East-West Theories of Tragedy: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ji Junxiang’s 纪君祥 Zhaoshi guer 赵氏孤儿 (The Orphan of Zhao)

Abstract

As a sally in reading across cultures, this paper takes two dramas conceived and performed at opposite ends of Eurasia as a point of departure for ruminations on the genre of tragedy. Though not considered a masterpiece by critics within or outside of China, Ji Junxiang’s 纪君祥 Zhaoshi guer 赵氏孤儿 (The Orphan of Zhao) was the first Chinese drama to be rendered into any European language and the only Chinese play that has had a significant impact on European drama. Unreflectively known as the “Chinese Hamlet” by those first European readers who were eager to find their own selves reflected in the new encounter with China, the play has become bound up with the politics of cultural poetics, which govern how we read works from cultures outside of “the West.” Here, I point to those larger structures of thought which underpin a given culture’s literary production and use Hamlet and The Orphan of Zhao as a test case for thinking more broadly about how drama as an art form in two major cultural traditions reflects different answers to the same perennial human questions.