23 Mar 2022 | News and features, United Kingdom
When I was at drama school in the early 1970s, there was a middle-aged Iranian on the directors’ course called Rokneddin. He’d been ejected from the Shah’s Iran for staging subversive productions. Rokneddin was no political firebrand: he had simply tried to put on Shakespeare’s history plays, which, like all plays in which a king died, were banned in Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty. The plays reminded people all too vividly that the divine right of kings had severe limits.
After the revolution Rokneddin went back, and tried to ply his trade again: this time he disappeared into prison, never to be seen again. At the time the Shah’s proscription was seen as the act of an exotic tyrant. That is not to say the English monarchy has always celebrated Shakespeare’s entire canon. During the period of George III’s madness in 18th-century Britain, King Lear was banished from the stage because the parallels were too obvious.
Shakespeare has had this unique symbolic significance for a long time. From the end of the 17th century, initially in England, and then increasingly in translation across Europe, his stock began its inexorable rise, until he was acclaimed across the whole of the Western world, to a degree never before or since equalled by any other writer. His work was a mirror in which people of widely diverse cultures could see themselves – in Scandinavia, in the Middle East, in Spain and the Americas.
He was fervently admired in France, despite his barbaric non-conformism to the laws of classical drama. In Germany and Russia, he was clasped to those nations’ bosoms, claimed by them as, respectively, German and Russian. Shakespeare’s perceived universality – which expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries to include Africa, India, China and Japan – inevitably meant that his work would be recruited to embody the positions of various political and philosophical groupings. And with this came, equally inevitably, censorship and suppression.
Not that Shakespeare was a stranger to censorship in his own time, living and working as he did in, first, the Elizabethan, then the Jacobean, police state where people’s actions and their very thoughts were under constant surveillance. The theatre in which he worked was heavily patrolled by the Master of the Revels, who was charged not only with providing entertainment for the monarch, but with averting controversy, particularly in the sphere of foreign relations. Sometimes this meant deleting matters offensive to allies, sometimes it meant suppressing criticism – or perceived criticism – of the crown, sometimes, more rarely, it meant eliminating morally or sexually offensive material. The theatre was a minefield of significance for dramatists and their companies. Even a simple dig at German and Spanish dress had to be cut from Much Ado About Nothing because of contemporary diplomatic sensitivities. But the reach of the censor went well beyond the explicit. The characters and narratives in Shakespeare’s plays were perceived symbolically, as commentaries on current events.
In 1601 Shakespeare and his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, ran into danger on this account: the Earl of Essex and his supporter, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and possibly his lover, were planning a rebellion against the ageing Queen. They decided that it would help to rally support if Shakespeare’s old play about a wayward despot, King Richard II, were to be revived. Comparisons between Richard and Elizabeth were common – even the Queen knew about them.
“I am Richard II, know ye not that?” she said to the keeper of records. “This tragedy,” she continued, raging against the players’ apparent impunity, “was played 40 times in open streets and houses.” For the 1601 revival, the company really went out on a limb, adding the famous scene, possibly specially commissioned for the occasion, in which the king abdicates and is deposed. For their pains, the actors, including Shakespeare, found themselves arraigned by the Privy Council. Any one of them, including Shakespeare, could have been imprisoned for life, like Southampton, or, like Essex, beheaded. In the end they got off on the shaky plea that they were just doing their job. The rebellion, of course, had failed abjectly. Had the rebellion succeeded, it might have been a different matter.
After Shakespeare’s death, his plays were subjected to a different, internal, sort of censorship: on moral grounds, or those of taste. Happy endings were imposed, filth extirpated, difficult characters, like the fool in Lear, excised. But by the end of the 19th century, theatrical reformers had begun to establish the wildly controversial idea that Shakespeare might have known what he was doing. Almost immediately after this revelation directors began to use the plays to make points about the modern world. Especially in the wake of World War I, the martial dimension of the plays was subjected to intense scrutiny, and Shakespeare’s patriotism was rarely taken at face value, until World War II, when, in Olivier’s famous film, Henry V again became a rallying cry. But post-war productions have once again used the plays as a retort in which to examine our present preoccupations: Peter Brook’s bleak absurdist King Lear, for example; Peter Hall’s grimly realistic The Wars of the Roses; Jonathan Miller’s Alzheimer’s-stricken King Lear. Devastating truths have been confronted, but subversion has rarely been attempted.
Elsewhere, however, the plays have been keenly probed for political endorsement, or denounced for its absence. In 1941, Joseph Stalin banned Hamlet. The historian Arthur Mendel wrote: “The very idea of showing on the stage a thoughtful, reflective hero who took nothing on faith, who intently scrutinized the life around him in an effort to discover for himself, without outside ‘prompting,’ the reasons for its defects, separating truth from falsehood, the very idea seemed almost ‘criminal’.” Having Hamlet suppressed must have been a nasty shock for Russians: at least since the times of novelist and short story writer Ivan Turgenev, the Danish Prince had been identified with the Russian soul. Ten years earlier, Adolf Hitler, had claimed the play as quintessentially Aryan, and described Nazi Germany as resembling Elizabethan England, in its youthfulness and vitality (unlike the allegedly decadent and moribund British Empire). In his Germany, Hamlet was reimagined as a proto-German warrior. Only weeks after Hitler took power in 1933 an official party publication appeared titled Shakespeare – A Germanic Writer.
10 Jul 2018 | Event Reports, News and features
Additional reporting by Shreya Parjan and Sandra Oseifri.
“When you hold the mirror up to […] a totalitarian regime, it recognises it and attempts to stamp it out,” said Tony Howard, a Warwick University professor, discussing how Shakespeare can be used to slip controversial ideas into public spaces under the eyes of the censors.
Howard was part of a discussion held at London’s Globe theatre looking at how censorship is used against theatres and how playwrights can sometimes get around it.
The Shakespeare Under The Radar debate was held as part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the UK Theatres’ Act in 1968. Until then the Lord Chamberlain had the power to stop plays going on stage, or mark sections of the script to be taken out.
The panel also featured Index on Censorship magazine editor Rachael Jolley, Memet Ali Alabora, the exiled Turkish actor, and Zoe Lafferty, theatre director and producer. It was chaired by Samira Ahmed, the award-winning journalist and broadcaster.
“Turkey is one of the rarest countries where the persecution of artists has never ended,” Alabora told the audience in the Sam Wanamaker theatre, named after an actor who was blacklisted in the USA during McCarthyism. “When you’ve got a state of emergency the law gives you the right to ban material because it is unsafe,” added Alabora.
Alabora talked about his personal experience as director and actor in the 2012 play Mi Minör. The play was set in Pinima, a fictional country where the president decides anything. Amid the wave of demonstrations and civil unrest during the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the play was condemned by governmental and pro-governmental agencies, as an attempt to “rehearse” the protests. The threats against Alabora and his creative team forced them to leave the country because of fears for their safety.
Jolley said theatre can be a medium for social change, even in the face of censorship. “Theatre can do things in a way that is more radical or challenging because censors are more attuned to film and TV,” she said. She talked about how memes are used in China to get around censorship: “Everybody can use that form of communication to talk about things that are not allowed.”
Lafferty’s work, which includes Queens of Syria, the story of female Syrian refugees, focuses on conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon and Haiti. Her plays are dedicated to giving life to stories that might otherwise be inaccessible due to conflict, military occupation or censorship. “In the nine or ten years I’ve been involved with Palestine, the censorship, in lots of different ways, has been very brutal, including imprisonment and death,” she says.
However, it could be difficult to pinpoint exactly who does the censoring, she said. “It’s hard to get into all of the layers. There is the military occupation, the Palestinian authorities, the taboos of society, etc.” As Lafferty’s experience illustrates, there are also more insidious ways to silence: “There is a huge visa process which is a massive form of censorship.”
Despite the obstacles put in their way, Alabora and Lafferty have no intention of backing down from their theatrical work. Alabora directed Meltem Arikan’s play Enough is Enough, which highlights issues around incest, child abuse and violence against women. Meanwhile, Lafferty directed the play And Here I Am, which is based on the life story of Ahmed Tobasi, who went from being a member of Palestine’s Islamic Jihad to an actor.
8 Apr 2016 | Magazine, Volume 45.01 Spring 2016 Extras
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5 Apr 2016 | China, News and features
Referred to as Shashibiya or Old Man Sha, Shakespeare’s star is shining bright this year in China. On top of a UK government-funded initiative to translate his complete works into Mandarin, the Royal Shakespeare Company has embarked on its first major tour of China. Called King and Country, the tour includes performances of Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II and Henry V in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
None of this would have been possible 40 years ago, when China was still under the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976. Shakespeare was banned, alongside a series of other Western playwrights, his work was labelled bourgeois and lumped into the doomed category of moral and spiritual pollution. When the government finally lifted their ban on Shakespeare in 1977, it was seen as a sign of political liberalisation. Indeed his coming back into favour was evidence that the Cultural Revolution really was over and that China had moved on.
But Shakespeare’s re-emergence was still political, albeit of a different political nature. After the death of communist leader Mao Zedong in the late 1970s, a new ideology was being propagated. This ideology supported a market economy under the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Shakespeare could easily adapt to this new look – and his plays quickly did. Enter the era of the big and brash Shakespeare shows, which continue today. State productions are typically extravagant and driven by a message: China is modern, culturally plural and open to the West.
Chinese-British actor Daniel York was part of one of these big productions. He acted in a 2006 bilingual version of King Lear in Shanghai, the bare bones of which he outlined to Index. It was set in a future Shanghai, which is a leading international centre with a bilingual population, where King Lear was played by a Hong Kong billionaire businessman. The play climaxed with a battle, as in the original, only the location had shifted away from the jagged cliffs of Dover to the heat of the Chinese stock exchange.
Whatever the political mood, the Chinese government uses Shakespeare to reflect it. It’s made easy by how Shakespeare is taught in China, namely in the Chinese department as part of world literature, and the drama department, but not in the English department. Tuition is in Mandarin and so the pupil is directly at the mercy of the teacher.
As scholar Murray Levith writes of Shakespeare: “Perhaps more than any other nation, China has used a great artist to forward its own ideology rather than meet him on his own ground.”
The Chinese Communist Party does not have a monopoly on Shakespeare and what ideologies are advanced through his plays. Other Chinese voices have come to the fore, some of which are overtly critical of the government. A case in point is the film, Prince of the Himalayas. This 2009 movie, based on Hamlet, was an instant hit, airing at cinemas across the country and even spawning stage recreations. The film – shot in Tibet – was about a prince who returns to his kingdom to find he has been usurped. The allegory of modern Tibet was not lost on many movie goers. Yet it was set in a pre-modern mythical kingdom and it was Shakespeare, so it was allowed. In some instances Shakespeare can extend the limits of free speech.
Other interpretations are less political and yet still use Shakespeare as a means of furthering their own agenda. Alexa Huang, an expert on Shakespeare in China, told Index about watching The Taming of the Shrew in Beijing back in 2006.
“They took the taming literally, disciplining Katherine for her behaviour,” said Huang, who is a professor at George Washington University. She’s also seen productions of King Lear, which have been interpreted in China as an allegory for fulfilling filial duty. Unlike the typically sympathetic portrayal of Cordelia, in China she is seen as stepping out of line, a defiant character who publically shames her father. Placed within the context of a country which has a long way to go in terms of female liberation and still values Confucianism, the message behind both of these examples is clear.
“With Shakespeare you almost have a total free licence,” said Huang. That certainly might be the case. China’s current president, Xi Jinping, is a huge fan of Shakespeare. He even went out of his way to seek banned copies of the plays during the Cultural Revolution.
Alison Friedman from Ping Pong Productions, a company that seeks to bring China and the world closer through the arts, has a similar view. She helped stage a US version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2014. Friedman said she has had no problemsproducing her work in China.
“Generally speaking (and it certainly changes when the pendulum swings, which it does), we find if you don’t bother them they don’t bother you.”
She added: “When it comes to the performing arts, China is a much more open space than the outside world thinks it is. What a lot of young and independent artists face is lack of funding rather than political persecution.”
Naturally part of the success of more controversial Shakespeare interpretations lies in the main arena being the stage. The CCP does not approach theatre in quite the way they do other more mainstream media.
“Playwrights joke that censors only pay attention to films and TV. They [the censors] are busy. They don’t read between the lines and they’re not literary critics,” said Huang.
This does not mean that anything goes. Huang highlights another play, based on Hamlet, which has yet to see the light of day. Called Tomorrow We Are Carrying The Coffin To The Cemetery, it was written by a young playwright straight after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. He never allowed it to be performed because of fear of death threats.
And back to the futuristic Shanghai of King Lear, York believes self-censorship came into play. “It steered clear of politics, corruption and triads,” he said.
Shakespeare’s introduction into China can be traced back to British colonial efforts in the 19th century, and a translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare (1807), was published in 1903 and 1904, with the first complete translation of a Shakespeare play appearing in 1921 when Hamlet was published.
Performances of Shakespeare’s plays did not gain their audiences in China just against a backdrop of the political. Rather, they were always central to the political scene. They grew in popularity in line with a new form of theatre. Huaja, known as spoken drama, was more confrontational in nature. It was in direct contrast to xiqu, Chinese opera, which dominated the stage until the early 20th century. China’s young revolutionaries and reformers viewed xiqu as decorative. Huaja, by contrast, could serve a political or educational purpose.
An early 20th-century performance of The Merchant of Venice exemplifies this. Influenced by ideas of female liberation coming out of the new women’s movements, students at Shanghai’s St John’s University staged the play with the character of Portia given a very positive portrayal.
As the political mood shifted in China in the middle of the century, so too did the interpretation of Shakespeare. Under the early communists, the bulk of literature in translation came from the Soviet Union, having been reworked to reflect Marxist-Leninist values. King Lear was described as “a portrayal of the shaken economic foundations of feudal society”; Romeo and Juliet was about “the desire of the bourgeoisie to shake off the yoke of the feudal code of ethics”. Then there was Hamlet, the most translated of Shakespeare’s plays and the most in line with the CCP. Bian Zhilin’s 50,000-word essay on Hamlet from 1957 set the tone. Bian depicts Hamlet as someone who aligns himself with society’s underdogs.
“Through his bitter thinking (ie his soliloquies) and his mad words, Hamlet realises the social inequality and the suffering that the masses have borne. Such an experience not only makes Hamlet hate his enemies more but also gives him more strength to carry on his fight.”
“This was Shakespeare with Chinese socialist characteristics,” said Huang. “The belief was that Shakespeare spoke for the proletariat.”
China might have largely moved on from thinking Shakespeare speaks for the proletariat, or even that Shakespeare is Western spiritual pollution, but utilising Shakespeare for a political or social cause continues. Time will tell how he will be used in the future.
