ABSTRACT
While Shakespeare has been a champion for the English-speaking world for over four centuries, his regular appearance on Taiwan’s stage has only a short history of four decades.1 Early productions were largely confi ned to academic environments, produced by college students majoring in drama or English. It was not until 1986 that commercial, upscale Shakespeare burgeoned, with The Kingdom of Desire (Yuwang chengguo; Macbeth [1986]) by the Contemporary Legend Theatre (Dangdai chuanqi juchang); Shamlet (Shamuleite [1992]), a parody of Hamlet, by the Ping-Fong Acting Troupe (Pingfeng biaoyan ban); and Kiss Me, Nana (Wen wo ba, Nana; The Taming of the Shrew [1997]) by Godot Theatre Company (Guotuo juchang). A Beijing (Peking) opera, a meta-theatrical comedy, and a musical, respectively, these three productions together epitomize Shakespeare on Taiwan’s stage-transfi gured, localized, and diversifi ed. Compared to some Asian communities formerly colonized by the British Empire, where Shakespeare was incorporated in formal education and integrated into a colonial discourse of cultural orthodoxy, Taiwan seems more prone to localizing, modernizing, stylizing, and even trivializing the Bard. For Taiwanese audiences, authenticity is not an issue-indeed, many fi rst encounter Shakespeare as a traditional Chinese opera, a musical, or a Hollywood movie. A relaxed attitude is integral to traditional Taiwanese theatre, and it metamorphoses into conscious defi ance against authority in postmodern, postcolonial Taiwan. Contemporary re-playing of Shakespeare as camp crystallizes a Taiwanese aesthetic: patronizing the vulgar, the ostentatious, and the anarchistic, an aesthetic in tune with Taiwan’s political zeitgeist.
