Pericles in Chinese

This article examines Chunfeng Yang’s 1981 Chinese picture book adaptation of William Shakespeare and George Wilkins’ Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as an early post-Cultural Revolution reimagining of the Shakespeare canon for young adult readers. Extending Lawrence Venuti’s concept of re-foreignisation beyond language to the visual realm, I argue that Yang’s adaptation transforms the play’s heterogeneous Mediterranean world into a coherent yet constructed fantasy of Westernness. Whilst scholarship on Anglophone young adult adaptations has shown how Shakespeare is often simplified or supplemented for younger audiences, this article shifts attention to a historically situated Chinese adaptation that reconfigures Shakespeare visually and ideologically. Drawing on textual analysis of the adaptation’s translation choices alongside its illustrations, this article shows how narrative ambiguity is replaced with moral clarity and how diverse historical, religious and cultural traditions are reduced into a homogenised image of the West. At the same time, the adaptation renders this Westernness through visual forms shaped by Chinese woodcut traditions and the cultural priorities of the early Reform Era. By examining why Pericles—a marginal and collaborative Shakespearean romance—was selected for adaptation alongside more canonical tragedies, this article argues that the picturebook functions not merely as a children’s adaptation but as a site through which China negotiated its identity in the early 1980s.