How I discovered the lure of Will power

Like most members of my generation, I was first exposed to Shakespeare in the late 1970s, when Laurence Olivier's Hamlet was revived on the Chinese screen along with a flood of classics being reintroduced after a decade of absence. Repeated radio airings of the dubbed soundtrack familiarized me with many of the Bard's lines, immortalized by the great Chinese actor Sun Daolin.

In my undergraduate years, my brush with Shakespeare took the form of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, which was on the reading list of my English course, and some of the better known plays in Chinese translation, newly available in the first-ever complete edition in 1978.

However, it wasn't until my post-graduate study (1982-85) at Sun Yat-sen University that I took a serious stab at Shakespeare's work. My professor was Dai Liuling (1913-98), who got his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh. He used an old-school approach and urged me to recite large chunks of the major plays. It didn't matter whether I was able to digest it or not, but it helped when he began to dissect individual words and sentences. Looking back, I'm thankful I received a solid training, even though the richness of the text often dawned on me much later.