Nan Z Da has been teaching Shakespeare’s play King Lear, she says, for more than six years. One cannot help but envy her students.
The ostensible purpose of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear is to draw “a long and elaborate analogy” between Lear (“the most ‘Chinese’ of Shakespeare’s plays”), and “China’s long twentieth-century history”. It is the nature of analogies that what matters isn’t so much their literal accuracy but their utility. That this analogy has been useful to the author to “understand a history that has followed me across two continents and over a still open-ended stretch of time” can be in no doubt.
Using Shakespeare to understand China is something of a bankshot, even if
in its vehemence, Lear gives us a modern and feudal dystopia more Taoist and Confucian than anything else I’ve read in the Western canon. Every circle of relations, from the personal to the cosmic, has been disordered. Things are wrong between husband and wife, sisters, brothers, fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, kings and courtiers, masters and servants, the people and the land, the land and the elements, words and the words right after them.
“If you had no interest in Lear but some interest in contemporary Chinese history, then you might change your mind about Lear after the comparison.”
Da’s analogy is in no way facile. She knows the play (and evidently several others) inside and out, both the text and the context (historical and otherwise); her observations are pithy and, on occasion, witty:
Lear feels even less populated than the two plays to which it is most often compared, Hamlet and Macbeth, both of which briefly inflate with the arrival of the players or a banquet or a small phalanx of people dressed as bushes.
The play resonates for her not just in the broad sweep of history but in her own life, which she recounts with empathy and a poet’s sense of pacing and metaphor:
Lear triggers other difficulties with memory. My mother and I talk about memories, argue over just-happened events. Between us we have forgotten stretches of years. I have tried to go over it, step by step, but it’s like dragging furniture through water.
Those who don’t know Chinese history might be wary of using Shakespeare as the lens through which to approach it. And those who do, might not need Shakespeare to explain it. The fact that Da is able to spin this analogy may say more about Shakespeare and Lear than it does about China.
Lear is about as far from China as anything could be. Yet Da is not alone in perceiving resonance: Chinese theatre directors and audiences have as well. Da touches on some of this, but The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear is not about viewing the play through Chinese eyes; instead, Da’s bouncing the play off China allows her, and by extension her fortunate readers, to revisit the play anew. Although her observations are informed by China, they are for most part about something far broader, for example:
Look in on almost any moment in Lear and you cannot quite see how bad the situation is. This is what struck me, reading it years later. A historian’s warning: it’s hard to see history as it is happening.
One doesn’t need to know Lear well (and I did not) to find book both compelling and enjoyable. Although packing it with detail, Da is not above dropping into the vernacular to make her literary point:
You want to get real? Ask Goneril and Regan. You want to get everything down to crude, quantifiable terms? Then let’s get really real. Let’s get really crude.
It’s hard to know how a reader with little knowledge or interest in China would take to the book, but as she writes:
If you had no interest in Lear but some interest in contemporary Chinese history, then you might change your mind about Lear after the comparison.
I did.
She ends with
Having gotten to the play’s vespers, to the part that we hear before we say good night, we see that we must rouse ourselves and go over it again.
I doubt I’ll be the only reader with a desire to go back to the play.