Shakespearean Romance and Yuan Zaju: Towards a Cross-Cultural Reading

Abstract

At a first glance, it may not be obvious what a Yuan zaju and one of Shakespeare’s late romances might have in common. As Lydia Liu argues, translating between cultures and between genres always involves “hypothetical equivalences” and raises the question of “whether it is possible to have reliable comparative categories on universal or transhistorical grounds”. That being said, this paper suggests that there remains fruitful work to be done precisely in bringing together works which had no direct influence upon each other to forge a more capacious paradigm for world dramaturgy. In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Guan Hanqing’s Injustice to Dou E, a woman is wronged and the reassertion of justice contains a staging of the miraculous. What is the nature of tragic justice in these plays? How might it illuminate our understanding of what the representational space of theatre is capable of for Mongol China and Shakespearean England?