In many classrooms around the world, it is Shakespeare who breaks the bad news. Humans are weak, immoral, lustful, deceitful, murderous, jealous, decrepit and insane — and in the pursuit of love and power, death and disaster are all too common.
But in modern China, the story of human frailties, as timelessly told by an Elizabethan playwright, is not the only enlightenment that schoolchildren and theatregoers stand to gain. New, creative ways of teaching the plays in schools and performing them in theatres, coinciding with a surge of interest in Shakespeare, are stretching Chinese families’ experience of art and education under an otherwise increasingly censorious regime.
During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, Shakespeare was banned along with all forms of drama except revolutionary plays and operas. But the Bard is now experiencing the latest and most intense of several revivals in recent decades.