ABSTRACT
The twenty-fi rst century is said to be the moment of Asian resurgence. The growth and development of major Asian economies will lead, it is believed, to a transformation of their geopolitical roles and an assertion of dominance in the cultural arenas too. This development, not sudden, but in the making for the last couple of decades, is particularly borne out in the surge of creativity in Asian theatre, especially in its experiments with that most iconic world author, William Shakespeare. Asian resurgence is underlined by the interest of the West not just in negotiating trade with the growing economies, but also in engaging with their literary and cultural output. The recognition, circulation, and approbation of Asian versions of Shakespeare in the last few decades mark a shift in intellectual property relations. A side benefi t of globalization has been the expansion of the areas of reckoning: ‘other Shakespeares’ can now cohabit the same playing space as the metropolitan. Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia serves to elaborate and fl esh out this very scenario: how Asian theatres, like Asian societies-many older than Shakespeare, certainly senior to the current geopolitical boundariesare opening out today; how they engage with Western and Shakespearean theatre on more equitable and interrogative terms than before; and how they produce innovative work which is forging new meanings and arresting the imagination beyond the ‘local,’ hereby changing the equation between East and West. Shakespeare, of course, has long been present in most Asian societies: the fi rst performances of Shakespeare’s plays by Asians in Asian languages were in 1852 in India, 1885 in Japan, 1913 in China, 1917 in Philippines, 1929 in Korea, and 1949 in Taiwan.1 However, unlike the earlier phase, the current intercultural interaction is more critical and confrontationist, and merits a considered discourse. This collection of essays therefore ‘re-plays’—that is, reviews for close critical attention-that ‘playing’ of Shakespeare in which there is a ‘playing around,’ a restaging and a rewriting through adaptation, appropriation, or acculturation of the Western, logocentric world of Shakespeare into the gestural, symbolic, stylized, or ritualized worlds of Asian theatre languages. It examines this interface in aesthetic, theatrical, cultural, and political terms, looking at the subversion/collaboration, hybridization/fusion-of locational space, textual structure, and ethnic body-to understand how widely differing cultures negotiate such encounters and the implications of this worldwide re-playing for a reassessment of Shakespeare’s theatre.
