People's Bard

The story of Shakespeare in China is one of cultural blending and reinvention. Peopled by devoted evangelists, theatre directors and dogged interpreters intent on bridging divisions of language and politics, it tracks the trajectory of modern Chinese history and the development of theatre arts. Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, Nancy Pellegrini pulls back the curtain on how the Bard of Avon rose from inauspicious Chinese beginnings to become the People’s Bard, exploring traditional opera-style Shakespeare productions, decades of Marxist interpretations, revolutionary translation methods and more.