their

comic and tragic elements work with or against one another.9 Thus, it is perhaps not so much

that comedy and tragedy are alternate possibilities, as that each implies the other.

Shakespeare, of course, is well known for mingling tragedy and comedy. The elements of

both genres, for instance, are mixed together most explicitly in his late romances, especially in

The Winter’s Tale. In the first part of The Winter’s Tale, the tone is predominantly tragic, and the

protagonists suffer intensely both because of the winds of fortune and their own weaknesses. In

contrast to this tragic element in the first three acts, the play moves from sorrow to joy in the

second part. Act Four opens with the figure of Time proclaiming that sixteen years have passed

6 Northrope Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia UP, 1949), 64-65. 7 T.G.A. Nelson, Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 28. 8 Verna Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 16. 9 Ibid., 53. 23

since the end of act three. We are aware that Perdita, who was abandoned on the seacoast of

Bohemia, has survived. Instead of the wintry world of Leontes’ Sicilian court, the play portrays a

delightful and comical pastoral celebration. The festive scenes set in Bohemia celebrate new life

and the awakening of spring. In a series of events, the complexities of the play are untangled:

Perdita’s true identity is revealed by the old Shepherd, and Perdita and Leontes are reunited, as

Polixenes and Leontes are reconciled. Polonius’ absurd list of dramatic forms in Hamlet:

“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical

[…]” (2.2.379-81) not only reveals the plays themselves as generic hybrids of comedy and

tragedy, but also poses questions about each individual genre.10 Medieval and Renaissance tragicomedy characteristically combines “the danger but not the death” of tragedy and the happy ending of comedy in such a way that tragic and comic effects moderate one another and the audience remains simultaneously aware of both tragic and comic possibilities.11 On the other

hand, modern tragicomedy, can seem more cruel than tragedy in presenting tragic experience

without tragic catharsis. But paradoxically, it is in granting expression to the tragic and allowing

it to be recognized as such even in the guise of comedy, that tragicomedy in the twentieth

century is able to redeem individual experience from comic meaninglessness.12

There is also a long tradition of mocking the solemnity of tragedy with comedy. Rhinthon

of Tarentum, who flourished as a dramatic poet at the end of the fourth century b.c.e., was

10 Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 84. Certainly, the word “genre” itself has many different meanings. Apart from referring to sub-types within a broader genre (when drama is broken into the genres of tragedy, comedy, romance […]), it also reflects the compartmentalisation of literature into different structural types, a work’s relation to reality, and the transformation of a literary text to screen is also a change from one genre to another (Cartmell and Whelehan, 85). Leitch (2008) also theorizes adaptation itself as “an invisible genre” with “its own rules, procedures, and textual markers that are just as powerful as any single ostensible source text […]” See Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation, the Genre,” Adaptation 1.2 (2008): 106. 11 Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, 35. 12 Ibid., 199. 24

credited with being the first to turn tragedy into burlesque: the dramatic form that resulted was

called the hilarotragodia, tragedy hilarified, or the joyous tragedy.13 “Burlesque” has been defined as a type of literature or drama designed to mock a serious work or an entire genre.

According to Dentith, the term came into both French and English usage in the seventeenth century, deriving from the Italian burla meaning ridicule or mockery. In the seventeenth century, burlesque had the primary signification of “merry” writing, and then became the generic term for different kinds of comic-parodic writing in the eighteenth century. This association of burlesque with the comic persists until the present time.14

The typical mythological burlesque consisted of a play in which appeared four or five

stock comic masks moving beside a number of persons treated in a more or less serious way.

Walter Hamilton, in Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (1885), states that

nearly every play written by Shakespeare has been burlesqued, and whenever one of the London

theatre managers produces a grand revival of a Shakespearean tragedy, a travesty of it is almost

immediately produced, at one or other smaller houses, which provides fun for the laughter-loving

public. No single passage from the plays of Shakespeare has been so frequently parodied and

imitated as the celebrated soliloquy commencing “to be, or not to be” (3.1.55-87).15 Hamilton

recorded almost fifty versions of such burlesques.16 Müller, in his essay “Hamlet at the Dentist’s:

Parodies of Shakespeare” analyzes the “dental soliloquy” (1837), a typical example of the

Victorian parody of Shakespeare, and one of the texts found in Hamilton’s anthology of

13 Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), 51. 14 Simon Dentith, Parody (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 190. 15 All references are to William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 16 Walter Hamilton, Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (London: Reeves & Turner, 1884-89), 146. 25

parodies.17 The parody was fully discussed in the London daily papers in 1883. Some of the published letters throw considerable light on what had been previously done as Shakespearean burlesques, and were also of interest for summing up the arguments for and against parody and burlesque in general.

Travesty, or burlesque, was actually a favorite form in the nineteenth century theatre, and the plays of Shakespeare were a natural target. Burlesque applies a comically inappropriate tone to serious subject matter, whereas travesty imitates a serious work in a grotesque or debased style.

These “self conscious, comic critiques” of his classic plays claimed a place on the stage at the

time, and the Shakespearean burlesque emerged as a distinctive theatre genre which allowed the

clowns to speak more than Shakespeare had set down for them.18 Burlesques of Shakespeare’s plays imitate the situations, characters, and language of the original play for comic effect.

Shakespearean burlesques were an especially vibrant, yet controversial form of nineteenth- century popular theatre—“Vibrant because of their exuberant humor, controversial because they seemed to imperil the sanctity of Shakespeare as a national icon;” and therefore as a “comic attack” upon the “legitimate” Shakespearean culture.19 These transformations do not simply

iterate but rather interpret their precursor texts.20

Certainly, burlesques are by no means only limited to the nineteenth century.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote parodic allusions, dialogues, and scenes, and his plays

certainly feature varying degrees of parody. While Marlowe (1564-93) is deliberately burlesqued

or caricatured in Henry IV, Shakespeare ridicules traditions of performance in the rude

17 Beate Müller, “Hamlet at the Dentist’s: Parodies of Shakespeare,” Parody: Dimensions and Perspectives, ed. Beate Müller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 140. 18 Richard Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 2-3 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Ibid., 21. 26

mechanicals’ attempt to perform a play about Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream.21 The short play became one of the best-known dramatic burlesques in the English language. Shakespeare had also radically altered well-known stories to suit his tragic purposes.

In his primary source for King Lear, for instance, The True Chronicle History of King LEIR

(1605), the king is restored to his throne by his daughter Cordella after Gonorill and Ragan have been defeated. It may therefore be argued that Shakespeare’s own method of “rewriting,” in some instances, is not entirely different from that of his later adapters.

The first wave of adaptations of Shakespeare came after the period of the closing of theatres in 1642. Political changes were accompanied by a radical change in tastes, ideals and conditions, which motivated playwrights and stage managers to make changes and “improve on”

Shakespeare. There were, for instance, complaints about the appearance of female characters in tragedies such as Othello. Desdemona’s role was played by adult male actors, thus not only breaking the theatrical illusion, but also created “a comic spectacle of femininity:”22

For to speak the truth, men act that are between

Forty and fifty, Wenches of fifteen;

With bone so large and nerve so incompliant,

When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.23

The necessity to change was noted. On 11 December 1660, Othello was first performed with a

woman playing Desdemona; and for the first time, female roles were taken by professional

actresses.

21 Ibid., 22. 22 Callaghan Dympna, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 1999), 71. 23 Ibid., 72. 27

During the closure of the theatres in the Interregnum and the early years of the

Restoration, comic parts of Shakespeare’s plays were performed for popular audiences at fairs,

taverns and empty theatres. Versions of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet and the Gadshill

robbery in Henry IV were printed in 1662 with a frontispiece showing Falstaff and Mistress

Quickly.24 During the same year, James Howard altered the ending of Romeo and Juliet so that

the lovers survive at the end. The comic adaptation was being played on alternate nights with the

tragic original. Comic adaptations also became part of the wars between the theatres. For

example, the Duke’s Company’s success with Thomas Shadwell’s The Tempest (1674) provoked

the King’s Company to put on Thomas Duffett’s parody The Mock-Tempest, performed the same year as Shadwell’s adaptation, and is the first in a long line of Shakespeare burlesques. Duffett also mocked the other Shakespeare performances of the rival company in the farces he staged. In both cases it is not Shakespeare that is being mocked. Instead, his plays became the convenient vehicle for mocking rivals’ theatrical styles.

This enduring theatrical tradition ranges from Thomas Duffett’s The Mock-Tempest to

Anton Dudley’s Romeo and Juliatric (2000). As staged by Cherry Red Productions at the Metro

Café in Washington DC, Romeo and Juliatric reframed the star-crossed lovers, satirizing

America’s attitudes towards seniors and the theatre community’s lame recent rush to reinterpret all of Shakespeare’s plays.25 Some of the actors in this parody are simply impossible to understand, as they swallowed the lines and stumbled over the Shakespearean language that

Dudley had used liberally.

The questions that follow are therefore: Can something that is clearly tragic be turned into laughter? (Or to be more precise, what does it mean by “clearly” tragic or comic? Can we

24 Peter Holland, William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 72. 25 Ibid., 3 28

measure the state and intensity of “tragic-ness”?) What allows a subject to shift from reading something tragic as comic? How does tragedy or comedy operate and serve a function in a socio- cultural context? Or the other way round, how does adaptation or translation negotiate the two different sides of the comic and the tragic, and sustain the survival of the work by means of transformation and change? Rather than accepting the standard view of genres as having a stable existence, distinct borders […] genre is “performed” and its movement shaped in the activity of reading. Rick Altman, in Film/Genre (1999) tells about the prevalence of genre-mixing in the

Hollywood studio system. Change and transformation do not end with the emergence with an identifiable genre, since “genre is not the permanent product of a singular origin, but the temporary by-product of an ongoing process.”26 New genres are produced by associating a new

type of approach with already existing genres—

Once a genre is recognized and practised throughout the industry, individual

studios have no further economic interest in practising it as such; instead, they

seek to create new cycles by associating a new type of material or approach with

an existing genres, thus initiating a new round of genrification.27

For example,

Burlesque comedy was once simply a form of comedy genre characterized by

travesty, caricature, and nonsense jokes (the original meaning of the adjective

‘burlesque’).” What initially appeared as (burlesque) comedy, then took on a new

identity when accompanied by burlesques of other genres, thus becoming

burlesque (comedy), with the adjective now outweighing the noun […] Eventually,

26 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 54. 27 Ibid., 62. 29

the only thing left was just plain burlesque, standing alone on the generic stage,

stripped of any necessary connection with comedy.28

Genre as an ongoing process takes place in the interplay of readings and of the social force they carry.29 Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan also point out: “it is important to

note that what is most significant about studying genre is its fluidity and its status as a cultural

category as well as descriptor […]” “each text we encounter carries with it the potential to

expand, or otherwise modify, our knowledge of its genre […].”30 The problem posed by

adaptation and translation is not how to choose between the two sides of the tragic-comic coin, but rather how to account for a kind of genre that is both formulated in terms of cultural boundaries and capable of transcending them, a transgenred identity which manifests itself as change, and a dynamic process.

By not focusing on one specific genre of categorization for a given text, the nature of comedy can also be more accurately captured. It is probably more productive to think of comedy as a term connoting both closeness and distance as well as the oscillating process that binds both discursive directions. Due to its constant shifting of contextual referents, it is quite difficult to assign any definition of comedy to a specific historical or cultural moment. Instead, it would be even more challenging to define and consider comedy as a process rather than definitive entity, and that it does transform and adapt to its particular context. In other words, comically (or tragically) reworked, it is the status of this “process” that allows such flexibility.

In broader terms, how do Shakespeare’s works or the works of the past retain identity in change? Shakespeare’s texts continue to be valued by reading communities other than those

28 Ibid., 51; Genres are formed or modified when adjectives become nouns in the process of genrification. See Altman, 49-68. 29 John Frow, Genre (New York: Routledge, 2006), 139. 30 Cartmell and Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, 18. 30

whose appreciation could have been originally predicted. His works endure, speaking across

spatial and temporal boundaries, even to those whose language and culture are different from his,

and despite their relocation, they persist in appearing both intelligible and meaningful.31 The

adaptation or translation brings to light a process of interpretation and production of meaning

through which the past enters the present, while being at the same time powerfully expelled from

it. The genre in transition can be taken as a reaction toward the resistance encountered in the

frame of the practice of translating, and the impossibility of establishing an identity of meaning

and form between the works of a culturally different past and that of the present. Genre,

additionally, also provides a way of talking about the translation of literary texts, as a way of

revivifying and recontextualising a classic literary text for a new audience, most noticeably in a

new historical, cultural and geographical location.32 The reworkings affect not only the viewing

of previous textual systems, but also foster ways to view texts—the construction and viewing of

future related literary texts.

Distance and the Creation of Comic Effects

Laughter raises difficult questions about the distance from which we view it.

Do you have to be a safe distance from a tragedy or disaster before you can laugh at it? Or is

comedy a means to create or claim that distance in the immediacy of the tragedy? Baudelaire’s

explorations into “the essence of laughter” (1855) reveal these complex relationships between

the laughing subject and the object. To laugh at the person falling in front of us is to forget our

own potential to fall. To laugh at another’s fall is to act as if we have never fallen or never will.

31 Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, “Still Being Read after so Many Years: Rethinking the Classic through Translation,” Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, ed. Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 5. 32 Cartmell and Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, 97. 31

Baudelaire suggests that it takes a philosopher to acknowledge the ontological status of the

laughing subject:

The comic and the capacity for laughter are situated in the laugher and by no

means in the object of his mirth. The man who trips would be the last to laugh at

his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who has acquired by

habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested

spectator at the phenomena of his own ego. But such cases are rare.33

When the philosopher laughs, he knows that when he is laughing at the other, he is

laughing at himself. As such, one has acquired by habit the power of rapid “self-division” necessary to laugh at oneself. This power is called double consciousness.34 One laughs until one splits, so to speak. Baudelaire himself refers to a “doubleness” necessary to laughter. Laughter has to do with a contradictory double nature.35

The superiority theory, of laughing at others, goes back to Plato, who in Philebus 48-50

defines laughter as a “mixed” emotion, a pleasure inspired by malice, that is, delighting in the

misfortunes of the weak, those not powerful enough to harm us in return.36 As Plato defines, some pleasures are always mixed; or at least that the pains are necessary conditions of the

pleasures. At the heart of ambiguity is what appears to be an insoluble emotional paradox,

feeling both happy and sad at precisely the same instant. The superiority theory proper, which

got its start in Plato and Aristotle, was then formulated and put into a stronger form by Hobbes,

whose definition predominated in Baudelaire’s time: “the passion of laughter is nothing else but

33 Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 154. 34 See Anca Parvulescu, Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 75-76. 35 Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” 153. 36 See Hugh H. Benson, “Plato’s Own View of the Value of Pleasure,” A Companion to Plato (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 318. 32

sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by

comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”37 This passion has no name

but is related to pride.38 Laughter is an expression of our sudden glory when we realize that in some way we are superior to someone else.

In implicating laughter’s “superiority,” Baudelaire revises the definition of the comic

itself. If laughter derives from a sense of superiority over the person laughed at, then the comic

must originate in the one who laughs, not in the object of the laughter. We may laugh at the

person who falls on the ice, but he probably will not laugh at himself—“the comic resides in

ourselves looking on, feeling superior for not being so clumsy.”39 Similarly, Bergson also

located within the individual the “distance” or detachment necessary for laughter, claiming that

laughter has no greater enemy than emotion: “Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested

spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy.”40 Comic laughter, like black humor or self-

mockery, necessarily incorporates some form of distance, or a sense of detachment from one’s

own suffering, or the suffering of others. A comic character is never fully identified with his role;

he always retains the ability to observe himself from the outside.41 As the readers of comedy are

concerned, laughter does no harm because they are laughing at fictional characters. Thus, the

English Romantic critic, Charles Lamb, writing of English Restoration comedy, argued that its

charm consisted precisely in “the escape from life—the oblivion of consequences.”42

37 Wallace Chafe, The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Feeling Behind Laughter and Humor (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 141. 38 Michele Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992), 26. 39 Ibid., 32. 40 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), 10; R.D.V. Glasgow, Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995), 22. 41 Felicity Lunn and Heike Munder, When Humor Becomes Painful (Zürich: JRP, Ringier, 2005), 54. 42 Charles Lamb, The Life and Works of Charles Lamb: The Essays of Elia (London: Macmillan, 1899), 287. 33

What comes to light then is that laughter itself creates the distance from its object. In an adaptation of a literary work, the element of play and distancing may be reinforced by various means. By “comedifying” the source, for instance, an adaptation could create a certain distance and comment on the work in a roundabout fashion.

Since Freud (1905), humor has been regarded as a manifestation of unconscious, repressed impulses, which in growing up we were gradually forced to suppress because they transgressed socially sanctioned norms. In other words, external repression has brought about internal inhibitions in people’s minds. Humor permits all the repressed aspects of the self in the form of linguistic images, with their paradoxes and ambiguities, to rise to the surface and be expressed in a sublimated form. In this way, the comic has the function of a psychological escape valve, and helps us cope with oppressive social processes. It creates a counter world and regards the joke as a weapon of the oppressed that can achieve a “liberating” function. The comic can be perceived as precisely that which briefly annuls the order of things and allows us to experience a momentary liberating blow.43

Freud views joking as the utterance of something otherwise repressed, that is, as a manifestation and an outlet of otherwise taboo impulses. He thus puts joking on the same plane as slips of the tongue and dreams. Shakespeare is ideologically forbidden to say certain things, but within the guise of madness or comedy, the restrictions on critical comment lapse. Ordinarily, laughter tends simply to presuppose safety, a non-threatening situation, or some form of distance from its object. This amused expression is fundamentally paradoxical. It signals that my present behavior is not to be taken seriously. My actions do not signal what they usually signal. Its message is that my present signals are not to be taken at face value. This equivocacy is essential

43 Lunn and Munder, When Humor Becomes Painful, 11. 34

to the realm of play, a locus where danger or threat can be classified as non-dangerous or non-

threatening. Play is and is not real. It is serious, but simultaneously not serious. Serious issues are

involved in play; and play is inextricably involved in “serious” work.44 As in theatrical

performance, what the spectator sees is on one level “real,” but on another level “just pretend.”

As Feinburg expounds on the social function of humor: “since society does not permit direct

expression of resentment […]” individuals have evolved a technique for expression; “by

presenting that they are playful in their criticism, that they don’t really mean what they say,

people manage to relieve themselves of frustration and repressions.”45 From the safety of another world, much laughter in art encourages us to view suffering by not taking things too seriously.

Laughter was a “defence mechanism that attempted mastery of the sources of fear by turning them into a joke.”46 In the face of pain, laughter becomes a weapon that domesticates fear by

distancing it, thus signaling the triumph over anxiety and fear.

Laughter is not merely treated as a counter-discourse to histories of pain and trauma. It

influences the tragic discourse by its power of observation. Happiness and sadness exist

simultaneously in the comic state. Plays that fuse comedy and tragedy, or laughter and tears, are

notable for the presence, but not the dilution of the comic edge.47 Much humor involves someone else’s discomfiture. As the spectator laughs at the man who experiences a fall, the fall is painful to the man but ridiculous to the viewer. At times, Chinese humor seems to be more satirical than comic.48 According to Zhang Jian, modern Chinese comedy is characterized by an aesthetic

complex that merges the comic and the tragic. As Chinese comedy has begun to strengthen its

44 Louise Peacock, Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance (Chicago: Intellect, 2009), 13. 45 Leonard Feinberg, The Secret of Humor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978), 78. 46 Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008), 199. 47 Weinstein, Directing Laughter, 333. 48 Henry W. Wells, Traditional Chinese Humor: A Study in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971), 218. 35

connection with social reality, “reform” has gradually become the core of modern Chinese comic consciousness. The ugliness and the hideous have entered the comic sphere. Laughter in comedy therefore both reflects and sublimates the follies and the negative values of the society as well as the inherent weaknesses of human.49 In the thought of modern Chinese comedy, the problem of

pain embedded in the sense of the comic has been much elaborated. This problem of pain

involves the intervention of ugliness, which represents the ugliness of the reality, its emotional

impact on the subject (the literary writers) and their experience of the ugliness in the society. The

tragic in traditional Chinese comedy represents the complications and sufferings before the

comic ending. It is therefore an artistic expression of the restoration of order. In modern Chinese

comedy, however, the emphasis on the tragic implies the awareness of the subject of the

violation of order in the reality. Overall, what can be observed is an infusion of the tragic into the

comic phenomenon. The conflicts and confusions accentuated by tears and laughter have

prompted a new artistic direction in modern Chinese comic literature.

“Bitter humor” that seeks to represent the absurdity of life with tears in laughter is often

employed in Chinese literature. For instance, jokes about the body and sexual desires reveal an

important aspect of people’s mentality from the Ming through the Qing dynasties, as humor may

escape or defy social norms. These sexual or scatological jokes made people laugh, but their

laughter was mixed with sorrow and the presumption that humor was the only tool to confront

problems like incest and love affairs.50 As for modern Chinese literature, instead of commenting

49 Zhang Jian, “The Historical Significance of Modern Ideological Transformation of Chinese Comedy,” Lun Zhongguo xiju guannian xiandai zhuanxing de lishi yiyi 論中國戲劇觀念現代轉型的歷史意義, Literature and Art Studies Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究 5 (2006): 95-96. 50 Huang Ko-wu and Lee Hsin-yi, “Sex and the Body in Jokes from the Ming and Qing Dynasties: An Analysis of The Expanded Treasury of Laughter” Ming-Qing xiaohua zhong de shenti yu qingyu: yi “Xiaolin guangji” wei zhongxin zhi fenxi 明清笑話中的身體與情慾: 以《笑林廣記》為中心之分析, Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 19.2-39 (2001): 373. 36

on social issues in a straight-forward way, writers such as Lao She often employ bitter humor in

their works. The device is much inspired by black comedy, which he has learnt from Western

literature. He does not agree that humor lacks a serious purpose, and thus under his satirical

playfulness lies his serious inquiry into the problems of Chinese society and culture.51 The

“tragic” not only represents the sufferings or complexities in the play before it moves on to the

joyous ending. Camouflaged by the comic mask, the “tragic” is also a tool for social criticism,

and it conveys the subject’s experience or perception of the “ugliness” of the society.

Cultural distance, on the other hand, also leads to the comic transformation of tragedy.

The raising of a laugh in the theatre depends on a set of shared points of reference.52 Given the

barriers separating one culture from another, dramatic texts are modified or even transformed to

ensure that they effectively fit the local context. The meaning of a dramatic text is naturally

altered with its migration to a new cultural context. Comedy, a form which in itself embodies transgression, lends itself to the study of a cultural hybrid. Humor also implies an exchange, usually between the maker of a joke, its recipient, and its object. Humor thus also functions in a precarious way, as far as relationships and communities are concerned. It arises from difference

(of positions, assumptions, and expectations), yet from similarity. Otherwise, jokes would not be understood as jokes and would simply become misunderstandings.53 The comic can result from

differences in everyday life, for example, between two nations. If every nation has its own social

norms that have come from the development of its own culture, then everything that does not

conform to these norms will be “comical.” The greater the differences, the more probable the

51 See Tam Kwok-kan, “Lao She’s Bitter Humour and His Social Re-visioning in Camel Xiangzi,” Camel Xiangzi 駱 駝祥子, trans. Shi Xiaojing (Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 2005), viii-xlix. 52 See Michael Mangan’s discussion of “cultural distance and the study of comedy”: A Preface to Shakespeare’s Comedies, 1594-1603 (New York: Longman, 1996), 20. 53 Graeme Dunphy and Rainer Emig, “Introduction,” Hybrid Humour: Comedy in Transcultural Perspectives, ed. Graeme Dunphy and Rainer Emig (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 25. 37

comic.54 While some jokes that were appropriate and humorous in Renaissance culture can no

longer surprise or bring pleasure to the audience, many of the tragedies of the early modern

period appear to modern sensibilities as very “funny.”55

In 1822, when an English troupe performed Shakespeare’s Othello in Paris, they were

jeered. Othello, at that time, was probably the best known Shakespearean play in France. Thus

even if the plot had been distorted, its outline was still familiar to the literate public.56 The

drinking-scene, when the wine is produced and Cassio becomes befuddled, was received with

shouts of derisive laughter: “A drunken man in tragedy! Shades of Racine and Corneille! […]”57

From then on, the play continued as a ludicrous show. “Desdemona was put to bed and

smothered amidst roars of laughter […] Othello stabbed himself to prove that suicide was a most

mirth-provoking catastrophe.”58 Some of this hostility or ridicule was simply anti-British and

much related to the political climate at the time.59

Another reinvention of Shakespeare was the loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in the comedic film 一妻兩夫 Yi Qi Liang Fu (One Husband Too Many) (1988) directed by Anthony

Chan, which turned the play into a contemporary urban comedy. In the film, Hsia and Hui move in together to recuperate from their divorces, and both of them attempt to woo the same woman, the Juliet figure, Frances. One Husband Too Many shows the failure of Romeo and Juliet to engage the attention of rural audiences. It opens with an amateur actor called Hsin and his troupe giving a performance of the play at a country fair. In the tomb scene, Hsin and his wife (the

54 Vladimir Propp, On the Comic and Laughter (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009), 42. 55 Nicholas Brooke, Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy (London: Open Books, 1979), 117. In contrast, “accounts of audience reaction in the early modern stage hardly ever talk about laughter at a tragedy except as marking the failure of that tragedy.” 56 Stirling Haig, “Vigny and Othello,” Yale French Studies 33 (1964): 57. 57 Julie Hankey, Othello (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 52. 58 Ibid., 52. 59 Ibid., 52. 38

film’s Juliet) are both dressed in typical brightly colored Elizabethan garb and speaking in stilted

speech; while the members of the audience, who were critics of Western culture, were

aggressively biting off sugar cane, standing on their feet, pointing and laughing.60 The

confusions arisen in the love affair also prevent the film from becoming a tragedy.

Lin Zhaohua (1936-), in his production of Hamlet in 1990, uses the grave-digging scene as a unifying theme of the play. Lin is one of the most innovative stage directors in contemporary

China. Having graduated from the Central Theatre Academy in 1961, Lin was an actor with the

Beijing People’s Art Theatre until he turned to directing in 1978. Between 1982 and 1985, he directed three plays by Gao Xingjian: 絕對信號 Juedui xinhao (Absolute Signal), 車站 Chezhan

(Bus Stop), and 野人 Yeren (Wild Men). He has also directed many other highly acclaimed productions, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1990), Guo Shixing’s 鳥人 Niaoren (Bird Men)

(1993), and Goethe’s Faust (1994).

In this comic scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the two men, while digging Ophelia’s grave, engage in a playful conversation, bantering with each other and Hamlet. Lin’s adaptation begins with the clanking of the diggers’ spades and the grave-digging scene in Act 5, Scene 1 of

Shakespeare’s play, which begins each act in the performance.61 In the opening scene of Act One,

the two gravediggers engage in a comic dialogue:

Gravedigger 1: Tell me. Who has the longest family history?

Both laugh

Gravedigger 1: You can't answer, can you? I'll tell you: peasants and us grave-

makers.

60 A woman refers to Hsin’s costume as “tight pants,” and the others shouting “Four eyes (Romeo), finish her off!” 61 See Sun Yanna, Shakespeare in China (PhD dissertation, Dresden University of Technology, 2008), 174-176. 39

Gravedigger 2: Really? Laughs

Gravedigger 1: Let me ask you another question.

Gravedigger 2: Go ahead.

Gravedigger 1: Who builds stronger than the mason, the shipwright or the

carpenter?

Gravedigger 2: […] Ha, the gallows […] that frame outlives a thousand tenants

Gravedigger 1: The houses we build last till doomsday!

Gravedigger 2: Really? Laughs

Gravedigger 1: Go and get me a bottle of liquor.

Gravedigger 2: All right.62

The gravediggers’ dialogue leads directly into the second scene of the play. Claudius, Gertrude

and Hamlet enter from different directions, and the former Gravedigger 1, walking up to

Claudius’ right, becomes Polonius.63 The gravediggers take the roles of other characters in the

play, suggesting that they are digging their own graves while plotting against the others. This

character-exchange complicates the comic roles of the clowns and their philosophical

contemplation on life and death. Lin states that contemporary Chinese intellectuals seem to share

Hamlet’s predicament, and describes the atmosphere and phenomenon of the society of his time

(after the Cultural Revolution): “a clown today may become a king tomorrow.”64 As the actors

exchange roles and speak each others’ lines, the famous monologue “to be or not to be” is also transformed from an internal monologue to a communal speech.

62 Li Ruru, Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2003), 88. 63 Ibid., 88-89. 64 Lin Weiyu, Lin Zhaohua and the Sinicization of Huaju (PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2006), 93. 40

Adapted and directed by He Wenhui in 1977, Sword of Vengeance (adapted from

Shakespeare’s Hamlet) has also brought out the “humor” in the original play, part of which was,

of course, unexpected. This was very evident from the audience reaction, especially during

Hamlet’s mad scenes and the scene in which Polonius was slain by Hamlet from behind the

drapery. Because of the translation, the audience readily laughs at scenes where no humor was originally present or intended. On the contrary, the comic scenes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet were

left out. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were very dead. Similar to many of the other Chinese

adaptations of Hamlet, their parts failed to appear. In Act 5, Scene 1, after Ophelia’s death, two

clowns are digging the grave. The Prince sighs and speculates darkly about life and death. The

entire grave-digging scene was eliminated because the pace becomes too fast towards the end of

the drastically shortened play to allow for any more philosophy in the form of wit. He Wenhui

tried to do justice to the Bard, however, by making the Prince recite four lines from a Chinese

poem:

丘墓蔽山崗,萬代同一時。

千秋萬歲後,榮名安所之?

[Grave and tombs cover mountains and hills,

Ten Thousands generations share but the same moment.

When thousands of years have gone past,

Where go our honour and fame?]65

Dealing with this particular scene, the director says: “[…] if it is performed in a strict forward

manner in Chinese costume, it must be very ridiculous.” This might be true, because the whole

setting will be quite funny. But why? The simplest answer is that the Chinese do not act in such a

65 He Wenhui, Sword of Vengeance Wangzi fuchouji 王子復仇記 (Hong Kong: Qin+yuan chubanshe, 2010), 59. 41

way. As a kind of respect for the dead, and also out of superstition, the Chinese tend not to touch

the bodies of the dead. Thus, it would be hard for the audience to imagine the Prince’s soliloquy

at the grave.66

Richard Ho points out that the “comedy moments” reflect to a certain extent the general

Chinese audience’s sensitivity to verbal exaggerations in costume drama, and may therefore find

the emotionally pronounced scenes amusing even after adaptation. He warns, though, that “one

must not preclude the possibility that not all theatre-goers are educated enough not to laugh at the

wrong places.”67 This seems to correspond to George Wilson Knight’s remark that “to the coarse mind an incident may seem comic which to the richer understanding is pitiful and tragic.”68

La Dame aux Camelias, a 19th century classic by Alexandre Dumas, was staged at the

National Theatre in Taipei as part of the 2011 Taiwan International Festival of Arts. The novel was first translated into Chinese (entitled 巴黎茶花女遺事Baili chahuanü yishi, Heritage of

Paris La Traviata) by Lin Shu (1852-1924). Wang Shouchang, who had studied in France interpreted the story for Lin. It was one of the translations that “cast the most profound influence on the literary scene of the late-Qing and early-Republican period” as it “introduced Chinese novelists and readers to many new literary techniques as well as to a new reading experience.”69

In the new production of La Dame aux Camelias as a play in 2011, Japanese director Tadashi

Suzuki infused other features from the local Taiwanese culture. Employing around twenty

66 Wang Hongzhi, “The Chinese Hamlet: A Discussion of He Wenhui’s Adaptation,” Zhongguo shi de wangzi fuchouji: tan he wenhui boshi de gaibian juben 中國式的《王子復仇記》:談何文滙博士的改編劇本 Studies on Hong Kong Drama Xianggang huaju lunwenji 香港話劇論文集 (Hong Kong: High Noon Production Co. Ltd, 1992), 199-200. 67 See Harry Garlick, “Lau Wun or the Importance of Being a Cantonese Hamlet,” Sword of Vengeance Wangzi fuchouji 王子復仇記 (Hong Kong: Qin+yuan chubanshe, 2010), 92-93. 68 George Wilson Knight, “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Routledge, 2001), 181. 69 Laurence Wong, “Lin Shu’s Story-retelling as Shown in His Chinese Translation of La Dame aux Camellias,” Babel 44.3 (1998): 208. 42

Taiwanese pop songs, the director points out that unrequited love is a universal theme. The

combination of various cultural features, however, produced certain comic effects in the midst of

the tragedy.

For instance, in one of the most impressive scenes, which reveals Marguerite’s sentiments, is when the male protagonist’s (Armand’s) father visits Marguerite, unexpectedly produced laughter. The actor who played the role of the father spoke with language and tone that is typical of that of Taiwanese soap opera, and then sang 愛拼才會贏 Ai pin cai hui ying (In

order to succeed, you must work hard), a song which had been sung during a political election. In

such ways, the cultural meanings behind the pop songs are involved. The emotions expressed in

the songs do not simply arise from the meanings of the words, but most often represent the

collective memories of a particular age. While Suzuki tried to reveal what is common to

loneliness and affections in different cultures, a certain dissonance emerged between the French

story and the political and cultural meanings embedded in the songs, as well as in the emotions

enacted by the characters and presented through the stage atmosphere in general. Thus what is

remarkable in intercultural performance is not only the possibility of connection and/or

differentiation between different cultural practices, but the possibility that different cultures can

be related in a negotiation with a vigor that allows the creation of a new paradigm.

Stage or cinematic adaptation, as a cultural process, reflect not only different ideas about

Shakespeare’s plays and classic works more generally, but also a cross-cultural imaginary: that a

prevailing set of values and assumptions effectively identifies a specific cultural moment and

differentiates it from other cultural moments. All adaptations operate within their specific

cultural imaginaries which constitute what Shakespeare has meant at different times in different

locations. Like taste, humor is a social strategy and according to Bourdieu, it is an expression of

43

our social background and position in society. The implication here is that humor requires a

context in order to be understood. Otherwise, it misses its mark and the recipient may feel out of

place or even insulted.70

As Rachel Carroll suggests, all adaptations express or address a desire to return to an

“original” textual encounter; as such, adaptations are perhaps symptomatic of a cultural compulsion to repeat. The motivations informing the production and consumption of adaptations may seem intent on replication, but every “return” is inevitably transformative of its object. An adaptation of a prior cultural text, no matter how “faithful” in intention or aesthetic, is inevitably a new interpretation of that particular text. Thus, to this extent, every adaptation is an instance of

“textual infidelity.”71 Repetition or historical distance can allow an event to be perceived as

comic. Dramatic texts are unstable and when represented to readers without any change in

appearance, might become comic merely due to their awareness that they are a replica, and thus

detached from the values originally held. Comedy can arise from tragedy due to the fact that the

moment is detached from events and situations that arouse feelings such as pity and fear. The

comic and the tragic can be central players in the formation of one another. As Wilson Knight

points out:

It may appear strange to search for any sort of comedy as a primary theme in a

play whose abiding gloom is so heavy, whose reading of human destiny and

human actions so starkly tragic. Yet it is an error of aesthetic judgment to regard

humor as essentially trivial. Though its impact usually appears vastly different

from that of tragedy, yet there is a humor that treads the brink of tears, and

70 Lunn and Munder, When Humor Becomes Painful, 13. 71 Rachel Carroll, Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (London: Continuum, 2009), 1. 44

tragedy which needs but an infinitesimal shift of perspective to disclose the varied

riches of comedy.72

In this interplay of comedy, tragedy and distance, the adapter plays a crucial role. One should not be misled by the widely held assumption about comedy, that there are certain themes, situations or character types which are the special province of comedy, or are more compatible to the comic muse. To take the most striking example of all: There is no question that we invariably associate fools with comedy; yet one of the most deeply tragic scenes in the history of the theatre is the storm scene between King Lear and the Fool on the heath. Particular attention has been given to the presence of comic motifs and structures in King Lear. Critics who are interested in the comic dimensions of Lear (Susan Snyder, Ronald Miller, George Wilson Knight, Robert

Miola) have focused on aspects such as the role of the Fool, the motif of redemption, as well as how the comic elements are manifested: how the comic genre is twisted to serve and intensify the tragic effects, and how madness is itself replete with comic potential. All the materials available to the dramatist, whether they be from his own experience, his culture, from history, are neutral and static. It is only by the playwright’s shaping (or the adapter’s reshaping) of them that they take on meaning (or new meanings), which may be tragic or comic.73 The audience response to the events which occur in a play will be the product of the causes built into that play by the playwright. Even plays universally accepted as tragic or comic can be transformed. For every comic use made of a given situation, one can find examples of a serious use of the same situation. In each case, the deciding factor is the way the artist has used his materials so that they will assume a comic or a serious shape. In so doing, the playwright will also shape the audience’s response to his own creation.

72 George Wilson Knight, “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” 181. 73 Robert Willoughby Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 7. 45

Nahum Tate (1652-1715) is an early example of adapting Shakespeare by changing

genre.74 In order to please his audience, he remarkably restored the happy ending to King Lear.

Contrary to Shakespeare’s play, Tate does not kill Cordelia, Lear and Gloucester, but the three major villains. In the final scene, Edgar and Cordelia are betrothed and become rulers of England while Lear retires with Albany and Kent. The plot reinforces royalist politics in its demand for legitimate rule and orderly succession. The ending resolves all of the problems in Shakespeare’s play, and makes Tate’s play the only Shakespearean adaptation to end happily, in a political

“restoration.”75 With this development, the story of Lear becomes what Sandra Clark calls

“romantic melodrama—” although editions of Tate’s play continued to call it a tragedy. In the

final scene, Edgar brings the news of her sisters’ deaths. Lear bestows his blessing on the lovers,

and proposes to retire with Gloster and Kent and cheerfully pass in calm reflection the remainder

of their lives. While in Shakespeare’s play Edgar’s final words are uttered in a sad tone, Tate’s

version ends with a speech by Edgar reflecting his love to Cordelia. The survival of Lear and

Cordelia in Tate’s play necessitated the removal of the striking entrance, “Re-enter Lear, with

Cordelia dead in his arms” (5.3.267). At this point in the play signals Tate’s major change to

Shakespeare’s dramatic structure, the substitution of a happy ending: the establishment of a new

empire.76

The change is both related to the changed stage and dramatic conventions of Restoration

theatres and the historical and political background of the period. Tate’s political consideration

plays an important part in his decision to replace Shakespeare’s tragic ending with “the King’s

74 Nahum Tate, “The History of King Lear,” Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel Fishlin and Mark Fortier (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 67. 75 Meryem Ayan, “Rewriting Shakespeare: Reshaping King Lear,” Tribute of Professor Oya Basak; (Re)reading Shakespeare in Text and Performance Papers from the Oya Basak Conference, ed. Asli Teskinay (Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 2005), 327. 76 C.B. Hardman, “Our Drooping Country Now Erects Her Head: Nahum Tate’s History of King Lear,” The Modern Language Review 95 (2000): 915. 46

blest Restauration.” The new reading bears a close resemblance to the comic resolution in

Shakespeare’s main dramatic source, the anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (1605).

More importantly, Tate’s revision is symptomatic of the progressive decline of tragedy and the

increasing popularity of tragicomedy. The popularity of tragicomedy reflects an attempt to

exorcise the specter of regicide, which was still haunting the collective memory of Tate’s

contemporaries.77

Yevgeniya Konstantinovna Lipkovskaya’s “merry England” production of Shakespeare’s

Much Ado About Nothing (1957) has also made certain adjustments to the play, especially with

the way the play darkens after the villain’s slanderous accusations. The adaptation introduced the

metaphorical concept of “merry England”; and in the production, the theme was connected to the

ideal of the socialist state. In order to create this atmosphere according to the theme, the director

reorganizes the structure of the acts and scenes, and emphasizes the Beatrice-Benedick plotline

while marginalizing Don John as an evil force and the darker aspects of the play.78 Unlike Much

Ado About Nothing, Beatrice does not have Benedick kill Claudio. This transposition therefore highlights the bright aspects of Shakespeare’s comedy.

Furthermore, humor possesses transformative qualities. Humor is the working out of uncertainty and confusion, not only providing psychological release but also providing perspective.79 In Hamlet, for instance, the gravediggers who appeared in the graveyard (Act Five)

bring out a radical change of perspective in the play, from the metaphysical concerns associated

with the protagonist to the physical reality of digging a grave. This change also entails a

77 Sonia Massai, “Nahum Tate’s Revision of Shakespeare’s ‘King Lears,’” Studies in English Literature 40 (2000): 436. 78 Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), 156. 79 Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997), 10. 47

profound change in Hamlet himself. Similar to the travesties, they make us reconsider the

essence of Shakespeare’s tragedy from a new or unfamiliar perspective.80

One common way to transform texts is to rework material in a significant way, such as by telling the story from a different point of view as a way to engage themes and issues left out of the previous version.81 For tragedy-within-comedy plays, “if a tragedy is inserted in a comedy,

the small tragedy is distorted into parody by means of textual features or by the way it is

performed, so that the tragedy actually becomes a comic interlude.”82 Though the adaptations

differ in many ways in how they mix comic and tragic elements, it is possible to see that in each

one the combination of comic and tragic elements leads to a realization of the play’s potential

perspective.

Thus, one of the functions of the comic transformation is to shed light on the same

situation from different points of view. Charlie Chaplin once famously observed that “life is a

tragedy in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”83 Similarly, Puck in A Midsummer’s Night’s

Dream comments on how the austere nature of human endeavour seems so insignificant from a

distance: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (3.2.115) How we see an incident, and the amount

we see plays a role in determining the generic distinctions in drama. So closely are tragedy and

comedy linked that it has been suggested that comedy is simply tragedy speeded up. The comic

effects in silent films were often achieved by shooting a sequence slowly and projecting it fast.

The speeding up of the action created a mechanical effect and turned its characters into

80 Manfred Draudt, “Nineteenth-Century Burlesques of Hamlet in London and Vienna,” Hamlet East-West, ed. Gibinska Marta and Jerzy Limon (Gdansk: Theatrum Gedanese Foundation, 1998), 80. 81 Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams, Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works (London: McFarland & Company, 2010), 4. 82 Frank Zipfel, “‘Very Tragical Mirth:’ The Play within the Play as a Strategy for Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy,” The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, ed. Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 212. 83 Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 211. 48

automatons. The resulting emotional detachment enables the audience to laugh at near disasters

or human foibles as jokes.84 Mel Brooks suggested how one’s perspective fundamentally alters a

situation: “tragedy is me cutting my finger; comedy is you falling down a manhole and dying.”85

Perspective and context is what allows a subject matter to shift from a reading as tragic to comic.

A comic text may be played seriously or a tragic text farcically.

Postmodern adaptations of Shakespeare continue to explore the tension between comedy

and tragedy. Tom Stoppard, for instance, turned Hamlet into an absurdist comedy with his play

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. First performed in August 1966, at Edinburgh by the

Oxford Theatre Company, the play places Shakespeare’s attendant Lords—only peripheral in

Hamlet—at the centre of the tragic events that preoccupied Shakespeare. Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern, who are employed by Claudius to find out the true reason for Hamlet’s

“transformation,” continue in their attempts to “pluck out the heart of [Hamlet’s] mystery”

(3.2.330-31). The collection of tragic and comic expressions in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Are Dead may actually call for a new genre that is differentiated from the monogeneric rubrics of

either tragedy or comedy. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern Are Dead provides an example of the complexity of “parody—”“There is a tension

between the text we know and what Stoppard does to it. Whenever an event is directly taken

from the Shakespearian model, Stoppard uses the original words. But he ‘trans-contextualizes’ them through his addition of scenes that the Bard never conceived.”86

84 T.G.A. Nelson, Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 32. 85 Cited as epigraph to Gary Larson, The Prehistory of the Far Side (1990): 213. 86 See Linda Hutcheon, “Modern Parody and Bakhtin,” Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1989), 95. 49

Shakespearean adaptations such as Cheah Chee Kong’s Chicken Rice War (2000) play

humorously on the familiarity of both Romeo and Juliet and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film. The

film adaptation has also adopted Shakespearean English, modern English and “Singlish—” a

patois that mixes English with the forms and vocabulary of local languages—to create humorous comic language effects.87 In Chicken Rice War, feature director Cheah Chee-kong turns classic

romantic tragedy into lowbrow romantic comedy. The localized film adaptation tells the story of

two rival hawker families, the Wongs and the Chans, whose chicken rice stalls have been

situated next to each other for two decades. Only when the two families discover that their

supplier sold them infected chickens which caused their customers to become sick, do they gang

up against the common enemy. The film, unlike the Shakespearean tragedy, comes to a happy

ending.

Another recent film which aims at the reinterpretation of the tragic heroine Juliet is Zhu

Li Ye (Juliets, 2010), a romantic comedy set in a modern Taiwanese context. The film combines

three short films (“Juliet’s Choice,” “Two Juliets,” and “One More Juliet”) by different directors,

each of whom gives his own take on the Juliet figure caught in the perplexity of love. As directed

by Chen Yu-hsun, comedy plays a particularly important role in “One More Juliet.” The Juliet in

this film, Zhu Li Ye, played by Taiwanese comic actor Kang Kang, is actually a gay, tubby,

middle-aged man who is distraught after his 28th unrequited love affair. As “Juliet” tries to

commit suicide in the woods and is about to hang himself from a tree, he is interrupted by an

assistant director, who requests that he step out of the frame as a TV commercial is being shot.

87 For the racial aspects of the adaptation, see Kenneth Paul Tan, “Racial Stereotypes in Singapore Films,” Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, ed. Daniel P.S. Goh, Matilda Gabreipillai, Philip Holden, and Gaik Cheng Khoo (London: Routledge, 2009), 127-129. 50

He is then offered a job as an extra and plays a part in a commercial for a slimming garment

made for men, and so meets his “Romeo,” a bus driver-cum-actor.

A particular sense of physical “ugliness” is used for comedic purposes. Whereas beauty is the exclusion of ugliness, comicality fraternizes with it; it dispels the repugnance provoked by ugliness and transforms ugliness into comedy.88 As Rosenkrantz’s Aesthetics of the Ugly

suggests, the comic (das Komische) is “impossible without the ingredient of ugliness […]”89 A

charming actor who, with considerable effort, pretends to be ugly, is unconvincing and fails to

achieve the comic effect. The unusual grouping of the male extras in Chen’s film reveals not

only their absurdity and clumsiness, but also innocence and helplessness in coping with their

own situation, which makes them, in addition to being laughable, also evoke the sympathy of the

audience.

The bestselling manga, Osaka Hamlet (2009) by Hiromi Morishita, narrates the story of

the Kubo family in Osaka, in which Hamlet is transformed into a bittersweet comedy. The

mother, who leads a double life (a hospital attendant by day, a club hostess at night)—raises

three sons with a mysterious, long lost uncle after the death of her husband. Upon the arrival of

the new father, the Kubo family members start to break out of their shell. The youngest son starts

cross-dressing and expresses his desire to become a girl, while the oldest son seeks comfort in a

woman several years older. The middle brother, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with the

play Hamlet and its meaning, hoping that he might find parallels to his own life in the tale of the

Danish prince.

88 On the aesthetic of the “ugly,” see Karl Rosenkranz, Äesthetik des Hässlichen (Koenigsberg: Borntraeger, 1853); Rosenkrantz’s Aesthetics of the Ugly was first published by the Verlag der Gebruder Borntrager in 1853. It has been seen as important for turning the idealist aesthetics twoward an analysis of the “ugly” as part of the aesthetics of the “beautiful.” 89 Margaret Rose, “Karl Rosenkranz and the ‘Aesthetics of the Ugly,’” Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegalian Debates, ed. Douglas Moggach (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2011), 241. 51

Other such adaptations in the Western tradition include the comic drama To Be or Not to

Be (1983) directed by Alan Johnson and produced by Mel Brooks, and the comic spin-off of

Romeo and Juliet, known as Pizza My Heart (2005), in which the two feuding families run rival

pizza restaurants in New Jersey. Letters to Juliet (2010), a romantic comedy directed by Gary

Winick, explores the city of Verona, the setting where the original Romeo and Juliet first met;

while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009), an American independent film written

and directed by Jordan Galland, is a comic reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its

aftermath, and whose title refers back to the film version of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern Are Dead (1990).

In addition to restructuring the plots of Shakespeare’s text, postmodern adaptations adopt

strategies of localization and debasement, transferring the action, language and setting to a

period and location with which the popular audiences were intimately familiar. The action is less

elevated than that of the original, characters are of lower social levels, and sometimes there is

also an exaggeration or caricature of some features of the characters, so that they become stock

types. Moral extremes of virtue and vice are toned down so that the characters appear ordinary,

and are primarily concerned with trivial and material matters such as domestic affairs, money, and amusement. This actually echoes Lu Xun’s celebrated remark, “Tragedy shows the destruction of valuable things to viewers; while comedy shows the tearing up of worthless things to viewers,” which was made with reference to an incident in a zawen essay, “More Talk about the Collapse of the Tower of Leifeng” Zai lun leifengta de daota.90

Comic transformations in some cases establish an important link between the popular and

the more elevated theatres. Apart from ending happily, and dealing with a group of ordinary

90 Wang Ban, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 72-73. 52

characters in an amusing way, what other aspects represent the shift from tragic to comic? In the

following section, I will investigate Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet (Taiwan, 1992), a postmodern

comic spin-off inspired by Hamlet. While Hamlet is one of the most tragic plays of Shakespeare,

it is also, surprisingly, one of the “funniest.”91 Hamlet himself often plays the fool in the comic

(and very often bitter) interactions with other characters, as in his obscenities and ambiguities with Ophelia.

Parody, Fragments, and the Emergence of a Polyphonous Performance

—Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet

Lee Kuo-Hsiu (1955-) is a playwright, actor and director in Taiwan. He founded

Pingfeng Performance Workshop in 1996. From 1976 to the present, he has published 36 theatrical works, which include Premarital Trust (1987), Memorandum of 1987, Republic of

China (1987), A Play Without Me (1988), and comedies such as Can Three Make It, Parts I-VI

(1987, 1988, 1993, 1997, 1999). Considered the “Moliere of Taiwan,” Lee is especially

remarkable in his local, original creative style. His observations and insights into social affairs

combine with the comic rhythm he employs and creates a unique stage effect.

In Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet, the writer-director breaks the order, reconstructs the tension

between the parts and the whole, the comic and the tragic. No single version of Shakespeare’s

play exists in this production, but rather, fragmentary scenes of Hamlet in the rehearsals of the fictionalized troupe in Shamlet. Errors and confusions constitute the fragmentary nature of

Shamlet, which in turn creates a comic parody of Hamlet. Parody, which involves conversion of a source text, such as mocking and inversion, is a common type of transformation and can appear

91 Vicki K. Janik, Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art and History: A Bio-biliographical Sourcebook (London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 233. 53

across modes and genres; and parody as a form is closely connected with the concept of

“distance” mentioned previously and the notion of the comic. Linda Hutcheon, for instance,

defines parody not as mocking a text, but imitating a text with “critical distance:”

There is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of a concept of ridicule,

as there is, for instance, in the joke or burla of burlesque. Parody, then, in its

ironic “trans-contextualization” and inversion, is repetition with difference. A

critical distance is implied between the background text being parodied and the

new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony. The pleasure of

parody’s irony comes […] from the degree of engagement of the reader in the

intertextual “bouncing” between complicity and distance.92

Thus, in Hutcheon’s view, parody requires a critical ironic distance, and it becomes

“repetition with critical distance,” which marks “difference” rather than similarity.93 Parody is a

perfect postmodern form, in some sense, as it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that

which is parodied.94 The use of parody may aim at a comic effect and thus the comic need not be

eliminated from the definition of parody, even if it involves the transmission of complex and

serious messages.95 Scholiasts spoke of parody as a “device for comic quotation,” and in

commenting on Aristophanes, described its main characteristics as the juxtaposition of the comic

and the tragic.96 Householder has pointed out that a comic effect was attributed to the parody, and that often an adjective designating humor was attached to the term.97 For these critics,

parody was a device for the comic, an important qualification which has served to distinguish

92 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 32. 93 Ibid., 34, 37. 94 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988), 11. 95 Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 29. 96 Margaret Rose, “Defining Parody,” Southern Review 13 (1980): 7. 97 See Fred Householder, “Parodia,” Journal of Classical Philology 39 (1944): 1-9. 54

parody from other literary forms of imitation or criticism. The comic effect of the parody must

not be omitted from its definition, if it is to serve a useful, distinct purpose as a literary term; and

the attribution also introduces to its definition the question of the role played by the reader (and

the process of reading) in the reception of the parodist’s text.

One of the devices used in creating the comic effect are “fragments;” or “pastiche,” a

term deriving from French, which in the musical sphere refers to a medley of references, a

composition made up of fragments pieced together.98 As a work made up of fragments of an

original, it may apply to a satire or a parody constructed in this patchwork manner. It can also be

an aspect of a work, something contained inside a wider work that is not itself pastiche (for

example, play-within-a-play).99 “Pastiche,” of course, is a more recent term than parody,

describing a more “neutral” practice of compilation which is not necessarily comic or critical of

its sources. As Fredric Jameson explains, both pastiche and parody “involve the imitation or,

better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches

of other styles.”100 But pastiche is a practice “without parody’s ulterior motive, without the

satiric impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something

normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic;” and thus, “pastiche is blank

parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor.”101 It may nonetheless be used by a parodist as

part of the parody; and the term has been used as a synonym for parody, especially in French

98 Dentith, Parody, 194. 99 Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London: Routledge, 2007), 2. 100 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” ed. Clive Cazeaux, The Continental Aesthetic Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 284. 101 Ibid., 284. 55

literature where it has been used to describe parody.102 In both forms, writers can move in and

out of an ironic distance from the matter imitated.103

Similar to Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1978), Shamlet consists of a variety of

disparate fragments, rather than a series of acts and scenes in a fixed and coherent entity.104 In

Shamlet, Lee only presents a few fragmentary scenes of Hamlet in an improvisational manner, which reflect the incidents that take place in the fictitious Fengping Theatre Troupe in Taiwan,

Lee’s career, and his theatre company, the Pingfeng Performance Workshop (as marked by the anagram). Although selected scenes from Hamlet are woven into the theatre troupe’s actings, the order of the original Hamlet is broken up. Shamlet’s structure, overlapping and often contradictory, precludes a coherent interpretation of the original Shakespearean text. The multi- layering of scenes are defined by the interplay between fragmented parts and the perception of the unity of an artwork. Different combinations and arrangements of the fragments arise when the mosaic is shuffled, which give birth to new interpretations, and lead to the dissolution of barriers between the worlds represented by the original and the reinvention—as well as the comic and tragic imagination of Shakespeare’s plays. This purposeful reassembly of fragments is not only an active element in many of the postmodernist texts, but is also involved in the process of adaptation and translation.105

Shamlet illustrates the central issues of the theory of writing fragments, issues clustered

around mediation between isolated particulars and coherent wholes. The title of the play

“Shamlet” itself is a combination of fragments: the first character of the Chinese transliteration of

102 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern, 72-73. 103 Dentith, Parody, 194. 104 The discussion of the fragmentary nature of spin-offs in this paper is inspired by the concept of the fragment in Romantic German aesthetics, particularly the work of Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829). See Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991); Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2002). 105 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 56

Shakespeare (Shashibiya) and the last three characters of the transliteration of Hamlet

(Hamuleite). The title originated with a typographical error, but was not discovered until the final

performance of the Fengping Theatre Troupe. In the comic adaptation, the story of Hamlet is

framed by the story of a second-rate theatre troupe rehearsing and staging Hamlet on a tour in

Taiwan. The opening scene of Shamlet is the last scene of Hamlet. Instead of a linear narrative,

the play progresses with alternate sections of the rehearsals and the “performances” of the play.

Scenes 1, 5 and 10 in Shamlet repeat the duel scene between Laertes and Hamlet in Act 5, Scene

2 in Shakespeare’s play. Selected scenes from Hamlet are inserted into scenes about the

Fengping Theatre Troupe itself in Lee’s play.106

The spin-off bounces back and forth between the events in Shamlet and Hamlet. The conflicts in the Prince’s palace in Denmark crisscross with the dialogue exchanges of resentment and grudges by the members of the fictitious theatre troupe in Taiwan. The incidents in the

Fengping Theatre Troupe reflect the motifs of selected scenes in Hamlet, and the actors in

Shamlet represent the characters in Hamlet. For instance, Xiao Zhongyan who was poisoned by a laxative responds to the former Emperor who was poisoned by Claudius in Hamlet; Fan

Yaoguang who becomes insane on stage because of his debts mimics Prince Hamlet who descends into madness. After violating the original narrative frame of Hamlet, Lee reconstructs a new narrative that involves intertwining and distorting the course of events, and the juxtaposition and recombination of the classic text with the postmodern rewriting of it. The multitude and variety of fragments in Shamlet are neither Shakespeare’s text nor Lee’s alone.

Errors and confusions lead to disjointed actions and constitute the fragmentary structure of Shamlet. These errors include actors mistaking, forgetting or stealing stage dialogues, bringing

106 Pingfeng Performance Workshop is the name of Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s acting troupe. “Pingfeng,” which means “screen” in Chinese, is changed to “Fengping” in Shamlet. 57

the wrong props, and making other mechanical errors on stage and so on. As Brooke points out, unexpected performance mishaps lead to audience laughing during tragedies.107 The point about this kind of laughter is that “it destroys the dramatic illusion entirely, and stops the tragedy in its tracks.”108 Confusions about the general situation are also heightened as stagehands interrupt, cell phones ring and actors’ dialogues become confused with their phone conversations offstage.

In the process of the performance, the actors take turns performing different characters, and occasionally mistake one person for another, or forget the role another person is playing. In Act 5,

Li Xiuguo, who is acting Laertes, frequently forgets his lines since he is unfamiliar with and unprepared for the role he is playing. The actress who plays the lady of the court helps him to remember his lines but is eventually forced to take out the prompt book and read Laertes’ lines aloud. But unexpectedly, the prompt-book falls and scatters about the stage halfway through her reading. The order of the pages is now confused, and the chronological sequence of the lines delivered is mixed up.109

The errors, confusions, and the failed rehearsals of the troupe in Shamlet not only break down the structure of Shakespeare’s original Hamlet, but also become a most important comic element. As discussed in the previous section, comedy depends for its effects upon a certain distancing—it requires a barely realized mental posture of superiority so that there can be a full expression of the element that causes us to laugh. As Bertrand Evans has shown in his classic study of Shakespeare’s comedies, most often confusions are caused by certain characters

107 Brooke, Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy, 115. 108 Ibid., 116. 109 Lee Kuo-Hsiu, 莎姆雷特 Shamuleite (Taipei: INK Publishing, 2006), 106-108. 58

knowing more than the others concerning what is going on in the play, and by the audience

knowing more than the stage characters.110

Lee uses the nature of tragic characters and chaotic events to achieve a comic situation.

Mistakes in elements such as time, people, and events destroy the order in which the characters

depend on to complete the task. He points out that comedy and tragedy are only one step apart;

and often reminds the comic actors not to use exaggerated expressions and gestures to win the

audience’s laughter, but rather that they need to show the predicament of the characters in the

drama. When the actors deal with a difficult situation in a serious manner, the awkward situation

is accentuated.

According to Lee, there are three types of errors in Shamlet: “Mis-take” (including faults made by the actors, forgetting the dialogue, bringing the wrong props, malfunction of the set);

“Mis-order” (chaos of the circumstances, such as changing the actors at the last moment, taking turns to participate in different roles and forgetting the roles); and “Mis-position” (referring to the rearrangement of the whole textual structure).111 Lee borrows material from Hamlet, but

distorts and parodies Shakespeare’s tragedy. Toward the end of Shamlet, the swordplay scene

becomes a chaotic role play. An actor performs multiple and contradictory roles, because the

director tries to assign different roles to the actors when an emergency arises. The cast changes

frequently, often with last-minute amendments to compensate for mechanical and human errors.

In Act 10, the actors are confused about the roles they are supposed to be playing and they forget

their lines completely:

倪然敏:(即興)請容許我瞭解多一些——現在, 誰是霍拉旭?!

110 John Creaser, “Forms of Confusion,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 92. 111 Lee, Shamuleite, 22. 59

李柱天:(即興)他們早就知道,霍拉旭是——

李修國:(急忙打斷)——霍拉旭是我!

李柱天:(即興)——是——(指著李修國) 他……那麼我是誰?

李修國:(即興)我是誰?哈!多麼富有哲學的問題。「我是誰?」全世界每一個

人在夜深人靜時都會對著鏡子問:「我是誰?」現在讓我告訴你,你是誰……

[Ni Ranmin (improvising): May I understand more—who is Horatio now?

Li Zhutian (improvising): They knew about it long ago, Horatio is—

Li Xiuguo (interrupting in a hurry):—I am Horatio!

Li Zhutian (improvising): He is—(pointing at Li Xiuguo) Then who am I?

Li Xiuguo (improvising): Who am I? Ha! What a philosophical question. “Who

am I?” Everybody will stand in front of the mirror at the middle of the night,

asking himself: “Who am I?” Now let me tell you who you are.]112

In this scene Lee reveals a flexible “pastiche identity” and the hybrid nature of self. The scene marks out the distance which separates it from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Identification with a particular character has become impossible. A character’s self, like the author’s, dissolves into mere intertextuality and is no longer recoverable. These errors and confusions in Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s

Shamlet undermine the tragedy in Hamlet. As Corrigan suggests, at the heart of comedy we will find a condition of misery, discord, confusion. Comedies may end happily, but along the way there is nothing but trouble. The comic world is full of disturbance.113 The comic and tragic elements appear in Shamlet one after another, comparable to a musical variation. As Lee asserted in his preface to the stage production, “Those whose life attitudes are not pessimistic should not

112 Lee, Shamuleite, 191-192. 113 Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form, 8. 60

come in contact with comedy. We are actually constructing happiness on the misery of the characters.”114 Comedy and tragedy are only one step away from each other, and “there is always a successful tragedy behind a successful comedy.”115 In other words, the tragedy of the characters in Shamlet is essential to understanding its comedy. The ludicrous nature of the comic and the solemnity of the tragic are interwoven in Lee’s play. Comedy in Lee’s work is based on and caused by disharmony, chaos, disorder, and every type of dissonance and misunderstanding existing in relations between people; that is to say, the tragic and the comic in his artistic world have the same source. The negative and the positive in comic scenes are inseparably fused, and a boundary between the two cannot be drawn.116 The comic arises precisely in intercourse between people, where various types of disparity, dissonance, and misunderstanding create the grounds for its manifestation.117

Lee also adopts the play within the play as a strategy for interweaving tragedy and comedy. He restructures and reinvents Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a situation comedy with the play within the play as the narrative structure. Plays that remind us that they are play, for instance, by drawing attention to the props or by talking about the audience, as well as plays that contain the device of a play-within-a play, all tend to distance the audience from the proceedings. The internal distancing of tragedy from its tragic substance via the device of the play within the play itself constituted a comic effect. The dramaturgical strategy can have different functions within the structure of a play. Besides the rather technical function of foregrounding (mirroring and thereby highlighting an element of the outer play in the internal play) and the more philosophical function of questioning our understanding of reality by blurring the borders between the different

114 Lee, Shamuleite, 7. 115 Ibid., 15. 116 Lesley Milne, Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 50. 117 Ibid., 54. 61

levels of fiction, one of the most important functions of the play within the play is to elucidate

the same problem or the same element of a story from different perspectives represented by the

tragic and the comic.

The play within the play is manifest in a multitude of forms and constellations, and it

fulfils an equally diverse variety of tasks and functions within the performing arts. It may be

thought of as a special mode of perception that allows for different ways of presenting

perspectives. Likewise, it is also a suitable aesthetic agency for the exploration of fields of social

and historical interaction or exchange, with a special dimension in the area of intercultural

contact or conflict. It can also be seen as an artistic agency of mediation between conventional

genres, or of generic transformation, permitting shifts from one genre to another.118 The comic

and tragic elements are combined by means of the play within the play.

Lee not only frees his text from the authorial dictates of the past by crossing the voices of

Hamlet with the voices of the present fictional characters, but also with other local,

contemporary voices in real-life. The names of the actors in Shamlet are anagrams of actual

actors in Lee’s theatre troupe, with whom the audience is familiar. Thus, for instance, the real

playwright Lee Kuo-Hsiu becomes Li Xiuguo. These inverted Chinese names manifest how the

fictional characters are shadows of the actual actors. The inversion with character names does not

only create comic effects but also a definitive textual opposition to Shakespeare’s fixity. While

Shamlet portrays fragmentary elements of Shakespeare, audiences are forced to encounter both

the new adapted text and the source text as fragments. Essentially the negotiation between old

and new becomes forefront in their minds.

118 Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner, “The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives,” The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, ed. Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (New York: Rodopi, 2007), xii. 62

The stories of the characters of the Fengping Theatre Troupe also depict the chaotic

condition of operating and managing a theatre troupe in contemporary Taiwan, where the artistic environment is not sufficiently ripe. Thus, the actors in Shamlet deliver both the voices of their

dramatic roles and their own voices as Taiwanese actors. Lee connects the themes of Hamlet to

his career as a playwright, manager, director and actor. He is not interested in royal politics, but

rather investigates the dark sides of human nature—such as revenge, conspiracy, skepticism, and

mental collapse. Throughout Shamlet, the director Li Xiuguo was busy proving his talent to his

doubting wife. The members of the theatre troupe fail to communicate and unite because of their

endless disputes and conflicts. The failures in the fictitious Fengping Theatre Troupe are Lee

Kuo-Hsiu’s fantasy, but they also reflect his fear, anxiety and struggles in managing the Pingfeng

Performance Workshop in a society that devalues theatre work.119 Similarly, the sudden and frequent changes of roles in Shamlet hint at Lee’s personal “accidents” in his past productions, which cause him to realize the contingency of performance.120

In the course of interweaving the dramatic representation of Shakespeare’s characters and

their lives offstage, Lee also breaks the invisible barrier that shapes and maintains the illusion of

a stage performance. People, incidents and objects on and off stage circulate and mutually

influence and interpret one another. Stage performance thus becomes part of life.121 In Lee’s

words, “dramatic works and the reality happen together at the crossroad, and it is hard to

distinguish whether ‘drama imitates life’ or ‘life imitates drama.’”122 The actors are not just

“creative artists—” they are also a reflection of the contemporary era that the drama

119 Lee, Shamuleite, 8. 120 Alexander Huang, “Impersonation, Autobiography, and Cross-Cultural Adaptation: Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet,” Asian Theatre Journal 22.1 (2005): 128. 121 Lee, Shamuleite, 9. 122 Ibid., 5. 63

represents.123 The juxtaposition of the characters’ experience on and off stage and the interaction

between cast and crew shatter the boundary between stage and audience, between the actor's

theatrical self and his identity off stage. This dynamic rejects the illusion of stage performance as

a confined space distinct from real life experience. By “performing” the company’s rehearsals

for the audience, and the process of production and improvisation on stage, Lee reveals

“liveness” as a distinct element of artwork in two ways: its immediate, on-the-spot nature and its inseparability from life itself.124

Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet reveals that the structural multiplicity of the fragments of the

play does not create a unified production. Similar to the duel scene in the opening, the play

closes with the Fengping Theatre Troupe’s production in a disoriented and chaotic state. Unlike

works that harness the power of paradox to represent a higher truth, the fragmentary nature of

Shakespearean spin-offs embodies a contradiction that is discernible only when the group of

fragments is taken together, and it does not synthesize into a higher moment of harmony. Also

noteworthy is that in the fragments, contradictions serve to signal a profound shift in the

conception of the voice permeating the fragments. In more than one sense, that voice reveals

itself to be more than Shakespeare’s alone. Rather than relying heavily on the coherence of a

single voice, a contradiction or a “counter-speech” conjures voices other than the single, uniform voice with which the author is usually thought to speak to the readers.

Yet the fragments do more than permit one or more voices to collide: they dissolve the

coherence of the authoritative authorial voice as such. For layered over the authorial voices and

at times drowning them out, a polyphony of a much stronger kind pervades the fragments. The

plethora of ideas in the fragments is gathered into such close proximity that they begin to engage

123 Ibid., 10. 124 See Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008). 64

in conversations among themselves. In the process, the appearance of contradictions is inevitable as they are necessary to keep the discussion going. The exchanges and conversations take place in a realm that transcends authorial voices and intentions.

The question of the precise relationship in which part and whole, fragment and totality, stand in the spin-offs, is crucial to understanding the transformation of the theory of

Shakespeare’s afterlife that we witness in the fragments. The problematic character of the relationship between fragments and totality is precisely what energizes a reinterpretation of the hierarchical relationship between the “original” and its rewritings. Rather than conceiving of the rewritings of Shakespeare as something distinct from, or even opposed to, the “original” work, we might think of them as consisting of the dynamic process which involves an unpredictable movement between system and chaos. The whole would no longer reside in the “elsewhere” to which the fragments would point, but its true essence would lie in forever becoming, never being completed. Totality can be conceptualized as the very process of production and the idea of totality exhausts itself in the process of dynamic interaction. The artistic whole in Shakespearean spin-offs contains nothing but interacting fragments. We will look in vain for a ground, a point, an origin, since from the start we are dealing with a multiplicity. The fragmentation of spin-offs engineers a break with the notion of the artwork as timeless and unchanging. With the idea of a basic incompletion from the moment of creation, the fragments replace the self-enclosed artwork with an open one. This necessitates a rethinking of the notion of an artwork itself.

The Shakespearean spin-off and the genre of the fragment reverse the direction of the story of the fall of the artwork from the state of grace: it does not begin with a self-posited whole or original that disintegrates into a collection of atomized, decentralized, meaningless pieces, but posits instead that fragmentation occurs for its own sake. The totality that the fragment seeks

65

does not rely on the smooth homogeneity of the system as an organic whole but allows the

elements to interact in fluid and unexpected ways. The collision of multiple voices enables an

adaptation to address both comedy and tragedy. The concepts of the comic and the tragic overlap

and intersect, and when one considers the comic and the tragic to be perspectives rather than

stationary realms of reality, it is possible that movements between these perspectives or frames

can occur. Rather than destroying the tragic frame or ignoring a tragic event, the comic frame

enriches or alters our attitude towards and responses to a tragedy.

There remains also the possibility that an individual may move between comic and tragic

perspectives. While the tragic celebrates emotions, the comic perspective allows us to see

ourselves from the outside rather than from a self-privileging perspective. Comedy thus affords a broader perspective on events, and tragedy can be viewed from within the comic frame or vision.

The multiple voices found in the comic adaptation make this discourse uniquely capable of transcending the tragic vision, even while the tragic events are ongoing. Instead of overlooking tragedy, it rather reframes a tragic situation in order to enrich or foster a change in response to the tragedy. The comic and the tragic are previously separated by convention, so that one style could not step beyond the boundary and be applied to the subject matter that belonged to the other. The ongoing process of adaptation, however, illustrates and explains the connection between the two genres that involve or to an extent fulfill one another.

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CHAPTER 2

Humor, Translation, and the (In)visibility of Bawdy Puns

This chapter argues that adaptation and translation do not merely suppress creative energies by conforming to social and cultural norms, but also stimulate those energies as directors, translators and actors respond to and interpret the ambivalent nature of Shakespeare’s bawdy humor. In other words, translations are not only determined or shaped by, but also construct, reality in various ways. They themselves are also determinants of cultural understanding.

Sigmund Freud, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, analyzed language as a source of “Witz,” and established its relationship to the unconscious. He made an important distinction between “conceptual” and “verbal” jokes, the former “playing with thoughts” and the latter “playing with words.”1 While verbal jokes do not necessarily have any underlying irony or

piquancy, and amuse mostly through their technique, the pleasure of conceptual jokes is often in

the lifting of an inhibition or suppression.2 Under the guise of a joke, if the thought appears as

“only a joke,” people will tend not to take the aggressive element in a joke too seriously. Bawdy jokes, for example, function as a licensed rebellion, and provide the means of evading restrictions and open sources of pleasure that were once forbidden—free from reproach or sanctions.

The pleasure of the forbidden, the sense of rebellion and the experience of our lost infantile freedom of expression suggest how jokes function as a “social process.” Jokes express

1 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 138. 2 Ibid., 138. 67

censored aggressive or libidinal impulses, but are made socially acceptable by their “form,” wit

and wordplay. They thus allow the acceptable expression of sexual and aggressive tension, and

provide an escape from society’s moral restrictions. According to Freud, a fundamental conflict

exists between the incessant demands of social acceptability and instinctual urges. The rational

mores of society demand that aggressive and sexual instincts be suppressed or kept from

conscious awareness:

It is our belief that civilization and higher education have a large influence in the

development of repression, and we suppose that, under such conditions, the

psychical organization undergoes an alteration as a result of which what was

formerly felt as agreeable now seems unacceptable and is rejected with all

possible psychical force. The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that

primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by

the censorship in us, are lost to us.3

In other words, the repressive influence of society and human internal censorship prevent

certain expressions of instincts, but to the human psyche all renunciation is exceedingly difficult.

Jokes make possible the satisfaction of an instinct, whether lustful or hostile, in the face of an

obstacle that stands in its way. They help circumvent this obstacle and in that way draw pleasure

from a source that the obstacle had made inaccessible.4 While saving psychical energy, jokes can retrieve pleasure and express hostile feelings. They also offer a temporary respite from the unceasing demands of civilized life and “relieve a person from the overbearing pressure to

3 Ibid., 101. 4 Ibid., 101. 68

conform to the dictates of moral or logical order.”5 The particular function of humor as a circumvention of social rules is apparent in Shakespeare’s plays, as he fully exploited sexual humor “to communicate sexual meanings without overtly transgressing the existing social taboos.”6 With the acceptability of the surface meaning, the teller of the pun can presume

innocence by leaving the inference to the listener to connect the literal and the bawdy meanings.

Thus, challenges to the taboos of society are possible, while remaining guiltless by hiding behind

the mask of the superficial, literal meaning of the language. Culturally determined repression in a

society forbids the enjoyment of blatant obscenity, but this hindrance is circumvented through

the use of humor.7 Humorous language therefore can be described as a mask or façade half-

hiding its “tendentiousness.” These forms of verbal play draw attention to themselves in their

capacity as masks and implicitly disclose what is being masked. Obscenities that are implied

through jokes are hidden in a mask of words. They are defined as play by their context and are

thus only half-serious, half real.

In Greek tragedy, the most hysterical behavior is hidden by the mask. The actual human

facial expression might repel, whereas the mask would not.8 It enables the audience to

experience passions at an intensity that goes beyond what they might reject.9 The mask is

ambiguous. Similarly, the principles of the masks used in acting are deeply ingrained in Asia’s theatrical tradition. The Noh drama, for instance, features the mask as an integral part of a theatrical complex. It is endowed with powers of psychological expression, although the actual

5 Catherine Bates, Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud (London: Open Gate Press, 1999), 86. 6 Dirk Delabastita, There’s a Double Tongue: An Investigation into the Translation of Shakespeare’s Wordplay, with Special Reference to Hamlet (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 307. 7 R.D.V. Glasgow, Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995), 253. 8 Peter Hall, Exposed by the Mask: Form and Language in Drama (New York: Theatre Communications Group), 24. 9 Ibid., 25. 69

“facial” expression is apparently neutral. Using the mask to show a blank face no doubt makes

the viewer wonder how the actor is feeling beneath it. The neutral, nonspecific expression of the

mask allows the performer to conjure the greatest range of emotions through it, as it becomes an

evocative instrument for the spectator’s imagination. The expressive power of the mask is most

clearly tied to the actor’s inner dynamism and the ability to express emotions through the mask,

which itself does not reveal his feelings.

In the theatre and the cinema, sexuality is often framed in its aesthetic context as illusory

or just pretend.10 Bawdy language in the theatre is often involved with the mask, play, and

illusion, which precludes any general statement about the suppression or “censorship” of sexual

language in Shakespeare’s plays. Sexual innuendoes in his plays hide the subversive content

behind the characters’ verbal decorum.11 Although such innuendoes permit a glimpse of taboo,

indecency remains veiled in a harmless form, which obscures the subversive potential of the innuendoes, yet evades any censoring of the play’s language. Thus, the translation of such innuendoes does not merely involve obscuring obscenities (or directly censoring forbidden words), but also the use of language to hide and simultaneously reveal the sexual meanings embodied in the text. In all such cases, the key point is that the translator should first recognize the difference between what is said and what is meant, between the obvious verbal mask and the hidden message. As Marvin Rosenberg claims in his discussion of the translations of erotic nuances in Hamlet:

[…] one of the greatest challenges for the translator of an English Renaissance

play is to deal with words and phrases that have meanings or connotations

10 Glasgow, Madness, Masks, and Laughter, 267. 11 Ibid., 266. 70

peculiar to the time. The problem is perhaps most difficult when Shakespeare

exploits sexual innuendoes native to Elizabethan England.12

The sexual allusions in Hamlet, for instance, reflect so much of the characters under stress, and

the sexuality of the court atmosphere. However, are the translators of Shakespeare familiar

enough with the implications of Elizabethan expressions to avoid certain innuendoes? What are

the dominant presumptions surrounding Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s bawdy puns?

How can the “mask” or the disguise of sexual innuendoes be transformed in translation? The focus here is not merely on the (un)translatable sexual humor, but rather on how humor thrives through the re-imagining of existing works, and the characteristics of that humor that arise from interactions between Chinese and Western languages and cultures. Most often, puns or wordplays produce the comic atmosphere of the entire play. Thus, failure to translate

Shakespeare’s puns could also imply a cultural reluctance to present the comic dimension of the translation.

The Translation of Bawdy Humor

The term “bawdy” is often used to categorize Shakespeare’s use of sexually suggestive or humorously indecent language. Eric Partridge was the first scholar to provide a critical study of sexual double-entendres in his 1947 book Shakespeare’s Bawdy. Later, E.A.M. Colman, in The

Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (1974), pointed out that Shakespeare’s bawdy language is crucial for a thorough understanding of his works, although he cautions against the over- reading of indecent elements in Shakespeare. Colman defines the term in the opening chapter of his book:

12 Marvin Rosenberg, “Translations of Erotic Nuances in Hamlet,” The Adventures of a Shakespeare Scholar: To Discover Shakespeare’s Art (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997), 287. 71

Bawdy, as distinct from straightforward sensuality, always partakes of the comic,

whether through absurdity, grossness, or a startling ingenuity […] to be bawdy, a

piece of talk or writing has to have behind it the intention to startle or shock […]

its other aspect is the exercise of wit, and this requires that the speaker remain

partly at a distance from what he contemplates.13

The word bawdy often pertains to “an exercise of wit,” and it is often “indirect,

metaphorical or allusive.”14 Its origin is difficult to trace, but it appears to have originated from the old French word “baud,” meaning lively, merry and bold. After the transfer from French to

English in the fourteenth century, “bawd” was also applied to “prostitute” or “procuress.” The word does appear in Shakespeare’s plays—the “bawd’s house” (Measure for Measure, 2.1.76) is a whorehouse. The Chinese phrase “猥褻語” weixie yu (“indecent language”) is often used as the equivalent of “bawdy,” but similar to “licentious,” “lewd,” and “obscene,” it tends to be more critical and pejorative, and does not reveal the sense of being “humorously indecent.”15 In

Äesthetik des Hässlichen (Aesthetics of the Ugly), Karl Rosenkranz treats obscenities as

belonging to the sphere of the comic, as the whole sphere of sexual vulgarity can only be

aesthetically freed through the comic. One of the functions of the comic is to present phenomena

in their absurdity, and so to negate them. Thus, the presentation of obscenities indirectly serves a

moral purpose.16

According to Hilda Hulme’s analysis of the “less decent language” in Shakespeare’s time,

since the beginning of the early eighteenth century, “few of the English editors and critics have

13 E.A.M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974), 3. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Sunny Tien Yuk, “The Translation of Shakespeare’s Suggestive Language,” Translation Quarterly 41 (2006): 27- 28. 16 Mark William Roche, Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel (Albany: State U of New York P, 1998), 307. 72

moved freely and without constraint in their exposition of the sexual imagery and allusion of

Shakespearean art.”17 Apparently editors simply cut the indelicate lines or critics ignored them in order to hide or marginalize Shakespeare’s bawdy language. The tendency towards decorum reached one of its high points in 1818, when Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) published Family

Shakespeare, an edition which stated in its secondary title that “nothing is added to the original

text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a

family.”18 Bowdler’s omissions of Shakespearean bawdy language have made his work a piece

of literary censorship, and his surname has also been used to coin the verb to “bowdlerize,” which means to expurgate (a book or writing) by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive. Justifying his “bowdlerized” edition, Bowdler explained:

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world’s greatest dramatic poet, but regret

that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and

therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

…some defects are to be found in the writings of our immortal bard. The

language is not always faultless. Many words and expressions occur which are of

so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased […]

My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of

Shakespeare some defects which diminish their value, and at the same time to

present to the public an edition of his plays, which the parent, the guardian, and

the instructor of youth may place without fear in the hands of the pupil […].19

17 Hilda M. Hulme, “The Less Decent Language of the Time,” Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language: Some Problems of Word Meaning in the Dramatic Text (London: Longmans, 1977), 91. 18 See Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (Boston: Godine, 1992), 63-64. 19 Thomas Bowdler, “Preface,” The Family Shakespeare (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1883). 73

Later in the twentieth century, greater frankness about sexual matters rendered Dr. Bowdler’s

efforts absurd, although the rewriting of Shakespeare’s plays to fit in with changing attitudes was

the norm at the time. Apart from Bowdler, other expurgators included Charles and Mary Lamb,

who expunged the bawdy language from their tales of Shakespeare, while John Hows removed

the comic figure Falstaff from Henry IV.20 On the other hand, criticisms attempted to protect

Shakespeare’s reputation by suggesting that he was only obliged to include the bawdy elements

so as to gratify the vulgar stratum of his audience.21 Some even proposed that the objectionable

passages were only interpolated by actors after Shakespeare’s death.

The presence of sexual and scatological themes, which are widespread throughout

Shakespeare’s plays, is likely to pose rather difficult and complicated issues for translators. How would the translators have dealt with the many and sometimes implicit bawdy allusions, especially when the sense of implicitness becomes even harder to differentiate with the increase in temporal and cultural distance? As Timothy Billings reminds us:

[…] the Shakespearean text is, afterall, often quite opaque and foreign even to

native English speakers whose experience of the plays is not unlike a kind of

translation itself in the struggle over literal interpretation, contextual

connotations.22

The transmission of bawdy humor across cultures is of particular relevance to the current

study of translation, which tends to focus instead on the constructed subject, the translator, and

the variety of norms that work on the translator’s decisions. Norms, as Gideon Toury defines

them in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995), imply:

20 Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy, 103. 21 Robert Bridges, The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare’s Drama (New York: Haskell House, 1966), 2. 22 Timothy Billings, “Glossing Shakespeare in Chinese Translation: Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao, and 暴風雨 (The Tempest),” Shakespeare Yearbook 17: Shakespeare and Asia (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 278. 74

[…] the translation of general values or ideas shared by a community […] into

performance instructions appropriate for and applicable to particular situations,

specifying what is prescribed and forbidden as well as what is tolerated and

permitted in a certain behavioural dimension.23

They are shared values and ideas on how to act, think, and to translate appropriately in a certain context and for a certain group of people. Normative structures are acquired by the individual during the process of socialization. Every intercultural actor appears as a complex product of multiple processes of socialization disseminated in various institutions. Attitudes, perceptions and practices (of translation) are linked to the individual’s dynamic and varying internalizations of the norms and structures of the source and target fields. They are the result of an interplay of multiple “habituses,” which influence an individual’s decision.24 Translators invest their energies in a creative search for expression for their own contemporary readers and audiences, particularly in dealing with culturally specific elements such as allusions, imagery, wordplays and jokes. The examination of bawdy language and its translation from Shakespeare thus reveals, in complex ways, the particular challenges for translators.

The following analysis is an exploration of how the bawdy innuendoes in Shakespeare’s works have been received in the Chinese cultural context. In 1903, the plays of Shakespeare first became known to Chinese readers, although they were not translated from the originals, but from a selection of stories based on Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. The complete

Lamb’s Tales rendered by Lin Shu and Wei Yi was published one year later in 1904. Tian Han, a

23 Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1995), 55. 24 Reine Meylaerts, “Translators and (their) Norms: Towards a Sociological Construction of the Individual,” Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008), 93-94. 75

playwright and translator, was the first who attempted to translate an entire Shakespearean play into modern vernacular Chinese. His Chinese translations of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet were published in Shanghai in 1922 and 1924 respectively. In the 1930s, three of the prominent translators of the time, Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shiqiu and Cao Weifeng who tried to render the complete works of Shakespeare and their translations greatly contributed to the translation of

Shakespeare and influenced later renditions. Zhu Shenghao managed to translate thirty-one and a half of the plays and his project was edited with the addition of his unfinished works by other translators. The complete edition was then published in 1978 by the People’s Literature

Publishing House. Liang, on the other hand, began his translations in 1931 and did not finish the complete plays until 1967. His translations were published by the Far East Publishing Company in Taiwan. A new translation of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in poetic form, edited by

Fang Ping, was published in 2000.

Some of the Chinese translators reshaped Shakespeare’s works, omitting the sexual innuendoes which pervade the plays. This translation strategy is particularly noticeable in the work of some early Chinese translators of Shakespeare. One of them was Zhu Shenghao (1912-

1944), who is not only the most prominent Chinese translator of Shakespeare, but also the one who, by far, filtered the largest number of bawdy innuendoes in translations. Zhu was a young editor who worked in the Shanghai World Publishing House after graduating from the Zhejiang

University in 1933. In 1935, at the age of twenty-four, he set himself the goal of rendering all of

Shakespeare’s works and viewed this as a “patriotic act,” because many world masterpieces at

the time were not available in Chinese. Zhu suffered from poverty and sickness throughout his

life and his original manuscripts were destroyed twice in the Sino-Japanese War, so he had to

rewrite much of his translated work. He also worked under very difficult conditions for about

76

nine years, until he was bedridden and died of tuberculosis in 1944. Six and a half plays and the

sonnets remained untranslated. Zhu’s renderings were published by The World Book Store in

1947, three years after his death.

Most scholars suggest that all of these omissions by translators reveal the cultural norms

that prohibit inclusion of the sexual innuendoes in Shakespeare as they were written. Fang Ping

(1921-), for example, attributes the suppression of sexual language in these translations to the

socio-cultural environment in China. He suggests that the cultural norms in China inhibit the use

of sexually connotative language. Translators sometimes need to avoid using terms that are unacceptable to the receiving culture, although they might actually be aware of the sexual connotations.25 But what are the other factors affecting the choices of different Chinese translators? Their preferences may also be associated with their treatment of humor and puns.

The omission or suppression of some of the bawdy humor occurs because they are thought to be merely “a play on words” and believed to be trivial and thus irrelevant to the overall meaning of the plays. Bawdy elements are often associated with the clowns in the comic plots, having entertainment value but no essential bearing on the action. Accordingly, the loss of a sense of familiarity with some of Shakespeare’s bawdy humor has frequently caused their alteration or omission to ensure the clarity of the translations in the target culture, since the allusions are alien to Chinese audiences. Translators not only need to resolve uncertainties within the text when composing intelligible sentences in the target language, but also to render ambiguities that may be part of the literary design.

25 Fang Ping, “Profundity in Vulgarity: Contemplation of a Shakespeare Translator” Cong cusu zhong jian bodajingshen: yige shaju yizhe de sikao 從粗俗中見博大精深: 一個莎劇譯者的思考, China Shakespeare Yearbook Zhongguo shaxue nianjian 中國莎學年鑑 (Changchun: Northeast Normal UP, 1995), 21. 77

Norms, the Translator, and the Tacit Censor

To discuss such restrictions on the translators, concepts of censorship seem to be useful in the sense that they not only refer to the open repression of undesirable elements of speech (by an authoritarian third party), but also include the “preemptive operations of norms” before people begin to speak or write at all. Censorship in translation does not arise if a literary work has been banned outright. More interesting, therefore, are cases where a text is allowed in, only to be subtly restrained by the translators. These cases illustrate instances of “regulation” of communication, which is typical of censorship; and in the case of translation, all originals are open to “censorship” in the sense that “their authority is hostage to the contexts in which they are consumed rather than to the ones in which they are produced.”26 Rather than radical opposition between the censor and the censored, the “softer” forms of censorship in translation involve the construction and negotiation of small and subtle differences that make the text desirable in a new cultural context.

While Chinese translators may be constrained by the local cultural context, it is also the translator himself who modifies the text in the course of “rewriting” it. The translator in some way “exercises an ‘interventionist power’ and makes an infinite number of choices during the translational process of the creative rewriting of a source text.”27 The “censoring” of sexual innuendoes in Shakespeare is a very ambiguous act, particularly when we consider the nature of its “masquerade.” Censorship can be considered the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing, and constitutes an external constraint on what a writer or translator can publish or re(write). “Self-censorship,” on the other hand, is an individual ethical struggle between one’s

26 See Michael Holquist, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” PMLA 109 (1994): 18. 27 Katja Krebs, “Anticipating Blue Lines: Translational Choices as Sites of (Self)-Censorship: Translating for the British Stage Under the Lord Chamberlain,” Modes of Censorship and Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media, ed. Francesca Billiani (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2006), 173. 78

self and the context. While translators are subject to state censorship, they more often contribute

to the process of censorship itself, because they tend to censor themselves in order to produce

rewritings that are “acceptable” from both social and personal perspectives. More often than not, it is the translators themselves who consider their options and accordingly, exercise a series of self-censorships, which do not depend upon forceful imposition by an external institution, but rather upon ideological, aesthetic or cultural circumstances.

The translation and rewriting of sexual language in Shakespeare is a case in point, which very often depends on social and political forces, but is also an area of personal struggle. It is in fact a struggle to reach a compromise between one’s ethics and society’s multiple constraints. In other words, just as any translation is a negotiation, “self-censorship” in response to cultural sensitivities can be understood as a negotiation process with the social context. The translator’s reaction to the threat of censorship is seldom one of passive submission. Here we may consider

Judith Butler’s discussion of “implicit censorship” in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the

Performative (1997). In referring to how subjects are produced by discursive constraints of their speech, Butler suggests that:

Here the question is not whether certain kinds of speech uttered by a subject are

censored, but how a certain operation of censorship determines who will be a

subject depending on whether the speech of such a candidate for subjecthood

obeys certain norms governing what is speakable and what is not.28

Butler describes how the construction of subjects through implicit censorship works by

employing the term “foreclosure,” which allows censorship to be seen as operating as a

28 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 133. 79

“preemptive operation of a norm” rather than “the censorious act of repression.”29 In order to

produce intelligible discourse, speaking subjects become “tacit censors,” even though they

themselves might not be aware of the mechanisms of “foreclosure.”30 In other words, the

subjects internalize the limitations of discourse, as Butler suggests:

Something is barred, but no subject bars it; the subject emerges as the result of the

bar itself. That barring is an action that is not exactly performed on a pregiven

subject, but performed in such a way that the subject himself is performatively

produced as a result of this primary cut. The remainder or what is cut out

constitutes the unperformable in all performativity.31

Translation is in part structured through a process of selection. The translators are

“censored” in a way through the forms of language use and discursive practice that they have

internalized.32 Bourdieu’s essay “Censorship and the Imposition of Form” in Language and

Symbolic Power also examines the constitutive level of censorship and the mechanisms of

internalization which took hold. He asserts that the more effective the process of regulation and

repression, the less apparent it becomes, as it begins to appear as the natural way of the world.

Censorship is thus something that happens before the translators start to render the text, which

reveals their “tacit complicity:”

The metaphor of censorship […] is the structure of the field itself which governs

expression by governing both access to expression and the form of expression,

29 Ibid., 138. 30 Elisabeth Gibbels, “Translators, the Tacit Censors,” Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cormac Ó Chuilleanáin, and David Parris (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), 72. 31 Butler, Excitable Speech, 138. 32 Gibbels, “Translators, the Tacit Censors,” 73. 80

and not some legal proceeding which has been specially adapted to designate and

repress the transgression of a kind of linguistic code […]

Censorship is never quite as perfect or as invisible as when each agent has nothing

to say apart from what he is objectively authorized to say: in this case he does not

even have to be his own censor because he is, in a way, censored once and for all,

through the forms of perception and expression that he has internalized and which

impose their form on all his expressions […]33

The indirect form of silencing polices the mind rather than its product. Censorship

establishes the practices that define us as social subjects. Hence the concept transmutes from an

external, repressive force to an exercise of power that makes individual subjects and governs the

form of expression. While histories of censorship used to delineate official, legal suppression of expression, here the focus and analysis of power is on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination. The “new censorship,” inspired by the works of Bourdieu, Foucault, and other scholars, has widened the concept of censorship beyond its conventional boundaries. The relationship of censorship is linked to cultural selection processes, economic forces, communicative norms and other forms of control. The results seem to implicitly blur clear-cut

distinctions between different kinds of power—the suppression of speech caused by legal action,

with that caused by the market, or by the institution of criticism or by other forces.34

Translation is characterized by the tension between expression and censorship. Self-

censorship in translation is not necessarily a conscious process whereby the translator lists the

pros and cons of including or excluding a possibly contentious passage. With the nature of the

33 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 138. 34 Robert Post, “Censorship and Silencing,” Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 4. 81

process, as an indirect form of silencing, even the statements made by the translators concerning

the exercise of self-censorship in their own creations might not be objective and reliable.

Humor as Circumvention

Sexually suggestive passages were a part of the theatrical convention in England at the time Shakespeare wrote for the stage, so the audience expected them. Hilda Hulme and Robert

Bridges relate the use of “less decent language” to the expectations of the audience of the time, suggesting that Shakespeare was obliged to include bad jokes and obscenity so as to suit his audience.35 The references to sex in Shakespeare’s works usually appear in an ambiguous form,

mostly through wordplay. This form of bawdy humor relates closely to censorship and

Elizabethan disguise mechanisms, which functioned as a kind of circumvention of the

prohibition of coarse language on stage.36 Taboo expressions, transformed by means of a

phonetic disguise, become seemingly innocuous variants.

A spectacular series of “double speak” occurred in response to the Puritan injunctions

against “Profanity on the Stage.” Explicit sexual language would have broken any restrictions

against indecency and profanity on the Elizabethan stage. The main law governing profanity

spoken on the stage, the “Act to Restraine Abuses of Players,” was instituted after the reign of

Elizabeth in 1606, which states that:

[…] any person doe or shall in any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame, or

Pageant jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy name of God or of Christ

35 Hulme, “The Less Decent Language of the Time,” 91; Bridges, The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare’s Drama, 2. 36 Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 12. 82

Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie […] shall forfeite for every such

Offence by him or them committed Tenne pounds.37

The response to the Act of 1606 was a marked increase in “minced oaths” which avoided direct

reference to foul or profane language. The circumvention of Elizabethan restraints on coarse

language was achieved by a complex variety of coded expressions on the stage, which could not

easily be pinned down to any one meaning.

As Annabel Patterson suggests, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the threat of

censorship often led authors to employ a technique “in which the indeterminacy inveterate to

language was fully and knowingly exploited by authors and readers alike.”38 The technique was

eventually accepted and recognized by readers and even by the censors themselves, and exerted a

lasting influence on literary language. The balance that a text has to strike between placating the

censor and signaling to the readers that it contains hidden messages is delicate. But in any case

ambiguity becomes “a creative and necessary instrument,” while at the same time interpretation

was reinvented and expanded.39 Literary writers attempt to circumvent the censor by employing

aesthetic devices to “smuggle” contentious ideas into the space between the lines and thus past

the censor.40

In Debora Shuger’s Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, she examines the issue of

interpretation and its relation to the censorship regulations in the Tudor-Stuart period (1485-

1714). At the time, the English defamation law operated with the hermeneutic rule known as mitior sensus, which stipulated that if an expression can be interpreted in both a defamatory and

37 Ibid., 103. 38 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984), 18. 39 Ibid., 18. 40 Beate Müller, Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 5. 83

an innocent sense, the milder sense should be considered.41 If someone was accused as a “poxy

knave,” the charge against the slanderer would be dismissed because the word “pox” could refer

either to the “French pox” or “smallpox,” and the better, milder sense was taken. This use of

hermeneutics in the mitior sensus rule, as Shuger points out, is closely connected with how the

writers disguised their use of offensive language in literature by employing literary techniques in

order to circumvent the restraints of the period. Other strategies they employed include

rearranging the political and satirical plays, changing the setting to a distant land to conceal their

historical account, or the use of romantic stories to portray political relationships, thus creating a

dilemma for the censor. The mitior sensus also regulated language and literature in the interest of

honor, as the rule required authors to criticize in a roundabout fashion, and by doing so, they

respected the dignity of those being criticized or thought to be criticized.42

Using jokes and humorous wordplays to allude to sex can prevent feelings of shame or

embarrassment when the expressions represent taboo subjects. With wordplays, the writer (or the

“joker”) manages to say something forbidden without offending the censor and the listener. As

Freud notes, we could never bring ourselves to laugh at coarse “smut.” Ordinarily, we would feel

ashamed, or it would seem disgusting. Thus we can only laugh at such forbidden or distasteful

subjects when a joke has come to our help.43 Much the same can be said for Shakespeare’s

humor. It would be improper to use the exact word for “a piece of excrement.” It would be a

violation of the standards of propriety. But when, for instance, the French physician Doctor

Caius’ pronounces “third” as “turd” in The Merry Wives of Windsor— “If there be one or two, I

41 Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensitivity: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006), 183. 42 Ibid., 186. 43 Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 101. 84

shall make-a the turd (3.3.215) —” the expression becomes a “Freudian slip,” a malapropism, a

mixing of similar words with different meanings.

Writers under conditions of censorship of all kinds became particularly dependent upon humorous and ironic modes of expression, and it is through such humorous ironic dissimulations that honesty reveals itself. The strategies of dissimulation, once set in motion, in turn develop an impetus of their own. In other words, self-censorship can develop its own dynamic, detach from the external conditions out of which it initially arose, and constitute itself as an autonomous condition of writing.44 Such ambiguity can enrich a play and censorship can actually mould

composition. Censorship, in this way, becomes a potent external force that interacts with creative

consciousness.45 While self-censorship tends to limit the writer or translator’s expression, at the

same time it could possibly have a creative effect. Such is the case of self-censorship in modern

Chinese fiction as well: in some cases, the boundaries of the writer’s imagination were restricted,

while in others a textual subtlety was contrived that allowed multiple interpretations of the text.46

Humor as Intervention

According to Freud’s theory, the wit and wordplay of a joke make a taboo expression

socially acceptable and provide a respite from the moral restrictions of society. But ironically,

when Shakespeare’s bawdy jokes are transplanted to another culture, the translators strive to

eliminate the “form” of the jokes. The most common strategy, adopted by Chinese translators, is

to select the superficial or innocent meaning of the pun and obscure the underlying bawdy

44 Michael G. Levine, Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis (London: The John Hopkins UP, 1994), 45. 45 Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority:’ Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990), 214. 46 See Bonnie S. Mc Dougall, “Censorship and Self-Censorship in Contemporary Chinese Literature,” After the Event: Human Rights and Their Future in China, ed. Susan Whitfield (London: The Wellsweep Press, 1993), 73-90. 85

meaning. Even when certain bawdy meanings convey the predominant sense of the pun, which

refers to the first meaning that comes to mind, translators choose to feature the innocent meaning.

One example is Mistress Quickly’s ludicrous misuse of the word “erection” when she means

“direction” in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is a typical malapropism that plays on the

phonological similarity between two words.47 Zhu Shenghao adhered to presenting the innocent

meaning of the wordplay:

Mistress Quickly: She does so take on with her men; they mistook

their erection (3.5.38-39).

她太相信她那兩個僕人啦，誰想得到他們竟會誤會了她的意思。48

[Mistress Quickly: She trusts her two servants too much. Who would have

thought that they actually misunderstood her?]

Quite a number of syphilitic puns are also neutralized, if not excised, by the translators. A

common Elizabethan term alluding to the effects of syphilis is “burn.”49 For instance, when

Dromio quibbles about the syphilitic nature of prostitutes in The Comedy of Errors:

Dromio of Syracuse: It is written, they appear to men like angels of light;

light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light

wenches will burn. Come not near her. (4.3.53-55)

“Light wenches” refers to women of loose morals, or prostitutes, who will “burn” a man

with venereal disease. The colloquialism “burn,” which is widespread in Elizabethan England,

47 Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London: Athlone Ltd, 1997), 116; Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London: Routledge, 2001), 101. 48 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor Wensha de feng liu niangr men 溫莎的風流娘兒們, trans. Zhu Shenghao (Taipei: World Bookstore, 1996), 112. 49 Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, 186; Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 59-60. 86

implies syphilitic infection. However, the “burning” that alludes to the transmission of a venereal

disease simply disappeared in the translations of Zhu:

她是個母夜叉，扮做婊子迷人。不要走近她的身邊，她身上有火。50

[Dromio of Syracuse: She is a hag, pretending to be a whore to infatuate people.

Don’t go near her, there is fire on her body.]

Omission is frequently employed in Zhu Shenghao’s works, which to the fullest extent suppressed references to sex. Certainly, in some cases, the translator may simply not be aware of

the bawdy/slang meaning of the terms. Such situations draw attention to the complex of

knowledge components which make up the translator’s competence.51

Zhu’s translations have received critical acclaim for their elegance and fluency. But one of the major disadvantages of his translations is that he did not faithfully render a large number of Shakespeare’s bawdy puns. Zhu’s work retained sexually suggestive passages relating to the

essentials of the main narratives, but discarded those comparatively non-essential digressions,

thought unimportant or irrelevant to the main plots. Omissions on the macro-level were mainly

the bawdy humor of the comic characters—one of the major examples being Mercutio in Romeo

and Juliet. Mercutio’s jokes can be taken as the most offensive lines in Romeo and Juliet, which

is considered arguably one of the bawdiest among all of Shakespeare’s plays.52 In Act Two, after

the masked ball held at the Capulet’s house, both Mercutio and Benvolio went in search of

50 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors Cuowu de xiju 錯誤的喜劇, trans. Zhu Shenghao (Taipei: World Bookstore, 1996), 80. 51 Albrecht Neubert, “Theory and Practice of Translation Studies Revisited: 25 Years of Translator Training in Europe,” Investigating Translation: Selected Papers from the 4th International Congress on Translation, Barcelona, 1998, ed. Allison Beeby, Doris Ensinger, and Marisa Presas (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000), 22. 52 Richard Burt, Shakespeare After Mass Media (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 71; Nicholas S. Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), 88. 87

Romeo. Then, using the guise of “invoking Rosaline” to “conjure up” the absent Romeo,

Mercutio uses a series of sexual double entendres:

This cannot anger him. ’Twould anger him

To raise a spirit in his mistress’ circle

Of some strange nature, letting it there stand

Till she had laid it and conjured it down;

That were some spite. My invocation

Is fair and honest, in his mistress’ name

I conjure only but to raise up him […]

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.

Now will he sit under a medlar tree

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit

As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.

Oh, Romeo, that she were, oh, that she were

An open-arse, and thou a pop’ring pear. (2.1.24-30, 34-39)

Mercutio’s sexually abusive words and phrases containing insinuations of genitals and copulation, together with other of his carnal speeches (including 2.1.23-42, 2.3.50-92, 2.3.122-

131) were omitted by Zhu. As such, the image of Mercutio is almost invisible in Zhu’s translation. Apart from Mercutio’s bawdy humor, a lengthy exchange between the Syracusian

Dromio and Antipholus (2.2.71-88) who joke about the common effects of syphilis in The

Comedy of Errors, was also omitted by Zhu:

Syr.Ant: Why is Time such a niggard of hair,

being, as it is, so plentiful an excrement?

88

Syr.Dro: Because it is a blessing that he bestows on

beasts, and what he hath scanted men in hair he hath

given them in wit.

Syr.Ant: Why, but there’s many a man hath

more hair than wit.

Syr.Dro: Not a man of those but he hath the wit to

lose his hair.

Syr.Ant: Why, thou didst conclude hairy men

plain dealers, without wit.

Syr.Dro: The plainer dealer, the sooner lost. Yet he

loseth it in a kind of jollity. (2.2.71-88)

Zhu deleted nearly fifty lines of the comic dialogue. There are also large-scale omissions of jokes related to venereal disease in Measure for Measure, when Lucio and two other young gentlemen are exchanging wisecracks in a vulgar tone. About twenty lines were deleted by Zhu

(1.2.29-55). Similarly, in Troilus and Cressida, the voice of Pandarus in the final soliloquy, addressed to all “traders in flesh,” faded in Zhu’s translation (5.10.45-56). Bilingual comic scenes, associated with a series of bawdy connotations, were deleted as well. In order to circumvent laws against profanity on the Elizabethan stage, Shakespeare was “adept at using foreign language as a vehicle for obscene puns.”53 For example, the language lesson in The

Merry Wives of Windsor, similar to the grammar lesson in Henry V, 3.4.22-51, is a scene which

used multilingualism to create a context for sexual humor:

Evans: Show me now, William, some declensions of

53 Hughes, Swearing, 107. 89

your pronouns.

William: Forsooth, I have forgot.

Evans: It is qui, que, quod. If you forget your qui’s,

your quae’s and your quod’s, you must be

preeches. Go your ways and play; go. (4.1.69-74)

Qui’s, quae’s, quod’s are pronounced as “keys, case, cods” in Latin, with “keys” being a euphemism for “penis,” “case” a term for “vagina,” and “cods” slang for “testicles.”54 Zhu removed sixty lines from the grammar-lesson scene (4.1.14-85). On some occasions, most noticeably in the translation of Liang Shiqiu, sexual connotations are often explained in annotations. Liang took up the task of translating Shakespeare’s works in 1931, when he was invited by Hu Shi, who was the Chairman of the Translation Committee of the China

Educational and Cultural Foundation, to be part of the committee (other members include Wen

Yiduo, Xu Zhimo, Zhen Dongbo and Ye Gongchao) and participate in a sizeable Shakespearean translation project. But the actual situation deviated from their initial plans as one of the members Xu Zhimo died accidentally in a plane crash and the others refused to take part in the project. Liang was then the only translator left to complete the task. In his translation, most of the explanatory notes clarify the double or multiple meanings embedded in the bawdy puns, and in some cases, Liang would cite references related to the commentaries of the Western critical editions, such as in the following example:

Mercutio: […] for this driveling is like a great natural, that runs lolling up and

down to hide his bauble in a hole.

Benvolio: Stop here, stop here.

54 Maurice Charney, Shakespeare on Love and Lust (New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 2000), 193. 90

Mercutio: Thou desirest me to stop in my tale against the hair.

Benvolio: Thou wouldst else have made thy tale large.

Mercutio: O, thou art deceived; I would have made it short: for I was

Come to the whole depth of my tale; and meant indeed to occupy

the argument no longer. (2.3.92-99)

Liang Shiqiu:

墨:因為一個一把鼻涕一把淚的情人,實在是像一個大傻瓜,伸著舌頭東竄西竄

的想把他的那根棍子(20)藏在一個洞裡。

班:停止罷,停止罷。

墨:你想要我說到一半就強勉的停止住。

班:否則你又要胡說八道了。

墨:阿! 你錯了;我正要結束;因為我已經深入到底,不想再搞下去了(21)。

註釋:

(20): 棍子, 原文 bauble, 即 the Fool’s sceptre, 宮廷弄臣照例手持的一根棍。有

相關的猥褻竟義。

(21): 原文to occupy the argument no longer, 按occupy一字系相關語。“有

‘copulate’ (交媾) 的意思, 參看亨利四節下篇二幕四景 160-2 (Hosley)”。55

[Mo: …a lover with a snotty and teary face is really like a big fool, who stretches

his tongue, scurrying here and there, wishing to hide his rod (20) in a hole.

Ban: Stop it, stop it.

55 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Shashibiya quanji 莎士比亞全集, trans. Liang Shiqiu (Hailaer: Nei menggu wenhua chubanshe, 1996), 415. 91

Mo: You want me to stop unwillingly in the middle of my speech?

Ban: If not, you are going to talk nonsense again.

Mo: Ah! You are wrong; I am almost done; because I have already reached the

deepest level, and I don’t want to carry on anymore (21).

Footnotes:

(20): Source text “bauble,” which means “the Fool’s scepter,” a rod held by the

courtier. With a related obscene meaning.

(21): Source text “to occupy the argument no longer.” With a meaning of

“copulate.” Please refer to Henry IV, Act 2, Scene 4, 160-2 (Hosley).]

As in Liang’s case, a translator might write longwinded explanations and interpret the sexual puns in a passage, but most often the humorous effect disappears, as the jokes are made too explicit for the intended readers. Annotations for puns and jokes can be meaningful to researchers, actors or directors, but not to target audiences who watch a production. Unlike readers who can reread a word or phrase several times if necessary, a theatre audience has no such chance and must immediately perceive the meaning of the pun to respond to its humor.

Footnotes are therefore of little value in rendering jokes in a play intended for performance.

Superficially, these comic characters in the plays seem to appear merely as farcical interludes and, since they are not essential to the main plot, do not significantly influence the overall impact of Shakespeare’s plays. The main plot could, in fact, proceed uninterrupted, without the bawdy exchange of these marginal characters. Zhu, therefore, reduced and removed the sexual jokes of these stage “entertainers” so that they would not offend Chinese audiences.

The humorous language, together with the suggestive lines, were simplified or omitted, as Zhu

92

believed that “omissions at this particular level would not necessarily affect the overall aim or

the identity of the source text.”56

Zhu considered the sexual jokes he omitted to be “verbal jokes,” which are merely a play

on words and serve no particular aim, rather than jokes that have a purpose. However, the

consequence of such omissions is not simply a loss of the play’s humorous elements. The loss of bawdy jokes in Zhu’s translations, which seem irrelevant to the overall identity of the plays, negatively influences the underlying themes of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, the omission of Mercutio’s bawdy jokes from Zhu’s translation of Romeo and Juliet contributed to a misrepresentation of the main theme of the play. Within the play the hyperbole of love is often counter-pointed or balanced by the cynicism and obscenity of the supporting characters. The creation of Mercutio as an anti-lyric character is therefore not to attack but rather to support the love theme of the play. With the loss of Mercutio’s sexual jokes, romantic love between the male and female protagonists moves into a remote idealistic plane, broken by the human reality of their passion and becomes “a mere dream.” Zhu’s omission of the jokes which to him were seemingly arbitrary, unrelated to plot details and frequently thought to perform solely as the function of “comic relief,” to a great extent interferes with the play’s theme development. In addition, bawdy humor was also used as a significant element of characterization.57 As E.A.M.

Colman suggests in his analysis of the dramatic function of Shakespeare’s bawdy: “for

characters like Falstaff, Pompey or Lucio, strip them of their indecency and they will virtually

56 Zhu Hongda and Wu Jiemin, Biography of Zhu Shenghao Zhu shenghao zhuan 朱生豪傳 (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1989), 129. 57 Hughes, Swearing, 108. 93

cease to exist.”58 The result of the omission of bawdy humor in the Chinese translations of

Shakespeare’s plays has therefore weakened the delineation of his characters.

The cultural norms that restrict descriptions of sex are also revealed in stage

performances. In the Chinese productions of Shakespeare in the 1980s, hugging and kissing, and

speaking coarse words on stage received strong criticism. The Merchant of Venice, for example,

which was staged by the Chinese Youth Art Theatre and directed by Zhang Qihong in 1980,

adopted Fang Ping’s translation in The New Complete Works of Shakespeare (2000). The

performance was a success, but unexpectedly, a cadre’s letter was published in the Beijing

Evening Paper on September 7th, 1980, criticizing elements of this comedy as being contrary to public morals and harmful to the atmosphere of society—citing the fact that the male and female protagonists hugged and kissed in public. Another letter, published on the 13th of September,

criticized the stage dialogue of the comedy as earthy and unspeakable.59

In He Wenhui’s adaptation of Hamlet, Sword of Vengeance (1977), he did not reveal the

overtones of desire in Gertrude’s character presentation. In translating the dialogues between

Hamlet and the Queen, in considering both the Chinese cultural atmosphere and the need to

reduce the amount of text in translation, he omitted the lines that focus on lust, but preserved the

speeches of the Prince that accuse his uncle of his crime and conspiracy. In Act Three, for

example, Hamlet is on the edge of hysteria and goes to his mother in the closet. The Queen asks

Hamlet why he is so violently mad. Hamlet tells her that it is her sexual passion that has driven

the memories of the King from her mind and removed her human morality:

Queen: What have I done that thou dar’st wag thy tongue

In noise so rude against me?

58 Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, 64. 59 Tien, “The Translation of Shakespeare’s Suggestive Language,” 64; Fang, “Profundity in Vulgarity,” 20. 94

[…]

Hamlet: […] O Shame! Where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn,

And reason panders will.

Queen: O Hamlet, speak no more!

Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul […] (3.4.38-89)

He Wenhui’s adaptive translation is quoted below. To provide a comparative context, I have also included the translation of Liang Shiqiu, who adopted a more “literal” approach in rendering Shakespeare’s plays:

He Wenhui:

后: 我究竟犯了什麼重罪,你的語氣要這樣嚴厲?

……

桓: 那我就希望這把刀能夠把你的罪惡全部割出來,使你不要沾沾自喜地嫁給

一個惡貫滿盈的殺人犯,一個戴起冠冕的跳梁小丑,一個盜國篡位的鼠竊狗

偷。

后:別說了!別說了!我求你!

[Queen: Why do you speak with such a harsh tone? What crimes have I

committed?

95

[…]

Hamlet: I hope that this sword can cut out all your crimes, so that you won’t be

satisfied marrying a murderer who cannot be tolerated by Heaven, a clown who

wears a crown, a thief like a dog who usurps the throne of the King.

Queen: Stop it! Stop it! Please!]

Liang Shiqiu:

后:我做了什麼事,你敢於鼓弄唇舌,這樣狂慢的對我說話?

……

哈: 啊可恥!你的廉恥安在?造反的惡魔呀,如其你能鑽到老婦的骨髓裡面去作

亂,那麼對於火焰般的青年,貞操只好算做蠟,要在那火焰裡熔化了罷;既然寒

霜都可以呼呼的燃燒起來,理性都可以做情慾的龜鴇,那麼青春情不自禁的時

候,更不必講什麼廉恥了。

后:哦哈姆雷特, 別再多說了;你已使得我的眼睛轉到我的靈魂深處……60

[Queen: What have I done, so that you dare to speak to me so frivolously?

Hamlet: O! Shameful! Where is your sense of honor? O rebellious devil, if you

can revolt in the bones of an old woman, then to the flaming youth, virtue can

only be wax and be melted in the flame. If the frost can be burnt and reason can

be the lust of a pimp, then honor and shame are not necessary in the

uncontrollable desire of youth.

Queen: O Hamlet, don’t speak anymore; you have already turned my eyes to my

inner soul…]

60 William Shakespeare, Four Great Tragedies Si da beiju 四大悲劇, trans. Liang Shiqiu (Taipei: Far East Book Company, 1999), 182-186. 96

He Wenhui’s translation reshapes the Queen as a really tragic character. At the end, not being able to stop the murder from happening, she drinks the poisoned wine for her son and atones for her crimes. When He Wenhui was rehearsing the performance in Beijing in 2009, he was impressed by one of the co-workers, who believed that the Queen had her own grievances and was only compelled to marry Claudius in order to protect the right of inheritance of her son.

The image of Gertrude has therefore become more affecting and forgiving, with the veiling of sensuality and other adjustments that have been made to the character. In the particular Chinese context, the desire and lust of Gertrude are seen to be contradictory to the motherly tendencies she displays, and to her relationship with Hamlet.

While the cultural taboo might be powerful for explaining why a Chinese translator suppresses Shakespeare’s bawdy language, it is not necessarily the sole determining factor that contributes to this minimization. Instead, the expurgation closely relates to the technicality and

treatment of jokes. The implications of the examples quoted earlier is that omissions on the

macro-level in Shakespeare’s plays consisted mainly of the bawdy puns spoken by the jesters,

the multilingual sexual humor in the “grammar scenes,” and jokes alluding to the symptoms and

treatment of venereal disease. These elements have not only been deleted or diluted in Chinese

translated texts but have also been absent in some of the stage performances. However, the

reason for the absence of these elements goes beyond the avoidance of offensive language.

A brief discussion of Ying Ruocheng’s treatment of sexual humor in Measure for

Measure in the following section illustrates the point. Ying’s translation, entitled 請君入甕

Qingjun ruweng (Please Step into the Furnace), was rendered specifically for the stage. The play,

presented at the Peking’s People’s Art Theatre from April to June in 1981, was translated and

directed by Ying Ruocheng, with Toby Robertson as visiting director. Ying had worked in

97

accordance with the target requirements of theatrical expediency, thus retaining any constitutive features that might be effective on the stage. As an actor and director with extensive experience in stage acting, he was thus consciously aware that crowds at the Elizabethan theatre were made up of common people, or even illiterate people. As such, the plays of Shakespeare were not intended to be studied or appreciated by great scholars, and therefore should be admired by scholars and laymen alike.61

Bearing in mind the true nature of his audiences, Ying therefore apparently represented the coarse language of his stage dialogue, particularly the suggestive speeches of the characters.

In Measure for Measure, most of the bawdy references are associated with clowns and occur almost exclusively in the brothel-keepers subplot.62 In order to distinguish the coarse language of the low-life characters from the formality of the courtly characters’ speech, Ying used the colloquial Beijing dialect for the ordinary characters but classical Chinese for the speeches of the

Duke, Claudio and Isabella. According to Carolyn Wakeman, Ying’s translation of the play

“captured with astonishing effectiveness in the idiom of the Peking streets, the pungency and bawdiness of Shakespeare’s punning humor.”63 However, many translations of bawdy puns did not appear in Ying’s performance texts. In the performance of his rendition of Measure for

Measure (1981), all the scenes in the original play are preserved, but sixty-two different passages totaling over 500 lines were omitted. The omissions included the 240-line interrogation of Elbow,

Froth and Pompey in Act 2, Scene 1. Apart from the religious allusions and lines that contradict the current political concepts in China, the lines omitted in most cases referred to venereal

61 Ying Ruocheng, “Afterword to the Translation Qingjun Ruweng” Qingjun ruweng yihouji 請君入甕譯後記, Foreign Literature Waiguo wenxue 外國文學 7 (1981): 38. 62 Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, 145. 63 Carolyn Wakeman, “Measure for Measure On the Chinese Stage,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 502. 98

disease (1.2.26-39), adultery (1.2.79-85), and prostitution (2.1.41-280; 3.2.19-20, 22-24, 43-46,

49-58).64

As Ying has suggested, owing to the limited stage time, some lines were omitted in the

performance of Measure for Measure in order to assist the audience in understanding the play.

Ying claimed that many of the comical speeches, which are closely related to the social

phenomena of early seventeenth century England, would not evoke laughter from modern

readers and are too difficult to comprehend.65 Examples of the comical dialogues are passages

with jokes related to venereal disease. These references to sexual potency and syphilis were

standard fare on the Elizabethan stage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with venereal

disease often implicitly or explicitly included by writers during Shakespeare’s age. In the sixteenth century, when venereal disease was a consuming social problem for all classes of society and treatment was relatively ineffective, writers found this particular affliction a target for mordant wit and a convenient, fertile field for wordplay.

Some criticisms assert that strong syphilitic symbolism does not particularly exist in

Shakespeare’s darker, more mature period, but is prevalent in sunnier works such as The Comedy of Errors.66 Many contemporary puns and euphemisms for the disease, its symptoms, and its treatment, were exploited in the works of Shakespeare.67 Thus, most of his plays are brimming with venereal quibbles with a satiric undertone and references to syphilitic symptoms such as baldness, hollow bones, aching bones and worn eyes. In Measure for Measure, for instance,

64 He Qixin, Shakespeare Through Chinese Eyes (PhD dissertation, Kent State University, 1986), 23, 157-158. 65 Ying, “Qingjun ruweng yihouji,” 38. 66 Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004), 29. 67 Frankie Rubinstein, “There Were Not Such Good Years,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 70. 99

Lucio and two other young gentlemen exchange wisecracks about venereal disease in a vulgar

tone:

1.Gent: Well; there went but a pair of shears between us.

Lucio: I grant; as there may between the lists and the velvet. Thou art the list.

1.Gent: And thou art the velvet—thou art good velvet; thou’rt a three-pil’d piece,

I warrant thee. I had as lief be a list of an English kersey as be pil’d, as thou art

pil’d, for a French velvet. Do I speak feelingly now?

Lucio: I think thou dost; and indeed with most painful feeling of thy speech. I will,

out of thine own confession, learn to begin thy health; but, whilst I live, forget to

drink after thee. (1.2.26-35)

Lucio plays on the words “piled” (napped) and “pilled” (bald), since loss of hair was a side effect of the treatment for syphilis, which was called the “French disease.” He then quibbles with “speak painfully,” which implies that his mouth is affected with the lesions of venereal disease. In another instance, Pompey plays on the two meanings of “tub.” The word has the connotation of “the vessel in which syphilitics were sweated as part of their treatment,” as opposed to its superficial meaning, “bath tub:”68

Lucio: How doth my dear morsel thy mistress? Procures she still, ha?

Pompey: Troth, sir, she hath eaten up all her beef, and she is

herself in the tub. (3.2.56-57)

These suggestive lines were deleted, however, in Ying’s performance, as he believes that the stage effect of these sexual jokes is no longer the same because it is at variance with

68 Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 315; Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, 220. 100

contemporary culture and society.69 Thus, jokes that were appropriate and humorous in

Renaissance culture may not be regarded so in modern Chinese culture. Shakespeare’s sexual

humor was omitted in Ying’s adaptations because he believes the sense of familiarity in the jokes

is lost and that they cannot surprise or bring pleasure to Chinese audiences. The perception of humor depends on the reader’s or audience’s familiarity with the subject, and sometimes that familiarity has to be intimate to permit full appreciation of the joke. The reader or audience from a dissimilar culture, who is unfamiliar with the subject, will be unable to understand the meaning of the jokes. The problem with the transposition of jokes actually is in their very nature—they are language and culture specific. As Delia Chiaro notes, “jokes which are too cultural-specific are not easily understood beyond their country of origin,” while “jokes in which socio-cultural references cross-cut plays on language are the most difficult of all to render in another language.”70

The downplay of sexual overtones in Ying’s performance puts forth the notion of

“performability” and its interference. This notion of an extra dimension to the written text

implies a distinction between the idea of the text and the performance, between the written and

the physical.71 It is assumed that a theatre text contains distinguishable structural features that

make it performable, and consequently the task of the translator is to determine what those

structures are and to translate them into the target language.72 The translator of dramatic texts is

also expected to take into account the constraints of the “medium” (not only the source and target

languages and contexts), and grapple with the problem of the relationship between the written

69 Ying, “Qingjun ruweng yihouji,” 38. 70 Delia Chairo, The Language of Jokes: Analyzing Verbal Play (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 87. 71 Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1991), 121-22. 72 Ibid., 122. 101

and the performed.73 Translations written for particular performances of the plays provide the ground for analysis of intersections between translation and performance. The dramatic text published after a performance has generally been edited, stage directions may have been added, and various decisions have been taken as to which parts shall remain or be added in the printed version.74

One of the components for stage text, or criteria for performability, is that it is

characterized by the interplay of multiple perspectives resulting from the interaction of different

factors and their effects on the audience, which include elements of metaphor, allusion, wordplay

and so on, as demonstrated in innumerable examples from Shakespeare to Tom Stoppard.75

Wordplays, as Mary-Snell Hornby describes, are not seen as constraints but as potential for

verbal expression. However, the paradox here is that the wide spectrum covered by the concept

of performability, from a textual viewpoint, also underlines the fluency of the translated text. It

implies an attempt in the target language to create fluent speech rhythms and so produce a text

that actors can speak without too much difficulty, at least in the opinion of the translator. From

the viewpoint of the mise en scène, as Susan Bassnett suggests, it implies a whole set of

strategies of cultural adaptation, including the substitution of regional accents in the source

language with accents in the target language, and omission of passages which are considered to

be too rooted in the cultural and linguistic context of the source text—as in the case of jokes,

puns, obscenities.76 Translating “performability,” or performability as a criterion of translation,

73 Susan Bassnett, “Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre,” Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), 96. 74 Ibid., 100. 75 Mary Snell-Hornby, “‘All the World’s a Stage’: Multimedial Translation—Constraint or Potential?” Traduzione multimediale per Il cinema, la television e la scena, ed. Christine Heiss and Rosa Maria Bolletieri Bosinelli (Bologna: CLUEB, 1996), 33. 76 Susan Bassnett, “Ways Through the Labyrinth: Strategies and Methods for Translating Theatre Texts,” The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Theo Hermans (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 101. 102

thus involves multiple codes, at times moving closer to the source text, and at other times further

from it; and not to mention, the problem of performability in translation is also complicated by

changing concepts of performance, variable through time and space.

Like Ying, Zhu Shenghao also reduced the complexity of the source texts by erasing the

various images, double tongues and wordplays in them, because he insisted on a comprehensible

language for his readers. Working in this direction, Zhu also omitted sexual jokes to enhance the

clarity of his translations. The Elizabethan audience understood the latest jokes and every nuance of a word, so that they could grasp the complicated pun of “hour” and “whore.”77 But many of

these words are difficult for contemporary British audiences to understand; and thus there have

been attempts to “modernize” Shakespeare.78 The contemporary Chinese audience too, may only

know the literal and presumably innocent Shakespearean meanings and cannot comprehend and

respond to the sexual allusions. When listeners are incapable of perceiving the sexual jokes,

obviously they not only do not make sense, but also pass unnoticed.

In contrast to Shakespearean performances that involve the expurgation of coarse

language, a recent production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by David Jiang (Jiang Weiguo),

adopted a different approach. The play was staged in the The Academy for Performing Arts in

post-colonial Hong Kong in March 2004. All actors were young and enthusiastic students

between the ages of 18 and 25. Jiang presented a fusion of the ancient and modern, leading his

viewers through different historical eras. As the plot develops, the characters remain the same,

but the environment surrounding them moves forward in time. At the beginning of the

performance, what can be seen on stage is a fifteenth-century Italian backdrop and costumes,

while in the later scenes, the costumes, fashions, customs and even language gradually change.

77 Marchette Chute, Shakespeare of London (New York: Dutton, 1949), 151. 78 Hulme, “The Less Decent Language of the Time,” 118. 103

For example, in the first scene the servants of the two feuding families use swords to fight each other. When it comes to the ball at the Capulet’s house, the characters’ costumes and the style of the dance already have an eighteenth-century appearance. In the last act, Romeo and Juliet wear jeans and a skirt, and Juliet kills herself with a pistol rather than a dagger. In this performance,

Jiang preserved most original allusions to sex, including the crude exchanges between two servants of the Capulet house:

Sampson: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels,

are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push

Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids

To the wall.

Gregory: The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.

Sampson: ’Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I

have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the

maids, and cut off their heads.

Gregory: The heads of the maids?

Sampson: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;

take it in what sense thou wilt.

Gregory: They must take it in sense that feel it.

Sampson: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and

’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Sampson: 係孟家的狗我都會頂硬上,男人就隊「冧」佢, 女人就隊到佢 lum

晒。

Gregory: 係我地兩家主人同埋下人有仇啫,與女人無關。 104

Sampson: 理得佢係男係女, 一於無「情講」,男既就要佢頭破血流;女既呢,就

攻破嗰度。就攻破嗰度呀!

Gregory: 最後防線?

Sampson: 你鍾意點講就點講啦。

Gregory: 唔知 D 女人又有乜野感覺呢?

Sampson: 只要我夠「硬」, 佢地就有難咯。我呢支秘密武器好犀利架噃。

[Sampson: I will use force on those who are the dogs of Meng. For men, I will rub

them out, For women, I will screw them and get them high.

Gregory: Only our two masters and their servants are enemies, and it has nothing

to do with women.

Sampson: I don’t care if someone is a man or woman: no mercy will be shown

whatsoever. For men, I will break open their heads; for women, I will break open

that part. Yes, breaking that part open.

Gregory: You mean the last defense?

Sampson: It’s up to you to define.

Gregory: What feeling will the women have?

Sampson: If I got “hard” enough, they will be in trouble. My secret weapon is

astonishing.]

Unlike some of the former Chinese translators, such as Cao Weifeng, who omitted the bawdy lines in the exchanges of Capulet’s servants, Jiang created new sexual puns through

Cantonese homophones, such as 隊冧佢 (rub them out) and 隊到佢lum (screw them) in the above example. His production was contrary to the conventional interpretations of Shakespeare’s

105

plays. With the influence by Soviet Shakespearean scholarship, the love between Romeo and

Juliet often suggests a reflection of anti-feudalism and an embodiment of Renaissance humanism.

This official interpretation frequently led to the suppression of erotic allusions and sexual humor

in the original text—Mercutio’s speeches were cut, while the old bawdy Nurse was often

replaced by a more conventionally kind and sympathetic female character.79 Shakespeare is seen

as a public, political figure in China, rather than as a dramatist of private passion.80 Instead of

conforming to the prevailing norms, Jiang’s performance proved to be norm-breaking, as he was

more eager to bring forth the humorous and suggestive meanings of Shakespeare’s original text.

The elimination or suppression of Shakespeare’s bawdy expressions in the Chinese

cultural context is the result of a combination of factors that exert influence on the translators.

The cultural norms that prescribe the minimization of bawdy innuendoes have restrained the

practices of the Chinese translators, but this tendency also closely associates with the treatment

of jokes and the inner workings of humor. First, the Chinese translators were hindered by the

linguistic barriers that arose during the transference of bawdy elements, which are not only

expressed through wordplay and ambiguity, but also through foreign words from such languages

as Latin and French. The multilingual jokes that contain sexual content are often left untranslated.

This approach, however, is more likely to be a method adopted by the translators because they

are unable to break through the foreign language barrier, rather than to purposely circumvent

Shakespeare’s sexual explicitness.

Similarly, most of the jokes related to venereal disease were omitted not because they are

objectionable. Instead, they were considered too culture-specific and could not amuse the

79 Li Ruru, “Negotiating Intercultural Spaces: Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet on the Chinese Stage,” World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2005), 44. 80 Fan Shen, “Shakespeare in China: The Merchant of Venice,” Asian Theatre Journal 5.1 (1988): 35-36. 106

Chinese audience. Jokes produce pleasure because they evade the mechanism of repression and

save psychical energy. Laughter arises when a quota of psychical energy needed to maintain an

inhibition has become unusable, so that it can find free discharge. However, jokes that require

too much interpretation direct energy away from pleasure and extinguish their intended effect.

Instead of being a way to circumvent social restrictions, Shakespeare’s humor becomes an

intervention when rendered in another language. The socio-cultural elements contained in a

Shakespearean joke are sometimes so specific that they become highly ambiguous and

incomprehensible when transmitted to a Chinese audience. Further, certain Chinese translators

such as Zhu Shenghao consider the bawdy innuendoes to be just “a play upon words” which lack

substance and bear no relation to the main plot and theme of the play. Apart from the cultural

norms, the perception and treatment of jokes by the translator also determine the omission of

bawdy innuendoes.

Self-censorship in translation may include a variety of strategies. It may omit sentences,

passages, or even leave these passages in the original language. The translator may also claim

that some passages have been excised but that nothing that affects the plot or construction of the

play has been omitted. They might also be cut and substituted with different, “softer” wordplays.

Or, sexual humor may be obscurely embedded in the text, challenging the reader to find its meaning. Extensive footnotes or endnotes can be integral to the pleasure of this form of erotica, in which the pressure to expurgate, to omit, has given rise to a paratextual excess which seeks both to make up for the “gaps” that remain untranslated in the primary text, but most of all, to set up a barrier (to block or isolate the potentially offensive meanings), and at the same time distract

107

the readers from the unattainability of the sexual implications.81 These footnotes remain at the

margins of the main text as interpretive possibilities that are accepted or rejected by the target

readers. The translators’ reading of modern critical editions or supplements have often been

interpolated in the translation, thus fusing the translation and the critical tradition. The translators

are not only rendering the text or their (mis)understanding of the text, but rather distilling and

reconstructing it from a variety of textual and critical readings, whether or not the sources are acknowledged.82 The readers’ understanding of a play would therefore have been conditioned by

the translator’s vision or interpretation.

Although the socio-political environment in which a translator has to live and work

affects the scope of actions, it might not necessarily be the main reason. Many other factors are

relevant: the translator himself, its medium, rhetoric, the reader, and the context, which makes

the analysis of both translation and self-censorship not only unpredictable, but also more

challenging.

81 Carol O’ Sullivan, “Censoring these ‘Racy Morsels of the Vernacular:’ Loss and Gain in Translations of Apuleius and Catullus,” Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cormac Ó Chuilleanáin, and David Parris (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), 91. 82 Billings, “Glossing Shakespeare in Chinese Translation,” 278. 108

CHAPTER 3

Pygmalion, Comedy, and the Adaptation of Speech Variety

In this chapter, based on the theory of heteroglossia, I will argue that the variety of dialects within a single work have been multiplied and transformed in the adaptations, and thus contribute to a reorganized and widening heteroglossia. Different languages and voices come into play, including “third speeches” which neither belong to the original content or to the new culture. These voices are capable of conveying their own messages, which can enter into dialogue with the other languages in the adaptations.

How heteroglossic can a translation be under a particular situation? What are the functions of language plurality in literary translation? As translation is a cross-cultural process between cultures with different patterns of power relationships, the interaction between languages/dialects can be loaded with special symbolic importance. Thus, studies of heteroglossia in translations and adaptations not only remind us that they function in a multilingual environment, but the representation of the language of translation and the degree of language plurality also enhance our understanding of cultural dynamics and the reconstruction of identities.1

Adaptation is rooted in the psychological transformation of otherness into selfhood. The notion of adaptation implies a way of making a literary work fit a particular historical moment or subjectivity. It involves making something foreign and alien fit a particular conception of the self, and a process of making oneness or creating wholeness through the merging of the self and other.

1 Reine Meylaerts, “Literary Heteroglossia in Translation: When the Language of Translation is the Locus of Ideological Struggle,” Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, ed. João Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra Assis Rosa, and Teresa Seruya (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006), 86. 109

The possibility of adaptation as an integration of foreignness into selfhood is especially valid in a

postmodern context when canonical works have already become foreign—historically, culturally and linguistically. If adaptations and translations contribute to the construction of the exotic other, what happens if this other is already constructed in the source text? What if “polyphony” is one of the defining characteristics of language and a feature of the drama?

This chapter engages issues of language, dialect and the creation of comic effects in the

Chinese adaptations of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, including the film adaptations

Gongzi duoqing (The Greatest Lover, 1988), starring Chow Yun-fat and Anita Mui; Yaotiao shenshi (My Fair Gentleman, 2009), performed by Sun Honglei and Kelly Lin, and Yaotiao shunü/Jueshi haobin (Driving Miss Wealthy/World’s Best Filipino, 2004), performed by Gigi

Leung and Sean Lau. Pygmalion multiplies linguistic varieties, to emulate or create multilingual and stratified social worlds. So how is Shaw’s multilingual comic world represented in these

Chinese adaptations? What happens when, for example, the colorful Cockney of London, with all its connotations, is translated and transported into diverse theatrical cultures such as Chinese?

How do the adaptations draw meanings for a different culture by re-accenting the source texts for their own purposes? This discussion not only concerns the translation from one language to another, but also the translation of the inter-relations of the languages used. More specifically, this chapter discusses the translation of the humor in the dialectical variations in Pygmalion, and how it has been employed in stage and film productions. I will also examine the treatment of these linguistic issues in Lin Yutang’s (1947) and Yang Xianyi’s (1982) Chinese translations of

Pygmalion.

110

Pygmalion and the Transformation of Language Humor

The basis of dialect humor is speech variation in differing language communities.

Wherever such variation exists there is a potential for dialect humor, a phenomenon in which one

or more specific speech varieties become the target of satire or ridicule. Jokes and the

exaggerated imitation of the phonological and grammatical characteristics of the speech of a

specific geographical community or of a certain social class constitute dialect humor. Language

usage becomes the topic or object of this particular type of humor. People who speak the

“standard” variety of a language, such as Standard English, often find the speech patterns of

people from other regions or in a lower stratum of society “strange” or uneducated. These could

be unusual pronunciations, or the use of unfamiliar words or peculiar phrases. These linguistic

features are then caricatured through imitation or exaggeration in order to generate humor.2 The

use of multiple dialects is of course not uncommon, for example members of a community who

speak a local dialect at home or among friends and use a “standard” dialect on public occasions,

or with people from other dialect communities.3 In other words, one tends to tailor one’s

language to the audience and the circumstances.4 In literature and visual culture, there are also a

number of texts/productions which concern the interplay of languages and cultures.

In Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet (1979), for instance, the author has attempted to write a play which teaches the audience the “dogg language” the play is written in.5 This language was

then translated back into English in square brackets. The play appeals to a fundamental source of

2 See Mahadev Apte, “Dialect Humor,” A Dictionary of Sociolinguistics, ed. Joan Swann (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004), 319-321. 3 In the Chinese context, the term “dialect” is used to indicate a variety of Chinese that differs from Mandarin Chinese in pronounciation, vocabulary and grammar. 4 Giovanna Summerfield, Patois and Linguistic Pastiche in Modern Literature (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), xi. 5 Tom Stoppard, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 8. The first stage performance of Dogg’s Hamlet was at the Arts Centre of the University of Warwick, on 21 May 1979, by British American Repertory Company. 111

linguistic humor—the phenomenon by which the same utterance may carry two different and

often contrasting meanings. The primary function of language is to enhance communication:

comedy recognizes this function, but often shows it being subverted.6 Often, however, a comic treatment of language will reveal philosophical paradoxes about the nature of language as such.

As Fred Miller Robinson points out, modern comic literature is frequently concerned with language as both medium and subject. The authors are not simply playing with words, but are deeply interested in the nature of this act, and in the comic effects that have to do with the individuals creating their sense of the world through language.7

German director Karin Beier (1965-) won wide acclaim for a Dusseldorf production of A

Midsummer Night’s Dream (1995) in which the performers came from nine different countries,

each speaking his or her native language. The project brought together fourteen actors from nine

countries with no common language. They spoke Shakespeare’s text in their own tongues, although whether the characters or the actors understood each other was actually unclear.

Though performed for a German audience, neither German nor English was the dominant language on stage. The occasional lines in English spoken by the non-native speakers only reminded the audience of what was absent.8 The misunderstandings and communication problems involved in the linguistic or theatrical variety of the production not only revealed the scenes of the contemporary multicultural world, but also illuminated Shakespeare’s comedy of confusion.

6 T.G.A. Nelson, Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 134, 136. 7 Fred Miller Robinson, The Comedy of Language: Studies in Modern Comic Literature (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980), 2. 8 Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 331. 112

In several theatrical works in Taiwan, multiple languages have also been used within a

single performance as a source of humor, and to explore issues of identity. The intertwined

issues of language and identity resonate with the audience. The experience of the audience varies

according to the linguistic background of the audience member. In Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Can Three

Make it? Part IV—Play Hard (1997), for instance, the eighteen characters in the play all have

different primary and secondary languages, including Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, Japanese,

Cantonese, Shanghainese, Sichuanese and English. While characters speak different languages to

different characters and do not understand each other, the audience—thanks to the subtitles—

knows everything that is being said.9 The recent adaptation of La Dame Aux Camellias (2011),

directed by Tadashi Suzuki (1939-) and performed in Taipei, has also merged canonical literature with different dialects, and with approximately twenty pop songs in Mandarin Chinese and

Taiwanese. The multilingual performance not only reveals the current cultural condition in

Taiwan and the fluid nature of the status of the language “Taiwanese,” but also twists the serious,

tragic play into an almost ironic and comic performance.

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion tells the story of Eliza Doolittle, a common flower girl who takes speech lessons from Professor Henry Higgins so that she can pass as a proper upper class lady. Higgins, a phonetics expert, makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can transform the speech and manners of this uneducated girl under his tutelage. The

“transformation” of Eliza into a sophisticated woman starts with his dressing her elegantly and introducing her to the middle and upper class way of life; this is followed by speech lessons.

Higgins wins his bet at the end of the six months, and the two of them take Eliza into high society, where she is universally admired and accepted. Shaw himself did not rank this story,

9 See John Weinstein, “Multilingual Theatre in Contemporary Taiwan,” Asian Theatre Journal 17.2 (2000): 269-283; Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006), 55. 113

with its “Cinderella” motif, very highly among his plays, referring to it as one of the “pot-

boilers.”10 But the play, in its first English production in 1914 and in its adaptations in other

mediums—as the 1959 musical comedy, My Fair Lady (starring Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews,

and Stanley Holloway), the 1964 film version directed by George Cukor (starring Audrey

Hepburn as Liza), and other film versions—has proved immensely popular and enduring.11

Shaw was also one of the English writers who had a remarkable influence on Ding

Xilin’s comedy, especially on its language, most notably in 一隻馬蜂 Yizhi mafeng (“A Wasp”)

(1923). Ding not only successfully introduced the art of dialogue, irony and absurdity onto the

new Chinese stage, but also made an important contribution to the maturity of modern Chinese

drama. Ding’s “A Wasp” is one of the best works of a playwright who helped develop the genre

of comedy in modern China. After studying in England, where he had explored the works of

Western playwrights such as Shaw, J.M. Barrie and George Meredith, Ding returned to China in

1920 and made use of the thoughtful comedy of these playwrights in “A Wasp.” This work

established his reputation as a first-rate writer of comedy, as he wittily portrayed complex, lively

characters whose entertaining personalities and opposing desires are revealed through the humor

and tricks, set amid the social milieu of the Chinese middle class of the 1920s.12

Language is central to Pygmalion: scarcely a minute of the play is without metalanguage,

i.e. some reference to words. The plot is built around a phonetics experiment, and two of the

main characters are language experts. Eliza has been “recreated” by Higgins through the medium

of language. As he says:

10 Louis Crompton, “Improving Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 45. 11 Charles A. Berst, Pygmalion: Shaw’s Spin on Myth and Cinderella (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 9-10. 12 Chen Xiaomei, “Introduction,” The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, ed. Chen Xiaomei (New York: Columbia UP, 2010), 9. 114

But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and

change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her.

It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.13

In Pygmalion, Shaw creates a “new sort of human being” and a new identity through

language. The “problem of language” and the theme of Eliza’s command of “new speech” are

evident throughout the play. Shaw skillfully used language to create a multitude of identities, and

demonstrates how speech transforms the speaker in the very act of speaking.14

One of the basic revisions of Shaw’s version of Ovid’s Pygmalion story is “the replacement of physical creation by linguistic transformation.”15 Just as physical creation gave

human life to Galatea, linguistic recreation allows Eliza to have a new social life. In Ovid, the

“perfect woman” has no voice and needs no training or lessons on how to “become” a perfect

woman. Conversely, in Shaw’s play, inspired by the myth Pygmalion, the problem of Eliza’s

education, of how she learns to sound and behave like a lady, becomes the central focus. The

most obvious hurdle that Eliza must overcome is, of course, her speech, and it is the training in

English pronunciation that Professor Higgins claims will transform what he calls this

“guttersnipe” (a person of the lowest class) into a lady who can pass for a duchess at the

Embassy Ball.

13 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957), 81- 82. 14 Jean Reynolds, Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999), 2-3; also see Lynda Mugglestone, “Shaw, Subjective Inequality, and the Social Meanings of Language in Pygmalion,” The Review of English Studies 44 (1993): 373-85; Wang Xiaoyan, “The Identity Construction and Split Self of Eliza in Pygmalion: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Canadian Social Science 4.3 (2008): 68-73; Bohman-Kalaja Kimberly, “Undoing Identities in Two Irish Shaw Plays: John Bull’s Other Island and Pygmalion,” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30 (2010): 108-132. 15 Vicki Kennell, “Pygmalion as Narrative Bridge Between the Centuries,” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 25 (2005): 73. 115

It is through linguistic retraining that Eliza is taken from one social milieu into another,

higher one, by a process of acculturation that includes the learning of a complete set of social

habits, which are primarily mediated through linguistic convention. Eliza’s task is to learn a new

social code and its attendant social correlates. By the end of the process of transformation at the

hands of her mentor she has in fact become “bi-dialectal,” or “diglossic,” in that she is in a

position to use her primary dialect of English as well as the super-imposed, educated variety. Just as a translator, who uses two completely different frames of reference, follows two sets of social conventions, and behaves in two different fashions depending on the language he is using, Eliza has to learn new habits of dress and deportment, the conventions of speech, and social manners that all coincide with the new language she acquires.16

However, an interesting point to be noted is that actors and directors often miss the

language emphasis in Pygmalion, preferring to interpret the play as a romance comedy and a

conventional love story between Higgins and Eliza—a problem that plagued Shaw from the first

British production in 1914. Interpreting Pygmalion as a “romance” has been the major trend ever

since its English-language premiere. The production was directed by the author himself, but that

could not stop Sir Herbert Beerhohm-Tree (who played Higgin’s role) from giving it a romantic

turn in the performance:

I writhed in hell,” Shaw told his wife. “The last thing I saw,” he raged, “was

Higgins shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals

to buy ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo.17

16 Shakespeare’s tragedies also express the difficulties of individual in adapting to changing social structure and that these difficulties lead to the various crimes which the Shakespeare hero personifies. 17 Steven Bach, Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 340. 116

As the curtain fell, Higgins threw a bunch of flowers across the stage to Eliza, much to Shaw’s

fury.18 Audiences, like the actors, seem to have almost intuited or demanded that the play’s

emotional momentum be resolved romantically.19 Shaw attempted to combat the efforts of the actors, who tried to suggest an eventual union between Higgins and Eliza in their performance.

However, the power of discourse (the changing of Eliza Doolittle from a simple flower girl to an upper-class lady through changing her language) involved in the play and its adaptations deserves more analysis. As Timothy Vesonder argues, “even a superficial examination of Pygmalion will show that the main focus of the play is […] the power of language […].”20 In Shaw’s play, code switching is employed not only to differentiate the

characters but also to show how the characters adjust their language for particular social effects.

Shaw’s comedies contain multiple linguistic differences or “varieties” to emulate or create

multilanguaged and stratified social worlds. Linguistic stratification in the play, on the one hand,

constructs characters as socially positioned and provides the comic verbal collisions. On the

other hand, it also makes an occasion for reflection on how social agents, playing out their own

struggles for superiority and distinction, are themselves “producers” of “acts of classification.” In

Bourdieu’s words, “the social agents whom the sociologists classifies are producers not only of

classifiable acts but also of acts of classification which are themselves classified.”21 In the following section, I will briefly outline Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, which is useful to the understanding of the interaction of the voices and meanings in the adaptations of

Pygmalion.

18 Charles Martindale, Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 209. 19 Bach, Dazzler, 341. 20 See Rodelle Weintraub, Fabian Feminist: Bernard Shaw and Woman (The Pennsylvania State UP, 1990), 42. 21 Lynne Magnusson, “Language and Comedy,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 162. Also see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984), 467. 117

Bakhtin’s Theory of Heteroglossia

Mikhail Bakhtin has identified as fundamental to the social dimension of language use what he calls “dialogized heteroglossia,” that is, the interplay of a plurality of languages that reflects all manner of social variations: the languages of different classes, situations and power relations. Language is not one unified entity, but rather is constituted by many social languages

(and the tensions and struggles between them). According to Bakhtin’s understanding of language use, a “social person,” who is also a “speaking person,” operates with a multitude of discourse practices that form in their totality a dynamic verbal culture belonging to the society concerned. In “Discourse in the Novel” he argues that,

[…] language is a process of heteroglot development, a process teeming with

future and former languages…depending on their degree of social scope and on

the ideological area in which they are employed.22

Bakhtin distinguishes between a “heteroglot” text, one composed of many voices, and a

“monoglot” one, which is singular in its discourse and view of the world. He also uses the term

“polyphony” in his discussions of Dostoevsky’s work to refer to the plurality of voices evident in novels. This coexistence of many voices within a textual space stands in contrast to a text where only one voice (usually the author’s) dominates. Bakhtin assumed that the fictions in the past were all under the complete control of their authors, so that in spite of the interweaving of different characters, there remained nothing but “homophony,” namely, a sort of “monologic

22 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 356-357. 118

fiction.” Quite the opposite, Dostoevsky’s novels are “polyphonic fiction.”23 “The comic style,”

as Bakhtin argues:

is based on the stratification of common language and on the possibilities

available for isolating from these strata, to one degree or another, one’s own

intentions, without ever completely merging with them. It is precisely the

diversity of speech, and not the unity of a normative shared language, that is the

ground of style.24

“Polyphony” refers not only to a number of voices but also to the capacity of one’s utterance to

embody someone else’s thereby creating a dialogic relationship between two voices and

ideologies. While there is some slippage between the uses of the terms “polyphony” and

“heteroglossia,” the former is often used to emphasize distinct individual voices, whereas the

latter is used to emphasize social languages; and while polyphony points to the fact of plurality,

heteroglossia often emphasizes the tensions between voices. The notion of heteroglossia moves

beyond voice into the analysis of the social pedigree of the voice, and reinserts the literary text

back into the real world. The social mixtures are what Bakhtin saw in the words that make up

language.

To have subjectivity, then, is to have in the first instance entered through language into

dialogue with others. The self, for Bakhtin, is made up of “languages,” the “voices” spoken by

others, all of which enter in and contend within oneself. Different speakers use language in

different, historically and socially constructed ways. As Bakhtin sees it, “the language of the

novel is a system of languages that mutually and ideologically inter-animate each other. It is

23 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). 24 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 308. 119

impossible to describe and analyze it as a unitary language.”25 Concerning this interplay between

language, self, and the other, French philosopher and phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty also

shows that the experience of language is particularly illuminating of one’s relations with others:

When I chat with a friend whom I know well, each of his remarks and each of

mine contains, in addition to the meaning it carries for everybody else, a host of

references to main dimensions of his character and mine, without our needing to

recall previous conversations with each other. These acquired worlds, which

confer upon my experience its secondary meaning, are themselves carved out of a

primary world which is the basis of the primary meaning. In the same way there is

“a world of thoughts,” or a sediment left by our mental processes, which enables

us to rely on our concepts and acquired judgments as we might on things there in

front of us, presented globally, without there being any need for us to resynthesize

them […]26

In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and

myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single

fabric… We have here a dual being, where the other is no longer a mere bit of

behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each

other in consummate reciprocity.27

In language, and in dialogue, self and other communicate, and we are reciprocally drawn out of

ourselves and our former thoughts toward the other. Within conversation and dialogue, language

25 Ibid., 47. 26 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2005), 149- 150: “The Kantian subject posits a world, but, in order to be able to assert a truth, the actual subject must in the first place have a world or be in the world, that is, sustain round about it a system of meanings whose reciprocities, relationships and involvements do not require to be made explicit in order to be exploited […] each perception is immediately located in relation to a great number of possible coordinates.” 27 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 413. 120

is an interaction that exceeds the sum of its parts, in which one’s self and ideas are transformed in relation to other living beings.28 During these transformative interactions with others, there is no fusion or “synthesis” of experience into a simple unity.

Heteroglossia is particularly characteristic of the dialogic nature of human relations on which it is predicated. An individual’s particular use of language (which expresses a point of view) can be fully distinguished from that of other interlocutors. However, what is characteristic of heteroglossia is the assimilation of the other’s speech and position. Thus, all language is conceived as dialogue, as any utterance anticipates a reply that reflects the interlocutor’s position, and thus meaning results from the negotiation of various points of views. Language “lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s.”29

Although Bakhtin has actually spoken very little about theatre specifically, and suggested a proclivity of drama toward a monologic model, successive criticisms in cultural and dramatic theory have raised important questions concerning his concept of heteroglossia and the nature of the polyphonic discourse. For example, James Clifford’s study of the inter-relationships between ethnography, literature and art in The Predicament of Culture (1988), recalls and expands

Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia. In Clifford’s view:

With expanded communication and intercultural influence, people interpret others,

and themselves, in a bewildering diversity of idioms—a global condition of what

Mikhail Bakhtin (1953) called “heteroglossia.” This ambiguous, multivocal world

28 Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008), 110. 29 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293. 121

makes it increasingly hard to conceive of human diversity as inscribed in bounded,

independent cultures.30

For Bakhtin, preoccupied with representation of nonhomogeneous wholes, there

are no integrated cultural worlds or languages […] A “culture” is, concretely, an

open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse

factions. A “language” is the interplay of regional dialects…the speech of

different individuals, and so forth. For Bakhtin the polyphonic novel is not a tour

de force of cultural or historical totalization but rather a carnivalesque arena of

diversity.31

Theatre scholar Marvin Carlson, in his book Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (2006), relates the concept of heteroglossia to the dramatic discourse, and explores

some of the operations of heteroglossia in the linguistic intersections that are central to the

understanding of theatre manifestations.32 Bakhtin’s discussion of the problem of subjective

identity in terms of linguistic usage, and his idea of polyphonic discourse is of relevance and can

be extended to a discussion of performance and adaptation. Many of his observations regarding

cultural complexity and the concept of heteroglossia in literature have relevance to theatrical

expression and the theory of adaptation.

Theatrical discourse can be understood as a heteroglot mix of languages from many

different social and literary realms. Neither the dramatist nor the translator speaks a “unified”

language. The unifying center is in the intersection of the languages in the play and its

30 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 23. 31 Ibid., 46. 32 Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 5-6. See also Stephen Breslow, “Trinidadian Heteroglossia: A Bakhtinian View of Derek Walcott’s Play A Branch of the Blue Nile,” World Literature Today 63.1 (1989): 36-39. 122

reworking.33 If one had perceived their own language through the eyes of another, then both

languages would have entered into a dialogue with each other. The adaptation of a

language/dialect therefore permits the embodiment of voices within voices and an opportunity to

orchestrate a dialogue among them. This layering of voices comprises the adaptation’s internal

discourse.34 Through adaptation one does not just see a simple reconciliation of languages. As

Butler points out, language is not some tool that is simply constructed at our will and then subsequently used and deployed. Rather, language is always implicated and invested from the outset in our engagements with others. There is no “I” who is originally formed and then enters the social world, but rather the “I” have always already become a self because of the responses of and to others that have conditioned and instantiated one’s self-identity.35

Three Adaptations of Pygmalion—

The Greatest Lover, Driving Miss Wealthy and My Fair Gentleman

Ovid’s story of Pygmalion has developed from its classical origin in Greek mythology to its ultimate transformation in Shaw’s play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts (1912) and

subsequently the film adaptation My Fair Lady (1956), which have in turn spawned plays,

musicals and films in other languages including Chinese. Issues of language and power, and the

survival of “non-standard” languages or dialects, have come much more to the fore in these

modern film and stage versions. What is more interesting is the extent to which the linguistic

consciousness manifested in Shaw’s play has taken on a more complex character in the Chinese

adaptations.

33 Thomas J. Farrell, Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1995), 82. 34 See Linda M. Park-Fuller, “Voices: Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia and Polyphony, and the Performance of Narrative Literature,” Literature in Performance 7 (1986): 1-12. 35 See Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham UP, 2005). 123

While Shaw was questioning the association between one’s use of English and social

standing in British society at the time he was writing Pygmalion, adaptations such as The

Greatest Lover (directed by Clarence Fok Yiu-leung in 1988) have prompted audiences in Hong

Kong to seek a cultural identity after its handover from Great Britain to China in 1997. The use

of language in the play is further complicated by cultural politics in its productions. Shaw’s play

hinges on the dialect and usage of English by the Cockney flower girl Eliza, whom Professor

Higgins intends to elevate socially by eliminating her accent and improving her language. The language variations create stratified social worlds. In the film adaptation, The Greatest Lover,

Qian Jin Fat (Chow Yun-fat), speaks the Chiuchow dialect. He and his buddies, who swam with him to Hong Kong (the stereotype of the illegal mainland Chinese immigrant escaping to the

British colony), have neither the money nor the manners to assimilate to modern urban culture.

Qian Jin’s mixture of Cantonese and Chiuchow accents, like Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney and

“proper” English, is a frequent source of humor in the film.

Qian Jin goes through a linguistic transformation similar to Eliza’s in order to become a

公子 gongzi, an upper-class gentleman, with the help of the top idol maker Anita (Anita Mui).

Apart from overcoming his Chiuchow accent, the development of Qian Jin’s second language is also important in his transformation. In Hong Kong, English was given considerable prestige even when compared with Standard Cantonese. In The Greatest Lover, Qian (the Chinese counterpart to Eliza) switches to English from time to time. To pass as a member of upper-class society, Qian has to learn not only Standard Cantonese, but Standard English as well. An important difference from Pygmalion is that Qian Jin’s lessons with Anita are bilingual.

Similar to The Greatest Lover, 窈窕淑女 Yaotiao shunü (My Fair Lady), the Hong Kong stage production of Pygmalion in 1997, also employed multiple dialects to reflect the linguistic 124

situation in Hong Kong. Another change is that the Higgins character, Professor Tam, is not a tutor to the rich but a professor of phonetics at the University of Hong Kong, who is conducting phonetic research through To Lan-heung (Eliza), a flower girl working at the Sheung Wan market in Hong Kong. Her speech is a mixture of Chiuchow, Pun-yu, and Taishan dialects adopted from her father, mother and stepmother, respectively. However, the characters in the play not only speak in different Chinese dialects, but also in different languages, including in

Mandarin Chinese, English and Japanese. Thus the concern with London’s dialects in Shaw’s play becomes a preoccupation with dialects and languages from different parts of China and abroad. The linguistic differences not only show class differences and images of Hong Kong as cosmopolitan, but also highlight the power relations between cultures, the tension between

Chinese ethnicity and nationalism, and the impact of Western modernization and colonialism.36

The production provides both the Shavian ending and the romantic ending. The two endings were explored with two different castings. In Cast A, the older Chung King-fai ends with the separation of Higgins and Eliza, while in Cast B, the younger Tse Kwan-ho ends with marital union, a conventional happy ending similar to that of My Fair Lady. According to Kay Li, the two endings “imply an ambiguity not just about Eliza’s future, but also about whether the

Chinese and the colonial British can live in harmony,” a central concern after the political handover in 1997.37 She also points out that, although To Lan-heung learns English from the

Westernized phonetics professor Tam Ying-kit, when Tam declares his love for Eliza at the end of the play he does so in Chinese dialect, which shows a reversal in the power relationship and also a note of localization.

36 Kay Li, Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007), 221. 37 Ibid., 224. 125

The new “shift” and relationships between the languages, as well as the linguistic negotiations between them, reveal central aspects of the power relationships in the target culture.

Language becomes a symbol of the history and identity of the culture it represents. Adaptations of Pygmalion for the postcolonial stage or film have been a particularly rich area of heteroglossic expression and reconstruction. Code-switching is not only used between dialect levels, but also between distinct languages; and heteroglossia is sometimes operating within a single character

(eg., Qian Jin), sometimes between characters, or even in different parts of the adaptation. At the same time, the adaptations employ the comic language device of the character improperly using a higher-class language that he does not fully understand (usually in the process of linguistic transformation). At the Indian Funding Banquet in the film, for example, Qian Jin does not understand when the Governor says “How do you do.” The nonstandard language of the play is conveyed by the distortion of the standard grammar, strange pronunciations, misunderstandings, slips of the tongue, and so on, which all become fundamental to the comic effects in the adapted versions. When Qian Jin fails to respond to the Governor’s greetings in English and switches back to his native Putonghua, he surprisingly wins the Governor’s high regard:

前進:港督先生,很高興認識你呀!

港督:你的普通話說得非常標準。

前進:你的普通話講得比我更好呀!

港督:現在香港的年輕人普通話說得像你那麼好的很少。

你一定要留在香港,未來的香港很需要你這樣的人才。

前進: Sure, no problem! 香港人應該可以講普通話,不會講普通話, 不算是香港

人了。

126

[Qian Jin: Mr. Governor, nice to meet you!

Governor: Your Putonghua is really fluent.

Qian Jin: You speak Putonghua better than I do!

Governor: Very few people in Hong Kong can speak Putonghua as well as you.

You must stay in Hong Kong. The future Hong Kong needs talents like you.

Qian Jin: Sure, no problem. Hong Kong people should be able to speak in

Putonghua. Those who cannot speak in Putonghua are not counted as Hong Kong

people.]

Qian’s knowledge of Putonghua actually becomes an asset and wins the admiration of the party, which marks the importance of the language given the close social and economic ties to

Mainland China after the handover of Hong Kong.38 As the adaptation shows, the diversity and stratification of languages, while contributing to the comic style, also reveal the power dynamics of different languages in the surrounding culture.

In another loose adaptation of Pygmalion, Driving Miss Wealthy (Mandarin: Yaotiao

Shuü, My Fair Lady; Cantonese: Jueshi Haobin, World’s Best Filipino), the Eliza figure becomes

Jennifer (Gigi Leung), who is the lazy, spoiled daughter of a millionaire, and Kit (Sean Lau), a former police officer but employed by Jennifer’s father as his daughter’s bodyguard and new

“Filipino” driver (Mario). To teach her a “lesson,” Jennifer’s father pretends to go into a coma, and the entire family fortune is stolen. The transformation, this time, does not concern climbing to the upper-class. In contrast, it involves Jennifer’s shift from her extravagant, luxurious life style to a lower-class life style. As in the Western adaptation Sabrina (a romance comedy in

1954, with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza), Jennifer is financially independent. Sabrina’s father

38 Ibid., 217. 127

provides his daughter with a substantial inheritance that he has earned from following his

employer’s financial investment strategies so that Sabrina can secure her position as a self-

supporting, wealthy woman. Similarly, Jennifer has a great deal of money, but her father hopes

that she can become an independent woman who can survive on her own; and Mario becomes

the person who carries out the actual plan.

This “Filipino Higgins” in Driving Miss Wealthy is certainly related to Hong Kong’s

sociocultural environment. The emergence of significant numbers of female Filipina migrants in

Hong Kong has resulted from a shortage of domestic workers and the increasing tendency of

Hong Kong women to work outside the home; thus, an increase in the demand for domestic

workers. However, they still maintain a Filipino community that is culturally and socially

separated from the rest of Hong Kong society.39 Foreign maids speak in languages that the locals

cannot understand, and in contrast to the images or memories of the Chinese “amahs” in the past,

who have posed no fundamental or moral challenge to existing patterns of culture and order,

contemporary foreign domestic workers constitute a threat and are considered a symbol of an

order turned inside out.40 The class identity of Filipina maids is also ambiguous. Unlike the uneducated Chinese domestic workers, Filipina domestic workers often have high levels of

education (many of the workers are professionals who had previously worked in the Philippines

as nurses, teachers, while others have university degrees) and their previous “high status”

contradicts their current identity as “servants.” These long-term domestic workers have become the focus of a court case that has prompted news conferences, marches and daily coverage in the local media in Hong Kong, and has fueled a spirited debate about what it means to be a “Hong

39 See Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007). 40 See Nicole Constable, “Sexuality and Discipline Among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” American Ethnologist 24.3 (2008): 540. 128

Kong resident.” Some decry what they see as discrimination against foreign domestic workers,

while other says that giving them permanent status could have serious social and economic

consequences. The case has also raised questions about the sensitive issue of Hong Kong’s legal

independence from Beijing and the “one country, two systems” model that has been in place

since the handover in 1997. The prevalence of Filipinos in the public spaces of Hong Kong on

Saturday evenings and Sundays is an example. Driving Miss Wealthy, however, presents a

positive and mirthful image of the Filipino, and it is the disguise as a Filipino that has eventually

transformed the “local.”

Mario’s fake Filipino identity and accent constitute one of the comedic elements of this

film adaptation. Pretending to be a Filipino, Mario keeps speaking to Jennifer in Cantonese with

a “Filipino” accent, but converses with the other characters in fluent Cantonese. Languages are

performed at different levels. Chow Yun-fat can certainly speak Standard Cantonese, but in the

adaptation, the comic actor or actress is “playing” the accent(s). The actor’s voice, style of

delivery, his own accent and pronunciation all have to be taken into account by the director and

translator. The regional accent or dialect can be made stronger or weaker by the actor—it is an

imitation with distance.41 The imitation of the accent cannot be too close to the real dialect, and

yet not far from it, in order to maintain its comic atmosphere and effects. To the audience, the

Filipino-Cantonese spoken by Sean Lau (Mario) does not really seem like a “Filipino accent,” but with his dark complexion, make-up and costume, he does look Filipino. The point is that

there is a certain “foreignness” involved in the comic language (and the character’s image),

which prevents the audience from completely believing that it is a real language. To one degree

41 Manuela Perteghella, “Language and Politics on Stage: Strategies for Translating Dialect and Slang with References to Shaw’s Pygmalion and Bond’s Saved,” Translation Review 64 (2002): 46. 129

or another, the audience distances themselves from the common language, sometimes achieved by the author’s exaggerating or adjusting the language.

Translating and adapting the dialect, therefore, is almost an invention of a language that

sounds like the dialect but isn’t; and the comic style demands a shift in the distance between the

audience and the language.42 In the English subtitles of the film adaptation, though, the variety of

accents has been neutralized as the dialogues are presented in Standard English. The reception of

the linguistic humor then wholly depends on the viewer’s experience of the sound and visual

images. An additional level of the language play in Driving Miss Wealthy is that Mario is in fact

Kit disguised as the Filipino driver. It is therefore Sean Lau who is playing Kit (former police officer) who in turn is playing the role of a Filipino bodyguard. These diverse accents create a new comic heteroglossia which is unique to the Chinese adaptation. While the distance created by time and culture might lead to the expression of certain kinds of comic effects, the caricature of the characters, such as through the strangeness of their voices, makeup, hairstyles, and physical appearances, also works in a similar fashion.

What is also worth mentioning, in this discussion of voice, communication, and comic

distance, is Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), which also presents a polyphony of

discourses, languages, and accents.43 When Chaplin finally got to talk on screen, he did it in two

parts: as a Jewish barber who awakens from a 20-year coma due to war injuries, and as the Great

Dictator. As a refugee Jewish barber who is fleeing the burning ghettos and the Nazi roundup of

Jews, he is mistaken for the German dictator. With a mastery of sound and music, he turns an essentially tragic picture into a play of comic elements. Playing the two parts, Chaplin himself

42 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 302. 43 Adrian Daub, “‘Hannah, Can You Hear Me?’—Chaplin’s Great Dictator, ‘Schtonk,’ and the Vicissitudes of Voice,” Criticism 51.3 (2009): 453, 464. 130

remarked that: “one of us is a tragedian, the other a comedian, I don’t know which is which.”44

The film also raises questions as to whether tyrants such as Hitler are fit subjects of humor, because the extremities of fear and sufferings created by such figures tend to remove them from the possibilities and appropriateness of comic representation. In the scene when Chaplin is delivering a speech in the highly comedic gibberish of dictator Hynkel, the audience hears a quasi language that resembles German, but it is never quite clear whether it is indeed a real language with a community of speakers. To some extent it is a visual language which matches the actor’s comic gestures. Given the gibberish of the speech, the discourse is still effective to the listeners and seems to derive its effectiveness not from a distinct meaning but in fact from its opacity. In other words, it characterizes a language that is between a distinct social language and a private language that is carried by individual voices.

According to Louis Crompton, manners have been a central feature of the comic stage from Roman times through Shakespeare down to our own day. For the discussion concerning phonology, it is possible with a little analysis to see that it is manners and not just speech that provide the clue to character contrasts in Pygmalion, accents being, so to speak, merely their outer clothing.45 My Fair Gentleman, directed by Gui-yuen Lee in 2009, is a modern Chinese version of the classic musical My Fair Lady. In My Fair Gentleman, Zeng Tiangao (Sun

Honglei), a newly rich Chinese businessman, the Chairman of China High Flying Group, who is obsessed with seducing a female celebrity named Fang Na, is transformed into a refined and upper-class gentleman. Zeng and Fang meet at a charitable event, during which rich people bid to win a dinner date with the celebrity. Obviously, Zeng’s problem is not money. He is wealthy enough to place the highest bid. But eventually he did not win because he does not understand

44 Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 434. 45 Crompton, “Improving Pygmalion,” 46. 131

and respond when the auctioneer and the bidders suddenly communicate in English. Zhang was rejected because of his lack of sophistication and his country manners. His problem is that he does not have the manners to behave like a “gentleman” in social settings, despite his wealth. He smokes in elevators, screams in public places and approaches women abruptly. So he then hires

Wu Jiaqian (Candice), a smart and elegant marketing executive, to be his image consultant.

Although My Fair Gentleman is a light romantic comedy, it introduces serious issues and touches on many aspects of contemporary Chinese society, such as the emergence of a new class of millionaires since China’s opening to the world. The film touches on the issue of nouveau riche Chinese, who have money, but not the culture and education to be considered accomplished individuals. Wu notes that it is easy to change the “software” (appearance, dressing), but not the

“hardware” (manners, attitudes, knowledge). While helping to revamp Zeng’s image, Wu stresses the importance of saying “sorry” before starting a sentence, and “thank you” at the end of the conversation. Zeng then keeps repeating “sorry” and “thank you” in every sentence he says, which makes his speech sounds unnatural but hilarious. In the process of transformation,

Wu treats Zhang as a “product” in need of a complete overhaul, and formulates a strategy to redesign, rebrand, and reposition him. The acquisition of “manners” is therefore treated as a kind of (re)packaging which is required to achieve certain goals or to gain access to a particular market.

Wu also teaches him the meaning of Da Vinci’s paintings, how to pronounce proper

English, how to taste wine, and how to appreciate Italian opera. The transformation process, again, involves different elements of the Western culture, except a few brief references to Xu

Zhimo’s poetry. On the one hand, this process reflects the increasing globalization of contemporary Chinese society and the infiltration of Western culture into Chinese society,

132

offering a glimpse into the cultural trends of China today in the era of globalization. On the other

hand, the fact that the film persists in associating manners with Westernization raises important

questions, such as: why does Wu teach Zeng to appreciate Da Vinci and Italian opera instead of

Chinese Confucian values, Chinese paintings, and operas? The adaptation also raises the

question of whether the qualities of being a “gentleman” should be defined by Western culture.

The qualities of a “Confucian gentleman,” for instance, are quite different. The term junzi

existed in classical Chinese texts long before Confucius. It first appeared in the Book of Changes,

with the connotation of “office holder.” In The Analects of Confucius, 君子 junzi is one of the

primary key words, and has been employed by Confucians mainly in reference to people who are

morally noble and superior. The meaning of junzi was noted by Arthur Waley in his translation

of the Analects: “Chün (jun) is the most general term for ‘ruler,’ and chün-tzu (junzi) is a ‘son of a ruler.’ The term was applied to descendants of the ruling house in any State, and so came to mean ‘gentleman,’ ‘member of the upper classes […]’” “The gentleman is bound by a particular code of morals and manners; so that the word chün-tzu implies not merely superiority of birth but also superiority of character and behavior.”46 In the Confucian discourse, the junzi is also the one

who considers what is just, and a man who devotes himself to lofty ideals, while the xiaoren

(little people) only care about their own benefits. Commitment to a sense of social and political

responsibility and contribution to the state are also included in what it meant to be a

“gentleman.”47 However, the core of such moral virtues in the constitution of a gentleman in the

Confucian discourse is not the main focus of Lee Guiyuen’s adaptation.

46 Confucius, The Analects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage Books, 1938), 34. 47 Song Geng, The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2004), 89. 133

In Pygmalion, Eliza’s transformation is not merely from her social class. In contrast to

her father, who becomes a gentleman merely by inheriting money, Eliza needs to do much more

in order to become a lady. Not only does she need to change her speech, but she must also

become literate at “acting the feminine part” to pass as a duchess in high society. For Shaw,

being a lady entails knowing how to speak, when to speak, and how to behave “properly” in

polite society. In order to cross class boundaries, Eliza must become literate in the signs of

femininity, signified by the word “lady.” In this sense, what Eliza needs to learn is how to

perform the feminine masquerade, to act like a particular kind of woman of sophistication. In

each rendition of the Pygmalion story, the cultural constructions of femininity have been

refigured. In the film My Fair Lady, being a lady means knowing what to wear—being literate in

the signs of clothing and style, projecting the proper image, and being seen by the Other’s gaze

as one wishes to be seen.48 Eliza’s training involves not only speech but training in etiquette,

deportment and dress. My Fair Lady portrays Eliza in a mise-en-scene of spectacle where

femininity is attained through dressing up and acting out a masquerade or prescribed role. Thus it

registers a struggle between the voices of the feminine and the masculine, manifested in a variety

of ways, which all have to do with performance.49 The perfect woman as a literate, high-fashion

consumer had already been woven into the fabric of Shaw’s rendition of the Pygmalion myth,

setting the stage for the film of My Fair Lady the following decade. What is involved in this

social education is not only learning proper language but also gaining fashion and shopping

acumen, literary and social skills. My Fair Gentleman has also illustrated this point. Toward the

48 Lisa Starks, “Educating Eliza: Fashioning the Model Woman in the ‘Pygmalion Film,’” Postscript: Essays in Film and the Humanities 16.2 (1997): 49. 49 Lesley Stern, “Acting Out of Character: The Performance of Femininity,” Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan Sheridan (London: Verso, 1988), 29. 134

end of the film, Zeng, who is running out of time before a social event, was asking for Wu’s

advice on what he should wear:

曾:那衣服怎麼辦呀?

吳:你現在那麼紅,穿什麼人家都會覺得很好看。

你就算穿個睡衣呀,拖鞋,人家都會覺得你很有創意,只有哪些想要成名的人,

才需要擔心自己穿什麼衣服。

[Zeng: What about the clothes?

Wu: You are so popular now, and no matter what you wear people will like it.

Even if you wear pajamas and slippers, people will think you are creative and

daring. Only those who want to be famous worry about what they wear.]

The story of Pygmalion is a metaphor for the creative process, by which the artist creates a

perfect work of art, which then comes to life.50 Toward the end of My Fair Gentleman, Zeng

reveals his real identity to Fang Na as the man who approached her at the charity event and

compares himself to a miraculous piece of artwork.

The Chinese Translation of Dialect in Pygmalion

As Catford suggests, while languages may be described in terms of a number of varieties,

the number and nature of these varies from one language to another—a fact of importance in

connection with translation.51 One of the most problematic challenges in theatre translation is the treatment of dialect, which in the source text shapes dramatic characterization and positions the character within a certain community or group and within a specific cultural and linguistic

50 Martindale, Ovid Renewed, 206. 51 J.C. Catford, A Lingusitic Theory of Translation; An Essay in Applied Linguistics (London: Oxford UP, 1965), 85. 135

tradition. The identities of the dramatic characters are sculpted by their use of language varieties.

The use of dialect conveys a lot of information about the character who uses the dialect—

something that cannot be easily ignored by the translator. However, translators most probably

face difficulties transporting such strong cultural, historical social and local features of a given

language across into another, alternative linguistic and cultural frame.

In Pygmalion, “Cockney” is a dialectal variant of British English spoken in certain

districts of London. “Cockney” literally means a “cock’s egg,” and is derived from the Middle

English “cokeney.” The word first meant “a foolish person who did not know a good egg from a cock’s egg (a small egg with no yolk),” and later was applied to people in London who shared a characteristic accent.52 It is perceived as both sociolect and regionalect, spoken by lower

classes.53 Many English playwrights of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who lived in

London used Cockney to represent the speech of the local lower class in their humor. They held

vulgarisms up to ridicule by making their comic characters speak Cockney.54 In fact, Cockney is often used as the English lower class accent in jokes probably because it is to be heard in the capital city, London.

From the beginning of the play, Shaw demonstrates the very difficult task of transforming

Eliza’s speech by having her speak a very strong Cockney, when Eliza is complaining about the manners of a young man after he accidentally knocks over her flower basket:

The Flower Girl:

Ow, Eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal,

52 Robert Henrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (New York: Facts on File, 2008), 188. 53 Perteghella, “Language and Politics on Stage,” 47. See William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present: A Short History of the Dialect of London (London: Routledge, 1972). 54 Helge Kökeritz, “A Record of Late 18th-Century Cockney,” Language 25.2 (1949): 192. 136

fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a

mather should, eed now bettern

to spawl a pore gel’d flahrzn

than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will

ye-oo py me f’them?

[Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a

phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]55

Catford suggests that, in translating Cockney dialogue into French, most translators would select Parigot, which is a northerly dialect of French. However, as he points out, the

“markers” of the source and target dialect may be quite different. While Cockney is marked chiefly by phonological features, the markers of Parigot may include a few phonological or graphological features, but are likely to be largely at the lexical level, in the form of the extensive use of argot.56 The translator may decide to use a dialectal form in the target language.

For example, Russian translator Alexandra Kropotkin claims that it is not at all “untranslatable” because “educated and uneducated people do not talk any more alike than they do in England,” and “Russia has just as many variations of accent and vocabulary.”57 However, what should be noted is that the connotations of the two dialects involved might be very different, as each is a part of a particular society with its own sociolinguistic background. Alternatively, in one of the

Spanish translations of Pygmalion, the translator has tried to portray the flower girl as a typical girl from either the South of Spain or South America, and has used a very low register that is

55 Shaw, Pygmalion, 16-17. 56 Catford, A Lingusitic Theory of Translation, 88. 57 A.M. Gibbs, Shaw: Interviews and Recollections (Iowa: U of Iowa P, 1990), 155. 137

typical of people from these areas who belong to a low social stratum.58 However, one of the

negative aspects of choosing a dialectal variant in the target language is that there is a lack of

natural background atmosphere. In the Spanish translation of Floreal Mazía (1966), for instance,

one of the characters is using a dialectal variant of Spanish, although the play has not changed its

geographical environment. The play still takes place in London, but the character is speaking the

dialect from another area, which leads to an artificiality in the overall play in translation.59

Siegfried Trebitsch (1869-1956), in his German translations, occasionally cleaned up

Shaw’s language and plays of some of their racier content and phrases. As for dialect, so central

to Pygmalion’s plot, he simply avoided it altogether. Indeed, Eliza’s Cockney accent is

“transposed into impeccable Standard German” by Trebitsch.60 As Stephen Joyce points out,

Trebitsch reveals a marked tendency to avoid importation of culturally specific items (he

transposes only in seemingly extreme situations when there is no adequate equivalent in German

and where the transposition poses no threat to understanding).61 Shaw’s English language

version derives much humor from Eliza and other Cockney characters’ inabilities to pronounce

the letter “h” (have ’ave), and other consonant sounds, such as “th,” which becomes “f”

(throughfroo); “ing,” which regularly becomes “in” (workingworkin’); and so on.62 Such variations, however, would have made no sense in the German language.63 Most creatively, in

the Italian version of Pygmalion, Eliza speaks a non-existent Italian language that attempts to

translate the London dialect. The effect, being very far from natural, does go in the direction of

58 María Sánchez, “Translation as a(n) (Im)possible Task: Dialect in Literature,” Babel 45.4 (1999): 307. 59 Ibid., 308. 60 Peter Conolly-Smith, “Shades of Local Color: Pygmalion and its Translation and Reception in Central Europe, 1913-1914,” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 29 (2009): 131-132. 61 Stephen Joyce, “George Bernard Shaw and Siegfried Trebitsch: A Prolegomenon to Translation Study,” Independent Shavian 28 (1990): 24. 62 See Evangeline Machlin, Dialects for the Stage (New York: Routledge, 2006). 63 Conolly-Smith, “Shades of Local Color,” 133. 138

achieving an exotic effect, which gives the measure of a cultural distance while avoiding the

risks of selecting a real dialect from the target culture. The accent is not from London and is not

really Italian, but something “other,” as the readers perceive. While the London context is

visually portrayed, the linguistic information remains hidden.64

While translation inevitably implies the loss of some of the subtleties of sociolinguistic

variation in the source text, in the Chinese renderings of Pygmalion the ideological framework is

rendered by resorting to the voice of the translator. The two translators of Pygmalion, Yang

Xianyi (1915-2009) and Lin Yutang (1895-1976), prefer to substitute standard language for dialect, despite the nuances and humor, and so certain aspects of characterization are not expressed:

楊憲益:

哦, 他是您的孩子嗎? 哼,您做媽媽的要

是管教管教孩子,他也不能把人家的花給

糟蹋完了,就跑開也不給錢。您替他給錢

吧?(1)

(1):英文此處為土語方言。65

[Yang Xianyi:

Oh, is he your child? Well, as a mother you should discipline your children. He

cannot just ruin someone else’s flowers and leave without even paying for it. Are

you paying for him? (1)

64 Irene Ranzato, “Localising Cockney: Translating Dialect into Italian,” New Insights into Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility: Media for All 2, ed. Jorge Diaz Cintas, Anna Matamala, and Josélia Neves (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 114-115. 65 See Bernard Shaw, Mai Hua Nü 賣花女, trans. Yang Xianyi (Beijing: China Translation and Publishing, 2002), 11. 139

(1): The English text is in dialect.]

林語堂:

什麼? 他是你的兒子,真的嗎? 喝,倘使你盡過

母親的本分,他應不至於這樣的不識大體,弄壞一個貧女的花

兒而不給錢就跑開。你肯給錢嗎? [這裡,請看官原諒,這樣的

不使用發音字母而勉強把她的方言寫出的嘗試應該放棄,認為

除在倫敦以外看不明白。]66

[Lin Yutang:

What? Is he really your son? Ha, if you have fulfilled your role as a mother, he

just cannot be so rude and immature, ruining the flowers of a poor girl and

running away without paying for it. Are you willing to pay for it? (Here, please

forgive me readers, the attempt to write her dialect without the use of vowels

should be abandoned. The people outside London will not be able to understand

it).]

When Frederick Tsai comments on the Chinese translation of Yang Xianyi, he points out

that “Yang is not able to render the dialect in Pygmalion—that cannot be solved by anybody.”67

Both translators have substituted standard language for dialect but added a footnote or an explanation. This strategy is more suitable for scholarly editions of drama, and also for productions that universalize some of the issues or ideals in the foreign play. Domestic connotations are avoided, and the setting and topical references are those of the original.

66 See Bernard Shaw, Mai Hua Nü 賣花女, trans. Lin Yutang (Changchun: Northeast Normal UP, 1994), 93. 67 Frederick Tsai, Selected Commentaries on the Key Passages of Pygmalion Mai hua nü xuan ping 賣花女選評, trans. Yang Xianyi (China Translation and Publishing, 2004), 3. 140

However, if this type of text is used for a stage production, the characterization will lose its strength and the musicality and colorfulness of the source dialogue will be lost.68

The reason the translators have used a bland, standard version of the target language—a version in which no dialectal features are noticeable—is that, among the several options available to them, the use of standard language is above all the easiest one, always presuming that the original dialect is well understood by the translator. Another reason may be related to the distinction between speech and written language. When Shaw first represents Eliza’s pronunciation in non-standard spelling conventions, he used the “eye dialect—”a term which is used to define written representations of dialect speech, whereby words are spelled in a manner which indicates a non-standard pronunciation. We have seen an example of this above. He then reverts to standard orthography for the remaining dialogue in Pygmalion, depending on the readers’ “inner ear” as the supplier of the dialect for the rest of the play to bring the image, the recollection of the twisted speech patterns to the printed page.69 In other words, what the reader

“hears” within his mind will echo his own imagined version of each character’s voice.

In the Chinese translation, however, the difficulty of employing such a “written version” of different dialects has favored the use of the standard variety of the language over any other variety. As Don Snow argues, “what is perhaps most distinctive about the Hong Kong speech community is that it is the only Chinese society in the world where one will regularly encounter the written form of a Chinese dialect.”70 In recent decades, Taiwanese has experienced development as a written language, but written Taiwanese “only plays a limited role in Taiwan’s

68 Perteghella, “Language and Politics on Stage,” 51. 69 Jane Raymond Walpole, “Eye Dialect in Fictional Dialogue,” College Composition and Communication 25.2 (1974): 195. 70 Don Snow, Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2004), 2. 141

cultural and linguistic life.”71 The text as a “written language,” the channel which transmits the information in the literary work, has been one of the determining factors in the treatment of dialect in translated literary works. Further, unlike English, Cantonese does not reveal social distinctions as far as phonology is concerned, which means that pronunciation alone cannot really distinguish between the speech of an “upper class” Hong Konger from that of a “lower class” one. A lower class person might use more slang and vulgar expressions, and speak with a coarser voice, but there are no systematic phonological differences such as those that distinguish a Cockney’s pronunciation.

Both Yang Xianyi and Lin Yutang have translated Shaw’s stage direction or added explanatory phrases that help the target readers to understand that dialectal language is being

used. From another perspective, these mediating translation devices have also become part of the

literary or theatrical experience, adding another voice to the comic heteroglossia. While the voice

of the “other,” representing dialectal variety is fading away, what can be seen is the emergence

and interpolation of the translator’s voice. The play of language, in this case, has broadened to

include not only the encounter of diverse languages, but also the devices by which this encounter

is negotiated and received. The negotiation of heteroglossia, thus, adds other voice(s) to the

multiplicity and dynamics of language.72

The Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia illuminate how the linguistic and philosophical issues explored in Shaw’s play are still current today. In drama, not only are non-

standard features such as dialects used at a higher frequency than in other literary works; they

can also be an important aspect of the main element of the plot, as well as a focus of humor.

Higgins uses the “new speech” as a comic device and a tool of social change, a change that takes

71 Ibid., 35. 72 Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 182. 142

place through the medium of language. The conflicts that erupt throughout Pygmalion exemplify

the complex connections between words and power. At the beginning, Eliza is imprisoned in

poverty by her inarticulate speech, while the new speech has empowered her and allowed her to acquire a new identity.73

In such a world of multilingual articulations, each dialect or accent represents a particular

level of modernity within the collective of diverse identities and positionalities.74 The process of

adaptation becomes an opportunity for cross-cultural comparisons and, more importantly, for

discovering something about one’s own culture while listening to the narratives about another. A

striking feature of the comic experience is the way in which the very notions of “self” and

“other” become difficult to disentangle. “Otherness” is viewed from multiple perspectives; and

the categories that define the self and the other are themselves unstable. It is not a single fixed

point but shifts from relationship to relationship throughout the interpretations of the play.75

73 Reynolds, Pygmalion’s Wordplay, 43. 74 Sheldon Lu, “Dialect and Modernity in Twenty-first-Century Sinophone Cinema,” Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2007), 163. 75 Edward Berry, “Laughing at ‘Others,’” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 128. 143

CHAPTER 4

Translating Society Comedies—

The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan

Oscar Wilde’s famous witticisms, paradoxes and humor not only have a strong cultural

impact across Europe, but also become objects of imitation and parody in Chinese culture.1 This final chapter deals with the Chinese translation of Oscar Wilde’s comedy of manners, a form of dramatic comedy that often satirizes the manners and affectations of contemporary society.

Unlike satire, the comedy of manners “tends to reward its cleverly unscrupulous characters rather than punish their immorality, with humor that relies chiefly upon elegant verbal wit and repartee.”2 An interesting phenomenon that occurs in translated comedy or humor is that both the

source and target readers may take pleasure in the same content, but for entirely different reasons.

Thus, instead of dismissing humor as “untranslatable,” it is more important to see how it is

retained or shaped; to understand how it is understood in a different way from a different

perspective; and, further, to understand how the comic effects are created through the dynamics

of translation and performance.3 The translated play exists as a translation of a play for the page,

a play written or revised for performance, and also, a text on the journey to its realization on the

stage.

The first section of this chapter explores how the comic elements and the notion of

identity is reconstructed in Yu Guangzhong’s translation of The Importance of Being Earnest,

published in 1983, and in the adaptation of the play, directed by Yang Shipeng and performed in

1 For the reception and performance history of Oscar Wilde in Europe, refer to Stefano Evangelista, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (London: Continuum, 2010). 2 Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 63. 3 Irene del Corral, “Humor: When Do We Lose it?” Translation Review 27 (1988): 26-27. 144

Hong Kong in 2004. Two Chinese translations of the play will be compared in this section: Yu

Guangzhong’s literary translation; and the revised translation for the stage performance. The key

issue that distinguishes theatre translation from other kinds of literary translation is the notion of

performativity. An actor needs to be able to speak the translated lines convincingly in the

performance. The director, on the other hand, needs to ensure that the actors’ interpretations of

translated texts capture the source while also remaining effective in the new context, which

suggests why literal translations are often revised or changed considerably by adapters and

directors in the process of adaptation for the stage.4

The second part of the chapter explores how the critical tone of Wilde’s society comedy is altered, and how the moral vision in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan is reshaped in Hung

Shen’s Chinese translation of the play published in the 1920s, in contrast to Yu Guangzhong’s

translation in the 1980s. In the 1920s and 1930s, adaptations and translations of comedies are

closely associated with the women’s emancipation movement in Republican China. For example,

the first play of Oscar Wilde introduced to China was An Ideal Husband, translated by a female

scholar named Xie Qiying, during the New Culture Movement in 1915, when young educated

women were striving for freedom from an oppressive patriarchal tradition. Xie’s translation of

Wilde’s play was published by New Youth to provide strong moral support for the women’s

emancipation movement. Similarly, ideology was a dominant issue in the introduction of Shaw’s

Mrs. Warren’s Profession to China. By 1919, there were many famous plays to choose from in

the Shavian canon. The obvious reason for translating the play into Chinese is that it dealt with

social messages on individuality, the liberation of women, and the freedom of the younger

generation from family and tradition, all issues strongly promoted by the young Chinese

4 Brigid Maher, Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), 70. 145

intellectuals in the Intellectual Revolution. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was chosen for translation because it was found to be compatible with the spirit of the Intellectual Revolution.5 The

comedic silent film A Spray of Plum Blossom, directed by Bu Wancang in 1931, turned

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona into a bildungsroman about two modern women of

Shanghai and Canton. The hybrid identity of the women in the film adaptation, of tradition and

modernity, also reflects the gendered imagination of the New Woman in the period.6

Different translations of the same work are subject to the test of time. The varieties of

translations demonstrate the patterns of translated literature. As products created by both the

translator and the target readers, different versions of translated literary texts assemble the value

systems and aesthetic perceptions of specific cultural backgrounds, and reveal interpretations, no

matter whether they agree or disagree with each other or with the original, which are important

phenomena in the process of the development and transmission of translated literature.

Once a play is performed, new interpretations become inevitable. It is, therefore, not only interesting to know how meanings in the source texts are expressed in a new language, but also how translation enables a text to continue life in a new reality. The translation becomes another original, with its continuing existence in the new context, demonstrating how the translation rewrites itself and how translation and performance interact and complement each other. From another perspective, insights from translation practice also have implications for the theory of comedy, and it is therefore also important to integrate observations from the translation of the comic to the theory of comedy.

5 Kay Li, Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-cultural Encounters (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007), 65-66. 6 Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), 122. 146

Bergson’s theory of comedy depends on repetition. He proposes that we laugh at human

beings when they behave with mindless automatism, when they lose their power to originate,

when they start repeating themselves:

The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite

laughter by their repetition. The truth is that a real living life should never repeat

itself. Whenever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect

some mechanism at work behind the living.7

Why is it there is something comic in the repetition of a word on the stage?

In a comic repetition of words, we generally find two terms: a repressed feeling

which goes off like a spring, and an idea that delights in repressing the feeling

anew.8

The comic effect of repetition is created when one takes pleasure in repressing and

releasing the feeling repeatedly. An adaptation or translation, however, is not only a repetition or

imitation of the comic effects in the source text. Thus, for instance, in the Chinese parody film 越

光寶盒 Yueguang baohe (Just Another Pandora’s Box, 2010), when comic actors Ronald Cheng and Wong Cho-lam, one after another, tried to imitate the typical funny and nonsense style and manner of speaking of Stephen Chow, the comic effects still fade and weaken with the layers of imitations. The adaptation of a comedy involves not merely an imitation and the interpretation of the “other” language, but the dialogue, and interaction between, multiple languages and diverse cultural elements, with additional, unexpected elements emerging in the transformation process.

The adaptation or translation of the comedy is particularly complex. Apart from the different

7 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), 35-36. 8 Ibid., 69. 147

connotations of the voices and the difficulties in the recreation of a written or visual form, it also involves an overall hidden “contest” between the comic voices and images.

Adaptation and Translation

Adaptations are often compared to translations. How does an adaptation differ from a translation? What are the theoretical boundaries between the two concepts, and how can we

express the close relationship between the two practices? In general terms, adaptation refers to a

target text that draws on a source text but which has been extensively modified for a new cultural

context. It takes the original as a point of departure, but is less “faithful” than a translation.9

Georges Bastin, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, defined adaptation as “a set

of translative operations which result in a text that is not accepted as a translation but is

nevertheless recognized as representing a source text.”10 Comparing the two paradigms, Sven

Rank analyzes how they function differently. He suggests that adapters function as a “trouble-

maker,” and an “attention-seeker,” as “he wishes to be noticed and recognized as the author of a

new work (other than the translator).”11 The adapter takes the image of the “iconoclast,” and an adaptation’s function tends to be interpellative rather than communicative […] For example, while the translation of classics seeks to reinstall the canonical text in a position of power, adaptation also seeks to reinstall its product in a position of power but only after it has first removed it from that position […].12

9 Clifford E. Landers, Literary Translation: A Practical Guide (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001), 55. 10 Georges Bastin, “Adaptation,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3. 11 Sven Rank, Twentieth-century Adaptations of Macbeth: Writing Between Influence, Intervention, and Cultural Transfer (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), 22. 12 Ibid., 26. 148

The basis of the distinction between the two practices seems to be the degree to which a

target text diverges from the source. However, how close does it have to be from the source in

order to be recognizable as a translation, or how far away to be classified as an adaptation? The

categories of “adaptation” and “translation” also appear blurred to some scholars, who may even

suggest that “translation is adaptation.” This explains why every classic work of literature has to

be retranslated every twenty or thirty years and a definitive version does not exist, as a

translation has to be “adapted” to a new era or environment.13 To render a classic play for a contemporary culture is a form of adaptation, as the translators respond to some elements in the play that relate to the modern culture.

“Adaptation” is one of the seven translation categories put forward by Vinay and

Darbelnet—others are “borrowing,” “calque,” “literal translation,” “transposition,”

“modulation,” and “equivalence.” As a type of “oblique translation,” it aims at achieving an equivalence of situations, whenever the context referred to in the source text/culture does not exist in the target culture.14 Lefevere’s theory of rewriting attempts to tell us that when a text is

moved from one language to another, it is also rewritten. He brought the practices and ideas of

adaptations into the field of translation studies, and shows that translators often do not simply

provide a “literal” translation, but in fact, to fulfill various purposes, insert passages in their

translations which cannot be found in the source text. The translator’s interpretation of the text

guides the rewriting and the reception of the translated text:

13 Peter Hall, “Translation in the Theatre I: Directing as Translating,” Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999), 389-390. 14 See Jean Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995). 149

All rewritings […] reflect a certain ideology and poetics and as such manipulate

literature to function in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation… and in its

positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society.15

For Lefevere, translation is the “most obviously recognizable type of rewriting,”16 and

manipulates the source text due to ideology and the dominant poetics in the target culture. The

interpretation of the translator combined with linguistic and cultural differences will be reflected

in the final product. Thus, the thinking of translation as rewriting helps us to step away from the

rigid boundaries between translating and adapting.17

Further, Lawrence Venuti, in his article “Adaptation, Translation, Critique,” (2007) develops the concept of “interpretant,” as an essential category for studying adaptation. The

“formal interpretants” include, for instance, a relation of equivalence, such as a particular style, or a concept of genre that necessitates a manipulation or revision of the adapted materials; while

“thematic interpretants” are codes, values or ideologies, which may include interpretations of the adapted materials that have been formulated elsewhere, as a morality or cultural taste used to appeal to a particular audience.18 Venuti proposes the hermeneutic model, viewing the relation

between translations and their source materials as “interpretive,” as a translation inscribes an

interpretation that inevitably varies the form and meaning of the source text, and any

correspondences between the source and translated texts are “subject to the exigencies of an

interpretive labor that is decisively determined by the translating language and culture.”19

15 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992), vii. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Susan Bassnett, Reflections on Translation (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2011), 42. 18 Lawrence Venuti, “Adaptation, Translation, Critique,” Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007): 33. 19 Ibid., 29. 150

Cattrysse suggests that there are no grounds for reducing the concept of translation to

mere interlinguistic relationships, and proposed that an extension of particular theories of

translation (e.g. the “polysystem” theories) to the study of film adaptations could provide new

insights into fundamental patterns of communication in both film and translation. The respective

cinematic genres, for instance, plays a very important role in the selection dimension, as well as

in the process of adaptation.20 On the other hand, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos (1929-

2003) proposes the use of adaptive strategies in literary translation. He coined the term

“transcreation,” which means transformation or rewriting of the source text as the task of the translator. Transcreation was characterized as an approach to creative literary translation and has been applied by Haroldo de Campos to his own translations of Chinese poetry and Japanese haiku.21

In the area of theatre texts, adjustments may be considered necessary by translators, as

every performance is a different version, a different adaptation of the text, and thus omissions or

additions may be made. Particular situations call for an adaptation, as in the translation of puns

and wordplays, or in works such as comedy or farce, when current references are often added to

the translated play to enhance topicality for a local audience. Adaptation is sometimes regarded

as a form of translation which is characteristic of particular genres, such as drama. As Bastin

points out, it is in relation to drama translation that adaptation has most frequently been

studied.22 The study of adaptation encourages the translation theorists to look beyond purely

20 Patrick Cattrysse, “Film (Adaptation) as Translation: Some Methodological Proposals,” Target 4.1(1992): 53-54. 21 See K. David Jackson, “Transcriação/Transcreation: The Brazilian Concrete Poets and Translation,” The Translator as Mediator of Cultures, ed. Humphrey Tonkin and Maria Esposito Frank (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010), 139. 22 Bastin, “Adaptation,” 4. 151

linguistic issues and helps reveal the role of the translator as a mediator and a creative participant in the intercultural communication, rather than an “invisible element” of the whole process.

Aaltonen’s discussion of translation suggests that three types of translations can be distinguished: an “introductory translation” that is written for a diverse audience of readers; a

“gloss translation” that insists on tailor-making the translations on the basis of linguistic analysis of the source text; and a third type, the “performance translation,” aimed at reception in a particular theatrical context, and intended to be received audio-visually.23 The categories can be further expanded—for example, when we consider Chang Nam Fung’s translation of The

Importance of Being Earnest, published in 1987.24 In his translation, performance instructions

were inserted as footnotes to point out, from a translator’s perspective, which part of the play

could be omitted if the play had to be revised in order to put it on stage.

As we have discussed in chapter two, one of the main issues that distinguishes theatre

translation from other kinds of literary translation is the notion of “performability.” It has been

pointed out that this is rather a hazy notion, but one which often underlies decisions about how

different types of media are to be considered in the translation of a text. One of the key

preoccupations of the theatre translator or adapter is the spoken style of the translation, because

the actor needs to be able to speak the translated lines on stage. This is where the adaptation of

“literary translations” takes place. Literary translations are revised by adapters or directors in the

process of adaptation. The improvisation of actors might also be involved in some cases, when

23 See Sirkku Aaltonen, Time-sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000). 24 Chang Nam-fung, Two English Dramas: The Importance of Being Earnest and Trelawny of the Wells Yingguo xiju erzhong: rezhen de zhongyao, kuangquan juyuan de qulangni xiaojie 英國戲劇二種:認真的重要,礦泉劇院的 屈朗尼小姐 (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1987). 152

they try to make sense of the humorous instances in the source text, and ensure that they are still

effective in the new media or context.

Since theatre and film involve both specific linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, the

strategies adopted for the transposition of drama considerably differ from those present in the

translation of the other genres.25 While the literary text is a verbal medium which has words to play with, theatrical performances can play not only with words but also with sound effects and moving photographic images.26 Linda Hutcheon, in her definition in A Theory of Adaptation

(2006), suggests that since adaptations are “remediations,” they are specifically “translations” in

the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system to another (for example, from

words to images). This means adaptation is translation in a specific sense, one that involves a

recoding into a new set of conventions and signs.27

The way language transforms in performance can provide inspiration for translation

strategies that go beyond the translation of words to words. Performance texts are not simply

texts that are read privately by individual readers, but are texts uttered by bodies that interact

with the texts. In Heather Marcovitch’s words, performance involves the negotiation between

text and body.28 It is therefore important to analyze how meanings are constructed in the

interaction of the actors with words.29 The study of “performance translation” concerns not only

25 Jorge Braga Riera, “The Adaptation of Seventeenth-Century Spanish Drama to the English Stage During the Restoration Period: The Case of Calderón,” Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650-1737, ed. Catie Gill (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 108. 26 Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 56. 27 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16. 28 Heather Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 18. 29 Jennifer Lindsay, Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia (Singapore: Singapore UP, 2006), 3-4. 153

the preparation of a text for performance, but also other areas such as the presentation of

translations in performances and the concept of translation as inherent to a performance itself.30

Two Versions of The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy of manners and mistaken identity, was

written by Oscar Wilde in 1894 and first produced at the St. James Theatre in 1895.31 The plot

revolves around two young gentlemen, Jack and Algernon, who create false personas so they can

get away from their otherwise humdrum lives. In order to escape his responsibilities in the

countryside, Jack developed a fictional younger brother, Ernest, who lives a life of pleasure in

London. Various romantic entanglements then become complicated. Leading a double life, Jack

is in love with Gwendolen, Algernon’s cousin, who is smitten by the name “Ernest.” The comic

verbal style of the characters was described by Max Beerbohm as “[…] a kind of beautiful

nonsense—the language of high comedy, twisted into fantasy.”32 Wilde’s subtitle “Trivial

Comedy for Serious People” reveals the subject of the play, that all the trivial things of life

should be treated very seriously, and on the other hand, all the serious things of life with a

studied triviality.

The Chinese version of The Importance of Being Earnest was translated by Yu

Guangzhong in 1983, when he was residing in Hong Kong. Directed by Yang Shipeng, the play

was performed by the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in 1984 and 1985; and during the summer

30 Ibid., 5. 31 Russell Jackson, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 161. 32 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), xxiv. See also Jacobus Gerhardus Riewald, Max Beerbohm’s Mischievous Wit: A Literary Entertainment (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000), 109. 154

of the same year it was staged in Guangzhou.33 It was then performed again at The Hong Kong

Academy For Performing Arts in 2004. The stage dialogues of the Hong Kong performance were

based on Yu Guangzhong’s Chinese translation, but changes were made for the new dramatic

context, particularly concerning humor, role-play and ideas concerning performativity.

Throughout the play every scene is dominated by dialogues and epigrams, with an emphasis on language. The various types of paradoxes, absurdities, and comic devices, which are considered “unexpected verbal reactions,” appear much more frequently in The Importance of

Being Earnest than in Wilde’s other social comedies.34 The animating force of the comic

response lies in the tension between the audience’s or readers’ initial expectations of absolute

logic or sense and the thwarting of these expectations.35 Humor increases when the speakers are

only committed to his own presuppositions, and respond in a completely opposite way to that in

which the hearer expects them. Paradox is a central element of Wilde’s epigrammatic style.

Wilde’s dandies employ paradox to distance themselves from the Philistines, thereby

demonstrating a sense of superiority, and to disguise their moral involvement in the central

conflicts of the play.36 Much comedy also derives from the play of language.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde creates a humorous symbol in the notion of

“bunburying” (to have an imaginary and secret other life and double identities; Otto Reinert

defines the term as “a means of escape from conventions.”37) The two young men in the play,

Jack and Algernon, go bunburying—that is, they leave their world and seek elsewhere for private

33 Fu Mengli, The Child of Dogwood: A Life of Yu Guangzhong Zhuyu de haizi: Yu Guangzhong zhuan 茱萸的孩子: 余光中傳 (Taipei: Commonwealth Publishing Group, 1999), 225. 34 Dariusz Pestka, “A Typology of Oscar Wilde’s Comic Devices,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies 22 (1989): 184. 35 Janet L. Solberg, “‘Who Was That Masked Man?’: Disguise and Deception in Medieval and Renaissance Comic Literature,” The Stranger in Medieval Society, ed. F.R.P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 133. 36 Karl Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 256. 37 Otto Reinert, “Satiric Strategy in The Importance of Being Earnest,” College English 18.1 (1956): 15. 155

satisfactions because they find no pleasures in the conventional society.38 Wilde creates a world

in which the characters are dandies, living or seeking to live entirely for pleasure. To know

“Bunbury” is to construct a life of pleasure, through a fiction or an act of imagination. The

difference between the superficial and the actual, the fictional and the real, is an important

component of the comic effect in drama, as it functions as a rebellion and provides the means to

evade restrictions and to open sources of pleasure that were once forbidden, free from sanctions.

Bunburying is also comedy’s best example of life as theatre, in which a situation is contrived in

order for an individual to engage in a secret play and to avoid participation in a ritual not to his

liking.39 The Bunburyist lives in a world of irresponsibility—to an extent, freed from the

enslavement of a hypocritical convention. However, the escape from convention is also itself a

flagrant instance of hypocrisy—pretence is the price that the Bunburyist pays for freedom.40

The notion of double identity and Wilde’s witty language have been represented in

different ways in the Western adaptations. Oliver Parker’s adaptation of The Importance of Being

Earnest (2002), for instance, emphasizes the topics of performance or theatricality. In the film

adaptation, the first conversation between Jack and Algy does not take place in Algy’s morning-

room but starts in the theatrical setting of a music hall. A mirror motif associated with Jack

throughout the adaptation also supports the theme of the double life—the mirror serving on the

one hand as a rehearsal aid for Jack’s performance in society, and on the other hand as a

confidante for his secret emotions.41 Other Western adaptations have not only imitated, but also

transformed Wilde’s style and his technique of ironic incongruity, reversals, and paradoxes.

38 Morris Freedman, “The Modern Tragicomedy of Wilde and O’Casey,” College English 25.7 (1964): 519. 39 Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose, 178. 40 Reinert, “Satiric Strategy in The Importance of Being Earnest,” 17. 41 Lucia Krämer, “Subversion in Disguise: Oliver Parker’s Adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest,” Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions Since the Mid-1990s, ed., Eckart Voigts-Virchow (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004), 141. 156

Additionally, some of the film directors merge Wildean polish with a violation of decorum: for

example, the contrast of the elevated form with obscene content, juxtaposition of Victorian

diction with contemporary slang, and the manifestation in the pastiche of divergent texts ranging

from the Bible to the jargons of psychoanalysis and of the media.42

In the translation of Yang Shipeng’s stage performance, some of Wilde’s humorous

features are omitted. Yang, for example, has omitted the instance when Algernon in Wilde’s

farce tries to extract the identity of the mysterious Cecily Cardew from Jack Worthing, “You had

much better have the thing out at once.” Jack, trying to evade the question, retorts (Yu

Guangzhong’s original translations will be quoted after the source text):

Jack: My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to

talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression.43

Yu Guangzhong:

杰:好阿吉,你的語氣活像拔牙的醫生。不是牙醫而要學牙醫的語氣,未免太俗

氣了。這會造成一種假象。44

[Jack: Good Algy, your tone sounds like that of a dentist. If you imitate a dentist’s

tone or manner of speaking but you are not a dentist, it is a bit too philistine. This

will cause a false impression.]

Another instance omitted is a childlike petulance revealed at the end of Act 1, where we see Jack and Algy trying to decide how they will amuse themselves that evening:

Algernon: What shall we do after dinner? Go to a theatre?

42 Annette Pankratz, “Playing with Oscar—Camp as Textual Strategy in Adaptations of The Importance of Being Earnest,” The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100 Years, ed. Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis, and Julie Hibbard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 232. 43 Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), 484. 44 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Buke erxi 不可兒戲, ed. Yu Guangzhong (Beijing: You Yi Publishing, 1986), 8. 157

Jack: Oh no! I loathe listening.

Algernon: Well, let us go to the Club?

Jack: Oh, no! I hate talking.

Algernon: Well, we might trot round to the Empire at ten?

Jack: Oh no! I can’t bear looking at things. It is so silly.

Algernon: Well, what shall we do?

Jack: Nothing!

Algernon: It is awfully hard work doing nothing.45

Yu Guangzhong:

亞:飯後去那兒呢?聽戲嗎?

杰:哦,不行!我討厭聽戲。

亞:那,去俱樂部吧?

杰:哦,不行!我最恨聊天。

亞:那,十點鐘散步去帝國樂廳吧?

杰:哦,不行!我最受不了一路東張西望,無聊得很!

亞:那,到底幹什麼呢?

杰:什麼也不幹!

亞:什麼也不幹,倒真是苦差事。46

[Algernon: Where are we going after dinner? Watch a drama?

Jack: Oh no! I hate drama.

Algernon: Then, how about going to the club?

45 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 498. 46 Wilde, Buke erxi, 25. 158

Jack: Oh no! I am most afraid of chatting.

Algernon: Then, how about walking to the Empire Music Hall at ten?

Jack: Oh no! I cannot stand looking around all the way. It’s so boring!

Algernon: Then, what should we do?

Jack: Nothing!

Algernon: Nothing, that is really an unpleasant task.]

Another hilarious instance at the end of Act One, was also omitted by Yang in his performance script. The conversation involves one of the battles against presuppositions which goes on and on throughout Wilde’s play:

Algernon: I hope tomorrow will be a fine day, Lane.

Lane: It never is, sir.

Algernon: Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist.

Lane: I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.

[…]

Jack: If you don’t take care, your friend Bunbury will get you into a serious

scrape some day.

Algernon: I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.

Jack: Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense.

Algernon: Nobody ever does.47

Yu Guangzhong:

杰:要是你不當心呀,

你這位朋友梁勉仁總有一天會未你招來嚴重的麻煩。

47 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 499-500. 159

亞:我喜歡麻煩呀。世界上只有麻煩這種事絕不嚴重。

杰:呸,又是胡說八道,阿吉。你一開口就是胡說八道。

亞:誰開口不是這樣呢。48

[Jack: If you are not careful, your friend will one day cause you serious troubles.

Algernon: I like troubles. There is only trouble in this world which is absolutely

not serious.

Jack: Pooh, you are talking nonsense again, Algernon. Every time you open your

mouth you are talking nonsense.

Algernon: Who doesn’t talk like that?]

In addition to a loss of humor, some of the minor details in the comedy have also been adjusted to the target culture. In witty conversation and in his plays and other writings, Wilde employed the convention of Australia as a place of joking—a vast and distant outpost overrun by convicts and wealthy philistines who were to be spurned.49 In real life, when Wilde was asked why he thought of going to Australia, he replied, “Well, do you know, when I look at the map and see what an ugly-looking country Australia is, I feel as if I want to go there to see if it cannot be changed into a more beautiful form.”50 The butt of imperial humor appears, for instance, in the dialogue between Cecily and Algernon, when Cecily informs Algernon that Jack has “gone up to buy (his) outfit for emigrating.” The location “Australia” was revised to “Africa” in the performance translation:

Cecily: I don’t think you will require neckties. Uncle Jack is sending you to

Australia.

48 Wilde, Buke erxi, 28. 49 Peter Pierce, The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 31. 50 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), 207. 160

Algernon: Australia? I’d sooner die.

Cecily: Well, he said at dinner on Wednesday night, that you would have to

choose between this world, the next world, and Australia.

Algernon: Oh, well! The accounts I have received of Australia and the next world,

are not particularly encouraging. This world is good enough for me, cousin

Cecily.51

Performance version:

西西麗:我看你不需要領帶吧?傑克叔叔打算送你去非洲。

亞吉能:非洲!我不如死掉。

西西麗:嗯,上禮拜三吃飯的時候,他說你必須在人間,天上和非洲之間作一個

選擇。

亞吉能:真的?讓我想想看。天上也好,非洲也好,我聽到的種種傳聞都不怎麼

令人心動。人間已經很合我意了。52

[Cecily: I see you don’t really need a tie. Uncle Jack plans to send you to Africa.

Algernon: Africa? I would rather die.

Cecily: Yes, when we were having dinner last Wednesday, he said you have to

make a choice between man’s world, Heaven and Africa.

Algernon: Really? Let me think about it. No matter whether it’s Heaven or Africa,

the tales that I have heard are not particularly moving. Man’s world is already to

my liking.]

51 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 504. 52 Mao Junhui, The Importance of Being Earnest Buke erxi 不可兒戲 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, 2004), 25. 161

Another example occurs in the scene in which Lady Bracknell mentions her visit to her friend. Here, the expected reaction to marriage is questioned. One finds Lady Bracknell referring to her recently widowed friend, Lady Harbury, in the following terms: “I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband’s death. I never saw a woman so altered. She looks quite twenty years younger.”53 The truth is revealed to shock with the unexpected contradiction, embodied in a traditionally respected concept of the theme of mourning. An additional quip about Lady Harbury is made by Algernon, who confirms the situation by saying: “I heard her hair has turned quite gold from grief,” which constitutes another comic paradox whose perverse irony is formed by using the word “gold,” which seems incongruous in this context.54 The change of hair color indicates a break in expectation and results in humor. While Yu Guangzhong’s translation played upon the similarity of sound, in order to induce the humorous effect of Wilde to the Chinese audience, the theatre group substituted “black” for “gold” in the performance version:

Literary version:

亞:聽說她的頭髮因為傷心變色像黃金。55

[Heard that her hair has turned golden because of grief.]

Performance version:

亞吉能:聽說她因為傷心,頭髮都全變黑了。56

[Heard that because she is too grieved, her hair has all turned black.]

The same cultural adjustment occurs when Gwendolen informs Jack: “What wonderfully blue eyes you have, Ernest! They are quite, quite, blue. I hope you will

53 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 488. 54 Pestka, “A Typology of Oscar Wilde’s Comic Devices,” 179. 55 Wilde, Buke erxi, 13. 56 Mao, Buke erxi, 10. 162

always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present.”57 In the

performance version, the “blue eyes” are also neutralized:

Literary version:

關:……你的眼睛藍得好奇妙啊,任真! 真的好藍,好藍啊。希望你永遠像這樣

望著我,尤其是當著別人的面。58

[Your blue eyes look marvelous, Ernest! They are really so blue, so blue! Hope

you can always look at me like this…]

Performance version:

關多琳:……你的眼睛真迷人啊,任真!真迷人,真迷人。希望你永遠像這樣望

著我,尤其是當著別人的面。59

[Your eyes are so glamorous, Ren Zhen! Really really glamorous. Hope you can

always look at me like this…]

In the revised translations of The Importance of Being Earnest, while part of the humor has been excluded, Yang has enriched the texts, not with additional puns lacking in the source text, but with cultural elements as substitutions for those that would seem alien to the target audience. Such patterns are part of a compensation strategy.60 In reading a translation, the target

readers accept that the foreigners in the book they are reading speak their own language, but they still remain foreigners; there is no need to change them into Chinese when one is translating into the target language.61 The Chinese features of the characters, however, are emphasized in the

performance. If we look at these cultural changes in the translation together with the actors on

57 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 492. 58 Wilde, Buke erxi, 17. 59 Mao, Buke erxi, 14. 60 Adrian Pablé, “The Importance of Re-naming Ernest: Italian Translations of Oscar Wilde,” Target: International Journal on Translation Studies 17.2 (2005): 319. 61 Jürgen von Stackelberg, “Translating Comical Writing,” Translation Review 28 (1988): 13. 163

stage, who are dressed in Western costumes, what can be observed is actually a play upon the

“artificiality” of the impersonation. The performance not only calls attention to the relation

between bodies and speech, but also the differentiation between the role itself and the character

who is actualized by the actor. A role refers to everything that the playwright asks of an actor,

including the lines and any stage directions or descriptive material that implies all the imaginable

potential. A range of probabilities inheres in any role and the audience may never see all of them

realized, while the actors bring into the performance their unique bodies, interpret and in turn

reinvent the role assigned to them.62 When we are talking about a “character,” what emerges is

also the “translation” of the character from a text to a performance, and the methods that an actor

uses for rendering a part from the page into an engaging individual on the stage. The actor

creates a particular type that is infused with new life every time when it is played. In the theatre

character is not a fixed entity but its potential to subject to translation and change in

performance.63

Maria Tymoczko puts forward the notion of “comic paradigm,” which refers to the world

views that determine what is or is not generally considered comic in a particular culture during a

particular time frame. If the comic paradigms of a target culture or era are very different from

those of the source text, the reception of a text will be greatly affected.64 Tymoczko

demonstrates that divergence of “cultural paradigms” can block the perception and translation of

complex cultural patterns from different cultures.65 Divergence of social structure, ideology, values, and other factors makes it difficult to recognize particular comic elements; or,

62 Albert Bermel, Comic Agony: Mixed Impressions in the Modern Theatre (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), ix. 63 Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels, “From Stage to Page: Character Through Theatre Practices in Romeo and Juliet,” Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999), 53-54. 64 Maher, Recreation and Style, 9. 65 Maria Tymoczko, “Translating the Humor in Early Irish Hero Tales,” Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1999), 192. 164

alternatively, makes a receiving audience laugh at things that are not intended to be funny in the

source text.66

Humor is an example of an aspect of human culture that is governed by paradigms.

People learn what is funny in a culture by learning specific jokes or by participating in activities

perceived as comic. Such comic paradigms naturally influence the translation of comedy. A

difference in comic paradigm will make it difficult to recognize the humor of another group, and

thus, the difficulty in perceiving the humor of earlier times or other cultures.67 Paradigms shape

the essence of the self and the other, even though the self and the other meet in translation across

paradigms, struggling for power over paradigms. But transmitting alternative perspectives is the

task of translators who challenge to encode such complexities of culture in their translations.

Translations act as a form of intercultural communication, making what is alien to a culture come into contact with what is peculiar to it […] cultural assumptions influence

performances, while performances rewrite cultural assumptions.68 The playwright and the

director shape the stage translation or production to provoke a certain response in the spectator.

The experience of the production will in turn establish or revise the audience’s horizon of

expectations.69 The spectators attend the show with some preconceived ideas about it, and when the performance starts and proceeds they test these preconceptions or hypotheses against the fictional world that is being offered to them.70 The fun barrier, in other words, is not to be overcome by toning down the comedy or the humor to make it more acceptable to current taste.

66 Ibid., 194. 67 Ibid., 195. 68 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1990), 2. 69 Marta Mateo, “Translation Strategies and the Reception of Drama Performances: A Mutual Influence,” Translation as Intercultural Communication: Selected Papers from the EST Congress, Prague 1995, ed. Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarova, and Klaus Kaindl (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997), 99. 70 Ibid., 101. 165

Instead, the readers need to experience a foreign sense of humor, while the translator actually

invites the readers to reconsider their own assumptions concerning comedy and humor. This

approach, however, also suggests the expression of a particular sense of strangeness in the

translation.71

Performance Translation

—From Verbal Humor to Physical Humor

Since the text is only one of the elements of the stage performance, in the following we

shall look at some of the extra-textual features that also determine the reception of the play in

performance.72 Translation in performance can also be approached from the perspective of the

transfer between verbal and non-verbal codes. Applying Roman Jakobson’s schema in “On

Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” this might be called “intersemiotic transposition,” which is

conceived as the transposition “from one system of signs into another” (for example, from verbal

art into music, dance, cinema, or painting).73

In Yang Shipeng’s stage production of The Importance of Being Earnest, the snobbish

and domineering aunt of Algernon, Lady Bracknell, was cross-dressed by two male actors. The

same technique was actually employed in some of the Western adaptations of Wilde’s plays.

Canada’s Stratford Festival and Humberside’s Great Eastern Stage Company also employed

male Lady Bracknells (William Hutt and Desmond Barrit).74 Dublin’s Rough Magic, in the

spring of 1994, also brought a radically readjusted Lady Windermere to London’s Tricycle

71 John Rutherford, “Translating Fun: Don Quixote,” The Translator as Writer, ed. Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush (London: Continuum, 2006), 80-81. 72 Mateo, Translation as Intercultural Communication, 102. 73 Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” 139. 74 Joel Kaplan, “Wilde on the Stage,” The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 270. 166

Theatre. The producer, Lynne Parker, used cross-dressing, the doubling of roles and direct

audience address to achieve a postmodern juxtaposition of performance styles.75 In the

performance directed by Yang, Wilde’s play was performed in two versions A and B. Two

different male actors (Liu Shixian and Zhou Zhihui) performed the role of Lady Bracknell, the

“obstacle” to Jack’s romance with Gwendolen. The two actors in the different versions have

contrasting physical attributes; one is fat and the other tall.76

Now that women can perform their own roles on stage, what could be the motivations for

preserving the tradition of men playing female roles? On one hand, it certainly challenges a

simplistic notion of identity. On the other hand, traditions are alive only insofar as performance

or adaptation takes place. The repository of comic traditions, simply by living in a specific

present, has the option to shape those traditions according to the context. Sexual disguises and

cross-casting, with the exaggeration and ludicrous body language have intensified the comic

effects in the adaptation. The facial expressions and movements of the performers, which are

unnatural and artificial, also produce hilarious effects from the visual perspective. When Yu

Guangzhong’s literary translation was adapted for performance, the verbal humor in Wilde was transformed to physical humor. The comic use of the body is emphasized over verbal impersonation. The comic tone of the revised version is kept with that of the original, though the mode of delivery becomes different.

Cross-dressing and role-playing have existed throughout much of the history of films and

other performing arts. Disguise of any kind permits its wearer to escape the confinements of a

single position or voice and to perform as another. Romantic heroines use sexual disguise to

75 Ibid., 272. 76 Thomas Luk, Translation and Adaptation of Western Drama in Hong Kong: From Script to Stage xiju de xianggang yanyi: cong wenzi dao wutai 西方戲劇的香港演繹:從文字到舞台 (Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 2007), 123. 167

occupy another gendered space and to explore the emotional territory of that “other.”77 Cross-

dressing can be seen as an act of transgression and the transcendence of traditional gender roles.

Take the productions of Shakespeare as examples. Since the late eighteenth century Hamlet has

inspired such actresses as Sarah Bernhardt and Asta Nielsen, who challenged common

expectations about gender roles. In the cross-gendered Macbeth, directed by David Jiang and

performed in China in 1994, the exchange of roles between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth also

suggests the postmodern blurring of genders. Feng Xiaogang’s film adaptation of Hamlet in 2006,

The Banquet, not only reformulates the Empress Gertrude as the central character, but also

foregrounds her sexual desire and political ambition, much in contrast to the conventionalized

images of Chinese women who are inactive in politics and society.

On one level, cross-dressing is a forum for the examination and reassessment of gender

roles. On the other, the recasting of gender roles has also become a way of comic expression.

The double exposure method, for instance, was used in classic Hollywood comedies such as

Buster Keaton’s The Playhouse (1921). In the comedy, Keaton simultaneously takes on all the

roles in a minstrel show—much similar to some of the Chinese directors who have taken the

position of film producers, screenwriters, action choreographers and even the protagonists all at

the same time. In The Playhouse, the theatre’s cleaner, musician, actor and audience members

are all played by Keaton himself—he even plays a trained chimpanzee. Reading the playbill, a

perplexed husband (Buster) proclaims, “This Keaton fellow seems to be the whole show.”

Keaton’s face is multiplied a great number of times to show that all the performers and the

audience had the same face.

77 Barbara Hodgdon, “Sexual Disguise and the Theatre of Gender,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 184. 168

Disguise, in Bergson’s theory, is seen to be comic. The mask puts something mechanical

and artificial in the place of the natural, thereby becoming a means to create comic effects. As

Bergson argues: “A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is also comic […]”

“our idea of disguise, has been entrusted with the special mandate of arousing laughter […]”78

Sexual disguise conceals a male body beneath a female facade and brings out the comedic

element of a play. An actor is often described as being fused with a character, and as one

experiences the character’s thoughts and emotions, his own is somehow displaced. A successful

actor or actress is “absorbed” in performing a role, similar to how people in everyday life are absorbed in what they are doing.79 In traditional Chinese opera, for example, the one who

disguises as a woman speaks softly, walks slowly and greets charmingly, always appearing to be

like a “real woman.”80 However, the comical expression of disguise acts in a different way. The

approach is not to transform into the character in order to make a fictional playacting become

real. In Wilde’s case, Lady Bracknell’s lines take on heightened and comic meanings when

delivered by a man because of ironic distance that is placed between the actor’s body and the

female character he plays.

Such creations of ironic distance and comic effects are closely related to the clothes of

the disguise, as distinguished from our “normal” clothing. In many cases, comic role-playing

comes with changes of clothes. Bergson argues that every form of fashion and clothing in

general is a form of masquerade and is therefore potentially comical.81 The reason why we do

not laugh at every garment is that the comic appears in a latent manner and remains covert. It is

78 Bergson, Laughter, 41, 43. 79 Peter Murray, Shakespeare’s Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role-playing And Acting (Lanham: Barnes and Noble Books, 1996), 43. 80 Li Siu-leung, Cross-dressing in Chinese Opera (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2003), 169. 81 Bergson, Laughter, 38. 169

thus not taken as a disguise, because the clothing merges with the body that wears it. Bergson

suggests:

Some eccentric individual dresses himself in the fashion of former times: our

attention is immediately drawn to the clothes themselves, we absolutely

distinguish them from the individual, we say that the latter is disguising

himself,—as though every article of clothing were not a disguise!

[…] although his usual dress was distinct from the individual, it appeared in our

mind to form one with him, because we had become accustomed to the sight…

the usual dress forms part of the body […] while in the case of cross-dressing, we

look upon the dress as artificially laid on, because it surprises us.82

Disguise, in other words, constitutes another instance of the impingement of the

mechanical upon the vital and organic.83 Clothing in comical cross-dressing appears to us to be a

“rigid envelop round the living suppleness of the body.” A male actor may dress as a woman and

is made to be grotesque through the exaggeration of feminine features, combined with clear and

reassuring evidence of the male identity of the performer that is hidden beneath the costume. The

comical gender cross-casting is at no point intended to make the character appear as a real

woman; nor is the character supposed to be “attractive” to the target audience. The grotesque and

comical appearance is above all a source of laughter—a laughter which tends to neutralize any

potential transgression contained in the figure of the cross-dresser.

Cross-casting is in fact particularly effective within the comic context and operates at different levels. First, it immediately renders the characters comic, with their falsetto voices and ill-concealed masculine features. The cross-casting of Lady Bracknell serves to exaggerate

82 Ibid., 41. 83 William Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), 568. 170

certain traits that are inherent in this type of character, in direct contrast to those of the young

heroine. What had, at one time, been a necessity (men playing female roles on stage), at this

stage becomes a means of enhancing the comic impact of a particular role.84 The cross-cast comic figure is a source of overt laughter, and by cross-dressing an extra dimension is added to her character. Secondly, the cross-dresser becomes a quintessentially theatrical figure. The disguise draws the attention to one of the fundamental tenets of the theatre, that the performer is not the same as his role. His costume acts as an external signifier of the role he is performing.

One of the most interesting aspects of the cross-dresser is that he resists any easy classification, but instead constitutes a third category. The cross-cast actors embody not only the tensions between male and female, but also between reality and falsehood in the theatre.

Further, cross-casting enhances the audience’s comic appreciation of the roles, because it allows communication directly from the male cross-dresser to the audience. The comic irony in this situation is great, as there is complicity between the actor and the audience. Lady Bracknell is supposedly accepted as a female character in the narrative of the play, and she was accepted as a woman by his co-performers. But much of the humor surrounding that figure is related to the fact that, obviously, the actor is not a woman, and that this is clear to the audience because their perspective can step beyond that of the fiction of the performance.85

Different versions of cross-dressing are offered as comic spectacles in adaptations. The

signifiers of femininity are exaggerated, sometimes to ludicrously performative extremes.86 The

“performance” of women in men’s bodies demonstrate an unexpected strength and the ability to

act as a source of humor. Yang Shipeng’s approach can be seen as a kind of compensation

84 Julia Prest, Theatre Under Louis XIV: Cross-casting and the Performance of Gender in Drama, Ballet and Opera (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 20. 85 Ibid., 27. 86 Geoff King, Film Comedy (New York: Wallflower, 2002), 140. 171

strategy, replacing wordplays that would not fulfill their original function if they were translated

literally into visual aspects that are not present in Wilde’s text. The question that comes up,

however, is: Should the translator make his reader laugh at other ideas than those of the source

text? While a translation inevitably changes the humorous voices of a source text, it can also

change the characters to whom these voices belong.87 However, as John Rutherford suggests,

while the source language is bound to offer expressive possibilities that might not be available in

the target language, the reverse case can also occur.88 Translators can “improve” the original text

in order to compensate, in places where the translated versions would be less effective than the

original. Yang Shipeng’s stage adaptation of Wilde’s play thus works comically on two levels.

First, he counters verbal wit with visual wit.89 The visual wit functions as a dynamic equivalent

or a substitute for Wilde’s spoken humor and his epigrams, which might have been lost in the

translation process, or are now hackneyed and stale after having been used again and again in

various occasions. Second, in this way Yang’s treatment of humor also potentially revives and

redoubles the wit in the play, by presenting a comic duality.

The Adaptive Translation of Lady Windermere’s Fan

The rise of modern Chinese drama has to be seen from the context of the May Fourth

Movement. Under the strong influence of Western playwrights, the new generation of dramatists found the traditional dramatic devices inadequate in the expression of the new concepts of

87 Maher, Recreation and Style, 7. 88 Rutherford, “Translating Fun: Don Quixote,” 79. 89 Ernst Lubitsch, in his adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan, also offers a “visual equivalent” to substitute Wilde’s epigrams. See Charles Musser, “The Hidden and the Unspeakable: On Theatrical Culture, Oscar Wilde, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan,” Film Studies 12.4 (Summer 2004): 23. 172

selfhood and liberation.90 The emergence of spoken drama (huaju) as a new form of theatre was

one of the significant changes during the period. While traditional Chinese drama consists of

acting, singing, dancing and music (as in Yuan Northern drama, tsa-chü), which provides the

play with the overall framework, huaju uses realistic spoken dialogues to delineate the inner

world of their characters, to describe their relationships and to explain their motivation. The

proponents of new drama, such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi also refuted the old idea of literature as

conveying the “way” (Tao) of Confucianism, but propagated at their own Tao of reformism, and

looked upon drama as a mouthpiece for social reform and a didactic means in the new wave of

thought.

As key concepts of reality and social concerns were found to be lacking in classical

Chinese drama (which tends to be melodramatic), the playwrights looked for guidance and

inspiration from the West. The Chinese intellectuals and playwrights began to consider social

problems in China at the time. They started to reflect social life in their work and to deal with

problems of superstition, marriage, feudal society, the position of women and so on. Female

emancipation was seen as one of the most important and symbolic aspects of modernity. Various

revolutions in culture, politics and education were redefining the way women functioned in

Chinese society. The search for female subjectivity was carried out in the May Fourth cultural

movement, most frequently in terms of capturing in a new form the identity crisis of the “new

women.” When Lady Windermere’s Fan was first adapted, what the Chinese writers appreciated

most in the play was his discussion of social and family problems rather than his verbal wit. As

the liberation of women was one of the key issues in the May Fourth Movement in China in 1919,

90 Gilbert Fong, “Western Influence and the Rise of Modern Chinese Drama,” Studies in Chinese-Western Comparative Drama, ed. Thomas Luk (Hong Kong: The Chinese UP, 1990), 18. 173

the issues raised by Wilde’s comedy of Victorian morals and marriage were bound to attract the

Chinese public.

While Oscar Wilde was praised as one of the greatest modern writers around the time of

the May Fourth Movement, the translations and rewritings of his plays have assumed particular

cultural characteristics. As Gilbert Fong points out, in an early partial translation of An Ideal

Husband, by Xue Qizhu, which was published in the journal New Youth from 1915-1916, a lot of

the Wildean wit and humor in the original and many of the stylistic features of aestheticism were

omitted.91 The wordplays and epigrams removed in Xue’s translation’s of An Ideal Husband

were, however, in some way reinstituted in other modern Chinese comedies, such as Ding

Xilin’s A Wasp, which were deeply influenced by the English comedy of manners.92

The Chinese adaptations of Western comedies introduce Western ideas and theatrical

practices into China but at the same time interplay with the resistances or challenges from

indigenous traditional drama, and thus offer interesting case studies of the cultural encounter

between East and West in China at the time. For instance, Wang Chung-hsien’s production of

Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in Shanghai in 1920 imposed foreign devices and modes of expression, while Hung Shen’s production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan transposed this play to a Chinese setting (Shanghai) with Chinese characters and mannerisms that were rewritten instead of translated literally. The contest between the old and the new, the

Chinese and Western tradition, was literally enacted on stage. It was not only a confrontation between two theatrical traditions, but also between two cultures. As humor is culturally bound, the question arises as to how the Chinese audience managed to understand and appreciate the

91 Weinstein, Directing Laughter, 49. 92 Chang Nam-fung, A Critical Study of the Chinese Translations of Oscar Wilde’s Comedies with Special Reference to Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 1987), 29; Weinstein, Directing Laughter, 55. 174

Western sense of humor and how the cultural differences between China and the West interfere

with the understanding of Western humor.

When Mrs. Warren’s Profession was staged in October 1920, the outcome was very

disappointing—some audiences left the performance as early as Act Two, and some audience

members were scolding and complaining by the end of the show. They either did not understand

what was being presented on stage, or regarded the show as uninteresting and awkward. The difficulty of translating drama is often related to the difficulty in understanding the customs, habits, behavior and thoughts of a foreign culture. This initial failure of Mrs. Warren’s

Profession compelled the adapters and translators to reconsider how to represent Western drama

on stage in order to fit in with the taste of a Chinese audience, and so they began to understand

the importance of transformation in the staging and translation of Western playtexts. As Kay Li

suggests, given the failures of the production, Shaw was not dismissed, but attention was drawn

to the need for new adaptations in Chinese drama to bridge not only the dramatic forms of the

East and West, but also the different geopolitical and cultural entities.93

Lady Windermere’s Fan was rewritten and directed by Hung Shen (1892-1955) and the

Shanghai Theatre Art Club in Shanghai in April 1924. Hung became interested in drama when he

attended National Tsinghua University in Beijing, and after graduating spent six years (1916-

1922) studying in America. He entered Harvard University in 1919 and received a Masters

degree with an emphasis in drama. His first play in Harvard, performed in 1920, was a play with

a Shakespearean theme called For Romeo and Juliet, which is a “Farcical Comedy in One Act.”

After Hung returned to China in 1922, he joined the Shanghai Dramatic Society where he

became the principal director of theatre. Lady Windermere’s Fan is a play he had studied in

93 Kay Li, “Mrs Warren’s Profession in China: Factors in Cross-cultural Adaptations,” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 25.1 (2005): 201. 175

America and which he intended to include in the modern Chinese theatre repertory.94 His production of Lady Windermere’s Fan was also the first mixed-gender performance to the general public in China and revealed his special concerns for replacing female impersonators by female actors.95

First published in 1893, the play concerns Lady Windermere, who fears that her husband

may be having an affair with another woman, Mrs Erlynne, because he has been spending much

time with her and has given her large sums of money. However, this is not the case: Lord

Windermere knows that Mrs Erlynne is his socially disgraced mother-in-law, and thus he has

been attempting to help her back into society. Lady Windermere decides to run away with the

dandy Lord Darlington, but Mrs Erlynne stops her and saves her daughter from public disgrace

by sacrificing her own reputation, though she never discloses the secret that she is, in fact, Lady

Windermere’s mother. The play has been adapted into film several times. The first is a silent film,

directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1925. Ernst Lubitsch is a German director who began appearing as

an actor in films in 1912. Later he was invited to the USA and during the silent period made a

series of comedies of manners, including The Three Women, The Marriage Circle, So This is

Paris and Lady Windermere’s Fan. In Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde’s “words”

were removed from the adaptation. As in most of Lubitsch’s silent films, framing and other

filmic devices were used “to develop a visual equivalent to specific figures of speech.”96 In the

silent cinema, only intertitles are capable of communicating the intricacies of Wilde’s dialogues.

But laboriously pondering over the sentences on the screen would detract the audience from the

94 See Walter J. Meserve and Ruth I. Meserve, “Hung Shen: Chinese Dramatist Trained in America,” Theatre Journal 31.1 (1979): 25-34. 95 Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 1997), 173. 96 Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 144. The most recent adaptation is a 2004 film, A Good Woman, directed by Mike Barker. 176

visual attributes of the film. Lubitsch also believes that the richness of expression would not be

reduced when images replace words; the screen adaptation relies more heavily on acting than

epigrams to advance its story.97

In the process of rewriting, and based on the original plot, Hung Shen sinicized the story,

environment, characters and even the language of the play. The names of the characters and

places all coincide with the conditions of the Chinese society. Hung highlighted the use of local

flavor drawn from Shanghai life. Locales such as “London” and “Selby” become “Shanghai” and

“Tsingtao;” while the characters are also given Chinese names (for example, “Lord Windermere”

is translated as “Xu Ziming”). He also shaped his adapted translation according to the

perspective of the theatre, because the previous translations are not suitable for stage

performance. Particular revisions were made in Hung’s translation, which, to a certain extent,

neutralized the satirical tone and presented a certain perspective for interpreting the moral vision

of the play. In Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere was initially presented as a woman with a

simplistic and childlike mindset about “good” and “evil.” Lady Windermere’s adherence to her

ideals is witnessed early in the play, in her conversation with Lord Darlington:

Lord Darlington: I think life is too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and

fast rules.

Lady Windermere: If we had ‘these hard and fast rules,’ we should find life much

more simple.

Lord Darlington: You allow no exceptions?

Lady Windermere: None!98

97 David Davidson, “The Importance of Being Ernst: Lubitsch and Lady Windermere’s Fan,” Literature Film Quarterly 11.2 (1983): 122. 98 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 338. 177

Wilde sets up Lady Windermere as a product of her society—a woman who is confident

of the strict ideals and guidelines according to which she judged the world and the actions of

other people.

The turning point arrives in Act Four. Wilde structures Lady Windermere’s Fan upon the principle of reversal. As the play develops, he reverses the readers’ attitude toward Mrs Erlynne,

who is initially the subject of intense dislike; while Lady Windermere, who at first seems an

idealized portrait of virtue, diminishes in esteem as the action progresses.99 Lady Windermere

herself develops in a remarkable way in the course of the play. By the end she seems to have

managed to escape the Victorian ideals of propriety and goodness. The simplicities are set aside

and values reassessed: because she “is made aware of her own fallibility,” she is “thereby

brought to look more kindly on the sins of others.”100 By Act Four, Lady Windermere is

chastising Arthur for calling Lady Erlynne a “bad woman.” She contradicts her earlier notions of

good and evil to reveal her expansion of the terms:

Arthur, Arthur, don’t talk so bitterly about any woman. I don’t think now that

people can be divided into the good and the bad, as though they were two separate

races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them,

mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women, as they are

termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice. And I don’t think

Mrs Erlynne a bad woman […].101

Hung Shen, in his Chinese translation, presents the transformation as the central theme of

the “morality play:”

99 Philip Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (London: Associated UP, 1978), 184-185. 100 Heather Lynn Donahoe Laforge, Rupturing the Stage: Performing Women in Brian Friel’s Theatre (PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2008), 144. 101 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 377. 178

Hung Shen:

徐少奶奶:這話更不對了。善,惡,人生常事。閉上了眼睛,不要知道世上的齷

齪,覺得可以保住自己的清高,豈非掩耳盜鈴?況且世上沒有全壞的壞人,也沒

有全好的好人。我們一時僥倖,沒有罪惡……102

[What you say is not true. Good and evil are common aspects of life. Nobody in

the world is completely bad, and nobody is completely good. When eyes are

closed, we are not aware of the filth in the world, believing that we can be aloof

from worldly interests. Isn’t that deceiving oneself? We are now by chance not

evil…]

As the director of the Lady Windermere production, Hung Shen states in the introduction

to his script that “the message of the play is forgiveness and kindness,” and Li Wanjun opines

that the play has the function of “purifying people’s feelings.”103

In Wilde’s play, however, did Lady Windermere’s journey really move her away from

the stereotypical Victorian woman and lead her to break out of societal bonds and enter into a

different understanding of the self?104 Wilde in fact creates an ironic depiction of the “ideal,” the

same as is demonstrated in his play An Ideal Husband. On one hand, Lady Windermere learns to

accept Mrs Erlynne because of her close encounter with adultery. If Mrs Erlynne, the “bad”

woman, can perform a noble gesture, then Lady Windermere herself can accept the transgressive

aspects of her own personality.105 On the other hand, however, conventional morality and

102 Hung Shen, “Young Mistress’ Fan” Shao nainai de shanzi 少奶奶的扇子, A Hundred Years of Modern Chinese Drama: A Selection Zhongguo huaju bainian juzuo xuan 中國話劇百年劇作選 (Beijing: China Translation and Publishing, 2007), 359. 103 Chang Nam-fung, Yes Prime Manipulator: How a Chinese Translation of British Political Humour Came into Being (Hong Kong: The Chinese UP, 2005), 43. 104 Laforge, Rupturing the Stage, 150. 105 Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose, 160. 179

transcendent values still exist in an uneasy tension: in Act Four of the play, Lady Windermere

still does not relinquish the “ideal” she has of a saintly dead mother. The scene with Mrs Erlynne

is a crucial moment of the play:

Mrs Erylnne: You are devoted to your mother’s memory, Lady Windermere, your

husband tells me.

Lady Windermere: We all have ideals in life. At least we all should have. Mine is

my mother.

Mrs Erylnne: Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but

they’re better.

Lady Windermere: If I lost my ideals, I should lose everything.

Mrs Erylnne: Everything?

Lady Windermere: Yes.106

The force of illusion, which Wilde links to conventional idealism, is summarized in Lady

Windermere’s expression of feelings toward her supposedly dead mother. She refuses to adapt

these feelings to her newly acquired insight into human nature. Although she can now forgive,

she persists in believing in a person who is flawless. The society depends upon the maintenance

of the illusion that most people live according to its moral standards. There is, however, a

discrepancy between the illusion and the reality: whether the idealism is living or dead, that is

the question. The majority are still prone to live and behave in a hypocritical dimension.107 In other words, Lady Windermere’s ideals remain the same at the end of the play and she is still living in a world of illusions.108 Only by questioning and revising their categories can one

106 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 384. 107 Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, 190. 108 Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 219. 180

become experienced—but she is not allowed to learn the truth because of her inability to tell the difference between ideals and illusions. It is therefore unclear whether she is really capable of true moral growth. Through Wilde’s ironic and subtle analysis of a particular kind of personality, he is not only attacking the inadequacy of the traditional categories of “good” and “evil,” but also the characters who are trapped in these notions.109 Hung Shen’s translation, by abbreviating

the conversation between Lady Windermere and Mrs Erylnne, reveals his own interpretation and

assessment of Lady Windermere’s change of attitude towards Mrs Erlynne. Hung believes she

has learnt that good and evil are not easily determined by simple rules and do not exist in pure

form. Wilde’s ironic commentaries on Lady Windermere’s sense of “idealism” are thus reduced

in his translation. A similar tendency is observed in Yang Yisheng’s translation. The “ideals” in

life are rendered as recollections of the past.

Hung Shen:

金女士:子明說你很想念你的母親?

徐少奶奶:家母去世的時候,可惜我年紀還小,一切音容都記不真了,只有小照

還在。110

[Madam Jin: Zi Ming said you miss your mother a lot?

Lady Xu: I was still young when my mother passed away. Now I can’t really

remember her voice and countenance. Only the photo that is still here.]

Yang Yisheng:

恩夫人:真的,鄔夫人你的丈夫告訴給我的,你很敬愛而懷念你那去世了的母

親。

109 Morse Peckham, “What Did Lady Windermere Learn?” College English 18.1 (1956): 13. 110 Hung, “Shao nainai de shanzi,” 357. 181

瑪加瑞:在我們的生命中總有追念的事物。

我的名字,就是我的母親的呀。

恩夫人:追念的事物,總是渺茫的。

實際上的,縱使人傷心,比較要好一點呢。

瑪加瑞:(搖頭)要是我沒有了追念,那麼一切事物我都沒有了。

恩夫人:一切事物嗎?

瑪加瑞:是呀。111

[Mrs Erlynne: True, Your husband told me, you respect and cherish the memory

of your dead mother.

Margaret: There are always memories we cherish. My name is my mother’s name.

Mrs Erlynne: Memories are always remote and vague. It would be better even if

one were sad.

Margaret: (shakes her head): If I lose my memories, then I lose everything.

Mrs Erlynne: Everything?

Margaret: Yes.]

Yu Guangzhong:

歐太太:是啊。您的丈夫對我說,溫夫人,說您對母親的懷念很深。

溫夫人:每個人都有人生的理想。至少每個人都應該有。我的理想就是我母

親。

111 Oscar Wilde, Young Mistress’ Fan Shao nainai de shanzi 少奶奶的扇子, ed. Yang Yisheng (Shanghai: Da Tong Publishing, 1926), 111. 182

歐太太:理想是危險的東西。還是現實比較好。儘管現實會傷人,還是好過

些。

溫夫人:(搖頭)如果我失去了理想,就會失去一切。

歐太太:失去一切?

溫夫人:是啊。112

[Mrs Erlynne: Yes, Lady Windermere. Your husband told me you cherish the

memory of your mother.

Lady Windermere: Everyone has an ideal of life. At least everyone should have it.

My ideal is my mother.

Mrs Erlynne: An ideal is a dangerous thing. Reality is better. Although reality

hurts people, it is still better.

Lady Windermere: (shakes her head): If I lose my ideal, I will lose everything.

Mrs Erlynne: Lose everything?

Lady Windermere: Yes.]

By the end of the play, we find Lady Windermere in a setting described similar to that of Act I.

As in the beginning, she is talking about the roses at their summer home: “In the rose garden at

Selby the roses are red and white.” For Lady Windermere, roses are either red or white—people

are either good or bad. It appears that she ends where she begins, sitting in the same chair in the

morning room, thinking about the same roses.113 The symbolic colors of the roses seem to reveal

112 Oscar Wilde, Lady’s Windermere’s Fan Wen furen de shanzi 溫夫人的扇子, ed. Yu Guangzhong (Taipei: Dadi chubanshe, 1992), 109-110. 113 Linda Costanzo Cahir, “A Shared Impulse: The Significance of Language in Oscar Wilde’s and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan,” Literature-Film Quarterly 19.1 (1991): 10. 183

that Lady Windermere has not questioned the basis by which she judges people, despite all her

claims and speeches:

Lady Windermere:

We never must be again. Oh, Arthur, don’t love me less, and I will trust you more.

I will trust you absolutely. Let us go to Selby. In the Rose Garden at Selby, the

roses are white and red.114

In Hung Shen’s version of Lady Windermere’s final conversation with her husband, the clear-cut

colors of “red and white roses” are rendered as “green grasses” and “red flowers.” While the

clearly defined colors are somehow representations of Lady Windermere’s clear delineated ideas

about evil and innocence, and the clear categories in her life (and the way she judges people), the

symbolic colors of the roses are altered and replaced by a more harmonious and compatible

image.115 In Yang Yisheng’s translation, the contrasting picture is simply omitted.

Hung Shen:

少奶奶:以後拆不散了。子明,子明!你愛我,不要比以前淡;我信你,一定比往常

深。子明,我們上青島去吧。聽說青島有山有水,一年四季,青的是草,紅的是

花。116

[We won’t be separated from now on. Zi Ming, Zi Ming! Do not love me less

than before; I trust you, you must love me more. Zi Ming, let’s go to Green Island.

I heard that there are mountains and rivers there, and for all seasons, grasses are

green and flowers are red.]

114 Wilde, Oscar Wilde, 386. 115 See An Ling, “Interpretation and Creation: A Discussion of Hung Shen’s Adaptive Translation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan,” Chanshi yu chuangzao: lun hong shen dui aosika wang’erde wendemi’er furen de shanzi de gaiyi 闡釋與創造:論洪深對奧斯卡·王爾德溫德米爾夫人的扇子的改譯 Journal of Shanghai Theatre Academy Shanghai xiju xueyuan xuebao 上海戲劇學院學報 3 (2008): 16-24. 116 Hung, “Shao nainai de shanzi,” 360. 184

Yang Yisheng:

啊,鄔德密不要有一點兒不愛我呀,我更加要信任你呢,此後我絕對的整個兒信

任你了。我們到塞爾賓去吧, 那裡有宜人的花園呢。117

[Oh, Windermere, don’t love me less. I have to trust you more. From now on I

will definitely trust you totally. Let’s go to Selby. There is a nice garden over

there.]

The play, despite its moral ending of reconciliation, ends up being a realm where people

can only survive by convincing themselves that a stereotype is an acceptable substitute for

agency. Nobody in the play seems free to cultivate his/her own persona. When Bernard Shaw’s

discussed the Idealists and the Realists, he used the term “Idealist” to characterize people who

clung to outworn and untenable “masks” shielding them from disagreeable truths, which may

have had an immediate effect on Wilde as a playwright. What drive the play are such hazards of

“Idealism.” However, the ironic commentary on Lady Windermere’s idealism is either omitted

or minimized in the early Chinese translations of the play.118 While John Weinstein suggests that

the “Chinese comedy of manners” are “parodies of the Western form and are more like critical

satires,” when we look at these translations, what occurs to us seems to be the fading and

softening of the critical or ironic tone in Wilde’s comedy of manners, as it has been

reconstructed.119

If dialogues of wit become literally “unspeakable” in translation, the play in its new linguistic guise may not proceed beyond the page unless or until further revisions—whether by dramatists, actors, or adapter, have brought it closer to the perceived norms of the receiving

117 Wilde, Shao nainai de shanzi, 117. 118 Marcovitch, The Art of the Pose, 181. 119 Weinstein, Directing Laughter, 26. 185

culture. Directing itself can also be seen as an act of translation, and that “all directing involves

some form of adapting.”120 The text, as the starting point, is transformed by the act of casting,

what the actors do and believe, and by the powerful suggestions provided by the setting and

costumes. All these elements belong to a part of the process of adaptation.

The above discussion raises the question as to when a translation become “adaptive.”

Superficial artefacts used in performance such as costume, make-up or other forms of “disguise”

act as a form of talisman for translating and expressing various kinds of engagement with

Western literature. The practice of performing and retelling not only concerns the dynamic

relationship between cultures, but also how we are drawn into the comic potential of the plays

from the outside through surfaces: costumes, actors’ faces and bodies, sound etc. Further, the act

of translation, partakes in a desire for mutual understanding and an “imagined comic

community.”121 It is therefore interesting to explore the issue of how cultural translations create

such imagined communities that are capable of recognizing differences while anticipating

possible commonalities of comic spirit.122

120 John Barton, “Translation in the Theatre II: Translation as Adaptation,” Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999), 407. 121 “Imagined community” is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s influential study on nation building. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). Anderson applies the term to the process by which people who have never met nevertheless imagine that they are connected and know one another: “It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation which may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” (Anderson, 7) 122 Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 174. 186

EPILOGUE

Literary humor arrives encoded in ways that do not bear the burden of explanation. Its reception concerns an “agreement” between the codes of the comic medium and the historical or

cultural knowledge that one possesses, and to the extent to which one belongs to or rejects facets

of the society or a particular group or community. In other words, humor has to do with the way

people believe themselves to have a shared identity. Specific to a particular culture or

community, it has always posed considerable challenges to adapters and translators. However,

the manifestation of the comic survives over centuries and reinvents itself continuously as it

returns in different guises.

This dissertation has been an attempt at devoting scholarly attention to the translational

forms of literary humor in modern China. While there has been some attention to humor in

ancient Chinese philosophy, and in Ming Dynasty humor collections, there have been fewer

attempts to consider Chinese humor more comparatively, from different theoretical and cultural

viewpoints. Thus, I have proposed a discussion that enables intertextual and interdisciplinary

exchange on the subject of Chinese humor. Such a perspective allows a fuller understanding of

the various ways that humor is involved in identity construction and in creative resistance, as

well as in the cultural interactions between China and the global world.

Adaptations, as we know, not only unearth the implied and hidden ideologies embedded

in the literary text, but also pose problems and introduce changes in and challenges to the text. In

responding to a text, we are able to discover what—because of the internalization of certain

notions shaped by our own culture—is repressed in ourselves, where our vision is hindered, and

what cannot be seen without distance. Without such a response, we can only use the neutralized

187

voice of our language, and our subjectivity is kept silent. “Re-vision,” the act of looking back, of

seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction, is an act of survival.

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.1

Adaptation suggests that subjectivity is to be explored in the context of the identity of the

other. In other words, the self is not only defined in terms of its presence, but also in

contradistinction to the other. Issuing from contemporary time and space, adaptation

demonstrates an emerging new sense of self in its negotiation of identity in the translational

process. There are plays that fuse comedy and tragedy, or laughter and tears, but adaptation

allows us to see how comedy can be transformed from tragedy, through changing perspectives

and the distance or detachment created by time and culture, and by a sense of foreignness—and

this in turn reveals what is meant by tragedy. The adaptation and translation of bawdy humor represents a site of implicit censorship. New constraints, however, also bring new comic creativity and encourage different ways of thinking and speaking what is supposed to be

“forbidden.” The employment of specific local and provincial dialects has also become an important marker of the comic imaginary. Different dialectal strands that make up literary texts and film or stage productions offer a new perspective from which to look into the formation of identity at various levels. When the translation of a comedy is adapted to be performed, what is involved is the intersection and collaboration of verbal and visual humor, as well as the dynamic between the character in a text and the role actualized by an actor on stage. In an age when we

are searching for new modes of expression and distinctive voices—whether to express the

present conditions or to preserve what is disappearing in our culture, or in a desire to rejuvenate

1 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 35. 188

our existing identity—the transformative process and the dialogical potential of adaptation have notable roles to play.

189

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YUK SUNNY TIEN

Education Ph.D. Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2012 M.A. Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2007 M.Phil. Translation Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2005 B.A. (Hons) Translation and Chinese (first class honors), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2002

Academic Honors and Awards Study Abroad Scholarship, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2007-2008 Grant for Summer Program, Middlebury College German Language School, 2006 Lion & Globe Educational Trust Translation Research Scholarship for Outstanding Achievement in Translation Research, Hong Kong Translation Society, 2005 Tuition Scholarship for Research Postgraduate Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2003

Publications “Interiority, Masks, and The Banquet.” Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009). Available online: . “The Banquet Scene in Macbeth and Curse of the Golden Flower.” Wissenschaftliches Seminar Online 6 (November, 2008), Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. “The Translation of Shakespeare’s Suggestive Language.” Translation Quarterly 41 (2006): 27- 93.

Conferences “Fragments and the Reinvention of Shakespeare: Lee Kuo-Hsiu’s Shamlet.” Shakespeare Association of America, April 2009. “Gendering Personal Pronouns and the Chinese Subjectivity in Lu Xun’s Fiction.” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting, March 2009. “Revenge and Disrupted Order: The Banquet Scene in Macbeth and The Curse of the Golden Flower,” Shakespeare’s Food: Stage and Banquet, Conference “Shakespeare-Tage.” German Shakespeare Society, April 2008. “The Chinese Translation of Bawdy Language in Romeo and Juliet: Zhu Shenghao as a Case in Point.” Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, December 2006. “The Bawdy Bard in China: Translation, Culture, Norms.” Symposium on Translation and Cultural Exchange, Northwest Normal University, August 2004.

Teaching Summer School on Transcultural Theory, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, Summer 2011 German, Penn State, 2009-2010 Chinese, Penn State, 2005-2007, Fall, 2008

Languages Chinese, English, German