While the man in the street is unperturbed at the thought of Shakespeare being performed some 400 years after his death, he is astonished to hear that Shakespeare is performed in Asia (never mind 400 years after his death). Commonality of language, culture, history, country and 'race' conspire to naturalise Shakespeare's otherwise highly 'unnatural' cultural longevity. By the same token, the sheer discontinuity and remoteness represented by 'Asia' exposes not just the longevity of Shakespeare but the workings of cultural value itself. It seems not just strange for Shakespeare to be performed in Asia, but somehow unfit. 'Part of an Englishman's constitution' (as Jane Austen put it), is Shakespeare therefore part of an Asian constitution too?

For a somewhat different reason, the notion of an ‘Asian Shakespeare’ may well seem odd to a Japanese, Chinese or Indian. In terms of what culture in the geographic domain of Asia does ‘Asia’ make sense? No one particular culture, of course. As Edward Said has suggested, ‘Asia’ is a geographic fiction rather than a life world. The difficulty is not got round by substituting the grouping of ‘India’, ‘China’ and ‘Japan’. The very bracketing of these countries bespeaks an implicitly Orientalist standpoint.