The character of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is often depicted as a rejected lover driven to insanity and to her own death by drowning. But while common interpretations have portrayed her as a dishevelled madwoman, East Asian interpretations have placed her as a strong symbol of female agency 
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There has always been a perceived affinity between Ophelia and East Asian women. In May 1930, Evelyn Waugh entertained the prospect of Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong playing Ophelia: “I should like to see Miss Wong playing Shakespeare. Why not a Chinese Ophelia? It seems to me that Miss Wong has exactly those attributes which one most requires of Shakespearean heroines.” 
Ophelia is a paradox in East Asian literature, drama and film. Even when she appears to depend on others for her thoughts like her Western counterpart, the figure of Ophelia in Asian rewritings signals a strong presence by her absence and even absent-mindedness. While Asian Ophelias may suffer from what S. I. Hayakawa calls “the Ophelia syndrome” (inability to formulate and express one’s own thoughts), they adopt various rhetorical strategies—balancing between eloquence and silence—to let themselves be seen and heard. Asian incarnations of Ophelias occupy a broad spectrum of interpretive range and possess more moral agency. 
In conversation with and moving beyond the Victorian legacy, Ophelia has been reimagined in Asian culture as a filial daughter, river goddess, an ideal lover, and a mediator between human and spiritual worlds. As they race to “botch [her] words up” (Hamlet 4.5.10) and tell Ophelia’s stories, Asian artists present an Ophelia figure who is no longer just a “document in madness” (4.5.178). In fact, Ophelia is so central to the anxiety of modernity that she remains a focal point on the Japanese stage even when Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy was cut completely in early adaptations in Tokyo and elsewhere. The first production of Hamlet in Japan, a kabuki adaptation around 1890, and the first performance of Hamlet in Tokyo in 1903, both indulged in the spectacle of the mad Ophelia. Significantly, the 1930 Tokyo production became a landmark event in Japan’s theatre and cultural history because Orieko (Ophelia) was played by an actress (Madame Sadayacco) rather than the customary onnagata, or female impersonator. This Western performance technique was used to offer an Asian take on Ophelia, as the production was set in contemporary Japan. 
The Victorian legacy has served as an iconic reference point for later artists and shaped Ophelia’s afterlife. Rhiannon Brace describes The Ophelia Project (2010) which she directed in London, as “a celebration of woman,” that drew upon “romantic images of women such as Millais’s Ophelia and other Pre-Raphaelite paintings [and their glorification of Nature] to create movement.” Natsume Sōseki created a painter obsessed by Millais’ Ophelia in his Kusamakura (1906), and one obsessed by the likeness of Ophelia herself in a portrait in Kojin, A Wanderer (1912-13). Lao She’s novella New Hamlet (1936) and Sherwood Hu’s film The Prince of the Himalayas (2006) were also inspired by this iconic painting, which was exhibited in Tokyo and Kobe in 1997-1998, and is well known to East Asian audiences. Ophelia, crowned by a floral wreath and floating in a lake, dominates one of the posters for Prince of the Himalayas, while Lao She’s novella creates an ironic distance from such unnatural naturalism and gendered poses that modern adapters have inherited from the pre-Raphaelite ideal. 
East Asian rewritings transform Ophelia from “a document of madness” to symbols of purity and female agency, privileged sites of resistance of authority, and an icon of true love. These adaptations of Hamlet are preoccupied with their placement and displacement in relation to sources of authority. While her songs still occupy the centre of attention, Ophelia does not tend to stand in for lost girlhood or female madness in Asia. Instead, the strands of girl power and fragile girlhood coexist as Asian Ophelias lay claim to their moral agency by thinking and acting on their own behalf. However, they are simultaneously limited by the new cultural locations they seek to sustain. In some instances, the double bind of Confucian ethical codes and East Asian modernity contribute to contrasting interpretations of Ophelia that make her, at once, a powerful mediator and a symbol of the abject. In other instances, these powerful rewritings serve as inspiration for local artists and audiences, for spawning new images of modern women. In still other instances, the figure of Ophelia is pitched as a cross between a conscientious and filial Cordelia, an innocent Desdemona, a loyal subject, and a fearless and dedicated lover. 
Though it is necessary to highlight the female agency in the local contexts, these examples do not seek to privilege any version of local feminism or to posit a nationalist category of “Asian” women. On the contrary, they slow us down, defamiliarise what has been assumed to be familiar, and help focus our attention as we “return” from translation and adaptation. They lead us back to Shakespeare’s plays with new paths for interpretation. The artistic achievements of these interpretations of Ophelia lie in the rich and complex pictures of love, social responsibility, and transcendence that they can offer. As much as Ophelia was freely appropriated as a privileged site of female agency in local contexts, writers and directors have also parodied the constructions of female madness and unrequited love through Ophelia. Indeed, as Elaine Showalter argues, there may be no “true” Ophelia for whom “feminist criticism must unambiguously speak.” A variety of images of East Asian women emerge through these rewritings. 
Excerpted from Alexander Huang’s “The Paradox of Female Agency: Ophelia and East Asian Sensibilities,” in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0230116906/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=103612307&amp;pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe&amp;pf_rd_t=201&amp;pf_rd_i=B0084EOLZE&amp;pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&amp;pf_rd_r=0PESFGK5VCMGDZRZFHPH">The Afterlife of Ophelia</a> (New York: Palgrave, 2012). 
<pre>Image from: http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/node_981/node_989/node_996/node_1017/node_1045/img/2010/12/13/129222162082948_1.jpg</pre>

Beyond the Madness: East Asia&#039;s Ophelia

Can Shakespeare’s plays give a “local habitation” to the “airy nothing” of globalisation? 
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Shakespeare is proclaimed, once again, the bearer of universal currency and Britain’s national poet as the London Olympics draw nearer. Much more ambitious than the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2006 “Complete Works” Festival, the <a href="http://www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk/about/">World Shakespeare Festival</a> in summer 2012 will bring theatre companies from different parts of the world to perform Shakespeare in their own languages. Shakespeare has been transformed from Britain’s export to import industry, but the meaning of this “return” is ambiguous. 
But a story of cultural globalisation already unfolded last year at the 2011 <a href="http://www.eif.co.uk/">Edinburgh International Festival </a>which featured Asian performing arts ranging from theatre to ballet. The renowned South Korean stage director and playwright Oh Tae-suk mounted his version of The Tempest to critical acclaim in Edinburgh. Master Oh’s adaptation brought the play born at the “dawning moment of British colonialism” and inspired by “the wreck of a ship bound for Virginia” <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival-reviews/8701748/Edinburgh-Festival-2011-The-Tempest-Kings-Theatre-review.html">to the shore of traditional Korea,</a> and back to the UK. A work that has routinely been politicised by artists in nations that were formerly colonised, The Tempest was transformed by Oh into a play infused with a sense of lightness and Oh’s wit. Like Prospero, the Daoist magician King Zilzi rules the island and orchestrates the shipwreck out of revenge. But he brings the men to his island partly because it is high time his fifteen-year-old daughter “met somebody.” The Korean Miranda later reminds her suitor that the question about her purity is ridiculous, after all she has grown up on “a desert island.” The European premiere of Oh’s Tempest demonstrates that while works that criticise global inequalities receive more attention from Western critics, the genre of productions critical of resource inequities or the geo-political status quo, represent but one perspective. Oh’s version is not exactly a rollicking comedy, but extrapolates something extraordinary from both the Elizabethan genre of romance and the Korean tradition of hybrid theatrical genres. 
Many people have seen international Shakespearean performances—and some of these works have become canonical and well-rehearsed success stories of cross-cultural ventures, such as the post-war Japanese director Kurosawa Akira’s Ran and Throne of Blood—but few people are aware that there is a rich and complex history of international performances of Shakespeare. This history complicates the notion of globalisation as necessarily just <a href="http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_to_judge_globalism">“global Westernisation.”</a> Examining Shakespeare’s place in world cultures, and the impact of diverse theatrical traditions on Shakespearean performance, can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the processes of globalisation and localisation. Globalisation and digital culture are two of the catch phrases for our time, but they remain an imprecise term in the classroom and popular discourse about cultural difference and assimilation. 
This is why I have worked with <a href="http://lit.mit.edu/people/pdonaldson.php">Peter Donaldson</a> to found <a href="http://globalshakespeares.org/">Global Shakespeares</a>, an open-access digital video archive (as reported on in <a href="http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/people/theglobalinfluenceofshakespeare">this story from GW Today</a>). Shakespeare’s global career began in his lifetime. Performances in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a global flair. European visitors such as Thomas Platter left behind diary records of plays they saw at the Globe in London in 1599. Shortly after appearing on stage in London, Shakespeare’s plays traveled to Europe through polyglot performances mounted by touring English players, which helped to initiate translations of the plays into the vernaculars such as Dutch, German, and French, and to spread the plays to Russia and other parts of the world. Take Hamlet for example. The play was performed under varying conditions on board the Red Dragon, a vessel of the East India Company, near what is now Sierra Leone in 1607, on the island of Socotra in 1608, and possibly in a Dutch fortress in Jayakarta in colonial Indonesia in 1609. As the centuries wore on, Shakespeare was made to speak in a diverse range of tongues for and against the same political cause in Asia and beyond. As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, both Asian-centric and Asian-inspired performances of Shakespeare have taken center stage. There are traditional productions such as Oh’s Tempest that use Shakespeare to rethink Korean history. There are also performances that are inspired by Asian elements such as Kenneth Branagh’s film As You Like It which deal with values that are believed to transcend cultures. 
The <a href="http://globalshakespeares.org/ ">Global Shakespeares</a> archive offers full videos of recorded performances and video highlights of select productions, many of which have English subtitles. At present, the archive covers Shakespeare in India, East Asia, Brazil, the Arab world, the U.S. and UK. The digital archive shifts the mode of passive viewing into active engagement with performances through robust video and image searching, and tools for composing multimedia essays. 
To promote a historical awareness of the local and international trajectories of theatrical productions, we offer dynamic timelines and maps. Used in conjunction with faceted browsing and tagged videos, the timelines and maps allow users to trace the paths of production and diffusion of Asian and touring productions. Maps and timelines of the large number of productions for Asian Shakespeare can suggest new questions and unexpected relationships, and—especially important for the study of world-wide performance and emerging forms in a global context—help students examine the common assumption that Asian intercultural performances necessarily originate in Asia or that Shakespeare’s original texts travel in one direction from England to the world. 
Our goal is to provide both a video-driven and a more familiar catalogue and filtered search method of moving through the collection, with the option to switch modes at any time. We believe that a digital, video-based global Shakespeare archive, beginning with a substantial body of work in Asia, with new tools for annotating, replaying and sharing user-defined video segments has the potential to transform how we think about Asia, Shakespeare, and the world, and how we use performance materials. 
To learn more about global Shakespeare and the World Shakespeare Festival, visit the following links for audio podcasts from the BBC: 
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/globalarts">BBC The Strand: Shakespeare Special</a> (51 minutes)<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00qh8sf#synopsis"> 
BBC The Strand: Alex Huang on Shakespeare</a> (18 minutes) 
This article was first published at <a href="http://bloggingshakespeare.com/year-of-shakespeare-shakespeare-in-borrowed-robes">Blogging Shakespeare</a>.
<pre>Image from: http://www.theoneonefour.com/2009/08/27/shakespeare-four-ways-at-the-seoul-performing-arts-festival/</pre>