The Banquet

A Glossary

Authors

Ya-chen Chen City College of New York

Abstract

Cluster: Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective

Edited by Alexa Huang

While parallels between The Banquet and Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays seem easy to spot for viewers with an eye for them, the Chinese intertexts are opaque and more challenging to grasp, as several contributors demonstrate in this collection. Furthermore, while the cultural and historical contexts of Maqbool are readily available in English (through essays here and elsewhere), the same could not be said of The Banquet, a film with equally rich allusions. This section examines the Chinese literary and historical traditions that inform director Feng Xiaogang's interpretation of Hamlet, focusing on three key elements in the film: Empress Wan as a parallel to Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty; the film's allusion to the sword of the Maiden of Yueh; and the banquet as a redaction of the historical "banquet in Hongmen." As an extended glossary, this section is designed to elucidate these connections for readers interested in the Chinese background of the film.

Author Biography

Ya-chen Chen, City College of New York

Ya-chen Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, City College of New York. She has published "There Is a Beauty in the Door(way) of Flying Daggers," in Asian Cinema 17.2 (2006) and a review of Chen Kaige's The Promise in Mediascape (Spring 2007); she has also edited a collection of Chinese essays on Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji: tongzhi yuedu yu kua wenhua duihua, Nanhua University, 2004) and a collection of English essays entitled Women in Taiwan: Sociocultural Perspectives (University of Indianapolis Press, forthcoming).