Joubin deliberately avoids a narrow focus on a particular national tradition or a single language, sacrificing the cohesiveness that a study of, say, Japanese Shakespeares, would have provided. Instead, Joubin proposes a comparative regional approach, assembling a varied body of works from multiple locales, cultures, and languages. Joubin’s approach does risk a complacent assumption of continuity and correspondence between the three dominant core cultures of East Asia. As Joubin herself acknowledges, the idea of the region as inherently global and intercultural could be seen as an uncritical endorsement of an ‘Asian century’ that reduces the region to the interests of finance markets. Joubin’s central premise, however, that disparate Asian adaptations of Shakespeare share common ground in that they all stage collective anxieties around processes of globalisation, is a compelling one. It brings cohesion to her analyses of a varied body of films and theatre productions that bear the dual burden of representing Asia back to an Anglophone audience frequently assumed to possess cultural ownership of Shakespeare, as well as of importing the bard as an emblem of Western modernity to viewers within Asia. Asian Shakespeares, for Joubin, inevitably raise questions over the impact that a global modernity has had on local cultures; the terms that enable and constrain intercultural exchange; and the norms that govern how Asia is represented on an anglicised world stage.

Of the intimidatingly long list of productions that Joubin cites, only a handful of adaptations are selected for extended analysis. Joubin’s tour of Asian Shakespeares opens in Japan, which Joubin regards as the first major Shakespearean site in East Asia, with the Western canon having circulated among Japanese and foreign students from Korea and China since the early twentieth century. The first chapter surveys the Shakespearean adaptations of Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa, paying close attention to their versions of Macbeth. Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood should be familiar to most intermediate students of Shakespeare, and Joubin gives a compelling description of it, through a close comparison with Ninagawa’s much-toured stage production of Macbeth. Joubin’s comparative reading foregrounds the ways in which Shakespeare comes to serve as a catalyst for postwar Japanese directors to revive certain local and traditional performance practices for a modern audience far removed from these theatrical histories. A second chapter deals with how Shakespeare is used to negotiate national and personal identities in the Sinosphere, and features a compelling account of Anthony Chan’s One Husband Too Many, a film from pre-handover Hong Kong’s golden age of slapstick comedy, about a local director’s quixotic attempts to stage Romeo and Juliet in the contested spaces of the British colony. Another chapter dwells on Korean cinema’s blending of theatrical traditions with elements from a youth-dominated mass culture, including a fascinating account of how gender norms are negotiated through this blend in Lee Joon-ik’s Hamletian The King and the Clown. The final chapter deals with multilingualism in Asian diasporas and the elevation of English as a marker of progressive modernity, with a reading of Chee Kong Cheah’s film Chicken Rice War, which retells the story of the clash between the Capulets and the Montagues as one between an Anglophone modernity and various non-English linguistic identities in multi-ethnic Singapore.

The book contains many more accounts of productions not mentioned here, although this reader did wish for a more detailed justification of what texts were included. A study like this will inevitably have to make exclusions, but the terms on which they are made could be further elaborated, especially given this book’s potential conferring of new life on these productions in the markets of tertiary study. The inclusion of Singapore within ‘East Asia’, for instance, risks taking the city-state’s belonging in the Sinophone world for granted and downplaying its contested efforts in establishing a national identity inclusive of its sizeable non-Chinese minorities. The exclusion of other South-East Asian Shakespeares (though Chicken Rice War’s director was born in Penang), especially given high-profile productions like Shakespeare Must Die from Thailand and Sintang Dalisay (a Filipino reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in a Muslim community), misses the opportunity to critique claims of Singapore’s exemplary representative status in South East Asia made on its behalf by the interests of global financial services. A few mistakes need correction: Otway’s Venice Preserved dates from 1682, not 1796, which is the publication date of a much later print edition, and the lead character Audrey in Chicken Rice War is played by May Yee Lum, rather than May Yee Lam.

Joubin ultimately provides a compelling initiation for those seeking a journey into the world of non-Anglophone Shakespeares. Asia, where ongoing political, cultural, and economic contestations continue to reshape definitions of the global, will no doubt continue to use Shakespeare to express new self-images to its inhabitants and the rest of the world. The forms of cultural diplomacy between Asia and the rest of the world that the Bard both enables and constrains should be the topic of further study, for which Alexa Alice Joubin provides an accessible entry.