Author ｜
Emily Sun
Abstract ｜
This essay juxtaposes two texts of Shakespearean retelling from the long nineteenth century: Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1806 Tales from Shakespeare and Lin Shu’s adaptive translation into Chinese of that collection in 1904, Yinbian Yanyu. Each text served influentially as a primer or introduction to Shakespeare addressed primarily to English and Anglophone children, on the one hand, and Chinese adults, on the other. In so doing, each text, I argue, performs the work of imagining and making the “common reader” in different local contexts and moments of historical and cultural transformation beyond the texts’ appeals to their ostensible primary addressees. I examine how each set of retellers manipulates the form of the tale collection to address and fashion an imagined “common reader,” and I compare the retellings of one play, The Tempest, to show how the characters of Miranda and Prospero emerge as respective figures or surrogates for the common reader. In turning to a global context, I consider how the texts’ mediations and interpellations participate in—as well as complicate—the processes of global textual production and circulation.
keywords ｜
long nineteenth century, “common reader,” translation, narrative, Shakespeare