King Lear and Mao’s China, with Nan Z. Da

Nan Z. Da, in her book The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, finds unsettling parallels between Shakespeare’s play and 20th-century China under Mao Zedong.

Da, a literature professor at Johns Hopkins University, weaves together personal history and literary analysis to reveal how King Lear reflects—and even anticipates—the emotional and political horrors of authoritarian regimes.

From public punishments to desperate displays of flattery, from state paranoia to family betrayal, she shows how Shakespeare’s tragedy resonates with the lived experiences of generations shaped by Maoism.

She joins us to discuss the story of her family in Mao’s China and why Lear may be Shakespeare’s most “Chinese” play.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

Nan Z. Da is an associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to that, she taught for nine years at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Intransitive Encounters: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange and co-editor of the Thinking Literature series.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 20, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

Shakespeare is endlessly adaptable. With a few costume choices and a fresh backdrop, directors can turn a 400-year-old play into a contemporary satire or political commentary.

Dress up Othello in fatigues or Julius Caesar in a suit and tie, and you’ve given the audience a new way to understand a familiar character. You may also have set off a controversy.

Nan Z. Da teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University. Da has written an original and deeply personal interpretation of King Lear. In her new book, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, Da draws analogies between the play and her own family’s experience living under Chairman Mao. In her telling, Shakespeare’s tragedy anticipates the authoritarian horrors of the 20th century. Reading her book, you could easily imagine a director staging Lear with this fresh cultural context in mind.

Here’s Barbara Bogaev in conversation with Nan Da.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: When did it first occur to you that King Lear lines up in some way with Maoist history and your own family’s experience of it?

NAN DA: Well, you know, I was taught the most curious part of Lear in college by a professor at the University of Chicago. He had pointed out to me what I say in the introduction, which is that there’s something wrong with the division of the kingdoms and it’s wrong in so many ways. But practically speaking, you know, for the ordinary person, one can see that it doesn’t make sense to ask a buzzer-beater question and then take the answers in order of seniority, or, you know, it doesn’t make sense to give out the award one third at a time if the amount is contingent on relative value. So, that got me thinking. You know, in Chinese poetic practice and cultural practice, there’s this art of finding a match for something. So, you know, in a duilian, which is a type of couplet, you’re given the first line of the couplet and then you have to come up with the second line of the couplet and the second line has to be, you know, each character in the second line has to match its corresponding character in the first line. So, this is an art form that I’m familiar with, and I thought I was finding a match here.

BOGAEV: In part, you make the point that Lear is perhaps a good match because you say that Lear is the most Chinese of Shakespeare’s plays. So, in what ways though, beyond the obvious theme of say filial piety, is Lear the most Chinese of Shakespeare’s plays?

DA: I think we can begin with filial piety, even though that seems like the more, the most obvious. When matters of the state are so conflated with matters in the home, it feels familiar because it triggers a kind of Confucian sensitivity and I take pains to clarify what that might mean to rescue Confucius from the bin of ridiculous philosophy. But what I mean when I say that it triggers Confucianism is the play understands that that wrongness is stitched into every layer. So, if there’s wrongness in the level of the state, there’s going to be wrongness in the home. Wrongness in every interaction, you know, not just between characters, but in the words themselves.

BOGAEV: So, it is in many levels, and you say this kind of Chinese-ness of Lear begins right from the moment with this unfair division of the kingdom. But help us understand that. How so?

DA: It is usually restaged as a parable of authoritarianism. That makes sense. And it’s usually restaged as a parable of fascist authoritarianism, which sort of makes sense. But there’s a kind of pettiness and passivity, attention seeking that grounds—for me—it in authoritarianism with which I’m more familiar.

BOGAEV: That’s interesting because I’m thinking, “Okay, in the beginning, Lear is almost kind of bluffing with this gambit to make his daughters say how much they love him.” and Cordelia doesn’t follow through. So, in the analogy, is Cordelia like a citizen of an authoritarian regime who just refuses to flatter the tyrant? To play the game?

DA: Yeah, and she’s historically been seen as that figure, as a real parrhesiastic figure, you know, someone whose willingness to speak truth to power is verified by the fact that she has much to lose. In China, she’s usually seen in that role.

BOGAEV: Is Cordelia a common trope or character in Chinese tales and romances and tragedies?

DA: That’s a good question. I think because there isn’t this parallel story, if you will, of the birth and death of Christ, which I think is there in Lear and in Cymbeline, for example, Cordelia as a kind of archetype works differently in Shakespeare than the way that she shows up in Chinese iterations. But I think that figure of the young woman who speaks a courageous truth is there, and also, I mean, more importantly than that, is the young woman who’s wronged even as she’s speaking this courageous truth. You know, one of my favorite Shakespearean scholars, William Empson, emphasized that Cordelia said nothing and it’s not true. She mends her speech.

BOGAEV: Well, you trace so many parallels between what happened in China in the 20th century to what happens in Lear. You have a plague, a regime change, political paranoia, persecutions that were, “Religious and theatrical in nature,” to use your language, and some of the examples you raise, they come from your own family’s history. I’d like you to tell us about the road that your grandfather built and then how it figured later in his reeducation.

DA: Yeah, it was just one of those, you know, shovel-ready ironies. My paternal grandfather, was a low-ranking communist administrator. Worked really hard. My grandmother as well. They were both types who connected to Maoism to the end. My grandmother would say that azaleas don’t usually bloom twice in the same season, but they bloomed twice when Mao died, you know, just to give you a sense of how irrational and how deep that love is.

But yes, my grandfather, he oversaw the building of a road in his county, a road that he later crawled on—willingly. You know, a lot of this punishment was self-designed and people had a sense of poetry even in their absurd punishments that they designed for themselves. The nature of the punishments in Lear are cruelly poetic, you know, so, there’s something about bringing the body down to its most base form that reminded me of the relationship between the two situations.

BOGAEV: I think it also prompts you to see Lear as a romance, a love story, and, as you said, the great love that your parents’ and your grandparents’ generations had for Maoism, some to the end, is all part of that understandably.

DA: Yeah, I think Lear‘s Shakespeare’s most romantic play. The anonymous 1606 Lear is already very romantic. As I say in the book, there’s that beautiful line where Edgar espies Cordelia, finds himself caught in a labyrinth of love. That kind of romance is somehow retained, even though there’s nothing, there’s no romance left in the play. It’s the most romantic, romance-less play. It’s that beseeching love.

BOGAEV: And how does it apply to your life? Because you were born at the tail end of this history that you draw parallels with. But what parallels did you experience before your family immigrated to the US?

DA: Well, as I say in the book, it was a very Shakespeare moment because I couldn’t quite figure out if I could say that things were bad or not. You know, it’s both this renaissance and we’re still rolling out from the depths of despair, and people had Lear-ian dispositions

BOGAEV: In what way?

DA: In the need for flattery, for excessive amounts of flattery, for flattery to govern every interaction, and I will say that that pathology is there in Chinese culture to begin with. We don’t need, you know, Maoism to activate it. But I think that there was something unnatural about the amount of, I suppose, insecurity that subtended human relationships.

BOGAEV: And you also tell a story about how deep the punishment and reward system goes. I think it’s from your kindergarten experience.

DA: Yeah, you know, they were trying so hard—there were leftover things from this kind of Soviet system, these very punishing calisthenics classes—they were trying very hard to move towards virality. But yes, the punishments that were doled out to children even then were quite severe, quite a bit of humiliation and quite a bit of not rewarding the best answer, of stifling the best answer, of creating the psychodrama of collective punishment. It was bleeding out, but it was still there.

BOGAEV: I’m just picturing thousands and thousands of Cordelias as you talk.

DA: And thousands and thousands of Gonerils and Regans.

BOGAEV: When and how did you first encounter Lear when you were growing up in China?

DA: The version that I had gotten a hold of was, you know, a kind of a paraphrased version. It was Lear collected with many other types of stories from around the world, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Blue Beard. Yeah, so it was completely out of place.

But Shakespeare in a way disappeared from China—well, that’s not quite true because there were Shakespeare plays put on, you know, even during the cultural revolution—but there was a memory of Shakespeare that had disappeared. Certain Shakespeare plays were allowed, and of course, only certain versions of them or certain interpretations of them. I don’t know if it was Lear that was disallowed, but there’s a particularly harrowing story of a professor at Beijing University who tried to put on Lear. You know, he was punished later, maybe not just for Lear, but as I say in the book, there’s just something inherently subversive about the play. You can’t get around it, you know? There’s no adaptation, however sycophantic of any regime that can get around the fact that what’s being done and asked for is illogical.

BOGAEV: Illogical, and also it’s elders being dishonored by their children and also a ruler being brought low.

DA: Yeah, that’s right. In Chinese culture, of course there’s great worry about the circumstances under which it would be permissible to dishonor your elder because it is so sacred. In post-Mao’s China, the problem was that, you know, elders or bodies of authority were not reliably authoritative. So, you can imagine the kind of confusion that grows when there’s a kind of inherent skepticism towards subversion. Not because people are obedient, but I think because Chinese people understand that subversion can, you know, many people can imagine themselves to be Cordelias, and many people can imagine themselves to be speaking truth to power, when in fact they’re just disrespectful. It makes the situation more poignant.

BOGAEV: Well, I’m thinking Shakespeare wrote Lear in a very chaotic time. It was during the plague, and during a time of regime change, and rising witch hunts, and paranoia, and superstition, and of course, the play is generally seen as a historical commentary—“a tricky one,” as you write. So, what resonance with China do you see in that setting in Shakespeare’s handling of it?

DA: It’s interesting. We forget that 1606, 1607 is, you know, the chartering of the Virginia colonies. When you have that perspective, it becomes easier maybe to understand how bad things got. I do think Shakespeare had it easier—that is, as precarious as Jacobian England was, early rule of James I—it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t smuggle things into his plays. So, the situation is more felicitous than it is in China but that drumbeat feels the same, of paranoia and persecution, especially after the Gunpowder Plot.

BOGAEV: Because of all of this you write that Lear anticipates totalitarianism, specifically, how tyranny always catches you by surprise, even though there’s so many indications of it. But your grandfather in particular experienced this first-hand. He wrote a memoir, and it sounds like he felt he was a frog in a pot of slowly heating water in the 1950s. That as you live—I mean, it’s always, I guess, the case with history—you don’t think you’re living history as you live it, you’re just in the present, but as you live your days, you don’t, you can’t see all the signs of tyranny and then all of a sudden it smacks you in the face.

DA: Yeah, he had a great memory. I think even he struggled with the inanity of it. You know, part of what’s hard to remember is that it’s stupid, do you know what I mean? You know, actually, like, extremely stupid things are very hard to remember, I think. Things were becoming conflated, right? So, your social circle was becoming exactly the same as your professional circle, was becoming the exact same thing as your political circle, and so forth, so, it was an all-around narrowing—or maybe stacking is the better word—of many things becoming one type of thing. But it was really, it was mission creep. It was very slow.

BOGAEV: Bringing it back to Lear, mission creep, could you talk more about what you mean by it anticipates totalitarianism? And what you write about the “simultaneous slowness and quickness of terror.”

DA: Yeah, maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t see Gloucester’s blinding coming, you know?

BOGAEV: Well, I think that’s by design. I mean, it’s so shocking, right?

DA: It’s so shocking, yeah, and it’s not like you’re not given enough hints. Cornwall, you know, promises to do something terrible and sends Edmund away. But the mood is confusing because, in a sense the mood is still just people showing up at other people’s houses, you know? It’s like, I thought we were in the genre of people showing up at other people’s houses and getting turned away—

BOGAEV: And all of a sudden someone’s eyes are plucked out.

DA: Yeah, exactly. What happens to Kent is similarly confusing. It feels like slapstick, and all of a sudden, it’s quite severe and cruel.

BOGAEV: And did your grandfather give examples of that in his memoir?

DA: Oh, no, he couldn’t do that. So, that’s the other problem is that once you finally remember it, you can’t even say it. So, you can only use distant euphemisms. You know, as I say in the book, the most, the severest thing he said about Mao is that he didn’t really care for him. Imagine that as the only thing you could say, you know? His book has also just disappeared from all Chinese libraries, all databases. It’s not even that subversive and it’s gone.

BOGAEV: I mean, you can speak out, and where you see the analogy between Lear and the Chinese state really in high relief is when you describe Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the mid-20th century and when the agrarian reforms backfired and mass starvation set in. You discuss what happens when rulers are out of touch, just what they’re capable of when they’re folly catches up with them.

DA: You know, in a way it never really caught up with Mao. It’s fascinating that this tragic law has not been completed. But, you know, in Chinese literary and cultural tradition there’s—like I said in the book—the genre of the sovereign dressed in plain clothes seeing everything that is wrong with this country. Information that he could never access by virtue of being the emperor. But that never happened during the Great Leap Forward. That kind of reckoning never came because the amount of work that people were willing to do to cover up the folly was historically unprecedented.

So, Mao does go to the countryside, but he doesn’t even do what Lear does, which is to say that, “I’ve taken too little care of this.” So, it’s worse, right? There’s that running joke—if you want to call it a running joke—in the play about what’s worse: you can’t say it’s the worst, as long as you can still say it’s the worst.

BOGAEV: You say that people were locked in a Lear-ian feedback loop in that time. What do you mean by that?

DA: Then and now I mean that the thing that abuses you is the only thing that is still left to give you any kind of recognition. So, that’s why children who have heard from their parents stories about abuses of Chinese communism will still hear from the same parents how lucky they were to have met so-and-so or to have taken a picture with so-and-so, or, you know, they still sing the same songs praising Mao. So, it’s very, very confusing.

BOGAEV: I always took that or I always understood that as such sacrifice was demanded—the country went through such pain and individuals’ lives were lost and people suffered so much that they couldn’t give up their love of Mao.

DA: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Because then it would all be for naught.

DA: Yeah, it would all be for naught. You know, the conditions were created for extreme love, so that’s where extreme love went, you know?

BOGAEV: Which is what Lear demands in the beginning of the play.

DA: Yeah, you know, as I say, Lear is still better than Mao. But yeah, you have to confront the fact that in the end Lear wanted what he wanted. There’s nothing you could do to gain say. And what he wanted was to be flattered by the person who’s least likely to do it. So yeah, emotions are betraying like that.

BOGAEV: It is, I think, a story of the collapse of the personal and the political. But I think it’s a story that you tell in all its particulars.

And just to pull out of Lear for a moment and talk about Shakespeare, you write that in the Mao era, Shakespeare became weaponized for class struggle. What form did that weaponization take?

DA: So, among Shakespeareans, those who quickly reformatted their readings of the play to reflect Mao’s revolution, the peasant revolution, survived.

BOGAEV: So, they were understood as dramas of the collapse of the feudal order?

DA: Yeah, and they’re absolutely available for that kind of reading, just in that by the end of the play, with the exception of Edgar and Albany, everyone has died. Servants are given really interesting roles in Lear. There’s a scene that’s in the quarto that actually is cut in the Folio where servant number two and servant number three discuss among themselves the aftermath of Cornwall’s blinding of Gloucester. Of course, it’s the first servant who takes Cornwall out so, it can be read, I think very convincingly, even to me, as a play about the overturning of the feudal order.

BOGAEV: And class struggle, yes?

DA: Yeah, of course, it’s absolutely there too. So, you know, you can’t even say that in a sense they were wrong and it’s the problem of interpretation.

BOGAEV:  Another really fascinating personal resonance for you—it’s really about theater—involves your mother and her maternal grandfather who were Peking Opera performers. So, how does their story coincide for you with Shakespeare’s Lear?

DA: My grandfather acted in so many roles that were Lear-like, and he, himself, was very Lear-like. He knows that. There’s a saying about Lear, which is that if you’re old enough to play Lear, you’re too old to play Lear, and my grandfather really tested that truth. He would be on stage performing these four-hour performances—and something that you have to understand about Peking Opera is it’s extraordinarily painful for the actors, you know. What they’re subjected to physically is just incredible, almost needlessly painful.

BOGAEV: How so?

DA: So, first, in order to get that look of having your face lifted up it’s many, many meters of gauze that’s wrapped around your head so tight that it can cause people to, you know, vomit and faint. Then you have to wear up to 20, 30 pounds of props. Then you have to wear these shoes that are like platform shoes but worse.

BOGAEV: Wooden?

DA: Yeah, you know, that are high in the middle. The whole thing is so excruciating. You have to be on stage for hours and hours. He was often acting these roles that took a lot out of you. They were about, you know, elderly men being abused by everyone, from family to country to posterity. So, they’re very excruciating to act as well.

BOGAEV: And Chinese opera also has fool characters, right?

DA: Yes. They’re very interesting.

BOGAEV: Yeah, how do they compare to Lear‘s Fool?

DA: The idea of jester’s privilege must be universal because the fools also exercise it. They’re the only ones who can exercise it in Peking Opera. But as I say, they pay a physical price for this I suppose, in the way that Shakespeare’s fools, some of them, pay a physical price. Certainly, the Fool in Lear pays a physical price. He’s unpaid. I think we have to take that seriously. He’s unfed.

BOGAEV: Yeah, he’s out there in the raging wind and storm.

DA: Yes, out there in the elements without supper or breakfast or anything. In Chinese opera, the fool suffers by virtue of having to squat the entire time. My great, great grandmother, my maternal grandfather’s mother, was the first female fool in Chinese opera history.

BOGAEV: Wow.

DA: And she would endure these performances squatting on stage for hours.

BOGAEV: Well, I want to know what you make of the very end of Lear, now that we’re nearing the end of the conversation, and Edgar’s final pronouncement on it: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.” I immediately thought of your China parallels because the story is one of sacrifice in China, right? The elders, the older generations’ sacrifice so that you might now have post-Maoist China.

DA: Yeah, yeah, I think that the story of what those lines mean to me is there’s a warning in it, you know, and this is generic good advice or generic profundity about how much the young still have yet to see. I think that the story of Maoism is not finished. It is simply not finished. It’s not done yet. So, we have not yet seen everything that there is to see.

BOGAEV: Well, then are Lear‘s themes becoming less Chinese as China modernizes and Chinese people become more capitalist and individualistic?

DA: I think that China’s a case where the worst of capitalism and the worst of communism can combine, or have, and work in tandem with one another. In the book, I talk about the current President of China Xi Jinping’s very Lear-ian family story. His sister hung herself. Her father was denounced and his mother participated in the denunciation ceremony and in his own denunciation ceremony. So, that means that, you know, that it just means that it’s not done. It’s not finished. The fact that he’s president, the fact that this happened to him, you know, has implications for the country. So, it’s still the same Lear-ian story. We haven’t actually exited it yet.

BOGAEV: Well, what do they say of Lear?  It’s a play that encompasses everything, and Chinese history encompasses everything. Thank you so much for trying to wrap your arms around both today on the show.

DA: Thank you so much for your time.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Nan Da, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Da’s book, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, is available for preorder now from Princeton University Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Katie Marquette in Baltimore, Maryland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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