A Fusion of Small and Big Times: Chinese Shakespeares in the Universities Shakespeare Festival

Running in its tenth year in 2014, the Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival (CUSF), organized by the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), has significantly connected university teams in Greater China (including Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China and Taiwan) in the performance of Shakespearean plays. First established in 2004 with the objective of “making Shakespeare’s great mastery of dramatic form and the English language better known in China”, the Festival is paradoxically positioned in postcolonial Hong Kong where only 20 out of 400 secondary schools offer English literature as an examination subject in the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education, and where the study of the practical functions of English has dominated the English curriculum at local universities. In my paper, not only will I explore the significance of the Festival in the dissection of Western modernity, I will also examine various intercultural adaptations of the winning teams, namely with political, aesthetic and cultural focuses. I shall especially highlight the example of National Taiwan University’s transformation of Macbeth (2011) in ridiculing the corruption existent in contemporary Taiwanese politics. By analyzing the videotaped performances and comparing the judges’ comments on the performance finals, I shall argue in my paper that the boundary between “small-time performances” and “big-time productions” is far from static. Furthermore, far from being labelled as a colonial festival, the CUSF is a feast of Chineseness, and even a fusion of Chinese and Western aesthetics by its bold incorporation of Chinese performance styles and Shakespearean lines.