Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000

THEATERS OF DESIRE AUTHORS, READERS, AND THE REPRODUCTION OF EARLY CHINESE SONG-DRAMA, 1300–2000

Patricia Sieber

Theaters of Desire

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Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300–2000

Patricia Sieber

4 / acknowledgments THEATERS OF DESIRE

© Patricia Sieber, 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6194–8 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sieber, Patricia Angela Theaters of desire: authors, readers, and the reproduction of early Chinese song-drama, 1300–2000/Patricia Sieber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–4039–6194–8 1. Ju qu—History and criticism. 2. Qu (Chinese literature)— Yuan dynasty, 1260–1368—History and criticism. 3. Qu (Chinese literature)—Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—History and criticism. I. Title: Authors, readers, and the reproduction of early Chinese song-drama, 1300–2000. II. Title. PL2354.6.S54 2003 895.1’209—dc21

2002193053

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of my grandparents, Werner Sieber-Schibli, who taught me to be curious about the world, and Marie Sieber-Schibli, who made it possible to cherish what I found in it

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Contents

Acknowledgments Prologue

ix xiii

Introduction

Rewriting Early Chinese Zaju Song-Drama for Transnational, National, and Local Contexts

1

Chapter 1

Art Song Anthologies, Editorial Attributions, and the Cult of Affect: Guan Hanqing (ca. 1220–ca. 1300) and the Transformation of Attestatory Authorship

45

Chapter 2

Early Song-Drama Collections, Examination Requirements, and the Exigencies of Desire: Li Kaixian (1502–68), Zang Maoxun (1550–1620), and the Uses of Reproductive Authorship

83

Chapter 3

Xixiang ji Editions, the Bookmarket, and the Discourse on Obscenity: Wang Jide (d. 1623), Jin Shengtan (1608–61), and the Creation of Uncommon Readers

123

Conclusion

Thinking Through Authors, Readers, and Desire

163

Notes

179

Bibliography

223

Glossary

245

Index

253

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Acknowledgments

Unbeknownst to anyone, this book began one afternoon during a seminar conducted in a small, book-studded office on the Berkeley campus. That day, I began to befriend the Xixiang ji, a text against whose allure, as I would later learn, the ancients had warned, but at that point, the play had already worked its strangely inexorable magic. Yet, these current explorations owe more than one of their main texts to that class session—what philological acumen they bring to bear on the materials at hand is largely due to Stephen H. West’s unremitting demand for precision. Much of the theoretical framework for this book was hammered out during a year of near-daily conversations with Naifei Ding. Jointly we discovered that much of what theory had to offer was both exciting and wrong—Bourdieu, Foucault, Barthes, and others impelled us to ask new questions of Chinese materials which these critics had mythologized or ignored much to the detriment, we thought, of their narratives about European and Chinese traditions. In the end, no matter how mistaken in the particulars, their boldness goaded us into taking our own reading and writing all the more seriously. During subsequent sojourns in the rare book rooms in libraries in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic of China, I was fortunate to be in the company of Kimberly Besio. Not only did I benefit from her knowledge of zaju and fiction, but her own example of scholarship, her generous critique of evolving ideas, and her unflagging support persuaded me to continue asking more and more material questions of what both seemed an impossibly arcane and beautifully tangible subject.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At OSU, my colleagues, particularly Xiaomei Chen, Kirk A. Denton, Stephen G. Yao, and Nina Berman, encouraged me to think about early Chinese song-drama through the lenses of modernity, translation, and cross-cultural reception. Ultimately, such a comparative approach brought the historical and theoretical significance of the late Ming and post-Ming moments at the heart of this book into sharper focus.

x / acknowledgments

The book-in-the-making had the good fortune of being scrutinized in its entirety by a number of careful, erudite, and perceptive readers. The book owes its deepest debts to Christopher A. Reed, who patiently, promptly, and incisively critiqued successive drafts of the entire work. He not only consistently challenged me to find the telling narrative detail to anchor the argument, but his own knowledge of print culture, otherwise wide-ranging interests, and good cheer did much to turn the labors of revision into an exhilarating process of discovery. Cynthia J. Brokaw also contributed much to this project. My thinking on print culture benefitted enormously from the conference she co-organized in 1998 and her thoughtful and nuanced observations on many points of the manuscript helped further refine my lines of inquiry. Over the years, Maram Epstein not only provided inspiration on how to read closely and critically, but she made many specific and helpful suggestions on how to tighten the individual chapters of this manuscript. Having nurtured the writing over many mutual visits, David Rolston saved the final manuscript from mistakes and inconsistencies. The final work is also greatly indebted to the reviews of Wilt L. Idema, Anne E. McLaren, and Ann Waltner, who offered astute recommendations and raised insightful questions that prompted me to clarify major terms and correct a host of minor points. I had the opportunity to circulate earlier versions of these chapters in the following scholarly venues: AOS Meeting (1994); Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley (1995); Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan (1995); Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library, Taipei (1996); Center for the Study of Sexuality and Difference, National Central University, Taiwan (1996); Wittenberg University (2000); AAS Meetings (1991, 1993, 1996–99); ICAS Meeting, Leiden (1998); “Gender and Chinese Literature” Symposium, Tsing Hua University (1997); “The Magnitude of Ming” Symposium, Bowdoin College (2000); “Beyond Peony Pavilion” Symposium, OSU (2001); OSU China Reading Group (2002). I am grateful for questions, observations, suggestions, and encouragement from commentators and readers, particularly Robert F. Campany, Katherine Carlitz, Mark Halperin, Robert E. Hegel, Josephine Ho, Theodore Huters, David Johnson, Wai-yee Li, Christopher Lupke, Colleen Lye, Michael Puett, Catherine Swatek, Tseng Yung-i, Douglas Wilkerson, Choi-lien Wong, Timothy Wong, Yeh Wen-hsin, Paola Zamperini, and Zhang Jingyuan. Some of the ideas presented in this book also took shape in graduate seminars I taught at OSU.

acknowledgments / xi

Among graduate students, I extend my heartfelt thanks to Li Yu and Leo Shing-chih Yip for timely assistance and continued conversations. The book could not have been written without institutional support. An R.O.C. Ministry of Education grant paid for an initial foray to the rare book room of the National Central Library, Taipei. A Center for Chinese Studies, Taipei, stipend made an extended stay there possible. A Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation postdoctoral grant allowed for crucial release time. OSU College of Humanities Grant-inAid and East Asian Studies Center support funded trips to conferences in Leiden, the Netherlands, and at Mt. Hood, Oregon. A quarter of release time supported by the College of Humanities moved the research along. Part of a Seed Grant from the OSU Office of Research enabled a research trip to the National Library in Beijing together with funding for research equipment and assistance. Tenure as a fellow at the OSU Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (ICRPH) provided the time necessary to complete the book. Throughout this process, the support of my department (DEALL) and its chair, James M. Unger, has been much appreciated. Finally, no work is written without all the people who contribute to the life, in ways both small and large. My debts in this regard are too numerous to list. However, I do want to thank my grandparents, Marie and Werner Sieber-Schibli, whose love instilled the curiosity, courage, and discipline that ultimately made this book possible. It is to the memory of their lives that I dedicate the work.

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Prologue

From among the two hundred fascicles of Chinese plays in the collection of his employer, the East India Company,1 John Francis Davis (1795–1890) chose to translate Autumn in the Han Palace (Hangong qiu). It was the first play in the most influential anthology of early Chinese song-drama, Zang Maoxun’s (1550–1620) One Hundred Yuan Plays (Yuanren baizhong qu, 1615/16), and treated the surrender of an emperor’s favorite consort to a Northern steppe ruler. In an essay that appeared in the prestigious London Quarterly Review in 1829 in conjunction with the publication of his translation that year, Davis tentatively observed that the play surprises by its forthright portrayal of erotic desire:PROLOGUE PROLOGUE Love and war . . . constitute its whole action, and the language of the imperial lover is frequently passionate to a degree one is not prepared to expect in such a country as China. . . . The drama in question, however, may teach us not to pronounce too dogmatically on such points by reasoning a priori, but to wait patiently for the fruits of actual research and experience.2

Despite Davis’s tempered stance, for reasons that will become apparent in the introductory chapter, he and subsequent modern scholars, both from the East and West, were inclined to stress the elements of war in this and other early Chinese song-dramas at the expense of representations of sex and sentiment. In particular, the ostensible theme of the struggle against non-Chinese “Tartars” loomed ever larger in the modern reception of these plays. Whereas the editor of One Hundred Yuan Plays, Zang Maoxun, shrewdly created “Yuan plays” as a clever counterfactual vis-à-vis official prohibitions of the Ming dynasty against the demimonde of performance and performers, modern scholars would refashion “Yuan drama” into “Han Chinese” “tragedies” written against the alleged racial oppression experienced by Chinese subjects of the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty.

xiv / prologue

In actuality, early zaju song-drama emerged prior to the Yuan dynasty. It was one of a number of performance-related genres that began to appear around 1100. Early zaju was widely performed in northern China as early as the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) and the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) that governed northern China in advance of the Mongols. With the reunification of northern and southern China by the Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1279, zaju performance also spread to southern China.3 Such song-dramas were performed in a variety of settings, including urban entertainment districts, the court, and temple stages. Composed of songs set to four distinct musical modes and of spoken dialogue, such plays generally consist of four acts, all of which were sung by the same actor or actress. In most cases, this singing role coincided with a single protagonist, the main male or female lead, but in some instances, the role type encompassed different characters. Actors and actresses specialized in the rendering of certain role types, which were principally divided into male (mo) and female (dan) as well as comic (jing) and supporting (fu) roles. Musically, zaju song-drama was related to the melodies of a new form of sung poetry, the so-called sanqu art songs. From around the mid-thirteenth century on, a considerable number of writers, most of whom remain relatively obscure, composed both zaju plays and sanqu art songs. After the year 1300, these two performance-related genres began to be textualized, setting in motion a lengthy and uneven process of integrating these relatively peripheral forms into the Chinese literary canon. Two sanqu art song anthologies, Sunny Spring, White Snow (Yangchun baixue, before 1324) and Songs of Great Peace (Taiping yuefu, 1351) initiated the transposition from a sung genre to a printed one, pioneering the notion of “Yuan-dynasty songs” (Yuanqu) modeled on the concept of “Tang-dynasty poetry” and “Song-dynasty lyrics.” Around the same decades, a number of critical treatises defined the contours of the musical, prosodic, literary, and bio-bibliographic dimensions of the emergent art song and song-drama tradition. In addition, the oldest extant specimens of zaju song-drama texts, the retrospectively named Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (Yuankan sanshizhong, ca. 1330) also date to this period. Consisting primarily of arias and devoid of the wordy dialogue characteristic of later early zaju editions, the slipshod imprints of Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays most likely served as performance texts for performers and reading aids for theater-going audiences. Due to new legal prohibitions against zaju around 1400, writers as well as urban commercial theaters began to shy away from producing

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zaju drama. However, members of the Ming imperial family as well as anonymous functionaries of the court entertainment bureau adopted and significantly modified Yuan-style zaju performances, providing an afterlife for the early song-tradition at court. Between 1400 and 1450, two Ming princes wrote their own zaju plays and also composed influential critical writings on song and drama. In the course of the fifteenth century, the court entertainment bureau reshaped the textual repertoire of early zaju in a profound and lasting manner. These farreaching alterations to the early song-tradition notwithstanding, the texts preserved at the Ming court and the legitimating example set by its august members helped foster a revival of literati interest in zaju after 1500. With the mid-sixteenth boom in commercial and private printing, early song-drama caught the attention of both publishing houses and literati editors. The first literati effort, Li Kaixian’s (1502–68) The Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies (Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi, ca. 1558–68) survives only as a fragment. Seven of the eight extant printed editions of early zaju anthologies date to the late Ming period between the 1570s and the 1630s. Four originated with commercial firms and the other three are the work of literati editors: Wang Jide (d. 1623), Zang Maoxun, and Meng Chengshun (1599–after 1684). The gradual process of textualization of song-drama culminated in the production of Zang Maoxun’s carefully orchestrated and sumptuously illustrated One Hundred Yuan Plays, a landmark edition that appeared just as early zaju had virtually ceased to be performed. Thanks to the sixteen titles among the Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays that have counterparts in these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions, we can gauge the extent and purpose of the liberties that later court, commercial, and literati editors took with these song-dramas. Despite the near-obsolescence of early operatic music in the late Ming, the textualization of early drama still intersected with performance in at least two ways. First, as Liao Ben, Lin Heyi, and others have shown,4 the sixteenth century witnessed the rise of many local forms of song-drama. Among these, the style originating in Kunshan in South China found favor among literati, including men like Zang Maoxun. For them, early song-drama had the advantage of being an ancient form with a historical pedigree, thus lending an air of authority to emergent performance-related genres.5 Second, as editors assumed more distinct editorial guises in their drama-related publications, they fashioned various imaginary social roles for themselves. Resembling the performative paintings of seventeenth-century portraiture or the

xvi / prologue

simulated storyteller rhetoric of vernacular fiction,6 such editorial costuming often amounts to what Richard Schechner has termed “restored behavior.”7 Zang’s legendary, albeit spurious, conceit that the Yuan dynasty had tested their highest-level examination candidates in dramatic composition is a striking example of the fictitious restoration of a past as it should have been. Yet, even during the historical juncture when these plays were textually manipulated to greatest cultural effect and acclaim, that is, the late Ming and post-Ming periods (1550–1683),8 the interpretations of these plays, insofar as they can be reconstructed, were not uniform. Some late and post-Ming editors seized upon early art song and song-drama to imagine socio-cultural alternatives to official literary culture. Li Kaixian’s (1502–68) various editorial endeavors, including his The Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies or Huang Zhengwei’s (fl. 1609) Accompaniments to Sunny Springs (Yangchun zou, 1609), exemplify this trend. At the same time, critics and editors also exploited the ambiguous place of these literary forms in the Chinese canon in order to explore issues of sentiment, desire, and romance. The theme of desire surfaced in dedicated song collections such as Love Songs From a Polychrome Brush (Caibi qingci, 1624) and romantically oriented play collections such as One Hundred Yuan Plays and Ancient Zaju (Gu zaju, ca. 1620). Interest in structures of sentiment and affect also drove the proliferation of several dozen editions of the most famous Yuan romance, the Xixiang ji, of which Jin Shengtan’s (1608–61) Sixth Book of Genius (Diliu caizi shu, ca. 1656) eventually eclipsed all others. As Maram Epstein and Martin Huang have noted, an affirmation of a sensualized aesthetic of life and writing in the late Ming often caused considerable ambivalence among the very men who most openly advocated such an ethos.9 Accordingly, the late Ming did not simply witness a blanket revalorization of desire in the philosophical domain. Rather, the currency of desire had to be negotiated in discrete literary and cultural practices. Fiction and drama became the privileged literary venue for the exploration of these conflicting and contradictory propositions. Situated between the tightly situational quality of much classical poetry and the sprawling fictionality of narrative prose, art song and song-drama offered to late Ming literati both the prestige of prosody and the lure of the imagination to charter new socio-literary terrain. Ming-authored drama, most notably Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1616) spectacularly successful Peony Pavilion (Mudanting, 1598, printed ca. 1618), struck a chord among male and female audiences and readers

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alike.10 Importantly, for quite a number of Tang’s contemporaries, the play embodied a “Yuan flavor,”11 pointing to the particular currency of that dynastic designation. The present study focuses on some of the meanings of an evolving “Yuan flavor” from around 1300 to the late 1600s. In choosing the neutrals term “early Chinese song-drama” or “early zaju plays” to alternate with “Yuan drama,” I mean to highlight the fact that in the history of Chinese drama, “Yuan” connotes different aesthetic, social, cultural, and political meanings at particular historical junctures. In addressing the problem of the reproduction of “Yuan” plays, the present book investigates how anthologizing practices, editorial attributions, critical personae, and rhetorical audiences coalesced around early song-drama to constitute to a simultaneously imaginative and regulatory discourse of desire. Proceeding from the assumption that cultural fictions and material practices impinge upon a literary field in flux, the study sequentially concerns itself with the following questions: How was elite male authorship reconfigured so that it could accommodate the extensive representation of eroticism? How did editorial practices give rise to a new aesthetic of desire? How did the rhetorical manipulation of official and courtly symbols facilitate the legitimating of nonofficial literary, monetary, and erotic desires? How did performance and print culture delineate boundaries between “desire” and “obscenity”? Given that the construction of a viable and self-authorizing literary past through editing of vernacular texts far exceeded “mere” editing, issues of authorship centrally impinge upon the formation of the early dramatic canon. Despite the centrality of writing in the Chinese elite imagination, however, different types of authorship have yet to be methodically catalogued.12 Creating such a taxonomy is complicated by the fact that successive generations of officials, scholars, and literati refashioned the literary corpus and reconceived the literary practices of earlier eras, generating a multiplicity of “back-formations.”13 At the heart of the present study are two interrelated forms of authorial backformations, both of which played a central part in facilitating the integration of early art song and song-drama into the Chinese literary canon. One was the attempt to bring early art song and song-drama under the rubric of what I call “attestatory authorship,” the other revolved around the invention of what I term “reproductive authorship.” I define “attestatory authorship” as the dominant, Confucianinspired form of literary expression. Under this model, Chinese writers were presumed to be speaking as witnesses and as evaluators of events and people. At the same time, their choice of linguistic registers and

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topics was assumed to reveal something of their own socio-moral integrity. Neither strictly individual nor indiscriminately collective, attestatory authorship enjoined social elites to document and textually instantiate allegiance to a text-based set of behavioral codes. A highly allegorical mode of expression, if not outright reticence governed matters of sentiment, passion, and sexuality. The formation of the printed canon of early art song and songdrama marked a shift from a relatively restrictive understanding of attestatory authorship to a more broadly conceived one. The reception of the Tang-dynasty tale on which the Xixiang ji was based, Yuan Zhen’s (779–831) “The Story of Yingying” (Yingying zhuan), reveals some of the ramifications of attestatory authorship. Yuan Zhen’s narrative distance notwithstanding, the story was widely read as a thinly veiled autobiographical tale about Yuan’s own youthful indiscretion. The moral character of the author might have been impugned even more than it already was, if he had dispensed with the mediating fiction of student Zhang to tell the story of a love affair between two unmarried people from elite backgrounds. In the end, the overtly didactic stance of male self-restraint on the part of the protagonist combined with the author’s social prominence served to deflect more pointed indictments of Yuan’s character. By contrast, the happy ending of the Xixiang ji was neither similarly restrained nor were either of its two presumed authors, Wang Shifu and Guan Hanqing (ca. 1220–ca. 1300), documented members of the scholar-official class. This set of variables regarding content, form, and authorship created a productive dilemma for critics in Yuan and Ming China, especially with regard to the author who was said to have established zaju, that is, Guan Hanqing. Chapter 1 examines how the retrospective formation of “Guan Hanqing” as an authorial-cum-editorial construct in Yuan and Ming art song- and drama-related sources addressed the quandary over authorial attestation. Partly because of the proximity of song-drama to the more conventionally literary form of art song, critical works such as the Rhymes of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan yinyun, 1324), versions of the Register of Ghosts (Lugui bu, 1330) and the Formulary of Correct Sounds of Great Peace (Taihe zhengyin pu, ca. 1398) could create an authorial identity for obscure figures such as Guan Hanqing. In doing so, such works also began to subsume Guan Hanqing’s oeuvre under quasi-attestatory models, a trend that resulted in the erroneous attribution of what later became Guan Hanqing’s most famous art song, “On Not Succumbing to Old Age” (Bu fulao, 1540). Contrary to

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received opinion, the chapter argues that this song was not authored by Guan Hanqing, but rather should be read as an effect of the romantic reinvention of “Guan Hanqing” in Ming times. Such a refashioning was underscored by the mid-Ming claim that Guan had had a hand in authoring or co-authoring the Xixiang ji, generally regarded as the premier romantic play in the early dramatic corpus. Through detailed study of editorial attributions to Guan Hanqing in art song anthologies such as Sunny Springs, White Snow, Songs of Harmonious Resplendence (Yongxi yuefu, 1540), and Love Songs from a Polychrome Brush as well as late Ming song-drama collections, the chapter shows that Ming anthologists sought to create an authorizing precedent for their own interest in consuming, reproducing, and creating romantic song-drama. Although Ming-authored plays were generally not included in collected works, in official biographies, or in the bibliographic treatise of the History of the Ming (Mingshi), late Ming authors, nevertheless, increasingly chose to attest to their authorship of drama, a practice that stood in marked contrast to the authorial treatment of vernacular fiction. At the same time, late Ming and post-Ming literati selected, revised, and published early song-drama and related texts that combined the pedigree of “old drama” with the possibility of “authentic literature.” Through such a quietly interventionist, creatively appropriative process of rewriting, literati reinvented themselves as reproductive authors. In the case of “reproductive authorship,” late Ming literati did not simply attribute these works to an original or pseudonymous author. Likewise, they did not declare the edited works to be their exclusive creation.14 Instead, by subsuming their own creativity under the guise of alternate social entities, for instance, the “people,” the “court,” the “ancients,” “men of talent,” or “heaven,” they magnified their own voice under the guise of a more powerful, collectively defined social other. As David Rolston has observed with regard to such commentatorial efforts in the realm of fiction, “the desire to present oneself as new and original conflicted with an equally strong desire to justify oneself by way of antecedents.”15 At the same time, such authors had to guard against charges of willful plagiarism on the one hand and of outright fabrication on the other. More or less self-consciously flaunting their editorial impersonations, such “reader–writers” concentrated on preexisting texts, but they leveraged the textual and visual particulars of their works to considerable effect. Chapter 2 explores how sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literati rhetorically manipulated official and courtly symbols associated

xx / prologue

with Yuan drama in order to articulate new socio-literary ideals of reproductive authorship. The chapter seeks to answer why Li Kaixian, one of the first literati to publish Yuan plays and songs, and Zang Maoxun, the producer and publisher of the definitive Ming anthology of Yuan zaju plays, turned to Yuan materials at all. Li and Zang both made “Yuan zaju” a significant discursive category that reimagined, albeit in diametrically opposed ways, the symbolic associations between manuscript culture, the examination system, the courtly approbation of drama, and the possibility of belles-lettristic excellence. Zang in particular subtly staged socio-literary fantasies in the textual and visual aspects of his zaju anthology. As a result, he succeeded not only in vindicating his own private literary, monetary, and erotic desires, but also in creating a potent cultural myth about the “official” nature of an “unofficial” genre. Chapter 3 investigates how seventeenth-century literati simultaneously criticized and exploited the enormous popularity of romantic Yuan zaju, most notably the Xixiang ji, to imagine nonofficial communities of elite readers. Specifically, the chapter explores the influential Xixiang ji editions by Wang Jide, an important playwrightcum-critic, and Jin Shengtan, the most influential critic of vernacular literature. In contrast to Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun, neither Wang nor Jin was primarily concerned with official recognition. Instead, they were keenly aware of the bookmarket and the theater as an alternative means of obtaining an audience or a literary reputation. At the same time, they believed that the commercial dimension of the book market and the theater could taint authors, texts, and editors alike, making all of them vulnerable to charges of “obscenity.” Seeking to distance the Xixiang ji from such innuendo, the two men, in different guises, imagined collective elite male audiences whose “reading–writing” habits of suspect texts would mark them as sophisticates instead. Addressed to “erudites,” Wang’s Xixiang ji sought to defuse possible charges of obscenity through deliberate literary archaisms, an aweinspiring philological apparatus, and superior standards of visual and textual representation. By contrast, Jin coined an exclusive literary category (caizi shu) for what were, as the chapter shows, the bestsellers of his time, applied Buddhist notions of nonduality to categories of literary judgment, and explicitly displaced “obscenity” from texts onto low-status readers and performers. Where Wang’s edition represented an unprecedented and much imitated marriage of philology and eroticism, Jin’s text constituted an authoritative appropriation of

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eroticism in the name of creating an open-ended, future-oriented family of knowing and/or enlightened readers. The cumulative efforts of these men had a noticeable impact on the formation of the Chinese literary canon. Simultaneously positioning themselves against both an entrenched, yet suspect, classicism and an incipient, albeit disreputable, commercialism, late Ming and post-Ming “reader–writers” of early Chinese songs and plays ruptured and redefined the literary field. On the one hand, such “reader–writers” often believed that political factionalism and official greed had made a travesty of the socio-ethical claims of the standard canon. On the other hand, they often railed against the alleged whims of the bookmarket, even if their own publications catered to a paying clientele. Positioned between canon and commerce, they conceived of themselves as a sophisticated elite. If indeed, as Zang Maoxun, Jin Shengtan, and others believed, properly edited plays could engineer new socio-literary identities, then the reading of those plays could not be left to chance. Situated between court and commerce, performance and print, pictures and texts, these “reader–writers” seized upon the increasingly refined instruments of print culture, and, while capitalizing on the broad appeal of texts about desire, nevertheless invented literary and material ways of producing and controlling desire. After the post-Ming period, early Chinese song-drama continued to be selectively reproduced by authors and readers. As the introductory chapter and the epilogue will show, even the ingenious and inspired reinventions of Yuan and Ming critics and editors could not preempt accidental and deliberate rereadings and rewritings of early song-drama across time and space. To be sure, even one hundred and fifty years later, in 1829, John Francis Davis would sense something of the romantic aesthetic embodied in Zang’s signature play. However, in the wake of subsequent imperialist aggression against the Chinese, acts which Davis ringingly endorsed, the intimation that these plays might have been textualized theaters of desire rapidly gave way to other understandings, to which we shall turn now.

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Introduction Rewriting Early Chinese Zaju Song-Drama for Transnational, National, and Local Contexts

In his 1930 preface to the first comprehensive history of classical Chinese drama in any language, Aoki Masaru (1887–1964) described an initiatory moment of textual seduction: When I was a child, I was already extremely enamored of [Japanese] puppet theater (jôruri). Around 1907, . . . I came across Sasagawa Rinpu’s History of Chinese Literature [1898]. The book quoted the “Startling Dream” scene from [Jin Shengtan’s version of the] Xixiang ji (Story of the Western wing) [in which Student Zhang dreams that his beloved Cui Yingying, from whom he is temporarily separated, follows him while she is simultaneously being pursued by a bandit]. I did not yet fully comprehend what I read, but I was already thoroughly entranced. Later on, when I obtained a book that contained several annotated scenes of the Xixiang ji, I was even happier. This was not only the beginning of my knowledge of, but also of my love for Chinese drama.1

Aoki, an internationally influential sinologist, presented his love affair with Chinese drama as an intimate and aesthetic affair of the heart. It is, of course, conceivable to take Aoki’s confessional revelation at face value and treat his fascination with the Xixiang ji as a timeless response to the aesthetic qualities inherent in a literary classic. Yet, Aoki’s account of his initial attraction to and subsequent pursuit of Chinese drama coincided with Japan’s attempt to reinvent itself as a colonial empire in the image of European powers. Such Japanese emulation did not limit itself to the industrial and military domain, but extended into the realm of culture and literature. By the late nineteenth century, it was widely believed in Europe, Japan, and incipiently in China that dramatic writing contributed to European cultural

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superiority and political supremacy. Accordingly, in the wake of colonial and imperial expansion, European, Japanese, and eventually Chinese scholars competed to define the place of drama, most notably that of “tragedy,” in the Chinese literary tradition with a view toward pegging China in a cultural hierarchy. Thus, as we shall see, Aoki’s youthful encounter with Sasagawa Rinpu’s (1870–1949) comments about Chinese drama in general and Jin Shengtan’s Xixiang ji in particular was already underwritten by a transnational wrangle over cultural and political hegemony. Aoki Masaru’s subsequent desire to understand, and exert authority over, the Xixiang ji represented but one instant in the long history of the reproduction of one of the earliest, but no longer performed genre of Chinese song-drama, that is, zaju. Other literary figures active before and after Aoki found themselves similarly drawn to the Xixiang ji and other early Chinese plays. The lure of these plays would prompt literati, scholars, and writers as diverse as Zhong Sicheng (ca. 1277–after 1345), Zhou Deqing (1277–1365), Zhu Quan (1378–1448), Li Kaixian (1502–68), Zang Maoxun (1550–1620), Wang Jide (d. 1623), Jin Shengtan (1608–61), Li Yu (1610–80), Joseph de Prémare (1666– 1736), J.-B. du Halde (1674–1743), Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), John Francis Davis (1795–1890), Wang Guowei (1887–1927), Guo Moruo (1892–1978), and Tian Han (1898–1968) to refashion these texts. Depending on the historical context, such rewriting could take many forms, including anthologization, criticism, historiography, editing, translation, and performance.2 From 1300 to the late 1600s, successive attempts to codify early Chinese song-drama were a largely Chinese-language matter, even though the first textual traces date to the later part of the Yuan period (1279–1368), that is, to a dynasty whose imperial family was of nonChinese origin. From the late 1600s to 2000, however, such textual reproduction became an increasingly transnational affair. In its unfolding over seven hundred years in China, Japan, Europe, and the United States, the history of early Chinese song-drama defined authors, readers, and texts alike. As the socio-cultural world around such plays as well as the material forms of such song-dramas has changed, different communities of readers have generated differential meanings, teasing out what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the “co-possibles” of a given text for their own ends.3 This introductory chapter will examine the history of two such “co-possibles” as they manifested in vastly different historical and cultural contexts. One derived from the early modern European desire

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to create a nation-based cultural field, another from the late Ming (1368–1644) and post-Ming (1644–83) Chinese desire to generate a less state-centered socio-literary field. If the first of these narratives crystallizes around the notion of “tragedy,” the second revolves around literary figurations of “romance.” This introduction will show that the modern Chinese view of early song-drama as “tragedies about Mongol rule” constitutes an ideological regime that was incidental to how they were read in Yuan and Ming China, but owes a great deal to early modern and modern European and Japanese conceptions of Chinese drama. Accordingly, as Aoki Masaru’s initial testimony suggests, the history of early Chinese song-drama was decidedly one of seduction, but the terms and effects of the textual allure vary among different communities of interpretation. Aoki may have thought he faithfully read Jin Shengtan’s version of the Xixiang ji, yet Aoki and other modern Japanese, European, and Chinese readers understood the Xixiang ji, One Hundred Yuan Plays, and various early Chinese songdramas in ways unimaginable in Jin’s day. Therefore, rather than assuming that all audiences responded to an unchanging literary essence, the chapters that follow show that, for all the surface similarities of experiences of enchantment by early Chinese plays, the reading of the Xixiang ji and other early Chinese song-dramas has a history wherein, as Roger Chartier has argued in another context, “minds are not disincarnated . . . and experiences and interpretations are historical, discontinuous, and differentiated.”4 The Beginning of Modern Chinese Studies of Drama Contemporary scholars agree that, because of modern China’s preoccupation with national identity, post-1917 Chinese literature was profoundly affected by China’s engagement with Japanese, European, and American cultural norms. After China’s military defeat by Japan in 1895, an increasing number of Chinese students spent extended periods in Japan in order to unlock the secrets of Japan’s success. Political exiles and exchange students studied Japanese institutions, movements, and ideas and acquainted themselves with the voluminous body of translations from European languages into Japanese. Through such intellectual labors, they sought to rejuvenate a Chinese nation suffering from an acute military, economic, social, and cultural crisis. Already predisposed toward correlating certain literary forms and the imperial body politic, Chinese intellectuals now borrowed EuroJapanese concepts and came to believe that belles-lettres defined the

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nation’s identity. China, they thought, could gain respect as a nation among nations by virtue of its ability to produce literature that would measure up to European standards of excellence. In the process of cultural translation, China’s educated elites took an active part in reformulating the often orientalist or ethnocentric paradigms with which they found themselves confronted in European or Japanese writings. In one view, such refashioning resulted in what Lydia Liu has termed “co-authorship.” In her view, in the act of translation, “meanings . . . are not so much ‘transformed’ . . . as invented within the new local environment.”5 Other studies take a less optimistic view, insisting, to paraphrase Shu-mei Shih, on the ineluctability of China’s “semi-colonial status” in all of its economic, military, and cultural dealings with Japan and the European powers, especially prior to 1949. In light of the highly unequal distribution of power, in this view, the leeway for emancipatory reinterpretations was narrowly circumscribed.6 No matter how much or how little creative latitude these scholars grant to Chinese intellectual elites, they typically neglect to consider what, if any, part the modern reformation of the classical Chinese literary canon played in cross-cultural confrontations. Of course, there are viable strategic reasons for why such a consideration may have been deferred. As Prasenjit Duara, Craig Clunas, and others have pointed out, modern Chinese, European, and Japanese scholarship has tended to treat every Chinese institution as though it began in times immemorial.7 Therefore, to situate the emergence of modern categories such as wenhua (culture), wenxue (literature), and guojia (nation) as the innovative and internationally mediated categories that they are,8 recent historians and literary critics have found it necessary to disrupt the transcendental impulse of earlier scholarly narratives. Nevertheless, as this case study of the early Chinese song-drama commonly labeled “Yuan drama” will show, the formation of the modern canon of classical literature also played a crucial role in coining and disseminating modern literary Chinese constructs and critical commonsense. In fact, some aspects of Chinese modernity result from the productive interaction between classical and modern Chinese, European, and Japanese literary production, scholarship, and translation. Such critical paradigms not only inflected the construction of the modern meaning of Yuan drama, but, via subsequent Yuan-drama criticism, also affected a number of contiguous Chinese literary, scholarly, cultural, and political domains. The person who would play a decisive role in this process was Wang Guowei, the well-known literary scholar and historian. Like many in

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his generation, he studied in Japan in 1901, where he was first exposed to European writers and philosophers, including Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). After the Chinese revolution in 1911, Wang spent several years at Kyoto University, associating with Japanese sinologists such as Kano Naoki (1868–1947), one of the founders of modern Japanese sinology, and young Aoki Masaru, the future authority on Chinese drama studies. Although Wang enjoyed almost lifelong patronage of the conservative bibliophile Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940), he corresponded with major Chinese literary reform figures like Hu Shi (1891–1962). Finding himself at the confluence of Chinese, Japanese, and European literary and scholarly traditions, Wang Guowei authored the seminal history of early Chinese song-drama, History of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu shi, 1913–14) in Kyoto in late 1912. The History was first published in installments in China’s leading contemporary reform journal, Dongfang zazhi/Eastern Miscellany. Although it is hazardous to ascribe too much influence to a given text, the History, nevertheless, had an impact quite disproportionate to the slimness of the eventual monograph. As we shall see, Wang Guowei used early song-drama to address some of the most pressing issues of the day. It was at least partially through Yuan drama that modern Chinese elites initiated and consolidated their own rhetorical participation in the discourse of “world literature” and “world history.” Thus, Wang’s History set a precedent for deploying a continually reimagined tradition in the interest of an evolving modernity. The choice of early song-drama, most notably on Wang Guowei’s part, was not accidental. Wang had the advantage of knowing that Zang Maoxun’s (1550–1620) One Hundred Yuan Plays had a long history in Europe. Other late Qing writers had pointed to European interest in aspects of the Chinese past in order to underscore the prestige and value of Chinese artifacts. Following their cue, Wang appended a detailed list of European translations to his History, echoes of which would be found in subsequent Republican-era publications.9 Wang named du Halde, Julien, Davis, and A. Bazin (1799–1863) among the Europeans who altogether had translated no fewer than thirty plays from among Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays.10 As scholars of translation have pointed out, intense translation activity often accompanies periods of cultural crisis and transformation.11 In post-revolutionary France, in particular, translation activity resulted in a previously unprecedented and as yet unrivalled number of translations of Chinese plays.12 With the consolidation of a sense of

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civilizational superiority vis-à-vis the “Orient,” however, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the production of new European language translations of Chinese drama slowed to a trickle.13 By contrast, when Wang was completing his History in 1912, the Chinese had begun to translate Japanese and Western-language materials of all kinds in great quantity.14 Therefore, at a historical juncture when the flow of cultural translation appeared to be largely unidirectional, Wang related the counterexample just discussed, hinting at a more reciprocal relationship between China and Europe. Yet, Wang’s invocation of Europe went beyond the simple matter of validation and prestige. In what seems, at first, an unrelated observation, Wang insisted that it was ethnic Han Chinese who had brought an immature form to literary fruition under the Jin and especially the Yuan dynasty. In terminology and substance, this was a novel claim, even if both plays and songs from the Yuan period appear to be principally “Chinese.” For instance, in terms of subject matter, none of the plays were set in the Yuan dynasty. Even the handful of plays that featured Jurchens, the founders of the earlier Jin dynasty, portrayed them from a Chinese perspective, albeit not as political antagonists.15 Similarly, in terms of language, Jurchen and Mongolian words were not only relatively rare,16 but prominent Yuan scholarofficials and early Ming princes insisted that the new art songs in particular had evolved out of the mainstream of the Chinese lyrical tradition.17 It was only in the late Ming dynasty that literati advocates of the fledgling Southern drama sought to denigrate the older and more prestigious “Northern” zaju plays by claiming that early songdrama was adulterated by “barbaric” (hu) elements.18 However, even the most partisan among late Ming proponents of Southern drama routinely acknowledged the accomplishment of Yuan-dynasty Jurchen, Uighur, and Mongol songwriters,19 without belaboring the issue of their ancestry.20 In terms of playwrights, only one, Li Zhifu, had been identified as a Jurchen, but not in explicit contrast to a “Han Chinese” group. Evidently, writing in Chinese literary forms overrode other distinctions.21 However, due to the incipient racialization of Chinese identity in Wang’s day, Wang anachronistically located such “Chineseness” in the writers’ Han ethnicity rather than in language, literary form, or cultural practice. Wang’s retrospective characterization of early song-drama as “Han Chinese” literature created under Yuan rule offered a cultural solution to the contemporary threat of foreign occupation. Given that in the years following the revolution in 1911, China was precariously

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positioned between the restorationist ambitions of the Manchu imperial family, various European demands on China’s territory, and Japanese colonial aspirations, Wang’s historical scenario offered the reassuring prospect that the presence of these powers would not impede, but perhaps even facilitate cultural greatness for the Chinese. Thus, Yuan plays could potentially be an early example of a quintessentially “Chinese” literary form in keeping with newly introduced concepts of “national history” and “race.”22 Ironically, however, it was the Europeans, and later the Japanese, who first insisted on reading Yuan plays through the racialized categories of “Chinese,” “Mongolian,” and “Tartar” values. Therefore, for all its purported defiance, Wang’s scenario actually reveals just how forcefully European and Japanese categories had insinuated themselves into the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon.23 The European Invention of “Tartar Drama” In his seminal study of East/West relationships, Orientalism, Edward Said outlined a methodological dialectic between the overriding ideological generalizations of orientalist discourse and the intricacies of individual writers participating in such a network of discursive practices. On the one hand, he noted that orientalism “is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in uneven exchange with various kinds of power.”24 On the other hand, in contrast to Foucault’s anonymous conception of power, Said insists on the importance of examining the “strategic location” of individual authors and texts in order to denaturalize the authority with which they variously represented the Orient. Such a simultaneous insistence on generality and particularity provides a useful analytical framework for the study of the diffusion of Chinese plays in Europe. As noted by Zhang Longxi, many of the general tropes and discursive strategies of control, manipulation, and containment identified by Said in his examination of European writings about the cultures of the Middle East also held true in the case of China.25 At the same time, according to what Europeans knew about China from the seventeenth century onward, China presented unique challenges to European conceptions of hegemony thanks to the length of China’s documented history, the high degree of literacy and learning among its population, and the relative military impenetrability of its territory. Moreover, each of the major parties involved in the

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construction of a discourse about China, that is, Britain, France, and the German states, while cognizant of each other’s writings about China, not only competed with each other in material and ideological terms, but differed sufficiently from each other so as to create contrasting representations of and reactions to Chinese ideas and artifacts. Therefore, the impact of Chinese theater and drama on European culture was variously inflected by the material contacts between China and these European powers, by the dominant political, social, and cultural concerns in the respective countries, and by current theatrical conventions.26 In the eighteenth century, Britain, the power that most vigorously pursued trade with China through the East India Company, did not systematically support the study of either the Chinese language or Chinese texts. By contrast, French trade with China was relatively negligible, but partly driven by the apparent political similarities between the two empires, the French evinced greater intellectual interest in China than other Europeans from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Initially, the late seventeenth-century Rites Controversy, which centered on Jesuit conversion methods, fueled the translation and publication efforts of French Jesuits.27 It was in the aftermath of that controversy between the Jesuits, other European religious orders, and the papacy that the first Chinese song-drama was published in France in J.-B. du Halde’s Description of the Empire of China and Chinese Tartary (1735). Deprived of their official reporting mission for the papacy in the late 1600s,28 J.-B. du Halde (1674–1743) and other Jesuits began to issue their compendia, most notably the Description (1735) and Edifying and Curious Letters from China (1703–43), through secular and commercial printers.29 The Description, a four-volume encyclopedia on Chinese geography, history, classics, customs and learning, as well as the geography of the Tartar steppe bordering on China, was repeatedly printed and reprinted in Paris in its entirety. Moreover, in the 1740s, the Description was variously and in some cases repeatedly translated into English, German, Dutch, and Russian, thus diffusing the Jesuit vision of China throughout the continent. These works exposed a great number of general readers to the generally favorable and Confucianized view of China common among Jesuits. In fact, the impact of these and other texts about China was such that Voltaire (1694–1778) had occasion to remark that China was now better known than several provinces in Europe.30

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For his section on customs in Description, du Halde resorted to somewhat dubious measures to incorporate a play from Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays. In 1731, the Jesuit Joseph de Prémare (1666–1736) had sent a draft translation of Orphan of Zhao (Zhaoshi gu’er) to Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745), a French grammarian.31 Prémare had only translated the dialogue as a supplement to his hastily annotated version of Zang Maoxun’s original text, leaving out the literary core of the play, that is, the arias. The abbreviated translation represented Prémare’s one literary example of spoken Chinese and was meant to convince Fourmont of the importance of publishing Prémare’s life’s work, A Knowledge of the Chinese Language (1731, printed 1831), the first textbook in a European language to deal with classical as well as vernacular Chinese.32 Du Halde intercepted Prémare’s missive to Fourmont. Contrary to Prémare’s stated wishes, du Halde published the “Chinese tragedy” Orphan of Zhao, a story of revenge, loyalty, and mistaken identity set in the Zhou period (ca. 1066 B.C.E. to 221 B.C.E.), as a salubrious counterexample to what the Jesuits typically considered the pernicious novels and plays produced in Europe.33 In comparison with the other plays contained in Zang’s One Hundred Yuan Plays, this particular piece had recommended itself on two counts, one formal and the other substantive.34 Unlike all other zaju in Zang’s collection, Orphan of Zhao has five rather than the standard four acts, a number that made it more readily assimilable to the five-act structure common in French theater.35 Substantively, in keeping with French conceptions of tragedy, the play’s elevated social setting, serious subject matter, and cathartic resolution may have also inspired the choice.36 In the play, a young man, after finding out that his “father” is actually the person who earlier executed the young man’s entire clan, proceeds to murder his “father.” If the Yuan-printed version of the play had vindicated revenge as a legitimate mode of action, Ming-court editors and late-Ming literati such as Zang Maoxun had seen to it that such disruptive and morally suspect behavior was subordinated to a newly introduced rhetoric of filial piety.37 Therefore, what the Jesuits read as “Chinese” morality reflected the cultural agenda of the particular stratum of Chinese society with which they were most familiar, the imperial and scholar-official elites. Drawing on Prémare’s letter to Fourmont, du Halde’s editorial remarks noted that this “Chinese tragedy” was written under the Yuan dynasty, a period whose Mongol rulers were in European eyes often

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conflated with the Manchus of the then reigning Qing dynasty (1644– 1911) under the common name of “Tartars.”38 In the wake of repeated military threats from various peoples residing in or on the periphery of the Central Asian steppe, particularly the Mongols, the Timurs, and the Turks, early modern Europeans wrote extensively about various facets of the history of the Eurasian continent.39 For instance, Marco Polo’s Yuan-era travelogue on Central Asia and China, which referred to the Mongols as “Tartars,” was widely reprinted.40 As Chinese and Arab sources on the Mongol empire were translated into European languages, studies of the history of the Mongols began to proliferate, too.41 At the same time, a substantial number of European historical accounts and plays portrayed the Chinese/Manchu transition in 1644 as yet another chapter in the history of the “Tartars.”42 Thus, the reception of Orphan of Zhao resonated with other European elaborations on “Tartars,” “Mongols,” and “Manchus.” Arguably for the first time in history East or West, William Hatchett’s (fl. 1730–41) The Orphan of China (1741) reworked Prémare’s “Yuan play” in light of a conflict between Chinese and Tartar/Mongols.43 Following Hatchett’s cue, the most famous European reinterpretation of Orphan of Zhao, Voltaire’s five-act tragedy The Orphan of China (1755), elevated this conflict to a philosophical question with considerable political import.44 On the one hand, given his conception of the Chinese as a highly developed, but stagnant empire, Voltaire construed the Tartars in general and Genghis Khan in particular as a barbaric, but vital counterforce, whose presence led to the flowering of imaginative belles-lettres during the Yuan dynasty.45 On the other hand, Voltaire was drawn to a Confucianized China that was humanistically ethical without being beholden to religious authority. Accordingly, Voltaire recast the story of Orphan of Zhao as a contest between Tartar might embodied by Genghis Khan, and Chinese virtue represented by a Chinese minister and his wife. In this showdown between brute force and morality, the latter prevailed.46 Despite a number of plot changes, Arthur Murphy’s (1727–1805) adaptation of Voltaire’s play, The Orphan of China: A Tragedy (1759) also emphasized the Tartar presence.47 Even though Murphy ostensibly focused on “Chinese virtues,” his play reflects the dimmer view the British took of the Chinese political system, a perspective that would be shared by the anonymous German adaptation of Orphan entitled A Chinese or the Justice of Fate (1774).48 Nevertheless, despite the increasingly negative tenor of much European writing on “Chinese despotism,” the nineteenth century also witnessed an unprecedented

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interest in Chinese drama in England and France. Such interest resulted in an outpouring of the translations that Wang Guowei would eventually list, as well as a number of books and articles and a host of incidental remarks about the subject. Although we witness considerable divergences among individual critics of Chinese drama, many continued to elaborate on the Chinese/Tartar contrast in regard to Yuan plays. Like some of his better studied counterparts in India,49 John Francis Davis (1795–1890), an affiliate of the East India Company in Canton and future governor-general of Hong Kong (1844–48), made no secret of the fact that he considered the translation of Chinese texts ancillary to British mercantile and military interests. Unlike the Jesuits who had only designated the Five Classics and the Four Books under the rubric of Chinese literature, Davis principally focused on the class of texts the Jesuits had considered mere illustrations of customs, that is, novels and plays. As Davis was to put it, “there appears no readier or more agreeable mode of becoming intimately acquainted with a people, from whom Europe can have so little to learn on the score of either moral or physical science, than by drawing largely from the inexhaustible stores of their lighter literature.”50 In addition to retranslating a novel previously published in 1761 by another Englishman, Thomas Percy (1729–1811), the late seventeenthcentury romance The Fortunate Union (Haoqiu zhuan), Davis produced the first two nineteenth-century versions of Yuan plays from Zang’s compendium, An Heir in His Old Age (Lao sheng’ er, 1817) and The Sorrows of Han (Hangong qiu, 1829), which would, despite the poor quality of the translations, rank among the most widely discussed and anthologized early Chinese song-dramas.51 In many ways, Davis echoed the concerns of Prémare, du Halde, and Voltaire. Davis justified his choice of An Heir in His Old Age, another relatively minor play in Zang’s compendium, by noting that it “illustrates the importance which the Chinese attach to having a son worship at the tombs of his family.”52 By contrast, in selecting the first play in Zang’s anthology, Autumn in the Han Palace (Hangong qiu), Davis chose a story of the conflicting exigencies of love and politics during the reign of Han Yuandi (r. 48–33 B.C.E.). Tellingly, much like earlier European adaptations of Orphan, Davis’s approximation of Autumn entitled The Sorrows of Han transposed the events from a specific Han dynasty discord with Northern Xiongnu barbarians to a generalized Tartar/ Chinese conflict: “The subject is strictly historical, and relates to that interesting period of Chinese annals when the declining strength of the

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government emboldened the Tartars in their aggressions, . . . which at last produced the downfall of the empire and the establishment of the Mongol domination.”53 Davis suggested that The Sorrows of Han represented a form of political allegory in Mongol as well as Manchu times, anachronistically designating the Han emperor’s foreign antagonist as the “K’han of the Tartars.” Davis’s imputation that the play intended “to expose the evil consequences of luxury, effeminacy, and supineness in the sovereign”54 not only explained Mongol domination during the Yuan dynasty, but also created an implicit parallel with Manchu rule during Davis’s day. Given that the translation anticipated an implicit rationale for Britain’s mid-century wars against China, military expeditions, which Davis himself wholeheartedly condoned,55 it is perhaps not altogether unexpected that “that very active association, the Oriental Translation Fund”56 sponsored the publication of The Sorrows of Han in 1829.57 In the wake of French colonial expansion into the Near East in the early nineteenth century, the French began to systematize the study of the Orient.58 Even though at that point France did not, as John Francis Davis noted with some bemusement, have any major colonial interests in China,59 the French state invested in the development of the academic discipline of sinology supported by and modeled on the developments in “Oriental Studies.”60 At the behest of Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), the man whom Edward Said identified as the most influential orientalist scholar of the nineteenth century,61 in 1814, a chair was founded for Chinese and Tartar–Manchu Language and Literature at the Collège de France, the premier research institution in France. In 1843, a chair for spoken Chinese was established at the École des Langues Orientales, a teaching institution.62 Unlike Davis, whose command of written Chinese was mediocre at best, the most famous and prolific occupants of those positions, JeanPierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), and Antoine Pierre Louis Bazin had solid Chinese language skills. Other newly founded scholarly institutions such as the Société asiatique (1822–) supported the work of scholars such as Julius Heinrich Klaproth (1783–1835), a German linguist living in Paris. These men too studied the Chinese plays and novels in their own possession or in the collection of libraries and published them with the approbation of the French and British sovereigns under the auspices of the French Imprimerie Royale and the British Oriental Translation Fund.

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Although not nearly as preoccupied with the Chinese/Tartar question as their religious and mercantile predecessors, these academicians did not disregard it either. For instance, Bazin published two major works of translation and research on Chinese drama. Chinese Theater (1838) chiefly consisted of four translations, including Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan). The Century of the Yuan (1850) represented a bibliographic study of all Yuan literature that included plot summaries of all One Hundred Yuan Plays. In his preliminary remarks, Bazin concurred with Voltaire that Chinese belles-lettres reached their peak under the Mongols.63 At the same time, catering to the populist inclination of his royal patrons,64 Bazin refocused Voltaire’s prerevolutionary concern with ruler/advisor relations; instead, he stressed the importance of the theater in mediating postrevolutionary hierarchies between the sovereign and “the people.” Accordingly, the choice of Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E appeared to buttress Bazin’s notion that imperial providence would come to the aid of the common people. Eventually, the numerous translations executed by Bazin and subsequently listed by Wang Guowei were published in the 1851 issues of Journal asiatique, the official organ of the Société asiatique. By contrast, Julius Klaproth and Stanislas Julien subordinated the allegorical political relevance of Chinese materials to the development of academic and disciplinary legitimacy for the rational study of the “Orient.” Pursuing the classification of all peoples of the Eurasian continent, Klaproth was keenly interested in the “Tartars.”65 In addition to compiling detailed historical studies, Klaproth published both a Manchu Primer (1828) and a Chinese Primer (1833). Such primers were the foundational genre of early orientalist scholarship.66 In addition to specimens from religious and travel literature, the Chinese Primer contained the entire Chinese text of the first complete European-language translation of a Chinese zaju play, the Story of the Chalk Circle (Huilan ji),67 which Julien had issued in 1832. Intent on participating in the emergent modern enterprise of philology, Stanislas Julien was largely indifferent to the Chinese/Tartar divide. In 1834, two years after translating Chalk Circle in its entirety and almost exactly a hundred years after du Halde’s publication of the abbreviated Orphan, Julien supplied the first complete translation of Orphan of Zhao. In the spirit of scholarly self-fashioning, Julien took earlier translators, most notably Prémare and Davis, to task for failing to properly translate the arias of the plays, which both men had declared to be virtually impenetrable.68 Most of Julien’s prefatory

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comments to Chalk Circle were taken up with a detailed list of French renditions of Chinese poetic tropes. In the prefatory remarks to Orphan of Zhao, Julien underscored the difficulty of Chinese poetry, noting that even the most learned of four Chinese visiting Paris in 1829, Joseph Li, could not elucidate poetry. Regretful that he had neither the right kind of dictionaries nor access to truly erudite Chinese scholars, Julien was, nevertheless, hopeful that poetry would eventually be established as a “new branch of literature” for sinology.69 At the same time, through his translations from Chinese drama, Julien also sought to contribute to the newly forming discipline of “comparative literature.”70 German polities had neither trade interests nor a burgeoning sinological establishment. Still, a handful of German Jesuits, of whom Adam Schall von Bell (1591–1666) was the most prominent, had, together with their French brethren, laid the groundwork for considerable sinophilia among German writers and philosophers, most notably Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679– 1754).71 As noted earlier, du Halde’s Description was translated into German as were a number of other French and English translations from the Chinese. Arguably, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832) was among the most responsive and influential readers of these publications. Bucking the intensifying trend of disparaging China, Goethe cultivated a lifelong interest in learning about things Chinese. In the early 1780s, Goethe studied Prémare’s Orphan of Zhao, after which he tried, unsuccessfully, to produce his own adaptation of the story. In the mid-1790s, Goethe read the German translation of The Fortunate Union (Haoqiu zhuan), the novel first edited by Thomas Percy. In 1815, he met with the German sinologist Klaproth. Around 1817/18, he read Davis’s An Heir in His Old Age. 72 In 1823, he met with two Chinese sojourning in Europe.73 During the years of 1827/28, he perused two romantic novels, The Two Cousins (Yu Jiao Li) in the 1826 translation by Abel-Rémusat and Chinese Courtship (Huajian ji) in the 1824 translation by Peter Perring Thoms (active 1814–51),74 a pioneer in the design of Chinese fonts active in Canton and Macao.75 In a much-cited study on the impact of translation on eighteenthand nineteenth-century German writers and critics, Antoine Berman credits Goethe with the creation of the term Weltliteratur (1827).76 What Berman neglects to mention, perhaps because earlier scholars had already made this point,77 is that in the conversation between Goethe and his interlocutor, where this term first occurs, a discussion of the antiquity, sophistication, and abundance of Chinese novels

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immediately preceded the mention of “world literature.”78 In that conversation, Goethe went on to declare that “national literature is no longer as relevant now that the epoch of world literature has dawned and everyone should do their best to accelerate this period”79 without blindly imitating any foreign example, including the Chinese. Although Goethe proceeded to laud the ancient Greeks as the fountainhead of timeless models, it is, nevertheless, apparent that for Goethe Chinese literary translations—classics, poetry, and especially novels and plays—had precipitated the advent of a new era of “world literature.” The dialectic between China and its relationship to the “world” adumbrated by du Halde, Voltaire, and Davis and enunciated by Goethe would remain central to the reception of Yuan plays in modern times. This was due to the enormous impact that European cultural categories began to exert on Japan and then on China in the wake of the military presence of European powers in East Asia after 1840. As the introductory chapter will show later, the most nationalistic and anti-imperialist Chinese mobilization of Yuan drama in the twentieth century was enabled by the very terms that eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European versions of Chinese drama had invented. Among the specifically European, yet ostensibly universal literary categories, none was to affect twentieth-century Chinese uses of Yuan drama more than the notion of “tragedy.” Given the centrality of this critical formation within European literary discourse, it is perhaps not surprising that Chinese writers, once exposed to this body of thought, particularly that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, would expend enormous efforts throughout the twentieth century to devise and define “tragedies” from within the Chinese theatrical corpus. In many ways, the modern Chinese critical production of “tragedy” sought to revise the peripheral position accorded to Chinese plays, and by extension Chinese culture, in nineteenth-century European criticism, especially in the imperialist second half of the century. Tragedy as Cultural Criticism In Criticism and Modernity (1999), one contemporary scholar of English literature, Thomas Docherty, argues that a politically inflected notion of the “tragic” was at the very heart of the modern critical enterprise, taking shape as early as the late seventeenth century.80 For all the centrality of tragedy, however, the definitions of “tragedy” in England, France, and Germany varied greatly over the course of the

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early modern period. With the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics in the seventeenth century, a formalist neoclassicism of the three unities of action, time, and the newly invented place, held sway in early modern France.81 Thanks to the non-classical aesthetic of Shakespeare, early modern English writers were somewhat less preoccupied with consolidating formal parameters and focused more on psychological characterization.82 In the German-speaking world, drama did not come into its own until the eighteenth century. Indebted to Aristotelian understandings of tragedy, German critics such as Johann Christoph Gottschedt (1700–66), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) were, in varying ways, concerned with formal questions of “tragedy” and its presumed effects on the audience. By contrast, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), one of the founders of the Romantic movement, redefined the essence of tragedy as an opposition between suffering and free will at the level of the individual character, an idea that was subsequently developed by G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel understood tragedy as the vanquishing of the individual in the name of universal ethics. Nineteenth-century critics such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche focused on the “tragic” as a philosophical category, which, in opposing ways, expressed the highest form of an individual’s relationship to life.83 Translation played a major role in the diffusion of new concepts of tragedy. Among such translated bodies of other literatures, Greek theories and plays were paramount, forming a touchstone against which all other traditions were compared. Chinese drama also helped articulate and consolidate formal and national criteria of tragic discourse. The reception of early Chinese song-drama translations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe illustrates how changing definitions of tragedy and the increasingly national, if not civilizational, dimension of this reception progressively marginalized Chinese theater in the eyes of European critics. In the mid-eighteenth century, du Halde’s Description had declared Prémare’s translation a “Chinese tragedy” (Tchao chi cou ell, ou le petit-fils de la Maison de Tchao, Tragédie chinoise). Most writers accepted the tautological claim advanced in the prefatory remarks that the play was a tragedy because it was “sufficiently tragic.” All mideighteenth-century adaptations of Prémare’s Orphan also defined themselves as “tragedies,” including Hatchett’s The Chinese Orphan: An Historical Tragedy (1741), Voltaire’s The Orphan of China: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1755), Murphy’s The Orphan of China: A Tragedy (1756)

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and Percy’s The Little Orphan of the House of Chao: A Chinese Tragedy (1762). When continental eighteenth-century critics offered explicit definitions of “tragedy” in relation to the translated Orphan of Zhao or one of its adaptations, the discussion centered around formal criteria, most notably whether or not the play corresponded to the three unities of action, time, and place. Opinions were mixed. Du Halde himself had noted that Orphan violated the three unities, but he felt, given that even in France theater had only recently reached a peak, the Chinese could be excused, especially in light of the early date of the composition,84 a qualification that was echoed by Voltaire. After comparing the Chinese play to the “monstrous farces” of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, Voltaire famously remarked that the Chinese piece had nothing but clarity to recommend itself, lacking all else—unity of time and action, development of feelings, description of customs, eloquence, reason, and passion, but that it, nevertheless, surpassed what had been written in France at the time.85 In keeping with their less formalist approach to drama in general, English critics tended to be more generous with regard to Chinese drama. Richard Hurd (1720–1808) initially proclaimed in 1751 that Orphan of Zhao demonstrated the independently developed, and hence natural, character of the three unities. Orphan, he granted, could have observed these unities even more tightly, but even in its somewhat compromised form, the play surpassed the works of “more knowing [European] dramatists.” Hurd dropped his remarks in subsequent editions of his works, possibly because, as Thomas Percy, who included them in his Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762), observed, the resemblance between Greek and Chinese drama might not have been as pronounced as Hurd had originally declared.86 In the early nineteenth century, John Francis Davis proceeded along formalist lines, but found much to recommend the two plays he had chosen to translate. Davis’s An Heir in His Old Age (1817) was subtitled “A Chinese Drama.” Although he noted that Chinese drama was China’s own invention, Davis went to great lengths to establish European characteristics of tragedy in Chinese plays: unity and integrity of action; natural and uninterrupted course of events; properly divided scenes and acts; natural expression of sentiments with a focus on virtue despite the occasional lapse into gross indecency; lyrical compositions bearing a strong resemblance to the chorus of old Greek tragedy; and prologues resembling the prologues of Greek drama, especially Euripides.87 In 1829, Davis subtitled his translation of The

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Sorrows of Han “A Chinese Tragedy.” In the preface to the translation, Davis observed that although the Chinese did not distinguish between comedy and tragedy, “we are quite at liberty to give the latter title to a play, which answers so completely to the European definition.” Although Davis conceded that he had to relabel the prologue (xiezi) as an act in order to arrive at the classical five acts of tragedy, he, nevertheless, asserted that the unities were more rigorously observed than on contemporary European stages. Furthermore, “the grandeur and gravity of the subject, the rank and dignity of the personages, the tragical catastrophe, and the strict award of poetical justice, might satisfy the most rigid admirer of Grecian rules.”88 Davis’s formalist evaluation of “Chinese tragedy” was to be questioned, particularly with the ascent of the character-centered approach developed by Herder and the evolutionary historical dialectic proposed by Hegel. Even though he depended entirely on the translations of Davis, Julien, and Bazin, J. L. Klein (1810–76), the German author of a monumental History of Drama (1865–76), openly derided the English and the French, treating their interest in anything Chinese as tangible proof of flaws in their respective national characters. Klein especially ridiculed the “Englishman” Davis’s categorization of The Sorrows of Han in virulently nationalist terms. In his view, Davis’s designation was patently ridiculous because the Chinese were incapable of producing tragedies about highly conflicted individuals due to their slavish mentality and their unchangingly repetitive behavior patterns.89 Klein’s views were echoed by later German critics, albeit in a more attenuated rhetorical style. In the first narrative monograph on Chinese drama in any language, The Theater and Drama of the Chinese (1887), Rudolf von Gottschall (1832–1909), a leading, if forgotten German cultural figure as well as a dramatist in his own right, subdivided his discussion in accordance with European theatrical genres, all of which he noted were amply represented in the Chinese repertoire. However, in Gottschall’s view, even the best plays such as The Sorrows of Han lacked “energy of the historical spirit”; such drama was devoid of the confrontation between destiny and individual because the peaceful disposition of the Chinese supplied nothing with which to create great tragic characters. Moreover, Gottschall found Davis’s assertion of an allegorical meaning unconvincing, suggesting instead that Sorrows of Han had yet to leave behind the infantile stage of mere historical chronicle.90

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For the two German philosophers whose conception of tragedy would exert great influence on modern European and East Asian criticism, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the Greek tradition proved to be far more important than Chinese plays. Schopenhauer discussed tragedy at length in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1844), presenting it as the supreme literary genre. Schopenhauer casually referred to Davis’s preface for An Heir in His Old Age, noting that the allegedly obscure poetic passages of that play might be analogous to the oracular quality of certain chorus parts in Greek drama, implying that he considered one on a par with the other.91 However, when discussing individual works of tragedy, Schopenhauer mentioned neither Orphan of Zhao nor Sorrows of Han, the two Chinese translations then circulating under the rubric of tragedy. Even if Chinese plays would prove peripheral to Schopenhauer’s main interests, his metaphysical definition of “tragedy” would lend itself more readily to cross-cultural adaptations than narrowly formalist approaches. Asian elements assumed an even more spectral presence in Nietzsche’s writings on tragedy. In an early essay on Greek music drama, Nietzsche distinguished between vocal and instrumental music, noting that the latter “served primarily to affirm virtuosity, prompting the genuine Greek to feel that there was something uncanny about it, something that was imported from the strange lands of Asia.”92 In Nietzsche’s main work on tragedy, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Asia no longer figured at all. Distinguishing between the formalistic spirit of Apollo and the rejuvenating forces of Dionysus, Nietzsche maintained that the latter were unleashed in early Greek tragedies, which he considered, partly thanks to the presence of the choir, as musical rather than spoken dramas. Despite his idealization of Greek performance, Nietzsche was also willing, at least initially, to grant that contemporary German opera, most notably Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) oeuvre, was capable of embodying the Dionysian force of destruction and renewal.93 Partly in response to the post-1868 translation of nineteenthcentury German writers and philosophers into Japanese, tragedy became something of a Japanese obsession as well. In the wake of Western-inspired theatrical reform in 1870s and 1880s, Japanese writers and critics sought to turn what had previously been marginal performance genres into a form of literature. The first and hugely influential History of Japanese Literature (Nihon bungaku shi, 1890)

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included discussion and samples of fiction and drama from the Edo period.94 In keeping with the Western reification of identifiable dramatic authorship and of literary tragedy, scholars singled out one writer, Chikamatsu (1653–1724), a prolific jôruri (puppet theater) and kabuki playwright, and a subset of his plays, the “contemporary plays” (setsumono) for canonization. His plays began to be republished and selectively anthologized; they also began to be studied for their language and for what they could tell readers about “tragic” conflicts between “duty” and “love” for Japanese commoners.95 After Japan’s military victory over China in 1895, Japanese critics also began to position themselves as authorities on Chinese literary genres previously neglected by both Chinese and Japanese scholars of China. Sasagawa Rinpu, a graduate of Tokyo University’s Japanese History program and editor of the influential journal Imperial Literature (Teikoku bungaku), published History of Chinese Fiction and Drama (Shina shôsetsu gikyoku shi, 1897). In his specialized History, he declared the Xixiang ji to be a “comic tragedy,” judging it to be of a lesser caliber than either European or Japanese tragedy.96 The year after, he followed with his general History of Chinese Literature (Shina bungaku shi, 1898). Modeled in format and concept on the seminal History of Japanese Literature, Sasagawa’s was the first influential general history in any language to discuss Chinese plays.97 Contrary to his specialized History, Sasagawa’s general work did not denigrate the Xixiang ji, drawing instead on the appreciative comments of Jin Shengtan, the most influential traditional drama critic.98 After the translation of Sasagawa’s general History into Chinese in 1903,99 Sasagawa’s newly configured literary field drew the ire of more traditionally minded Chinese critics such as Lin Chuanjia (1877– 1921).100 However, in due course, Sasagawa’s rearrangement of the Chinese canon would gain acceptance in China as well. Chinese scholars sojourning in Japan acted as critical intermediaries for the development of Chinese “tragedies.” In the realm of the scholarship on classical drama, no one was more influential than Wang Guowei. In 1901, during his first stay in Japan, Wang Guowei read a number of German philosophers and writers, including Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.101 In the famous 1904 essay that inaugurated the modern study of what would come to be known as “classical Chinese fiction” ( gudian xiaoshuo), Wang examined the most influential Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), in light of a Schopenhauerian conception of tragedy. Wang granted that The Dream of the Red Chamber embodied a tragic

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sensibility, with the main protagonist, Jia Baoyu, qualifying for the highest form of tragic consciousness.102 However, around the same time, Wang concluded that China had no dramatic tragedies to speak of,103 a view that was shared by Japanese and Chinese commentators who concluded that the lack of tragedies made Chinese drama inferior to other national traditions.104 Given the preeminence of tragedy in the quest for a viable national literary tradition, Wang did not leave the question of Chinese “tragedy” alone. In his capacity as the editor of the journal The World of Education ( Jiaoyu shijie), from 1904 onward, Wang authored a number of articles, some anonymously and one under his own name, on Nietzsche’s philosophy. In early essays on German philosophy, Wang discussed both comedy and tragedy in general in terms of a Nietzschean will to power.105 Around 1907, Wang began to conduct research on the early song and theatrical tradition. He edited the Register of Ghosts (Lugui bu, 1330), one of the earliest critical works devoted to art song and song-drama.106 Between 1908 and 1911, he published many of his articles on the early theatrical tradition in the National Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao).107 Amidst inspirational pieces about Ming loyalists exhorting the perspicacious reader to embrace anti-Manchu resistance,108 Wang’s essays on the origins of drama in the Song dynasty, its musical antecedents, and role types incorporated drama within the emerging field of “national learning” (guoxue). 109 Since it had only been a little over a century since a Manchu emperor had last proscribed, albeit not successfully suppressed, numerous works of fiction and drama, Wang’s efforts fell within a broader and unprecedented campaign to leverage previously suspect works against the imperial establishment.110 Wang’s research on Chinese drama culminated in his History of Song and Yuan Drama, which he finalized in three months at Kyoto University in late 1912. Showing familiarity with the literary categories of German philosophy as well as French scholarship on Chinese drama, with Chinese song-drama and criticism, and with Japanese literary scholarship, Wang’s History of early Chinese song-drama would become a major milestone in the production of modern Chinese culture. Yuan, Ming, and Qing critical writings on early Chinese songdrama furnished a conceptual basis for mapping discrete dynastic units of Chinese literary production into a linear Hegelian narrative. German idealism and post-idealism offered rhetorical and substantive categories that would define Wang’s work as cultural criticism rather than as a connoisseur’s appreciation of what was in his day a marginal literary

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form. Not only did Wang’s History follow a largely chronological outline, but it also drew on Nietzsche’s emphasis on musicality to reconsider the existence of Chinese tragedy. Sasagawa Rinpu’s literary histories had provided a literary typology for transposing the incidental genre of zaju into the privileged realm of “drama” (Jap. gikyoku, Ch. xiqu) that in turn inspired Wang’s terminology. In light of the profound impact of Wang’s History, it is fair to say that it represented the first systematic Chinese-authored insertion of Chinese literature into the discourse of “world literature.” The Anatomy of Multilingual Translation Translation has increasingly come to be recognized as a crucial aspect of interaction between different cultures. If the evaluation of translations used to be bedeviled by questions of the fidelity of a “copy” to an “original,” recent theories of translation have taken a more dynamic approach, recognizing that all translations inherently constitute a form of rewriting.111 Accordingly, rather than simply focusing on how a translated text may relate to a source text, scholars are beginning to explore how translated texts function within their new literary environment.112 What makes the formation of Chinese song-drama studies additionally compelling is that it defies a simple binary between a single source and target language. Instead, the implications of Wang’s title and preface to History of Song and Yuan Drama invites us to theorize the traversing of linguistic signs through the multilingually hybridized space of literary Chinese, classical and modern Japanese, as well as European vocabularies prior to the creation of modern Chinese after 1917. In choosing the term xiqu (drama) for the title of his History, Wang made a significantly modern and highly influential linguistic choice.113 Used very loosely to designate a variety of actual song formats, traditional Chinese drama-related terms highlighted the sung quality of the form, including ci (lyrics), qu (arias), ciqu (plays), and yuefu (originally, music bureau songs). Of these, the term qu most often applied to the early Chinese song-drama (zaju) as well as art song (sanqu). Another designation, chuanqi, was so loose that it could refer to prose tales and to short zaju plays as well as later multi-scene plays. Other terms referred to the regional provenance of such sung theatrical forms, including Northern drama (beiqu), Southern drama (nanxi, nanqu), Kun-style opera (kunqu), and Beijing opera ( jingju). Other designations defined the formal features of a given play, including

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the short farce (yuanben), the four-act early song drama (zaju) and the multi-scene xiwen and chuanqi. Some rarer terms foregrounded the staged quality of plays (juxi, xizi). However, what the Chinese language lacked was a synthetic term that highlighted the literary quality of plays regardless of their musical provenance or formal features. By contrast, the Japanese had, by virtue of a loan word from classical Chinese, already coined such a term, that is gikyoku (Ch. xiqu). From the fourteenth century onward, Chinese writers occasionally refer to xiqu, most commonly to distinguish the arias in a play from those of pure art song.114 By the late nineteenth century, the Japanese term written with the same characters as xiqu had come to designate “drama” more generally. Meiji-era Japanese literary histories of Japanese and Chinese literature alike commonly feature the term “drama” ( gikyoku). It is likely that Wang’s reintroduction of the term into what would become modern Chinese constituted another instance of translingual practice.115 As a Japanese loan-concept, the term xiqu denoted more than simple “arias within a play.” As early as 1908, Wang himself defined the term as “using song and dance to tell a story.”116 Strictly speaking, the term “opera” ( gequ, geju) might have been a more appropriate translation for Wang’s definition of a play. However, by using the term xiqu, Wang sought to encompass one particular defunct form of the Chinese operatic tradition, Yuan zaju, within the serious literary form of drama.117 Wang reinforced the literariness of zaju by comparing Yuan playwrights to Tang poets. To be sure, late and post-Ming critics such as Li Kaixian, Wang Jide, and Meng Chengshun (1599–after 1684) had also likened Yuan playwrights to Tang poets often with a view toward downplaying theatrical elements in favor of poetic prosody and style. However, in contrast to Wang, they had lacked the overarching concept of “drama.” Thanks to the sanction of theatrical forms within the Euro-Japanese literary fields, Wang’s traditionalist comparisons of playwrights to poets newly underscored the literariness of xiqu within an international framework. Wang’s coinage was readily diffused into Republican-era parlance. In fact, xiqu came to serve as an umbrella term for all forms of drama, including Beijing opera, Western drama and modern Chinese spoken drama (huaju).118 For instance, a collection containing spoken plays by leading Republican-era dramatists, including Guo Moruo (1892– 1968), Tian Han, and Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962), was published under the title A Premier Anthology of Drama (Xiqu jiaxuan) in 1935. Only after 1949 did the now common distinction between xiqu

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(traditional drama) and xiju (modern drama) take hold, strategically accentuating the divide between traditional and modern forms.119 Wang’s neologism also allowed him to position himself as a scholar with a singular expertise. In the preface to his History, Wang claimed rather grandiosely that he was the only expert on traditional drama. Not only was this an overstatement given the sophisticated critical writings of Yuan and Ming literati to be discussed in the body of this book, but the assertion was patently false in the context of Wang’s own time. Wang Guowei’s History did not become the seminal book that it did because Wang was the most knowledgeable person on the subject of Chinese drama. That honor went to Wu Mei (1884–1939), as some contemporaries recognized. In A Literary History of Contemporary China (Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi, 1933), Qian Jibo (1887–1957) suggested that people ought to revere Wu Mei rather than Wang Guowei as the doyen among modern scholars of drama.120 Despite Qian’s commendation, Wu Mei never attained the stature of Wang Guowei, despite the fact that Wu collected plays, published many books on drama with prestigious modern publishers, and produced well-known scholar-disciples such as Ren Na (1894–) and Lu Qian (1905–).121 Unlike Wang Guowei, however, Wu did not venture far beyond the traditional rhetorical formats of aria-related criticism: miscellaneous remarks on drama, bibliographies, formularies, and prefatorial comments.122 Even though he was sympathetic to late Qing reform efforts,123 Wu interpreted Chinese drama neither from the vantage point of Western theory nor in light of contemporary Chinese politics. Accordingly, both the narrative format and substantive outlook of his critical rhetoric inscribed a more narrowly traditionalist audience than Wang Guowei’s History. Granted, Wang’s History is itself heavily philological, but in comparison with his Wang’s earlier studies on drama published in the National Essence Journal, it hybridized Euro-Japanese and classical Chinese modalities of presentation. Such a dual affiliation is also evidenced by the two competing titles under which it circulated in the twentieth century.124 The progressive journal, Dongfang zazhi/Eastern Miscellany first serialized Wang’s History in 1913/14 under the heading History of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu shi). In the book version first published in 1915 and reprinted many times thereafter, the Commercial Press retained this modern title, highlighting Wang’s History as one of the first literary histories in Chinese. Reform-oriented secondary writings generally cited this particular title.125 By contrast, in 1922, another Shanghai publisher issued Wang’s work as part of a

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series on traditional drama criticism. The publisher changed the title to the more traditionalist Evidential Studies of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu kao). The second title underlined the work’s allegiance to a Chinese tradition of criticism rather than an internationalized form of discourse. A posthumous 1927 edition collated by Luo Zhenyu, Wang’s patron, further added credibility to the latter title.126 Not surprisingly perhaps, after 1949, publishers in the People’s Republic of China tended to prefer the original title, whereas publishers in Taiwan opted more frequently for the traditionalist title.127 Hybrid modalities between Euro-Japanese and classical Chinese concepts also inform one of the History’s most influential statements. Wang Guowei began the preface with the following words: “[The preQin state] Chu had the rhapsodic songs (sao), the Han dynasty had the rhapsody (fu), the Tang had poetry (shi), the Song had lyrics (ci) and the Yuan had arias (qu). They all can be considered the literature of that particular age (jie suowei yidai zhi wenxue), which posterity was not able to emulate.”128 Although deceptively similar to Yuan, Ming, and Qing formulations of the dynastic succession of particular genres,129 Wang, nevertheless, invoked the Japanese neologism “literature” (wenxue) rather than classical Chinese terms (wenzhang, wen) to define literary production. Inscribed into this notion of “literature” was the idea of generic diversity, linear progression, aesthetic autonomy, and universal standards. To be sure, Wang himself did not use the term “evolution” or “progression” (jinhua), but subsequent literary historians reformulated Wang’s semi-traditional trope of dynastic literary resonance to encompass the modern concept of “evolution.” Even if Wang did not explicitly stress the evolutionary nature of Chinese literature as a whole, he was decidedly concerned with defining its place within an international literary context. Thanks to Nietzsche’s assertion that music drama in its early Greek or contemporary Wagnerian incarnation represented the only viable forms of the tragic, Wang could reasonably imply that at least certain Chinese “music dramas” also deserved to be considered tragedies. Wang named five Yuan zaju plays, including Autumn in the Han Palace (Davis’s The Sorrows of Han), as worthy of being counted as tragedies because of their unhappy endings. He noted that the self-conscious embrace of adversity on the part of the main protagonists in two other early songdramas, Guan Hanqing’s Injustice to Dou E and Ji Junxiang’s Orphan of Zhao, allowed these plays to be ranked “among the great tragedies of the world” (shijie dabeiju) without embarrassment.130 In doing so,

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Wang launched the notion of “Chinese tragedy” in a Chinese-language context,131 a concept that would come to be accepted among Chinese and some Japanese literary historians.132 At the same time, Wang was careful to attribute the rise of the evolved form of zaju composed under the Yuan to indigenous Chinese forms dating back to the Song dynasty.133 He tacitly downplayed the late Ming polemics that ascribed the emergence of “Northern drama” to the disorderly, if not uncivilized, impact of the barbarian Jin and Yuan invaders. He also implicitly disputed the claims of contemporary European and Japanese scholars who attributed the rise of zaju songdrama to the positive impetus of the Mongol “Tartars.”134 Instead, by shifting the origins of zaju from a Chinese culturalist or a European racial argument to an institutional reason, Wang assigned a neutral rather than a negative or a positive role to the Mongols and subtly claimed productive agency for Han Chinese instead: Among the Mongols and the Jurchen, there were a number of songwriters. However, with the exception of Li Zhifu, a Jurchen, all playwrights were Han Chinese. After the Mongols abolished the Jin dynasty, the examinations were suspended for eighty years. This was an unprecedented state of affairs since the inception of the examination system. Thus, unless they served as clerks, the literati had nothing with which to recommend themselves. Therefore, it is not surprising that many playwrights were clerks. . . . The claim made by Shen Defu and Zang Maoxun that in the age of the Mongols, officials were selected through the composition of drama is completely spurious. I maintain that the reason zaju song-drama developed is precisely because the Yuan had abolished the examinations in the first part of the dynasty.135

Wang disregarded Yuan-dynasty evidence that some playwrights, including Zhong Sicheng (ca. 1277–after 1345), the compiler of the Register of Ghosts, had in fact sat for the examinations after their reinstitution in 1313.136 However, there were compelling reasons for ignoring such evidence. The implicit historical analogy offered the possibility of literary production independent of major state sponsorship. The abolition of the Chinese civil service examination in 1905 spelt the end of imperial support for certain forms of literary production. In 1908, writers for the conservative National Essence Journal had distinguished between “imperial” and “national” learning, striving to imagine the latter as an independent activity.137 Wang’s interpretation of mature zaju as a response by Chinese literati to the absence of civil service opportunities subtly reinvented the past to address a contemporary dilemma: Chinese

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literati living in Yuan times provided a model for producing “world literature” while enjoying neither outright imperial support nor pandering to crass commercial interests. At the same time, Wang offered an ethnic perspective on such literary excellence. By insisting that it was Han Chinese who advanced Jurchen farces (yuanben) to the point of mature zaju, Wang reworked a partisan mid-Ming comment in defense of “Yuan drama.” In an effort to privilege the established Northern over the emergent Southern dramatic tradition with its plethora of romantic plays, a Ming critic, Hu Shi (fl. 1548), had cited Mongol favoritism with regard to official appointments as a proximate cause that spurred men from the Central Plains (Zhongzhou ren), who would otherwise have become scholarofficials, to realize their talent and ambition through the writing of serious plays.138 Wang recast Hu’s strategic remark to provide a seemingly factual basis for a retrospective vision of collective racial achievement. Wang’s claim intersected with heated debates among National Essence scholars in the first decade of the twentieth century on the future of the declared successors to the Jurchen, that is, the Manchu rulers of the Qing, their Mongol bannermen, and other ethnic allies in the Chinese empire. Inspired by the anti-Manchu racialism of Wang Fuzhi (1619–92), the extremists among the National Essence group advocated death to the Manchus, hoping to expel them from China. Others favored a more reasoned response, allowing for the ratification of a nondiscrimination treaty for the five major ethnic groups within Chinese borders.139 Written in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Wang’s creation of a golden age of Chinese drama under Jurchen and Mongol rule held out an even more conciliatory stance, allowing for “Han Chinese” literary greatness to flourish irrespective of a “barbarian” presence, Mongol, Manchu, or otherwise. Thanks to Wang’s facility with classical Chinese dramarelated texts, his knowledge of Japanese, and his readings of German philosophy, the History “translated” and “rewrote” separate strands of literary terminology and historical experience into a new model of literary production that proved to be highly compelling for modern Chinese critics. The Modern Uses of “Traditional” Literature In modern scholarship on Chinese literature, it has become standard practice to bifurcate historical narratives as though the decade between

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1910 and 1920 was an unbridgeable watershed between the “premodern” and the “modern” separated by what Stephen Owen has termed “the brilliant fiction of the Date.”140 Even as early as the 1920s, when literary histories began to be written in greater numbers, accounts such as Qian Jibo’s mentioned earlier, which covered both literature in the various registers of classical Chinese and modern Chinese, were the exception rather than the rule. More commonly, literary histories began to treat classical and modern literature separately, as though there were few, if any, connections between them.141 Powered by a pervasive desire for political, social, and aesthetic reform, the iconoclastic post-1919 May Fourth rhetoric obscured interaction between the emergence of modern literature and the evolving classical canon. After 1949, critics in the PRC, Japan, and the United States, continued, for reasons of their own, to elaborate on a dichotomized view of Chinese literary history. In recent years, however, both historians such as Dorothy Ko and literary scholars such as Kirk Denton have compellingly argued for challenging such May Fourth dichotomies, either because tradition was not nearly as monolithic as May Fourth criticism often made it out to be or because the past exerted considerable influence on particulars of the formation of Chinese modernity.142 An examination of the impact of Wang’s History shows that far from being an impediment to modernization, the modern formation of the classical canon provided an impetus for it. As noted earlier, Wang’s History was first published in installments from 1913 to 1914 in the leading reform journal, the Dongfang zazhi/Eastern Miscellany, issued by the prestigious and innovative Commercial Press. In those years, the journal had a circulation of 15,000 copies per issue, making it the most widely read journal in China.143 Through dissemination in this journalistic venue as well as their subsequent publication and frequent republication as a “primer for national learning” by the Commercial Press, Wang’s ideas reached a broad audience among educated, reform-oriented readers. Even if Wang’s own outlook on Chinese culture after 1912 became increasingly conservative, the impact of his synthetic blend of classical Chinese, Japanese, and European narratives reverberated through various domains of cultural reform. Arenas where the discursive power of the History made itself felt included modern literary thought, educational philosophy and curricula, and the formation of the modern classical canon. Wang’s History contributed in substantial fashion to the formation of modern theories of drama. The reform of dramatic writing had been

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something of a concern in the post-1898 agenda. However, with the advent of May Fourth criticism, writers such as Hu Shi, Ouyang Yuqian, and others articulated the need for a new “serious” Westernstyle drama with considerable and cohesive force. In 1918, one of the prominent vernacular language journals, New Youth (Xin qingnian), devoted a special issue to drama reform (xiju gailiang), which featured an influential essay entitled “The Concept of Literary Evolution and Drama Reform” (Wenxue jinhua guannian yu xiju gailiang) by Hu Shi.144 Hu Shi’s article was designed to exhort contemporary dramatists to write plays that could measure up to the best the Western dramatic tradition had to offer. Ostensibly, Hu not only echoed the negative assessments of many reform writers of what they viewed as the “abomination” of traditional drama (e’lie xiju), but Hu repeatedly criticized Wang Guowei for both philological mistakes and aesthetic misjudgments regarding traditional drama. In actuality, however, Hu cleverly adapted many of the concepts of Wang’s History, pushing Wang’s incipient hybridization of classical Chinese with Euro-Japanese literary-philosophical concepts a step further. In Hu’s conception, Wang’s traditionalist correlation of genre and period was transformed into an evolutionary paradigm in order to effect China’s integration into what Hu called, perhaps for the first time in a Chinese language context, “the history of world literature.”145 In accordance with a progressive perspective that rated later forms more highly than earlier ones, Hu Shi did not consider any early Chinese song-drama a tragedy. However, if Wang Guowei had been content to merely offer some Yuan plays as potential contenders for the world’s most esteemed dramatic genre, Hu inserted the development of early Chinese song-drama in a universal history of mutually dependent evolution: “In the history of world literature (shijie wenxue shi), there are countless examples that when a literature reached a point of stagnation, it evolved further because it came into contact with another literature and thus either inadvertently absorbed or consciously emulated its strengths.”146 In making Yuan drama one of the few instances of Chinese/foreign literary interaction, Hu laid the groundwork for other Republican-era writers to enlist Yuan drama, as Gong Pengcheng has aptly argued, as a politically charged metaphor for China’s relationship to its various “national” and/or “ethnic” others.147 Among traditional literary forms, Yuan drama appeared uniquely suited to embody the concept of Chinese racial superiority (minzu). In 1923, a well-known literary scholar, Xie Wuliang (1884–1964),

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published the first modern study of two individual Yuan writers, Luo Guanzhong and Ma Zhiyuan, whom he considered as exemplary Chinese literati in an age dominated by a racially alien (yizu) people. Conceding that the Yuan was an “evolutionary period” ( jinhua de shidai) for playwrighting, Xie went beyond Wang’s History and asserted that Chinese literati used zaju plays as a vehicle of protest against their alien overlords,148 a reading that would gain immense popularity in post-1949 state-sponsored interpretations of Yuan plays. Six years later, drawing on the traditional, but newly racialized notion of “sinification,”149 He Changqun’s (1905–) An Introduction to Yuan Drama (Yuanqu gailun, 1929) suggested that Yuan drama provided an example of the cross-ethnic diffusion of Chinese culture among races with inferior levels of culture,150 a trope that would also remain relevant for post-1949 Chinese inter-ethnic nation-building purposes.151 Perhaps most innovative in the cross-cultural conception of Yuan drama was Liu Dajie’s (1904–) History of the Development of Chinese Literature (Zhongguo wenxue fada shi, 1941–49). Allowing for the possibility of cultural exchange between equals, Liu compared Yuan drama to the intercultural popularity of contemporaneous performance practices across linguistic barriers. Liu suggested that Yuan drama functioned as a cross-cultural token of exchange between the Chinese and the Mongols in a manner similar to that of the Beijing opera star Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) touring America and to undubbed English language films being shown in Shanghai to non-English speaking audiences. The example of Yuan drama enabled Liu to create historical depth for the intensified and accelerated exchange among different cultures during the Republican era, normalizing such interactions as a recurrent theme in Chinese history. The post-1949 version of Liu’s history purposefully omitted these passages.152 Thanks partly to Hu’s advocacy as well as to Wang’s History itself, reform dramatists edited not only modern editions of Yuan drama, but adapted early song-drama for their own creative work. Late Qing and early Republican-era publishers issued reprints of Yuan plays, including Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays and Jin Shengtan’s Xixiang ji. In an effort to build broader readerships for these editions, some publishers sought out reform writers to author prefaces for these newly issued editions. In 1921, Guo Moruo (1892–1978), the writer and translator, was asked by a publishing house to write a preface for a new edition of the Xixiang ji. He turned to Wang’s History to educate himself about Yuan drama,153 concluding that Yuan plays “occupy a significant place in our literary history.”154 Thereafter, in short order,

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Guo wrote three historical plays of his own, which were collectively published as The Three Rebellious Women (Sange panni de nüxing ) in 1926.155 Guo acknowledged Autumn in the Han Palace as a significant intertext for the creation of Wang Zhaojun, one of the three plays contained in that collection.156 Drama criticism, histories of drama, reprints of old plays, and new dramatic compositions were not the only arenas in which Wang’s History made its influence felt. In an article first published in 1917 in New Youth (Xin qingnian) and subsequently widely reprinted, Cai Yuanpei (1867–1940), once one of the driving forces at the Commercial Press and now president of Beijing University, called for an overhaul of the educational curriculum. Based on his own studies of German philosophy as well as his familiarity with Wang’s articles in Eastern Miscellany, Cai called for a new aesthetic education to replace all traditional moral instruction. Privileging tragedy as the supreme form of literary expression, Cai proposed that certain masterpieces of Chinese literature, including The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) and Story of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji), be incorporated into such a curriculum.157 Other important cultural figures also pursued the educational value of tragedy. In 1919, Tian Han, the famous playwright, translated Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy for a youth-oriented journal, Young China (Shaonian Zhongguo), and in 1925, Xu Zhimo (1896–1931), the well-known poet, declared Birth of Tragedy to be one of the ten must-read books for youngsters.158 Cai Yuanpei’s call for curriculum reform may have been relatively generic, but departments at Beijing University implemented a more specific scholarly reform agenda. In 1923, the editorial program of a newly formatted journal, The National Learning Review (Guoxue jikan), issued by Beijing University under Hu Shi’s editorship, inaugurated a self-consciously internationalist research agenda that reflected the impact of Wang’s History. Simultaneously conceiving itself against a narrow modernist iconoclasm and against conservative doomsday scenarios lamenting the demise of classical learning, the journal predicted a new flowering of classical studies. According to the mission statement, such confidence was warranted because classical studies would benefit from a scientific approach. Thanks to an expanded scope of inquiry, new and international methodologies, and the discovery of new materials, classical studies would contribute to the modernization of China.159 Unlike the late Qing National Essence Journal, which was ambivalent about Westernization, the post-revolutionary National Learning Review made the Chinese past part of an international research agenda.

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If the National Learning Review expanded the range of acceptable topics of inquiry beyond what the National Essence Journal could have envisioned, it was in part due to Wang Guowei, whose pioneering research on early song-drama had set a precedent for every single one of the journal’s objectives. First, in its list of desirable research topics, the mission statement specifically singled out the two Yuan dynasty playwrights to whom Wang had accorded paramount place, namely Guan Hanqing and Ma Zhiyuan. Second, in terms of new approaches, Wang’s History had already demonstrated that “new” classical Chinese literary artifacts could be successfully investigated with internationalized methodologies. Third, in 1915, Luo Zhenyu had supplied the exemplar for the printing of what are, to this day, the only specimens of genuine Yuan-dynasty drama, the so-called Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (Yuankan sanshizhong). First issued under the auspices of the Department of Sinology at Kyoto University, the collection was reprinted with a preface by Wang Guowei in Shanghai in 1916.160 In light of the fact that Wang wrote his History of Song and Yuan Drama in Kyoto and that the earliest examples of Chinese song-drama were first printed there, it is evident that Japanese academic institutions played a significant role in reconstructing the Chinese past for modern ends. Thanks to its relative geographic and linguistic proximity as well as its head start in the command of Western technologies and knowledge, Japan inflected, magnified as well as accelerated the impact of Western literary concepts on the Chinese, as Chinese scholars readily conceded.161 The Paradoxes of Japanese Scholarship on Chinese Drama In the late nineteenth century, Japan began to waver between wanting to cut all ties with Asia in order to become a modern state on par with those in the West and wanting to assume a hegemonic leadership position in East Asia. In light of the long and profound impact of “Chûgoku,” denoting the “Middle Kingdom,” on Japan, the relationship with China was of paramount importance in the Japanese quest for a modern national identity. One significant indicator of Japan’s growing assertiveness vis-à-vis its continental neighbor was the late nineteenth-century adoption of the phonetic and seemingly objective term “Shina” to refer to what previously had been most commonly referred to as “Chûgoku.” From the outset, Chinese objected to this designation. Some countered it with spurious, but symbolically charged etymological arguments, others would later storm

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into Japanese bookstores and tear the books that contained “Shina” in the title from the shelves. After World War II, the Japanese dropped the term in favor of the traditional “Chûgoku.”162 During the half century that “Shina” was in use, however, Japanese scholars redefined the contours of literary and historical studies of both Japan and China. The flagship institutions of the modern Japanese educational system, Tokyo and Kyoto Universities, competed and collaborated in the formation of new academic disciplines. In the 1890s, the nativist study of Japanese literature (kokugaku) was redefined as the study of national literature (kokubungaku), a process that involved refashioning the literary corpus in accordance with Western literary values of national character and historical evolution.163 Theater, for instance, had been peripheral to nativist learning, but the new field of national Japanese literature encompassed “drama” as an evolutionary and national form. In the 1890s and early 1900s, as a result of military victories over China and Russia, Japanese selfconfidence swelled, generating a sense of mission with regard to other nations in Asia. As a result, the study of Chinese classics (Kangaku), which had been put on the backburner in the first throes of modernization, experienced a revival, leading to the establishment of “sinology” (Shinagaku) as the “scientific” study of China.164 Meanwhile, the new field of “Oriental History” (Tôyô shi) provided an overarching intellectual and institutional framework in which the cultural differences, similarities and hierarchies between Japan, China, and the West could be reconstructed in Japan’s favor.165 As will become apparent, all of these disciplinary developments impinged upon the modern Japanese and, subsequently, Chinese reconceptualization of classical Chinese song-drama. Kano Naoki (1868–1947), the son of a family of Kangaku scholars, a specialist in evidential scholarship (kaozheng) and one of the founders of modern Japanese sinology,166 played an important intermediary role for the development of the study of Chinese song-drama. In 1900, Kano had been one of the first scholars sent to China by the Japanese Ministry of Education, quite possibly with a view toward training him to eventually head the newly founded department of Chinese studies (Shinagaku) at Kyoto University in 1906. After having made several trips to China in the 1900s, Kano called for the study of everyday cultural practices, subjects traditionally ignored by Kangaku. Conducted properly, such research would, according to Kano, offer the opportunity to extend the Japanese sphere of influence in China. Although Kano’s major publications centered on traditional literary

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criticism and a newly nationalistic and imperialist form of Confucianism, he nevertheless evinced an interest in ritual and everyday life, which in turn stimulated his curiosity about drama.167 After 1911, Kano became close friends with Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei when the latter two took up residence in Kyoto in a selfimposed exile. Despite Kano’s own training in classical philology, he seemed to regret the historical turn in Wang’s scholarship after Wang completed the pioneering History of Song and Yuan Drama in 1912. In the preface written for the Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays, Kano showed not only intimate familiarity with Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays, but also expressed some reservations about the vulgarity of the newly discovered plays. Nevertheless, in the end, he felt compelled to put Yuan plays on a par with Song lyrics, Tang poetry, and Han prose,168 without naming any genres for the Ming and Qing period. Thus, he was implicitly underscoring the increasingly common Japanese notion that China had produced little of literary or cultural value during the Ming and Qing dynasties. If Kano’s interest in drama was driven by philosophical, political, and institutional exigencies, his student Aoki Masaru was at least partly spurred on by a personal interest in theatrical forms. As alluded to in the beginning of this introductory chapter, after reading an excerpt from the play Xixiang ji around 1907 in Sasagawa’s literary history, Aoki was sufficiently entranced to pursue the study of Chinese literature at Kyoto University. A fan of Japanese-style puppet theater (jôruri) since childhood, Aoki counted an adaptation of the Xixiang ji for jôruri among his first translation endeavors at Kyoto University. Completing his undergraduate studies in Chinese literature in 1913 with a paper on Yuan drama, Aoki put the study of drama aside at the behest of his teacher Kano, focusing on the writing of general literary histories instead.169 Eventually, after several trips to China in the 1920s, he completed the first major narrative monograph on History of Chinese Drama of the Early Modern Period (Shina kinsei gikyoku shi, 1930) in any language. Besides examining major plays and playwrights principally from the Song period on, the book also treated performance-related aspects such as music, instruments, roles, singing styles, and stages in unprecedented detail. Aoki’s History embodies the complex paradoxes of Japanese perspectives on Chinese culture. In his conscious choice of “Shina,”170 Aoki clearly aligned himself with the new disciplinary regimens of colonialist scholarship. In using the term “early modern” (kinsei) as the framework for his periodization, he paid tribute to the ideas of Naitô

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Konan (1866–1934), one of the two founders of “Shinagaku” at Kyoto University. Naitô had pushed the incipient moment of China’s modernity back to the Song dynasty, partly with a view toward claiming Japan as the subsequent and sole legitimate inheritor of those Song-dynasty innovations in the face of internal Chinese stagnation and decline.171 Indeed, in the History itself, Aoki picked up on this theme of innovation and decline at two key moments in the history of Chinese drama. First, he identified the transition from Northern zaju drama to the nationwide dominance of zaju in the Yuan. Second, he pointed to the transition from the dominance of Southern kunqu drama to that of the largely Northern local operas in the Qing. Presenting the history of Chinese drama as an alternation between the competing essences embodied in northern and southern China, Aoki observed that the Mongol “entry and rule” (ruzhu) precipitated literary innovation in a stagnant older Chinese form, the form alternately known as farce (yuanben) or variety play (zaju). In amplifying the Mongol role in the emergence of Yuan zaju, Aoki not only highlighted the reputedly beneficial effects of alien invasion, but he foregrounded the ethnically alien element in his narrative of cultural progress.172 Conversely, in Aoki’s discussion of the rise of local opera during the Qing, he set up a historical analogy between the Warring States period and his own day, suggesting that another Han emperor was needed in order to stem the vulgarization of the theatrical repertoire brought on by Manchu rule.173 Inscribing ethnicity into civilizational hierarchies was of course all the more insidious given that some modern Japanese scholars not only portrayed the Japanese as belonging to the same ethnic group as the Mongols, but also because the Japanese government prepared to “enter and rule” China from the very same geographic region, that is, the northern forest lands of Manchuria, as had the Manchus three hundred years earlier. For all of Aoki’s indebtedness to a colonialist and covertly imperialist rhetoric, he made substantive, if not seminal, contributions to the rethinking of classical Chinese theater and drama. As Aoki explained in the preface to the History, interest in performance distinguished him from the antiquarian Wang Guowei, who mocked Aoki when the latter expressed a desire to frequent theaters in Beijing in 1925. Yet, although the History covers local opera in detail, Aoki’s interest in truly performer-centered arts such as Beijing opera was minimal. Instead, Aoki’s sympathies lay with a current theatrical form, that is kunqu, which also had an identifiable literary heritage. On seeing kunqu performed for the first time in Shanghai by what Aoki

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claimed to be the sole remaining kunqu opera troupe, he exclaimed that the yearnings of a lifetime had been fulfilled.174 Through his scholarly labors, Aoki may have hoped to reverse the decline of his favorite Chinese type of drama, kunqu-style opera, a possibility suggested by the changing fortunes of Japanese puppet theater (jôruri), with which Aoki had grown up. As noted earlier, Japanese scholarship had recreated jôruri as a respectable literary genre, reflected in its status as the sole representative kind of drama in the seminal History of Japanese Literature (1890).175 Such publications and further research led only to a minor revival of jôruri performances,176 yet, they created unprecedented literary prestige for a previously marginal form. If Aoki was hoping to play a role analogous to that of jôruri scholars in Japan or to Wang Guowei in China, his hopes were at least vindicated in the scholarly domain. For one thing, Aoki Masaru was quite likely the most frequently translated Japanese authority on classical Chinese literature in the Republican era.177 Some of his studies on literary thought and Chinese drama were issued as reference works for “national learning” ( guoxue).178 The History of Early Modern Chinese Drama was translated both in full and as an excerpt by at least two different publishers in the early 1930s.179 Furthermore, the authors of Republican-era Chinese histories on drama acknowledged that Aoki’s History set a precedent for their work,180 not unlike Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) acknowledgment of his debts to foreign literary histories in his A Historical Survey of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe, 1924).181 Interestingly, however, in the PRC, despite being reissued in the 1950s,182 Aoki’s History was not nearly as influential as his Prolegomena to Yuan zaju (Genjin zatsugeki josetsu, 1937). First translated by Sui Shusen during the Anti-Japanese War and then again in 1956,183 Aoki’s Prolegomena fed into the most extravagant Yuan drama canonization effort in modern times. As noted earlier, the supposed link of early plays with the “Mongols” had been an incidental aspect of their late Ming and post-Ming reception, but, as we have seen, the reputed connection between such plays and the “Tartars” had played a major role in European and Japanese constructions of China’s theatrical corpus. Beginning with Wang Guowei, Republican era critics had expanded on this theme. Now in the late 1950s, to an extent unprecedented in Chinese history, the “Mongol” dimension became the single most important factor in the reception of “Yuan drama.” Such an ethnic conceit in turn incorporated and modified the idea of tragedy as it had previously surfaced in European, Japanese, and

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modern Chinese writings on early song-drama. As we shall see, this post-1949 emphasis on “Mongol drama” owed much to transnationally constituted Republican-era writings, showing that, for all its ruptures, revisions, and elisions, Sino-Marxist rhetoric successfully appropriated certain categories of Chinese liberalism. Thus, paradoxically, Chinese “tradition” as well as Euro-Japanese “bourgeois values” continued to inform a socialist modernity whose avowed goals were to break away from “a feudal past” and “foreign imperialism.” The PRC Invention of “Mongol Tragedy” Western historians of modern China examined the ways in which historiographic discourse privileged the formation of nation and nationalism. Distinguishing between traditionalist, liberal, and Marxist orientations, they have often portrayed the liberal project as having failed.184 However, what the case of Yuan drama shows, is that it is not only difficult to neatly disentangle these strands of ideology, but there might be more continuity between liberal and Marxist constructions of the literary canon than is commonly understood. In particular, the Sino-Marxist reinscription of “Yuan drama” as an anti-imperialist, antifeudal, and tragic form of literary production represented a cooptation of liberal Republican-era discourse on drama. The denotation of one of the literary constructs discussed earlier, that is, tragedy, is a case in point. In 1913, Wang Guowei introduced the notion that some Yuan plays, including Injustice to Dou E, qualified as “tragedies” on account of their unhappy denouement. However, dictionaries of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s listed only foreign plays, most notably those written by Shakespeare, under the rubric of “tragedy” (beiju).185 In contrast, by the 1990s, the authoritative Hanyu da cidian (The great dictionary of the Chinese language, 1998) cited Injustice to Dou E, the story of the unjust execution of a young widow, as the sole example of “tragedy.”186 Significantly, the play’s author, Guan Hanqing, had in the course of the twentieth century not only been declared one of the great authors of world literature,187 but had been increasingly defined as an author of “tragedies.” Left-wing discussions of tragedy and of tragic authors began in the Republican period. In the 1920s and 1930s, as leftist writers embraced the notion that literature should expose social injustice and economic disparities, they searched for antecedents within the Chinese literary past. Wang Guowei had commended Yuan plays, most notably Guan Hanqing’s, for their “naturalness.” Later leftist critics transposed

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Wang’s traditionalist invocation of a natural style onto the modern category of “realism” (xieshi), which, given their bleak outlook on the past, often translated into tragic interpretations of comic plays. For instance, Zhu Xiang’s (1904–33) 1927 essay on Guan’s romantic comedy Rescuing a Coquette ( Jiu fengchen), the story of a savvy courtesan rescuing a befuddled friend from an abusive marriage to a patron, set an important precedent for interpretations of this sort. Rather than reading the play as a witty inversion of the stereotypical tale of the marriage-bound prostitute, Zhu Xiang understood the play as a “tragic” indictment of the prostitution system, a system that, as he adumbrated at the end of the essay, was still in existence.188 At the same time, general histories of literature popularized the notion of Yuan drama as a highly “realist” genre. Ignoring the rich corpus of lost plays about the socially powerful listed in the Register of Ghosts, such histories highlighted plays that exposed the injustices endured by the less privileged segments of society. In History of Chinese Literature (Zhongguo wenxue shi, 1932), for instance, Hu Yunyi amalgamated Wang Guowei with Zhu Xiang’s perspective, presenting Yuan drama as “realist” literature created by underemployed literati. Declaring Injustice to Dou E a “famous tragedy,” Hu also lauded Guan for his sympathetic portrayal and deep understanding of prostitute protagonists such as the two women portrayed in Rescuing a Coquette.189 Obvious projections of a contemporary social reform agenda onto the literary past began to dominate post-1949 interpretations of Yuan drama as well. After 1949, the state controlled the construction of the Chinese literary canon very carefully.190 Previously, individuals had generally written literary histories on their own initiative or at the behest of publishers. In the 1950s, Republican-era histories were revised191 or new collectively authored histories were issued,192 often with a view toward adoption into university curricula. Through such revisionist endeavors, a broad segment of educated people was exposed to the notion of Yuan drama as “tragic” literature.193 Revised and newly authored general histories of Chinese literature were not the only means to popularize such views. Similar to the ceremonial events designed to make a state-sponsored icon out of the modern writer Lu Xun194 and classical authors such as Qu Yuan (343?–290 B.C.E.),195 the authorities of the People’s Republic of China orchestrated a week-long commemorative, 700th anniversary celebration for Guan Hanqing from June 28 to July 5, 1958, despite the fact that Guan’s dates are uncertain at best.196 Special events and symposia were held, the findings of which were published in newspapers and essay

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collections. In addition to the revival of Guan’s plays on stage by seventeen theater companies in Beijing, a special exhibition was held at the Palace Museum. Fifteen hundred companies were said to have adapted his plays nationwide. Both national and local radio stations broadcast special programs about Guan Hanqing, and the Chinese postal service issued a commemorative Guan Hanqing stamp. Held in conjunction with preparations for the Great Leap Forward, the Guan Hanqing festivities involved major political figures such as Chen Yi (1901–72), Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), and Kang Sheng (1898–1975) as well as representatives from state-sponsored cultural organizations such as Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian, Mei Lanfang, Zheng Zhenduo, and Guo Moruo. Although the events were targeted primarily at Chinese audiences, they were initiated under the International Peace Federation headed by Guo Moruo. At least one performance involved a large number of foreign dignitaries. Combining the staging of ritualized events, the dissemination of broadly propagated and highly ideological essays, and the organization of more circumscribed, quasischolarly research, these nationwide festivities popularized, if not recreated “Yuan drama” for PRC audiences.197 Representing the official point of view, Guo Moruo delivered the keynote address for the celebration entitled “Learning From and Surpassing Guan Hanqing,” which was published in the official organ, The People’s Daily (Renmin ribao).198 Explicitly directed against American, English, and French imperialism while expressing support for the Soviet Union’s launching of the Sputnik, the address sounded every cliché that would circumscribe critical writings on Guan for decades to come. According to Guo, Guan was a democratically minded warrior who had turned the art of zaju into a weapon against feudalism during a time of war amongst the Mongols, Jurchen, and Han Chinese. Concerned about the plight of women, Guan created heroines whose ingenuity defied oppression. Although slighted by the likes of Zhu Quan, a Ming prince and reputed author of the influential critical work, Formulary of the Correct Sounds of Great Peace (Taihe zhengyin pu, ca. 1398), Guan was eternally loved by the people, who, with the founding of New China, were now in a position to properly honor their advocate. In his eulogy, Guo turned Guan into an exemplar of resistance against foreign enemies such as the Mongols and the Jurchen as well as an inspiration for the policies of collectivization and industrialization of the Great Leap Forward. However, for all the official anti-Western rhetoric, Guo’s address built on the internationalist Euro-Japanese and Chinese rhetoric of

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earlier eras. In an ironic reversal of European designations of the Mongol “Tartars” as barbaric others, Guo implicitly reserved the role of barbarism for the NATO powers. However, in the domain of literary examples, Guo could not escape the long reach of European “tragedy.” Guo compared Guan Hanqing to Shakespeare, the premier foreign playwright. In Guo’s view, not only was Guan a playwright in a class by himself like Shakespeare, but Guan preceded the latter by several hundred years. Yet, rather than creating a purely Chinese hero, Guo insisted on Guan’s international stature. Guo noted that “peaceloving people from the entire world” were gathered to commemorate Guan Hanqing’s contribution to “mankind,” with “Guan Hanqing belonging not simply to China, but to all of humanity.” To be sure, in keeping with his government’s agenda of socialist, Third Worldoriented alliance-building, Guo’s “world” might well have designated political entities other than Western Europe and the United States, the principal referents of the Republican-era discourse on the “world.”199 Nevertheless, amplifying Wang Guowei’s modest gesture of classifying a few Yuan plays as “world-class tragedies” and Hu Shi’s hesitant incorporation of Yuan plays into a “world literary history,” Guo Moruo deployed Guan Hanqing and his plays as a powerful force in a revolutionary “world history.” Interestingly, the basis for a more historically grounded criticism of early song-drama was also laid during the 1950s when traditionally trained scholars brought their philological acumen to bear on newly esteemed “popular” literature such as plays and novels. However, the cultural and political fruits of their textual labors would not become apparent until much later, when Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars started to focus on editions of plays rather than the plays themselves. In due course, attention to the contours of historical print culture would lead to the realization that Orphan of Zhao, Injustice to Dou E, and other individual plays were less important than the proliferations of anthologies and editions that had powered the seventeenthcentury publishing boom responsible for supplying the copies purchased by Chinese, European, and Japanese critics. Resituating these “Chinese plays” as part of a dynamic, urban, locally specific, and socially distinct culture200 undercut the usefulness of these dramas for European, Japanese, or Chinese nation-building purposes, but allowed them to contribute to the examination of a historically particularized literary field without voiding the possibility of broader comparative considerations.

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The Sociology of Editions In 1940, Ren Na published remarks that his teacher, Wu Mei, the man whose knowledge about drama Qian Jibo had favorably compared to that of Wang Guowei, had made about specific editions of dramatic texts. Among them, Wu Mei assessed the Xixiang ji in the following manner: “Printed editions of the Xixiang ji are more numerous [than those of any other play]. Formerly, I had Wang Jide’s and Ling Mengchu’s [1550–1644] editions in my collection . . . . When I collated them, I noticed that there were many mistakes, which might have been the doing of greedy booksellers. . . . Wang Jide had already noted the rarity of genuine old editions.” 201 If such an edition-centered approach had once represented the mainstream of Chinese scholarly appreciation of drama, such knowledge did not make a comeback until the late twentieth century, albeit with a postmodern twist. Rather than enforcing unquestioned aesthetic standards, the new approaches would pay homage to the notion that, in Jerome McGann’s words, “[v]arious readers and audiences are hidden in our texts, and the traces of their multiple presence are scripted at the most material levels.”202 Although Wang Guowei’s History did much to reduce zaju to “tragedies,” Wang was also involved with the discovery of a major alternative text to Zang Maoxun’s near-canonical One Hundred Yuan Plays. As noted earlier, in 1915, Kano Naoki and Luo Zhenyu, Wang’s patron, published the earliest Yuan-printed zaju, the so-called Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays. In 1938, the single largest collection of manuscript and printed Yuan and Ming zaju from the Yuan and Ming, Zhao Qimei’s (1563–1624) collection, alternatively known as zaju Plays Old and New from the Yeshi Garden (Yeshiyuan gujin zaju) and zaju Plays Old and New from the Mowang Hall (Mowangguan gujin zaju), was issued in China by Zheng Zhenduo. Based on these and other newly republished editions, Chinese scholars, most notably Sun Kaidi (1902–) and Zheng Qian (1906–), created what Yuan drama had not had before, a textual history. In doing so, they enabled subsequent generations of Chinese, Japanese, European, and American scholars to analyze the various cultural myths that had accrued around early Chinese song-drama over the centuries. In 1953, a few years before Guan Hanqing was anointed as the revolutionary writer par excellence, Sun Kaidi, who had done extensive research on Chinese fiction and drama in Chinese and Japanese libraries, published his monograph on Zhao Qimei’s collection. Zhao’s collection contained Yuan zaju selections from two late Ming

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commercial editions as well as Yuan zaju manuscripts handcopied from texts kept in the Ming palace archives. Thanks to his detailed comparisons between court and commercial editions, Sun Kaidi showed that all extant late Ming “Yuan zaju” had undergone revisions at the hands of the members of the court’s entertainment bureaus.203 In the early 1960s, Zheng Qian, a Taiwan scholar, prepared the first critical edition of the Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays. Moreover, he pointed out that far from being an “authentic Yuan text,” Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays differed most substantially from the Thirty YuanPrinted Plays as well as from all the other late Ming editions except for the one that was modeled on Zang’s edition, Meng Chengshun’s Joint Selection of Famous Plays Old and New (Gujin mingju hexuan, 1633). Zheng’s meticulous analysis of the prototypical modern Yuan zaju, Guan Hanqing’s Injustice to Dou E, created a precedent for the critical dissection of other zaju plays.204 The scholarly shift from plays to editions also characterized Japanese scholarship. In some instances, such a focus was primarily bibliographic, but by implication it began to call into question the verities of previous generations of literati and scholars. In 1979, the Japanese scholar Denda Akira published a descriptive catalogue of late Ming editions of the Xixiang ji based on originals held in Japanese libraries and on bibliographic references. The list of sixty different editions of the play published between 1498 and 1644 showed that this play was by far not only the most popular “Yuan” play, but also the most widely reprinted play of the late Ming period.205 Not only did other Japanese scholars analyze different versions of Yuan plays, but Tanaka Issei pushed Sun and Zheng’s incipient correlations of particular editions and social strata even farther, arguing that specific Ming-dynasty theatrical texts and their performance distinguished and stratified specific social groups.206 Although Tanaka’s Marxist framework might have led him to disregard sources that did not match his relatively rigid matrix of texts and social class,207 his work not only represented the new orientation of post–World War II scholarship in Japan, but also brought Chinese drama to the attention of social and cultural historians in the West. Throughout most of the twentieth century, unlike their religious, mercantile and academic forbears, European and American sinologists had evinced little interest in the study of classical Chinese drama. To be sure, Chinese plays elicited unprecedented attention from European and American playwrights and producers. From around 1908, French productions of plays such as The Miser (Kangian nu) and the Autumn in the

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Han Palace started to be staged in Paris, some of which were later diffused over radio broadcast.208 More or less loose adaptations of Autumn in the Han Palace, Orphan of Zhao, and The Chalk Circle began to be produced on Broadway from 1912 onward.209 Most famously perhaps, inspired by Beijing opera legend Mei Lanfang and by Yuan plays, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) developed his own influential critical and creative oeuvre.210 However, most sinologists made their reputations in other ways, deeming classical drama either insufficiently literary or overly didactic.211 Eventually, however, the combined examples of Chinese, Japanese, and earlier European examinations of drama editions resurrected the study of early Chinese song-drama first from a philological,212 then from a socio-literary point of view. Among practitioners of the latter, Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema are jointly responsible for raising new questions about early song-drama editions: how do we think about authors in non-canonical textual environments? What is a play when you have sixty substantially different editions of it? And, to a lesser extent, who were the readers and what did they stand to gain from reading these various texts?213 Building on these studies, the current book not only considers the play texts of such editions, but also begins to address what Gérard Genette terms the “paratexts” contained therein.214 Late Ming and post-Ming editions of song-drama contained much more than merely the text of a play. They contained supplementary materials, prefaces, editorial guidelines, appendices, glossaries, rhyme tables, illustrations, and commentary in the upper margins, at the end of acts and between the lines. In short, they constitute what Christopher Connery defines as a “text–system.”215 In varying degrees, Chinese editions of plays selfconsciously constructed themselves as literary artifacts. In light of the analysis of the authorial games of such texts, early Chinese song-drama emerges as a retrospective creation, a perspective that culminates in the demise of Yuan dramatists such as Guan Hanqing as “popular” and “unitary” authors and the resurrection of Zang Maoxun, Jin Shengtan, and others as “reader–writers.” Moreover, given the seventeenth-century codification of romantic storylines in general and of the Xixiang ji in particular, such an editionbased view of early Chinese song-drama makes it clear that “desire” rather than “tragedy” lay at the core of the late and post-Ming reproduction of “Yuan drama.” Such an edition-based inventory of extant plays lends scholarly force to an insight enunciated by the celebrated writer Qian Zhongshu (1910–99), who in 1935 pointedly critiqued Wang Guowei’s obsession with tragedy, offering an alternate

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characterization of the Chinese dramatic corpus: “Apart from comedies and farces, the rank and file of our serious drama belongs to what is properly called the romantic drama.”216 The chapters that follow will show that no matter how varied and fascinating the reproductions of Yuan zaju may have been in the centuries following the death of Zhong Sicheng, Zang Maoxun, Jin Shengtan, and others, it was these Yuan, Ming, and post-Ming figures who fashioned early Chinese song-drama and art song into an alluring set of texts and therefore deserve our attention. Rather than treating early Chinese song-dramas as alternately free floating or fixed entities arbitrarily attached to the dynasty of their presumed origin, it is necessary to study so-called “Yuan plays” as well as early art songs in the context of authorial, editorial, critical, and publishing practices from the moment when they first began to be textualized around 1300. An analysis of attestatory and reproductive authorial approaches will prove especially fruitful. Such an endeavor will show how Yuan, Ming and post-Ming “reader–writers” successfully created a canon of plays, which not only broadened the literary field in China, but also helped to underwrite the beginnings of world literature.

Chapter 1 Art Song Anthologies, Editorial Attributions, and the Cult of Affect: Guan Hanqing (ca. 1220– ca. 1300) and the Transformation of Attestatory Authorship

Introduction In the first Chinese history of Chinese literature, History of Chinese Humanities (Zhongguo wenxue shi, 1904), Lin Chuanjia (1877–1921) faulted not only Yuan-dynasty literature for its alleged vulgarity, but also took the well-known Japanese proponent of Chinese fiction and drama, Sasagawa Rinpu (1870–1949), to task for mistaking “low-class customs” for “high-brow literature”: The literary forms of the Yuan deteriorated steadily. They could not match the splendor of the Tang and the Song. . . . [In the Yuan,] they latched onto Yuan Zhen’s prose tale “Encountering a Transcendent” [alternately known as “Story of Yingying”] and turned it into the obscene lyrics [of the Xixiang ji]. In his History of Chinese Literature, the Japanese [author] Sasagawa recorded all the obscene books that were previously burnt in China. He did not know that zaju plays and yuanben farces could not be compared to the prose of old. At best, they should be listed among customs (fengsu). . . . The fact that Sasagawa included plays and novels, including [those by] Tang Xianzu of the Ming and [by] Jin Shengtan of the Qing, shows that he had the adulterated understanding [characteristic] of the lower echelons of Chinese society.1

Written at the behest of the newly founded Qing Ministry of Education, Lin’s vitriolic defense of a traditionalist educational curriculum of Chinese writing was issued the year before the civil service examinations were officially terminated.2 Lin seemed to suggest

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that the deterioration of Chinese literature was historically brought about by the Yuan dynasty and scandalously reinforced by the misguided narrative of a Japanese outsider. However, for all their disagreements over content, generic hierarchies, and the role of the Yuan dynasty in the evolution of Chinese literature, neither Lin Chuanjia nor Sasagawa Rinpu cared to remark on early sanqu art song, which played a significant role in the vernacularization of the literary canon that was as abhorrent to Lin as it was dear to Sasagawa. Even if modern scholars have been slow to acknowledge it, virtually all Yuan and a large number of Ming critical writings as well as many Ming collectanea simultaneously encompass art song and song-drama. Partly such a dual emphasis resulted from the shared characteristics of art song and zaju song-drama. Both forms drew on a lively vernacular, even if the plays were more colloquial than the songs. Typically, the same writers wrote both plays and songs, even if some men were known exclusively for their art songs. Both forms derived from the same musical tradition, even if they shared few individual melodies between them. Both genres favored certain dramatic modes of presentation, including direct speech, dialogue, and impersonation. They also exhibited similar rhetorical conceits such as numerical word play, prosodic tour-de-force, and self-referential punning on song tunes and dramatic characters. However, despite literati attempts to liken art song, and to a lesser degree, song-drama to the earlier lyrical tradition, initially neither art song nor song-drama conformed to the socioliterary conventions characteristic of earlier poetry. This is particularly true with regard to the question of authorship, which may not be surprising given that the trajectory of the author and the relative esteem for vernacular genres are closely correlated.3 Accordingly, this chapter will examine the principal sources of the early ariatic tradition of both art song and song-drama—rhyme books, bio-bibliographic treatises, collectanea, and anthologies—for what they can tell us about the modulations of what I call “attestatory” authorship and its impact on the formation of the vernacular canon. Attestation made exemplary social performance a touchstone for the moral viability of literary expression and vice versa. Typically, its expressive code demanded first and foremost that writings demonstrate both public utility and personal reticence. This chapter will illuminate how the retrospective authorial career of the now best-known Yuan writer, Guan Hanqing, broadened the parameters of attestation. Yuan literati critics of varying social stature, members of the Ming imperial family, the broader Ming court establishment, and late Ming literati

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editors all played a crucial role in fashioning the socially obscure Guan Hanqing into an “author.” Through misattributions of art songs such as “On Not Succumbing to Old Age” and of song-dramas such as the Xixiang ji, they retroactively reconceived the thematically versatile Guan Hanqing as a “romantic literatus.” As a result of their collective efforts, publicly acknowledged authorship in a vernacular, noncanonical genre, extensive expression of sentiment and sensuality, and the affirmation of elite male social status could be reconciled under a single authorial name. The cumulative impact of the transformation of what has been termed the “author-function” allowed restless late Ming elites in search of cultural alternatives to bureaucratic ossification and unbridled commercialism to rethink their own literary practice. Authorial figurations surrounding early song-drama set a precedent for the creation of new plays such as the well-studied Peony Pavilion (Mudanting, 1598, printed ca. 1618). They also inspired countless new textual adaptations of early song-drama, most notably the Xixiang ji. If some segments of the Chinese elite such as Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) and Jin Shengtan (1608–61) deemed such new authorial endeavors viable, other literati such as Lin Chuanjia would construe them as flagrant violations of conventional literary principles. However, insofar as such changes of authorial practice appeared to be associated with Yuan-dynasty texts and figures, it is incumbent upon us to investigate the critical and editorial matrix of early art song and song-drama. Hence, much to the chagrin of Lin Chuanjia and his ilk, in the course of the Ming dynasty, the strictures of attestatory authorship were considerably loosened.

The Prestige of Prosody In one of the prefaces to Zhou Deqing’s (1277–1365) influential Rhymes of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan yinyun, 1324), Luo Zongxin (fl. 1324), a close friend of Zhou’s, compared the relative difficulty of various poetic genres. In his comments, Luo sought to establish the relative superiority of the newest and least esteemed among these genres, the art song of his own dynasty: Verily, the world commends the shi poetry of the Tang dynasty, the ci lyrics of the Song dynasty, and the yuefu art songs of the Great Yuan dynasty. As for meeting prosodic requirements, those who study Song-dynasty lyrics need only observe the proper number of words,

48 / theaters of desire whereas the study of contemporary lyrics is considerably more involved. Whenever Confucian scholars make light of the latter, I humbly counter that those who have only desultory endowments are not capable [of writing such difficult songs]. Therefore, one ought not to dismiss [this endeavor]. Only broadly learned Confucian scholars and fine literary talents would be able to bring out the marvelous subtlety involved.4

Zhou Deqing’s Rhymes was one among a series of new rhyme manuals that appeared in the first half of the fourteenth century. In contrast to earlier works such as Dissected Rhymes (Qieyun, 601) and Expanded Rhymes (Guangyun, 1011), most of these new texts were aimed not at civil service examination candidates, but at aspiring songwriters.5 Compared to the pre-Yuan manuals, Zhou’s Rhymes represented a considerable simplification of rhyme schemes. Reducing the two hundred-odd rhyme categories of the Expanded Rhymes to nineteen, Zhou’s Rhymes sought to bring rhymes in line with a contemporary Northern standard vernacular.6 Though weighted toward the composition of art song, Zhou’s Rhymes, nevertheless, touched upon song-drama, presenting a number of arias from plays to illustrate some of the finer points of song composition.7 The afterlife of Zhou’s Rhymes in the Ming dynasty makes it clear that the canonization of early song-drama as a literati genre cannot be divorced from at least one of the generic advantages that song-drama offered over fiction: together with art song, early song-drama could be construed as a rhymed genre. Many fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century figures who took an interest in art song and drama drew attention to the necessity and challenges of prosody. Zhu Quan (1378–1448), the Ming prince, indicated patterns of tonal distribution for all the sample songs and arias he included in his influential Formulary of Correct Sounds of Great Peace (Taihe zhengyin pu, ca. 1398).8 Kang Hai (1475–1541), one of the first literati of his generation to pursue the study of early song and drama, noted that he had excised all supplementary materials from his edited version of Zhu Quan’s Formulary except for Zhou Deqing’s instructions on how to write songs. He retained them in order to improve adherence to prosodic foundations.9 Similarly, in his wellknown miscellany, Seven Domains of Learning (Qixiu leigao, ca. 1566), Lang Ying (1487–ca. 1566) reproduced the lists of the names and alternate melodies from Zhou’s work in order to aid aspiring composers such as himself to learn how to distinguish between them.10

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By the mid-sixteenth century, as literati interest in early art song and drama began to grow, prosody emerged as a crucial feature of this new domain of erudition. As Li Kaixian (1502–68), the first known literatus to publish Yuan songs and plays, remarked: The rules for writing songs [ci] are embodied in The Rhymes of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan [yin]yun). The writers are listed in The Register of Ghosts (Lugui bu). A brief survey is contained in the Formulary of the Correct Sounds of Great Peace ([Taihe] zhengyin pu). The various collections [i.e. rhyme manuals] of Wutou, Qionglin, and Yanshan as well as the song anthologies of Supplementary Brocades of Heavenly Movements (Tianji yujin), Sunny Springs, White Snow (Yangchun baixue), Songs of Great Peace (Taiping yuefu), Assembled Jades (Yuefu qunyu), and Assembled Pearls ([Yuefu] qunzhu) all share a set of rhymes and contain superior selections.11

As if to illustrate that the composition of arias was nothing but a skillful application of rhyme schemes, Li preceded the publication of one hundred short art songs of his own with a table of Zhou Deqing’s nineteen rhyme categories.12 Both Lang Ying and Li Kaixian’s excerpts from Rhymes were partly motivated by what they perceived as a deplorable lack of access to Zhou’s important work. By the late sixteenth century, Yang Yichao (fl. 1588) felt it necessary to broaden the circulation of Rhymes. From Yang’s prefatory remarks to his printed reissue of Rhymes, it becomes clear that Zhou Deqing’s upward biographical mobility reflected the growing prestige of songrelated prosodic knowledge. In a local gazetteer of 1515, Zhou had been ranked as a mere “practitioner” (fangshi), a social classification that incensed Yang who thought that Zhou’s association with leading Yuan-dynasty scholar-officials such as Yu Ji (1272–1348) and Ouyang Xuan (1274–1358) demanded a different social grouping. Such a call would eventually be heeded by an early Qing gazetteer, which placed Zhou in the literati category (wenyuan) instead.13 By the early seventeenth century, attention to the prosodic practices of the early song tradition intensified, partly because of the relative laxity of prosodic rules in the emergent southern forms of art song and song-drama. In one of the first major literati art song collections, The Annals of Palace-Style Northern and Southern Lyrics (Nanbei gongci ji, 1604), the editor Chen Suowen (fl. 1604) lauded Zhou’s prosodic precision in contrast to the deleterious approximations of contemporary authors. He observed that his anthology excluded otherwise fine songs if they violated prosodic patterns. In the words of Chen, “If one could be

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desultory [with regard to rhymes], then everybody could write [songs].”14 In the famous miscellany, Unofficial Compilations of the Wanli Era (Wanli yehuobian, 1606 and 1619), Shen Defu (1578–1642), the astute observer and gossip, praised the rhyming practices of early songwriters. Referring to a specific Xixiang ji-related example drawn from Zhou’s Rhymes, Shen noted certain forms of internal rhyme where three out of six characters in a line rhyme were not nearly as difficult as certain other kinds, but that such prosodic feats were commonplace for all Yuan writers. Shen adduced several examples from art song as well as from three romantic zaju comedies besides the Xixiang ji to buttress his observation about the prosodic accomplishments of the previous dynasty.15 In One Hundred Yuan Plays (Yuanren baizhong qu, 1615/16), Zang Maoxun exploited the legitimizing potential of prosody to the fullest. He included excerpts from Zhou’s Rhymes. More importantly, relying on the precedent of rhymed segments in Tang and Song civil service examinations, Zang made the spurious, but not entirely implausible, claim that Yuan writers had written song-drama as part of the Yuan imperial examinations. Not only was Zang’s fiction widely cited, but subsequent drama enthusiasts took it literally. In the appendix to his revised version of the Xixiang ji, Shen Pansui (fl. 1639) includes three figures from the Yuan dynasty under the heading “The Names of Former Worthies [who pursued] the Study of Songs,” namely Zhou Deqing, Guan Hanqing, and Wang Shifu. In Shen’s list, Guan and Wang were the only Yuan writers declared to be palace graduates.16 Shen Pangsui’s list is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, it points to the rising stature of Zhou Deqing and the prosodic enterprise with which his name was inextricably linked. Second, if Zhou’s name had originally been principally invoked in the context of the composition of art song, that began to change in the seventeenth century, when literati like Shen Defu, Zang Maoxun, and Shen Pangsui appealed to him in order to highlight the prosodic nature of early song-drama. Third, the various classifications of what scant biographical knowledge existed about Zhou Deqing testify to one of the productive, if not generative, quandaries of the early song tradition: these writers had identifiable authorial names, but were not firmly anchored in a known social entity. So intense was the need to create a collectivity that Shen Pangsui claimed that two Yuan playwrights were top graduates despite the fact that the dynastic history of the

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period, History of the Yuan (Yuanshi), the standard repository for biographical information about such distinguished figures, was utterly silent about them. Perhaps no single Yuan authorial name highlights the fertile nature of the interpretive dilemma more poignantly than one of two men Shen Pangsui falsely declared to be a jinshi, that is, Guan Hanqing. The Importance of Having a Biography Sometime around the year 1620, Wang Jide (d. 1623), the most knowledgeable among late Ming drama critics, remarked with a certain degree of astonished perplexity: “The various worthies of the previous [Yuan] dynasty all flourished for a time. Wang [Shifu], Guan [Hanqing], Ma [Zhiyuan], and Bai [Pu] all were [active] in Dadu [i.e., Beijing]. Yet if one makes inquiries in their native place nowadays, one cannot come up with a single thing to say about them.”17 Wang Jide went to considerable length to track down details about the lives of these playwrights. He traveled from his native place of Shaoxing in the south to Beijing to conduct fieldwork on Yuan zaju several times over a number of decades. Ultimately, given that he had turned up very little in the course of his research, Wang found himself confronted with the quandary of being unable to satisfactorily define either the individuals or the collective, thus running up against the limits of an attestatory model of authorship. Few Yuan and Ming critics admitted their ignorance about Yuan writers as candidly as did Wang Jide. Yuan and early Ming critics were cognizant of the fact that the bulk of early art songs and especially song-drama was neither completely anonymous nor the creation of eminent scholar-officials. They attempted to rhetorically defy the social obscurity of these Yuan writers in order to overcome the corresponding interpretive indeterminacy of their works. Rather than poring vainly over official histories, local gazetteers, genealogies, or eulogies in the manner of Wang Jide, Yuan literati and early Ming court critics resorted to different rhetorical strategies to embed the vexingly elusive songwriters and playwrights in inventive socio-literary categories. Such biographical tropes for collective as well as individual identities were designed to fashion the works of these men into “readable” authorial entities.18 The earliest extant Yuan art song collection, Sunny Spring, White Snow (Yangchun baixue, before 1324) relied on the format of the collective anthology to textualize the new form of art song.19 The editor, a then well-known songwriter, Yang Zhaoying (fl. 1320–51),

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arranged the songs by musical modes and tune patterns, offering exemplars for recitation and composition.20 Songs using the same tune by the same author were clustered together, allowing for a sampling of a given writer’s work. In his preface, Guan Yunshi (1286–1324), one of handful of eminent scholar-officials who also pursued songwriting,21 elaborated on a conspicuous attribute of a traditional authorial persona, that is, an identifiable poetic style, in order to assess the artistic merits of art song. However, rather than discussing writers individually, he grouped them in pairs. For instance, Guan Yuanshi noted that “Guan Hanqing’s and Geng Tianxi’s (ca. 1220–ca. 1300) word choice was bewitching.”22 In his preface to Rhymes, Zhou Deqing comparably grouped Guan with three other writers. Despite the Rhymes’ general emphasis on art song, this particular grouping appears to highlight the literary accomplishment of the song-dramas attributed to those men rather than their skill in art song alone. In fact, this foursome would eventually become synonymous with the best in Yuan plays, even if, as Wang Jide’s comments above demonstrate, Wang Shifu would at times supplant Zheng Guangzu. As Zhou put it:23 No other [era] has rivaled the current age in terms of the popularity, the completeness, and the difficulty of songs (yuefu). As for their popularity, the ones who sing and chant them are numerous, ranging from those wearing official robes to those living in the wards. Therefore, songs can be said to flourish. As for their completeness, since Guan [Hanqing], Zheng [Guangzu], Bai [Pu], and Ma [Zhiyuan] rejuvenated the compositions, the rhymes all sound natural. The diction includes the spoken language of the land, the phrasing is uncontrived and attractive, with the rhymes complementing the tune pattern!24

In a similarly collective fashion, Yang Weizhen (1296–1370), the son of a merchant, a 1327 jinshi and the leader of local poetry societies,25 judged the songs of Guan Hanqing, Geng Tianxi, Yang Zhaoying, and Lu Zhi (ca. 1242–ca. 1314) to have “novel and wellcrafted wording.”26 In grouping the socially less prominent figures of Guan, Geng, and Yang with the eminent scholar-official Lu Zhi,27 Yang emphasized literary talent rather than social background. However, for the anthologists and preface writers of Sunny Spring, White Snow and Rhymes, issues of biography were secondary to the stated goal of providing model songs for others to intone and emulate. Individual biography did not become a central concern in the representation of songwriters and playwrights alike until Zhong

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Sicheng (ca. 1277–after 1345) compiled his Register of Ghosts (1330).28 A native of the southern city of Hangzhou, Zhong had studied the Confucian classics as well as songwriting and drama.29 As noted in the introductory chapter, Zhong had repeatedly sat for and failed the civil service examinations. In the 1320s, prompted by the southward shift of the center of dramatic activities from the northern city of Beijing to his native Hangzhou,30 Zhong began the lifelong labor of compiling and revising the Register.31 Zhong’s Register was the first text to create individual profiles of songwriters and playwrights within a newly constituted literary collective, the eponymous “ghosts” of the title. Zhong’s socially encompassing category of “ghost” described all of the “ancients,” including Confucian worthies as well as recently deceased songwriters and playwrights. In constructing historical transmission as the process of turning already deceased ghosts into undying ghosts, Zhong was able to reconcile the typically mutually exclusive attributes of great literary talent and low social status. As he put it: “The status [of these ancients] was low, their official careers did not take off, but they were highly talented and broadly learned, and all deserve to be recorded.”32 Idiosyncratic in its arrangement, the Register subdivided the names of over 150 writers and close to 450 play titles into seven sections organized along three major axes: generic, chronological, and autobiographical.33 Throughout the work, Register emphasized talent as a way to redeem social obscurity. No term is repeated more often than cai (talent), with fame (ming) being a close second; in fact, the headings for songwriters and playwrights are “famous gentlemen and talented persons” (minggong cairen) or “talented persons” (cairen).34 Moreover, rather than deriving from the illustriousness of one’s family or one’s official position, fame (ming) was said to flow from realizing one’s literary talent (cai) in either songwriting or playwrighting.35 Such terminology shaped the perception of other Yuan critics. Echoing the Register and the Rhymes,36 Tao Zongyi (ca. 1316–ca. 1402), the author of an important miscellany, Record of Respites from Farming (Chuogeng lu, ca. 1366) declared Guan Hanqing “a romantic man of high talent” (gaocai fengliu ren).37 In order to make the achievements of individual talent tangible, Register systematically correlated play titles, song collections and individuals’ names for the first time in the history of Chinese performance-related genres. Major art song collections such as Sunny Spring, White Snow, or its successor anthology, Songs of Great Peace (Taiping yuefu, 1351), did not reliably identify the authors of all of

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their verse selections. In Rhymes, Zhou Deqing included arias from a handful of plays, including the Xixiang ji, as well as art songs to illustrate desirable metric patterns, prosodic effects, and word choice, but he did not indicate authors of the plays.38 More importantly, Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (Yuankan sanshizhong, ca. 1330) made no reference to the playwrights. By contrast, Zhong listed play titles under the name of authors. In doing so, he brought an unidentified body of vernacular works within the domain of the author-function hitherto reserved for more authoritative texts. In his short biographical comments, Zhong distinguished between personal acquaintances and famous strangers. Most interestingly, in keeping with the commemorative impetus evident in the overall arrangement, Zhong wrote short verse elegies for those predeceased writers whom he had known personally.39 In these biographical descriptions, Zhong very rarely relied on conventional bureaucratic military and civil service terminology to describe the process of writing.40 Instead, he focused on his friends’ temperament, talent, interests, as well as prosodic and musical knowledge.41 In terms of motivation, however, drawing on the conventional parlance of public service, he often alluded to the fact that these men could not, despite their considerable talents, “attain their political aspirations.”42 Through this arrangement, Zhong sought to legitimize his own and his cohort’s new literary endeavors rather than, as some Ming literati and numerous modern scholars have surmised, to critique Mongol governance. By embedding the composition of art song and song-drama within the rhetoric of frustrated ambition, Zhong mobilized the traditionalist framework of attestatory authorship, where higher social status tended to bestow greater literary authority. In deference to this scheme, Zhong listed “the famous men of a previous generation who have already died and whose art songs circulate in the world” and “the famous men of today,” in the first two sections of the text principally by their official titles. For the playwrights in the following section, Zhong instead gave their names, occasionally appending glosses indicating official positions in smaller characters. Heading this section, Guan Hanqing is “a functionary in the Grand Medical Dispensary,” an office whose existence cannot be independently corroborated.43 Aware of the potential “illegibility” of the literary endeavors of such humble figures, Zhong postulated not only the existence of the “new plays” of “undying ghosts,” but invented a group of kindred readers for their exquisite works: “The likes of us will for now savor the clams and talk about them to those who can discriminate among the flavors.”44

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Other Yuan critics developed the various tropes embedded in Zhong’s Register. Among them, Zhu Jing (fl. 1341–64), a friend of Zhong’s, a palace graduate, and the author of a handful of lost zaju song-dramas,45 pursued the theme of frustrated ambition. He declared that both Zhong’s Register as well as many of the men represented therein operated within the officially sanctioned context of involuntary reclusion. A highly malleable and nuanced discourse,46 reclusion had and would continue to authorize elite male lives outside of the norms of public service.47 In a laudatory verse on the Register, Zhu noted that Zhong’s Register represented “public fame and merit [written down] on paper,/ gratitude and resentment [articulated] in song,/ [the thoughts and attitudes of] fisherman and woodcutters expressed in spoken words.”48 In his preface to another important Yuan text, the collection of short biographies about Yuan actresses known as the Green Bower Collection (Qinglou ji, 1364), Zhu Jing made the analogy with reclusion even more explicit: When our resplendent Yuan first brought the world together, the loyalists of the Jin such as Du Sanren [Du Shanfu], Bai Langu [Bai Pu] and Guan Yizhai [Guan Hanqing], all did not deign to serve and be advanced. So they poked fun at the wind and dallied with the moonlight, enchanted by the sights. They transformed the vulgarity and baseness amidst which they found themselves only to be derided by careerists. Admittedly, the minds of these three gentlemen are hard to discern. Less than a hundred years ago, things were in disarray. Having lost their purpose and livelihood, scholars were frustrated in their ambition, and with the dangers inherent in wine and poetry, how could these men express their worries? Under a small porch they dwelt in privacy, given to dreams and meditation.49

Zhu’s short passage conflates several tropes of reclusion, namely the refusal to serve two dynasties, a life of wine and poetry, and the lure of the demimonde. Neither part of the “vulgar and base” world of urban life nor given to official opportunism, Zhu’s playwrights were presented as “default recluses.” Rather than offering a desirable way out of the dilemmas of political engagement, wine and poetry remain fraught with potential harm to one’s health and to one’s reputation, no matter how hard these men were said to have distanced themselves through lighthearted and playful humor.50 It was only with the reconfiguration of early song-drama at the Ming court that such sensual pleasures became an integral and valued aspect of the authorship of song and drama.

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After the fall of the Yuan in 1368, the Ming court adopted many practices from their dynastic predecessors, including a passion for the performing arts. Enforcement of measures to control performance of song-drama in the world at large went hand in hand with the pursuit of textual codification of songs and plays at court. Such imperial interest in peripheral song genres was not unprecedented. In fact, two courtrelated anthologies of earlier song forms, the New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong, 548) and Among the Flowers (Huajian ji, 940) had both transformed so-called “music bureau songs” and “song lyrics” from marginal folk genres into respectable vehicles of poetic expression. Interestingly, both those anthologies disregarded the thematic breadth of the earlier lyrical traditions in favor of love. In each case, male literati appropriated what had originally been a female voice for what Paul Rouzer has called the allegorical possibilities of the “seductions of public power.”51 In the drama-related endeavors of the Ming court, female and male voices would be enlisted for such male self-expression, albeit not necessarily with allegorical intent. The first court-related miscellany on Yuan-dynasty art song and song-drama, Zhu Quan’s Formulary of Correct Sounds of Great Peace, played a major role in the codification of early art song and songdrama.52 Like many members of the Ming imperial clan, Zhu Quan took a keen interest in drama. Politically outmaneuvered by his ruthless brother, the usurping emperor Zhu Di (r. 1403–24), Zhu devoted the latter half of his life to the pursuit of the arts of Daoist immortality and of the theater, authoring many plays, tracts, and critical works. Zhu’s Formulary synthesized Zhong’s Register as well as Zhou Deqing’s Rhymes and Yan’an Zhi’an’s short Treatise on Singing (Changlun, before 1324),53 combining the evaluative and bibliographic approach of the Register with the prosodic and anthologizing impulse of the Rhymes. However, rather than couching his redemptive project in the historiographic language of “undying ghosts” as Zhong Sicheng had done, Zhu created several other categories to describe the authors discussed. As we shall see, the designations in question, “assembled luminaries” (qunying), “old Confucians of the Yuan” (Yuan zhi laoru), and “men of good families” (liangjia zhi zi), adumbrated an aristocratic approach to dramatic production. Leisure, talent and, at a minimum, respectable commoner status rather than official rank or professional skill marked the accomplished writer of song and plays. Although some modern scholars have averred that Zhu valued songwriting more highly than playwrighting,54 the Formulary gave unprecedented attention to song-drama. For one thing, Zhu’s

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evaluative language not only is informed by Daoist tropes, but it also resonates strongly with theatrical practice at the Ming court. As modern scholars Wang Anqi, Wilt L. Idema, and others have shown, the various entertainment bureaus at the Ming court produced extremely extravagant productions, involving lavish props, huge casts, and special visual effects designed to create the illusion that the court was indeed a replica of Daoist paradises.55 Furthermore, judging from the remarkable overlap between excellence in the composition of art song and song-drama, Zhu took the latter into account when creating his rankings of individual writers. Zhu’s judgment of Guan Hanqing makes his generic priorities explicit. Comparing Guan Hanqing’s songs to those of “an intoxicated guest at a jasper banquet,” Zhu Quan also observed that “the merits of his diction are debatable, but because he originated zaju plays, we have ranked him upfront.”56 Finally, to a much greater extent than the Rhymes, the Formulary anthologized both art songs and dramatic arias. The social universe of authorship delineated by the Formulary was organized around two axes of social differentiation, one status-based, the other leisure-oriented. Both situated songs and plays above lowstatus acting and beyond frustrated literati ambition. The Formulary contrasted the literary pursuit of drama by men of good family against the performance by professional actors (paiyou, changfu), who belonged to a hereditary demeaned status group barred from taking the examinations. Rather than simply imposing this distinction in his own name, Zhu enlisted the otherwise uncorroborated quotations of two Yuan figures, Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), offspring of the imperial clan of the Song, eminent Hanlin academician, poet, painter, and calligrapher, and Guan Hanqing in defining drama as the province of “eminent Confucians and great scholars” (hongru shuoshi). Zhao Mengfu was credited with the observation that “actors would have nothing to go by for their performance if it were not for the works of the likes of us [elite playwrights],” whereas Guan was made to declare that actors “are mere slaves who provide laughs and effort in order to service the likes of us [elite playwrights]. As for acting of the men of good families, it is merely a romantic diversion.”57 The choice of these two men was, of course, far from accidental. Prefaces to Rhymes had established the musical and prosodic expertise of both Zhao Mengfu and Guan Hanqing.58 However, expertise per se was not the only issue at hand. In selecting Zhao Mengfu, best known for his painting, an art form in which the distinction between amateurs and professionals was already current,59 Zhu insinuated that drama,

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hitherto mostly an art of professionals, could be assimilated to the amateur ideal. Given that Zhu elsewhere described Guan Hanqing as the originator of zaju plays, Zhu’s choice of Guan as the spokesperson for a nonprofessional approach to drama was designed to redeem all subsequent dramatic production from the taint of professionalism. At the same time, just as drama was assimilated to the art of painting, Guan’s status was also elevated from Zhong’s “medical functionary.” In pairing Guan with Zhao Mengfu, a man at the pinnacle of Yuan society, Zhu assigned unprecedented social authority to Guan Hanqing. Interestingly, however, in his quest to legitimate drama as an elite activity, Zhu not only eschewed the professionalism of the entertainment quarters and of the court entertainment bureau. He also bypassed the sanctioned tropes of officialdom current in literati culture. In the Register, Zhong Sicheng had emphasized the official appointment of songwriters and playwrights, no matter how humble. By contrast, Zhu emulated Zhong’s division of songwriters and playwrights, but never mentioned their official ranks. In fact, in the bipartite division between the “187 men of the Yuan” and the “150 men below those,” Zhu relegated many of the writers whom Zhong had identified by their office, including Zhao Mengfu, to the second tier of songwriters.60 The twelve songwriters whom Zhu placed at the top of his list and for whom he coined critical epithets as well as evaluative comments were, by and large, without being identified as such, very minor clerks and lowly officials much like Guan Hanqing. Jia Zhongming (ca. 1343–after 1422), one of the courtiers patronized by Zhu Quan’s brother Zhu Di and the author of art songs, fourteen plays, and an expanded version of as well as most likely a continuation of Register,61 further elaborated on aria-related authorship, albeit with a new twist. Previously, Zhong Sicheng’s original Register inspired a host of authorial designations that emphasized the literary rather than the social aspects of authorial endeavors in contradistinction to frustrated officialdom (zuozhe,62 mingjia,63 ciren,64 wenren65). Zhu’s Formulary propagated the idea of sophisticated and literary creativity as a counterpoint to professional performance or pointless carousing among idle courtiers. Now Jia’s revised Register inscribed a romantic dimension within the tacitly fictionalized lives of spuriously successful playwrights-cum-officials. In the revised Register, Jia harked back to Zhong’s tropes of officialdom, but rather than presenting playwrights as official failures, he greatly inflated their social status. In his afterword, he repeatedly

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contrived to subsume the playwrights represented within the highest social class, the gentry (shi). Moreover, despite the Register’s evidence to the contrary, Jia asserted that these men had held a variety of high offices.66 Unlike Zhong Sicheng, who wrote elegies only for his deceased friends, Jia Zhongmin had no qualms about writing about people whom he did not know. In relying on tropes of the examination system and the military to describe the composition of arias, Jia revised the attestatory rhetoric of substitution espoused by Zhong Sicheng and his friend Zhu Jing. Rather than writing songs instead of taking the exams or serving in the military, in Jia’s imagery, songwriting was a form of civil or military competition. Thus, Jia transposed conventional competencies of elite male action onto an alternative social realm. Despite the metaphorical nature of such tropes, Jia’s description simulated an attestatory connection between the writers’ lives and the kind of plays they wrote.67 In the case of Guan Hanqing, Jia made expertise in the demimonde a central feature of Guan Hanqing’s authorial person. The elegy on Guan Hanqing reads in its entirety: His pearl-like phrases flowed forth naturally. His gold and jade-like expressions welled up freely. Endowed by heaven with delicate sensibilities, He was exceedingly familiar with romantic sentiments. His fragrant reputation circulated in the entire world. Driving away the leaders of the actors’ world, He was always first among the playwrights, Besting all zaju writers.68

As Wilt L. Idema has pointed out, Jia espoused a similarly romantic orientation in his own zaju plays, which most commonly portray passion and its sensual delights from the male point of view.69 In marked contrast to Zhu Jing’s defensive embrace of wine and verse among courtesans discussed above, Jia’s Jade Jar Spring (Yuhuchun), subsequently anthologized by both Zang Maoxun and Meng Chengshun, celebrated such a lifestyle. Read against the exaltation of a demimonde-oriented outlook in the revised Register, the play invited the reader to approve of its reversal of customary elite pursuits. As Lu Lin has observed, Jia Zhongming was among the first critics to explicitly claim that plays had the power to induce people to act morally,70 a critical stance that may have derived from Ming court edicts that distinguished between didactically acceptable and socially transgressive plays.71 However, Jia’s one moralistic comment to that

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effect may not nearly be as important as his ability to reconcile attestatory authorship with the expression of romance. If Zhu Quan’s primary concern had been to claim the writing of song-drama as an elite activity, Jia Zhongming was arguably the first elite writer to seamlessly reconcile art song, song-drama, elite authorship, and the representation of romance in his portrayals of authors and protagonists alike. Although modern scholarship has yet to fully concede this point,72 it is probably no accident that court-related figures such as Zhu Quan and Jia Zhongming subtly revolutionized dramatic authorship. They transformed the largely compensatory rhetoric of Yuan-dynasty literati critics into an alternative modality of generating a literary reputation. Rather than simply portraying “song, wine, and women” as an unsatisfactory substitute for the public and moral rewards of examination-related social and literary success, these court elites presented the pursuit of these pleasures as a viable form of life for the gifted few. Neither given to the tedium of official busywork, nor to the gratuitous revels of an untalented aristocracy nor to the demeaning work of professional acting, a court coterie with literary inclinations could make the most of their privileges. For these men, such a reevaluation may have in part derived from their own experience as participants in the banquets, festive occasions, and theatrical spectacles commonly held at the Ming court. After all, Zhu Quan noted in his preface that he compiled the Formulary “in his spare time apart from refined banquets.”73 Partly thanks to the limited, but still appreciable dissemination of critical works such as the Formulary and the revised Register in the late Ming,74 these conceptions of the authorship of drama and song would eventually be diffused beyond the Ming court. Significantly, the emergence of the art song “On Not Succumbing to Old Age” in the mid-Ming coincided with these early court-related endeavors to represent Guan Hanqing as a literary expert of the leisured life of the demimonde. Some modern critics have concluded that Jia Zhongmin modeled his elegy on Guan Hanqing on “On Not Succumbing.”75 More significant in my view is the fact that the protagonists of Jia Zhongming’s own plays more closely resemble the versatile habitué portrayed in “On Not Succumbing” than any Yuan-printed song or play. Therefore, it is much more likely that the song originated in the Ming court milieu. As I will show in the next section, contrary to late Ming and modern belief, “On Not Succumbing” was most likely not authored by Guan Hanqing. The complicated textual trajectory of the song in Ming anthologies will serve as an indicator of how thoroughly mid-to-late Ming literati

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reconfigured the nexus of authorship, vernacular writing, and romantic proclivities through their editorial practices. The Eroticization of Editorial Attributions The literary figuration of desire was a problematic dimension of authorial attestation. On the one hand, Confucian thought explicitly pitted the pursuit of sexual desire against the moderation of selfcultivation. Among other terms, the outer limits of eroticism were defined by se (form, color, sensual appeal) and yin (excess, lasciviousness, obscenity), both of which were discussed in the Analects. In a muchrepeated line, one of Confucius’s disciples advised that a man should “esteem inner worthiness and make light of sensual appeal (se).”76 On the other hand, the earliest poetic classics, The Book of Odes (Shijing) reputedly edited by the sagacious Confucius, and Encountering Sorrow (Lisao), the progenitor of the rhapsodic tradition authored by the loyal Qu Yuan, ensured that figurations of desire would be lodged at the heart of the poetic tradition. As Paul Rouzer has elegantly argued, in medieval Chinese literary texts, the expression of desire consistently speaks to the “seductions of public power, in which court ladies, fellow officials, and the ruler himself become obsessions and objects of seduction.”77 Such textual figurations of predominantly heterosexual male desire do not simply elaborate on desire as a political metaphor nor as a token of sexual exchange. Instead, desire informed the composition and anticipated effects of textual circulation. No matter how “private” a genre might appear to be, such texts were actually designed to be read by others in a social universe suspended between the competing desires for social success and significance (gongming) and for a perfect reader-cum-friend (zhiyin).78 However, even at the margins of licit expression, the relative social prominence of the authors involved guaranteed that a reading about “the seductions of public power” always remained a possibility. Such allegorical readings could be reinforced through the social arrangement of the principal tool of traditional Chinese canon formation, the anthology. As Pauline Yu has noted, the anthologizing practices of Tang poetry speak of the mutual imbrication of social prerogatives, ethical pedigree, and literary competence. Social roles provided the primary socio-ethical framework for contextualizing literary expression. Accordingly, anthologies were conventionally organized in accordance with social hierarchies. Bracketed by poems authored by imperial figures at the apex of social power in front and by those

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composed by marginal persons such as women, monks, and foreigners at the back, the bulk of anthologies were devoted to males with an identifiable place in the bureaucratic order who exemplified the sociomoral competencies necessary to qualify as someone who was worthy of “expressing their intent.”79 In due course, this attestatory model would hold sway even in the case of ci song lyrics, a poetic genre that had no immediate ties to the examination system. As one Southern Songdynasty song anthologist of ci lyrics put it: “The joy and sorrow in many love themes are thus used as allegories to convey the private lingering feelings of those noble gentlemen who could not express themselves in any better way.”80 To some degree, the first song anthologies Sunny Spring, White Snow (before 1324) and Songs of Great Peace (1351) sought to filiate themselves with the earlier poetic tradition.81 However, in some important regards, they violated the attestatory paradigm embodied in earlier poetic collections on at least three accounts. First, as discussed above, despite the involvement of a number of prominent scholarofficials such as Guan Yunshi and Lu Zhi, the vast majority of art songwriters were neither easily identifiable members of the bureaucracy nor did they belong to a distinctive social category marked by imperial kinship, gender, religion, or cultural affiliation. Thus, they eschewed the principal categories of previous authorial identity. Second, no matter what the socio-literary situation described in art songs, they frequently gave established tropes a romantic coloring. In Songs of Great Peace, for instance, even songs with seemingly conventional content often feature romantic relationships. Rather than celebrating separation from one’s bureaucratic peers, farewell songs are almost invariably musings on being parted from one’s lover. Instead of dwelling on one’s homosocial affiliations, songs on reclusion routinely contain allusions to romantic liaisons. Far from treating religious awakenings, songs on enlightenment almost invariably concern one’s desired withdrawal from the pitfalls of the demimonde. Third, in violation of attestatory self-moderation, art songs thrived on unprecedented hyperbole, theatricality, and fictionality in a rhetorical world modeled on, and intertextually attuned to, the new narratives of the stage. Though less colloquial than the arias of the song-dramas, art songs, especially the multi-stanza variety known as song-suites (taoshu), employed a lively mix of linguistic registers, ranging from contemporary vulgarisms to established poetic tropes. Similar modes of presentation— direct speech, dialogue, impersonation, allusion to stage characters, technical tour-de-force—characterize both art song and song-drama.

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More often than not, art songs employed such theatrical ingenuity in the service of exploring variations on romantic scenarios. Moreover, such songs seemed largely fictional fables staged for the benefit of other cognoscenti rather than truthful renditions of personal experience, a feature most evident in the frequent assumption of the rhetorical guises of well-known romantic heroes and heroines. The gap between highly dramatized narrators on the one hand and the relative social obscurity of art song authors provided the literary backdrop against which a romantically modified form of attestatory authorship could develop in the course of the Ming dynasty. Perhaps no song allows us to trace this transformation better than the song-suite alternately entitled “Guan Hanqing On Not Succumbing to Old Age” and “On Not Succumbing to Old Age.” In order to illustrate how this song could be construed in vastly different ways depending on the authorial paradigm involved, I will cite it in full. [Yizhihua] I pluck every single flower [i.e., courtesan] that sticks out of the wall. I break off every single willow [i.e., courtesan] that overlooks the road. Among the flowers that I plucked the red pistils were tender, Among the willows that I have broken off the green twigs were soft. This profligate is dashing. I trust my willow-snapping, flower-plucking hands all the way until flowers wither and willows are laid to waste— Then I quit. For half a lifetime I have broken off willows and plucked flowers, For a whole life I have slept among the flowers and lain among the willows. [Liangzhou] I am the leader of all the dandies under heaven and section head of all the profligates of this world. I wish my ruddy face would not change and always remain as before. Amidst the flowers I while away my time, Amidst wine I forget my anxieties. I know the art of tea ceremony and how to draw lots in gambling. I play the “Double-Six” and the “Hiding-Fists” games.82 I am conversant with the five sounds and the six pitches. What idle worry ever comes unto my heart! The one who accompanies me is the girl who plays the silver zheng in front of a silver mirror—tuning the silver zheng, she smiles as she leans against the silver screen. The one who accompanies me is a transcendent from the jade heaven interlocking her jade hands and putting her jade shoulder [against mine] as we ascend the jade loft together.

64 / theaters of desire The one who accompanies me is the guest with the golden hairpin singing the Golden Willow [Robe] tune holding up a golden goblet in both hands, filling the golden jar to the brim.83 You say I am old, For now desist! I hold the supreme title in the hall of love, I am quick and clever, and I am sophisticated and sharp. I am the Grand Marshall of the brocade troupes and the flower encampments. I have played all prefectures and traveled all circuits. [Gewei] The other playboys are just a bunch of newly kindled hares, who, crawling out of the sandy burrows in the grass-covered mound, suddenly run onto the hunting grounds. I am an old pheasant with dark green feathers who has been caged and snared, and is used to treading like a cavalry horse. I am a charming wax spear tip84 who has withstood hidden crossbows and cold arrows. I have not fallen behind anyone. It is said that “when a person reaches middle age, everything ceases.” But would I be willing to pass the seasons of my life in vain? [Coda] I am a single ringing and resounding bronze bean that can neither be steamed nor cooked nor crushed nor popped. As for you playboys—who made you worm your way into that brocade snare of ten thousand layers that can neither be hoed apart, nor hacked down, nor unfastened nor cast off? What I have enjoyed is the moon in the [opulent] Liang Garden, What I have drunk is the [superior] wine of the Eastern Capital, What I have appreciated are the flowers of Luoyang, [the Eastern Capital] What I have plucked are the willows of Zhangtai [in the Western Capital]. I can play chess and ball, hunt, do comic routines, sing and dance, play wind and string instruments, do a vocal performance, recite poems, and play the “Double-Six” game. Even if you make my teeth fall out, contort my mouth, render my legs lame, or break my hands, Even if Heaven besets me with awful ailments, I will never quit. Only if Lord Yama [of the Netherworld] himself calls me And the spirits and the demons personally come to get me will my three earth-souls return to the earthly realm and the seven cloudsouls be buried in the netherworld. By heavens! Then and only then will I not walk on the misty flower path anymore.85

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Compared to the songs found in Sunny Spring, White Snow and Songs of Great Peace, especially those attributed to Guan Hanqing, “On Not Succumbing” shows marked differences with regard to tune patterns, linguistic register, semantic fields, and point of view. First, Yuan art song was metrically pliable thanks to the use of so-called padding words, which allowed for the insertion of extra words within fixed metric patterns. However, despite this flexibility, art song was, nevertheless, governed by fairly restrictive prosodic rules. “On Not Succumbing” is not only atypical among similar Yuan melodies, but appears to deliberately exaggerate the flexibility of Yuan metrics. Second, Yuan art song incorporated a great range of vernacular terms, but from a linguistic point of view, “On Not Succumbing” rather colorlessly amalgamates classical imagery and pseudo-colloquial phrasing. Thus, contrary to the claims of modern critics,86 its language is not particularly representative of Yuan-printed song-suites. Third, in terms of semantics, it is worth noting that many of the terms used to designate suitors in “On Not Succumbing” do not appear in Yuan art song.87 Finally, compared to Guan Hanqing’s descriptive precision in his Yuan songs about the entertainment world, the environment evoked in this song-suite is curiously generic. Rather than playfully interrogating received notions of social stratification, the song reinstates conventional social hierarchies between suitors and courtesans. On the whole, in terms of metrical patterns, wording, and thematics, “On Not Succumbing” resonates more closely with mid- and late Ming sources.88 “On Not Succumbing” is said to have first appeared in the midMing collection Assembled Pearls (Yuefu qunzhu).89 Although the extant Assembled Pearls no longer contains the song, such a mid-Ming appearance suggests a possible reading of the song. Compared with other Yuan art songs on love and desire, the representation of desire found in “On Not Succumbing” may constitute a post-Yuan humorous spoof on the common trope of “sincere renunciation.” In Sunny Spring, White Snow and Songs of Great Peace, many songs feature a habitué of the demimonde, who, plied by too many disappointments, forswears further romantic attachments.90 However, regardless of whether we compare “On Not Succumbing” against Sunny Spring, White Snow, Songs of Great Peace or even Assembled Pearls, the humorously hyperbolic rhetoric of such songs militate against a seriously biographical, let alone confessionally autobiographical, interpretation. The first extant text of the song-suite entitled “Guan Hanqing On Not Succumbing”91 is found in Songs of Harmonious Resplendence (Yongxi yuefu, 1540), a twenty-chapter compendium edited by Guo

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Xun (1475–1542), a publisher of fiction with close ties with the Ming court.92 Harmonious Resplendence included Yuan and Ming art songs and excerpts from zaju plays, all arranged according to tune patterns. Much like other mid-sixteenth century fiction and song miscellanies, Harmonious Resplendence does not reveal an editorial program. In light of the collection’s inconsistent titling and attributive practices, it is impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether “On Not Succumbing” would have been understood as a song by Guan Hanqing about someone else, a song by Guan Hanqing about himself, or as a song about Guan Hanqing by someone else. However, given that there were a number of other parodically exaggerated art songs about Guan Hanqing in this and other contemporary art song collections, the last of these possibilities is, I would suggest, the most likely scenario. In Harmonious Resplendence, the piece immediately following “On Not Succumbing” contains the name of the author in the title. The song in question is Zhong Sicheng’s parodic song on his ugliness entitled “Chouzhai zishu (A Self-Description by Mr. Ugly Studio),” which had first appeared under Zhong Sicheng’s name in Songs of Great Peace.93 Inverting the word order of the title in the Yuan-printed text, the newly arranged title creates a syntactical parallel with “Hanqing bu fulao.” However, even if both of these songs indicate a self-referential dimension, it is advisable to read them as a form of literary one-upmanship rather than as autobiography.94 Furthermore, given that the title “On Not Succumbing” appeared in other songs and plays about historical figures,95 one of which was included in Harmonious Resplendence,96 “Guan Hanqing On Not Succumbing” could well have been understood as yet another caricature of an intrepid and foolish old man. Most importantly, in other Harmonious Resplendence songs about Guan Hanqing, the playful mockery directed against the protagonist clearly preempts an autobiographical reading. Specifically, in addition to “On Not Succumbing” and a number of other songs by Guan Hanqing,97 Harmonious Resplendence includes two sets of songs about the Xixiang ji, one laudatory, one satirical, both of which contain a song about Guan Hanqing. 98 Having first appeared in the 1498 Hongzhi edition of the Xixiang ji,99 the satirical song on Guan Hanqing reads: [Manting fan] Guan Hanqing—he is not of high [talent]! He understands neither nature nor principle,

guan hanqing and attestatory authorship / 67 But solely displays his poetic skills!100 Without rhyme and reason he praises and blames the boorish and the smart, And makes a show of his talent and learning. His heaven-deceiving lies are no little thing. The penalty of having his tongue ripped out He’ll not be spared after death! He’ll make people say that He built a bridge in thin air And that he wrote of himself in vain as if his brush were a sword.101

Despite the overtly moralistic tone of the song, the choice of genre makes it likely that the ostensible vitriole amounted to a tonguein-cheek spoof of fictional discourse among a group of like-minded cognoscenti. The fact that a similar set of songs exalting Guan Hanqing as well as the protagonists of the Xixiang ji immediately followed this series of mocking songs lends further credence to such an interpretation. Such mid-Ming songs playfully fashioned a hyperbolic figure predisposed to romantic exploits or to the fabrication of romantic fables. This newly defined persona would in turn shape the late Ming codification of Guan’s oeuvre in an increasingly attestatory fashion, which would invest humorous hyperbole with a serious sentimentality. An early seventeenth-century anthology of songs, the twelve-chapter Love Songs from a Polychrome Brush (Caibi qingci, 1624) published “On Not Succumbing” once again in its entirety. In Love Songs, the cluster of meanings surrounding qing (passion, feeling, desire, love) is associated with romantic love in the demimonde. As Dorothy Ko has pointed out, while courtesans always played an important integrative function in Chinese life of the elite, the visibility and respectability of courtesan culture peaked in the late Ming.102 Kang-i Sun Chang has also noted that in the late Ming great love was most often thought to transpire between scholar-officials, literati, and sophisticated courtesans.103 In light of this attempt in certain segments of the elite to refashion romantic love as a moral and aesthetic force,104 it is perhaps not surprising that Guan Hanqing’s putative “On Not Succumbing” should have been given renewed, and differently keyed, attention. In his preface to Love Songs, the editor, Zhang Xu (fl. 1624), noted that the collection was conceived in response to the recent printing of Rhymes from the Green Bowers (Qinglou yunyu, 1616),105 a collection of courtesan poetry.106 In a second preface, a certain Zhang Chong (fl. 1624) was intent on securing proper moral credentials for the collection. In a dialogic refutation of potential objections, Zhang Chong insisted on Love Songs’ merits as a work embodying literati qing. In exact emulation

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of the courtesan text, Love Songs gives a point-by-point explanation of its editorial guidelines, touching on everything from omissions to illustrations. Portraying the entertainment quarters from the clients’ perspective, the thematic headings include the following: dedications, sex, obstruction, farewell, separation, emotion, encounters, lovesickness, mockery, and mourning. Love Songs ascribed three songs to Guan Hanqing.107 Two of those songs appeared in the “Bedazzled by Love” (danlian) section, namely “On Not Succumbing” and a song-suite on festive moments in the demimonde, which Yuan and early Ming anthologies had previously attributed to Zeng Rui.108 Guan Hanqing was the only author represented twice in this category, underlining that he had become associated with amorous intoxication.109 Furthermore, this category has a larger proportion of Yuan songs than any of the other sections. In other words, in the eyes of certain late Ming literati, Yuan writers seemed to have been taken with love’s excesses, and among them, perhaps none more so than Guan Hanqing. Rendering the title as “On Not Succumbing to Old Age,” Love Songs lists Guan Hanqing as the author together with his dynasty. In keeping with the emphasis on the “literati” identity of the authors selected for the anthology, Love Songs changed the order and the types of activities the first-person narrator pursues. In Love Songs, the passage in question reads: “I can recite poems, I can write different zhuan calligraphic scripts, I can pluck the silk [strings of the qin], I can appreciate bamboo [used for flutes], I can also sing the ‘Partridge [Heaven Tune],’ I can dance the ‘Dropping Hand’ [Dance], I can hunt, I can play kick-ball, I can play chess and I can play the ‘DoubleSix’ game.”110 The description is designed to attest to the author’s refined socio-cultural background in a number of ways: in placing poetry first, in being more specific about the instruments involved, in naming a tune deriving from the earlier ci song lyric tradition, and in adding archaic forms of calligraphy to the repertoire. Such a literati profile is underscored by leaving out the “comic routines” mentioned in Harmonious Resplendence. Accordingly, Love Songs does not present “On Not Succumbing to Old Age” as a potential spoof of a protagonist, but as an attestatory tribute to the author’s romantic expertise in the demimonde. Such an attestatory interpretation would have been further corroborated by the representation of Guan’s art song in late Ming anthologies. By the late Ming, editorial attributions and misattributions narrowed Guan Hanqing’s oeuvre, focusing on the romantic aspects to

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the exclusion of other themes. Three love songs, namely the suites entitled “Feelings of Separation,”111 “Boudoir Lament,”112 and the “Twenty Turns”113 were repeatedly anthologized in Ming collections. At the same time, a number of spurious attributions expanded Guan Hanqing’s romantic oeuvre. Among the short songs, a song on a pretty maid “not inferior to Hongniang,” one of the main protagonists of the Xixiang ji story, was ascribed to Guan Hanqing instead of Zhou Deqing.114 Similarly, a song mocking a prostitute’s short fingernails was also appended to Guan’s works.115 In addition, Choice Melodies from the Forest of Lyrics (Cilin zhaiyan, 1525) made Guan Hanqing the author of what had previously been an anonymous romantic song.116 White Snow from the Forest of Lyrics (Cilin baixue, 1606) also newly attributed a southern boudoir song entitled “Autumn Feelings” to Guan Hanqing.117 A similar trend can be observed in the domain of song-drama. To be sure, late Ming selections of Guan Hanqing’s oeuvre also included courtroom dramas such as The Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan), The Butterfly Dream (Hudiemeng), and Lu Zhailang (Lu Zhailang). Yet, the bulk of the published plays attributed to him fell under the category of romantic comedies.118 Two of the three selected prostitute plays with courtesan leads, The Pond of the Golden Threads (Jinxian chi) and Rescuing a Coquette (Jiu fengchen), did not rely on any known classical or vernacular precedent.119 In keeping with the attestatory tendency to conflate author and work, these romantic comedies may have been read as suggestive evidence of the author’s familiarity with the demimonde. More pointedly still, Guan’s most widely anthologized plays featured besotted literati either in the main role The Jade Mirror Stand (Yujingtai) or as important secondary figures (The Pond of the Golden Threads and Xie Tianxiang). However, what may have consolidated Guan’s authorial persona more than all the plays the Register claimed he had written, was the misattribution of the premier romantic comedy, the much famed Xixiang ji, to him. The Register and the Formulary had held Wang Shifu responsible for the Xixiang ji. Yet, given that these critical works had somewhat limited circulation, other pressures came to bear on the formation of literary attributions to Guan Hanqing. Guan Hanqing and the Myth of the Xixiang ji In his Poetry Comments of Nanhao (Nanhao shihua, 1513), Du Mu (1459–1525) argued against what he termed the popular notion that Guan Hanqing had written the Xixiang ji: “In recent times the Xixiang ji has been foremost among Northern lyrics. It has been popularly

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transmitted that it was written by Guan Hanqing; some have assumed that since Guan Hanqing did not finish writing the text, Wang Shifu supplemented it. I read in the Register of Ghosts that it was Wang Shifu’s work, not Guan Hanqing’s.”120 Despite repeated appeals to the Register and the Formulary, Guan Hanqing’s name remained connected with the Xixiang ji throughout the Ming and the Qing dynasties. Given the Register’s evidence to the contrary, the tenacity of the attribution hints at a compromise of a popular attribution of the best play to the best zaju dramatist with incipient attestatory tendencies characteristic of the reception of Ming-authored literati drama among literary elites. By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the notion that Guan Hanqing had at least collaborated in the writing of the premier romantic zaju, the Xixiang ji, was becoming widespread.121 The midMing Assembled Pearls mentioned in the previous section attributed a boudoir song, a series of songs on reclusion, and a poetic retelling of the Xixiang ji story to Guan Hanqing.122 Although the reclusion songs and the love song had already appeared in the Songs of Great Peace,123 the Assembled Pearls may have been the first text to establish a link between Guan Hanqing and the Xixiang ji story cycle.124 Art songs contained in the first extant edition of the Xixiang ji itself, the 1498 Hongzhi edition, more directly credited Guan Hanqing with the composition of the play. Other art song and drama collections such as Harmonious Resplendence and Brocade Sachet of Romance (Fengyue jinnang, 1553) also reinforced such associations. Exalting the Xixiang ji as the quintessential scholar-and-beauty romance,125 Brocade Sachet of Romance contains both the arias of the Xixiang ji proper as well as songs about the play. Entitled “Mocking the Xixiang [ji]” (Dapo Xixiang) and subtitled “Yingying Makes Public the Wrongs Committed Against Her” (Yingying suyuan), one such song, written from Cui Yingying’s point of view, begins and ends with the following humorous spoof on Guan Hanqing’s motivation for writing the Xixiang ji: The Prime Minister Cui had a splendid reputation. When he was alive, he served at the Imperial Academy of Letters. When Guan Hanqing came to take the examinations, He was unlucky and his name did not appear on the golden boards. He blamed my father for not selecting him. Because [Guan’s] name was omitted from the board, He harbored resentment and thus fabricated and contrived these empty words, Pretending that Zhang Junrui came to stay at the Temple of Universal Salvation. ...

guan hanqing and attestatory authorship / 71 I curse you Guan Hanqing! What enmity was there between you and me? In a hundred ways you took me on. To whom do I tell such injustice? You put together that Xixiang ji, Which slanders the clergy and the Buddha, adding to the transgressions under Heaven. Your cleverness has earned you a place in Hell.126

However, even if the fantastic etiology of the play did not gain credibility as the true version of the events leading up to its creation, the parodic impulse, nevertheless, betrays something of the growing importance of attestatory interpretations, especially in the wake of the increasing participation of well-placed late Ming literati in the composition of Southern chuanqi plays. The reception of Qiu Jun’s (1421–95) morality play The Five Cardinal Relationships Perfected and Completed (Wulun quanbei) in the late Ming illustrates how chuanqi were often thought to be thinly veiled autobiographical tales, even if the play seemed to have no immediate bearing on the author’s life.127 A 1454 jinshi and highly successful official of the mid-Ming, Qiu Jun had an encyclopedic disposition. Among many other works on topics such as economic history and statecraft, he wrote a didactic play extolling the embodiment of the Confucian virtues in riveting, if not sensuous detail.128 However, most late Ming literati found the play awash in clichés and too hackneyed for words.129 Yet, even this scrupulously moral play did not escape a attestatory interpretation. Shen Defu noted that two interpretations of the play were in circulation, one treating the play as a settling of political scores, the other holding it up as a pious expiation for a youthful act of sexual indiscretion.130 If even a self-consciously didactic play such as Five Cardinal Relationships could not escape such innuendo, it comes perhaps as no surprise that the works of literati embroiled in factional politics were interpreted as little more than ad hominem retaliation. Deeply disappointed with the realities of official political and literary culture, a small number of literati, including the earliest Northern zaju enthusiasts, Wang Jiusi (1468–1551) and Kang Hai, reworked drama to create auto-historiographical tales of what was and of what should have been.131 Such plays were characterized by a projection of the self into a historical guise, a technique literati might have adopted from earlier court-related zaju.132 Even if such plays might not have been veiled attacks on real-life enemies, more often

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than not they came to be understood that way. Wang Jiusi’s zaju play about the poet Du Fu (712–70) was interpreted as an underhanded indictment of Li Dongyang (1447–1516), a supposition that blocked Wang’s attempts to be reinstated at court.133 Kang Hai’s play about an ungrateful wolf was widely believed to be a broadside directed against one of his former colleagues, Li Mengyang (1473–1529).134 Similarly, the doyen of sixteenth-century literature, Wang Shizhen (1526–90), and his disciples were thought to have documented the rise and fall of an enemy faction through Story of the Crying Phoenixes (Mingfeng ji).135 So prevalent was this literary and critical practice that, a century later, the playwright and critic Li Yu (1610–80) felt compelled to take his fellow playwrights to task, advising them not to settle historical scores by ways of dramatic representation.136 In the case of Guan Hanqing, historically relevant detail was as scant as ever. However, in a tautological loop between work and persona characteristic of attestatory authorship, art songs and other plays suggested that Guan was knowledgeable about courtesans. Interestingly, Guan Hanqing’s reputed romantic expertise in the demimonde may well have reinforced his claim to the authorship of the Xixiang ji and vice versa. Contrary to what the surface plot of a love story between a scholar and a gentry woman might suggest, in Yuan and Ming times, the Xixiang ji resonated with elite male participation in courtesan culture. In Yuan songs, Cui Yingying, the respectable daughter of an elite family, is often compared to a courtesan. In a song entitled “The Prostitute Who Loved Sleep” (Ji hao shui), an anonymous writer likened the woman to a number of fictional heroines: “A Yingying who sleeps while standing at the Western Wing,/ a Xiaoqing who faints on the tea boat,/ a Xiuying who is dumbfounded at the Eastern Wall.”137 In a song on “A Beautiful Prostitute,” the Yuan playwright Wu Changling invoked a series of similar analogies: “If she is not a latterday incarnation of Su Qing from the Poppy Garden,/ she must be the spitting image of Yingying from the Western Wing.”138 Such Yuan overtones continued to resonate through a variety of Ming materials. Zhu Youdun (1379–1439) noted that Yingying’s role was played by a “flowery female lead,” a role type, which, according to the Green Bower Collection, was usually reserved for courtesans.139 In a short late Ming work on reduplicated first names for women, Yingying is mentioned first and said to have had a secret liaison with a certain Zhang Haoran. The vast majority of the other women listed with such duplicated names are courtesans.140 A late Ming compendium on

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courtesans, Mei Dingzuo’s (1549–1615) A Record of Lotuses Transcending the Mud (Qingni lianhua ji, 1600), includes the story of a certain Cui Hui, a Tang courtesan first described in a now lost poem by Yuan Zhen. Said to have lived in Puzhou, the same district in which the story of the Xixiang ji was set, Cui Hui died out of love for a scholar-official who did not want to regularize relations.141 Due to the fact that both Cui Hui’s and Cui Yingying’s stories were attributed to Yuan Zhen (779–831), Cui Hui’s formed a shadow text for Cui Yingying’s tale, a circumstance born out by the common confusion between the two in late Ming texts.142 Ming-authored farces and zaju song-drama also reinforced the reading of Cui Yingying as a courtesan. In a short comic play entitled A Midday Dream in the Garden (Yuanlin wumeng, 1561) Li Kaixian paired Li Wa, the courtesan heroine of the eponymous Tang story, with Cui Yingying. The two traded insults with each other, each accusing the other of being more sexually forward.143 This particular playlet became one of the most widely anthologized supplementary texts of late Ming Xixiang ji editions, especially in the more commercially oriented sort. Similarly, the standard collection of Ming zaju, Zaju of the High Ming (Sheng Ming zaju, 1629) contained a play entitled The Double Oriole Tale (Shuang Ying zhuan), a title that punned on Yuan Zhen’s “Yingying zhuan” (The story of Yingying). The play treats the trials and tribulations of two aspiring scholar friends, who accidentally meet two courtesan friends, whom they eventually marry.144 Ming art song also alluded to the interchangeability of Cui Yingying with courtesans. For instance, one of Wang Jide’s art songs addressed to a performer in the capital not only drew on the language and imagery of the Xixiang ji, but was characterized by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), the editor of the song collection in which the song appeared, as “not inferior to the Xixiang ji.”145 In another instance, Wang reworked an earlier song by Li Rihua (1565–1635) on the Xixiang ji. Retelling the story of the Xixiang ji in seven stanzas, the song-series alternates between the voices of the male and female protagonist, ending on a note of prospective reunion thanks to the “sincere will” of the parties concerned, a trope most often invoked in Yuan songs about the demimonde.146 Accordingly, between the suggestive name and the sexual license, Yingying’s story was as likely to allude to the demimonde as to the world of cloistered young girls (guixiu), a social boundary that, as Dorothy Ko has noted, became increasingly blurred in the course of the seventeenth century.147

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Interestingly, however, despite all the attempts to create a biography for Guan Hanqing, neither Guan Hanqing nor Wang Shifu for that matter were enshrined as conventional “attestatory authors.” Although some scholars such as Du Mu had averred that Wang Shifu was the sole author of the Xixiang ji, in many ways, Wang Shifu was too shadowy a figure to lay claim to the premier play of the Northern corpus. Not only did he not form part of the original foursome of Yuan greats first mentioned by Zhou Deqing, but his body of works was pitiably small. Wang’s other surviving zaju was in the eyes of many critics so clearly inferior to the Xixiang ji148 that it cast doubts upon Wang’s ability to have written the acknowledged masterpiece of the early dramatic tradition. Other texts such as the satirical songs cited above suggested that Guan Hanqing was the principal author of the play. However, in his study of over fifty late Ming editions of the Xixiang ji, Jiang Xingyu found that most credited Guan Hanqing with the last five of the twenty acts.149 In the end, all attempts to conclusively situate Guan Hanqing in a biography failed, precluding overtly auto-historiographical or allegorical readings of his romantic texts. Neither fact nor fiction yielded sufficient or adequately consistent detail to warrant the conventional attestatory interpretation to which most literati-authored chuanqi plays were subjected. Therefore, rather than becoming a traditional attestatory author himself, Guan Hanqing’s usefulness as an authorial construct principally derived from the ambiguity of his persona as well as the fluidity of editorial attributions. On the one hand, as is evident in the increasing number of privately published, Ming-authored plays in the late Ming, the precedent of the early song tradition, of which Guan was the premier representative, expanded the attestatory repertoire for late Ming literati. On the other hand, as is borne out by the publication of innumerable versions of the Xixiang ji and other early song-dramas, the dubious biographical and textual situation surrounding the early art song and dramatic corpus allowed late Ming literati to reinvent themselves as “reproductive authors.” Between Attestation and Reproduction Through critical and editorial practices, Guan Hanqing came to assume an emblematic status for late Ming literati as a precursor of an exemplar of male elite qing. To be sure, not much was known about him, as Wang Jide pointedly acknowledged, but in the end, such ignorance proved to be no obstacle to Guan’s usefulness in the transformation of

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authorial functions. On the contrary, the relative anonymity of the writers of the Yuan made them more suitable as proper names to which invented personae could be assigned. In a gradual process of assimilation, this persona would authorize the writing of love songs by the most distinguished members of the elite. In contrast to earlier generations, the public circulation of such fictions would enhance rather than sully the reputation of such an author. The authoritative, albeit false, precedent of a newly created authorial persona of Guan Hanqing facilitated the reconciliation of elite status, vernacular writing, and the representation of romance. By the last couple of decades of the Ming, the example of Guan Hanqing signaled that it was conceivable to defy the conventional constraints of attestatory authorship. The elements that had previously been in conflict with each other—elite status, vernacular form, and romantic representations—could now be reconciled under a new form of authorship. As Lin Heyi’s statistics on the official status of late Ming playwrights show, many of these men had passed the jinshi examination themselves, many others passed at least provincial level.150 Her figures also show that late Ming elite males no longer wrote plays anonymously or under assumed names. They often published their plays during their lifetimes, including love dramas. Meng Chengshun (1599–after 1684), the literati editor of an important zaju collection, the Joint Selection of Famous Plays Old and New (Gujin mingju hexuan, 1633), is a case in point. Naming his thematically grouped segments of the collection after lines from famous ci lyrics by Liu Yong (987–1053) and Su Shi (1037–1101) respectively, Meng chose the same lyrics that preceded the Sunny Spring, White Snow art song anthology.151 In having a “romantic” half named The Willow Branch Collection (Liuzhi ji) after Liu’s lyric and an “official” half named The River Libation Collection (Leijiang ji) after Su’s lyric, Meng’s anthology projects a complimentary view of male sensibilities, but, by virtue of order, prioritizes the “romantic” over the “official” segment. Meng included the Register, which put Guan Hanqing at the beginning of the section of playwrights. Zheng Guangzu’s play Qiannü’s Spirit Leaves Her Body (Qiannü lihun) headed the collection, a function of Meng’s belief that that particular Yuan play was the principal source for Peony Pavilion. Guan Hanqing was represented with two plays, which were placed after song-dramas by Zheng Guangzu, Ma Zhiyuan, and Qiao Ji (1280–1345). Most significantly, that part of Meng’s anthology encompassed ten plays by five Ming playwrights, most notably two by Jia Zhongmin, the author of the

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revised Register discussed above, three by Zhu Youdun, the imperial prince, and three of his own. All of Meng’s plays treated well-known love stories, some of them bearing the hallmark of Guan Hanqing’s influence.152 In his preface, Meng insisted that songwriting was more difficult than the composition of lyrics. However, unlike the comparable claim that Luo Zhongxin had advanced in Rhymes, Meng’s comments were primarily directed toward the writing of song-drama rather than the composition of art song. Moreover, rather than stressing the prosodic difficulties involved, Meng noted that the difficulty of drama lay in the need for playwrights to imaginatively identify themselves with the protagonists.153 Echoing Zang Maoxun’s preface to One Hundred Yuan Plays, which singled out Guan Hanqing as the prime example of such identificatory composition, Meng stressed the proximity a versatile imagination could create. Thus, instead of depending on the social distance between author and protagonists or on the precise accord between actual experience and literary representation, the imagination could plausibly simulate an approximation of somebody else’s experience.154 In short, such stories might then be understood to represent neither allegories of frustrated ambition nor authentic records of the author’s life, but embody new cultural ideals. An emphasis on the imaginative dimension of playwrighting might also explain why, paradoxically perhaps, Guan Hanqing, the reputed master of the form and the romantic spirit par excellence, came to be assigned the authorship of the last five acts of the Xixiang ji. For one thing, it was those last four acts that deviated from the reputedly historical record of the Tang tale, thus imputing to Guan Hanqing what for some was an undesirable capacity for imaginative flights of fancy. At the same time, all the critical harping about the alleged stylistic inferiority of those four acts also created considerable leeway for late Ming critics, who otherwise might have felt even more redundant than they already did. As the astute Wang Jide pointed out: “In the realm of playwrighting, everything has already been done. It’s extremely difficult to come up with something new.”155 By relegating Guan Hanqing, the recognized author of romance, to a secondary position in the composition in the Xixiang ji, late Ming figures could improve upon the romantic fictions of the past, asserting themselves as reproductive authors in the process. In conjunction with the refashioning of early art song and songdrama, “Guan Hanqing” as a proper name succeeded in spawning new

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modalities of elite editing, editing-cum-writing, and writing, precisely because it was precariously, but productively, suspended between collective ignorance and individual identification. Biographically, the ghosts of Zhong Sicheng’s Register remained a fairly spectral presence, but their works continued to haunt late imperial literature thanks to the “ghostwriting” of another, more illustrious generation of literati. As Li Yu, the witty observer, would wisecrack about the ultimate reproductive text, Jin Shengtan’s Xixiang ji: “For four hundred years, the spirit (xin) of the author of the Xixiang ji had not died. But now [that Jin Shengtan has finally explained why the Xixiang ji is the best of all plays], the spirit of its author can be said to have died. This kind of death is not particular to the [author of the] Xixiang ji, but is true of everyone who has ever written anything. People worry that they are not [as good as as] Wang Shifu, but [even if they were], who can know whether or not several hundred years later, there might not be a Jin Shengtan [who would surpass them].”156 Conclusion Authorship has been one of the great sites of critical controversy in contemporary literary criticism ever since Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, each in his own way, announced that they wished death upon the author as a transcendental analytical category. As Barthes put it: “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person.’ ” For Barthes, the desired removal of the author resulted in a liberation of the text, which is, “to refuse God and his hypostases— reason, science, law.”157 Michel Foucault also problematized the seemingly transparent categories of “author,” “book,” and “oeuvre.” As he noted: “[I]f one speaks, so indiscriminately and unreflectingly of an author’s oeuvre, it is because one imagines it to be defined by a certain expressive function. . . . [The] oeuvre emerges . . . as the expression of the thought, the experience, the imagination, of the unconscious of the author, or indeed, of the historical determinations that operated upon him.”158 For Foucault, oeuvre is one of those falsely immediate, certain, and homogenous unities that belong among the mass of notions that systematically conspire to project a false sense of continuity.159

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In the thirty years since Barthes and Foucault each issued their heuristic challenges, a curious bifurcation has occurred in a Western context. At the popular level, the author reigns supreme. In the scholarly arena, certain fields, most notably literary history, continue to be practiced as though all authors were beholden to what Margaret Ezell calls “our games of authorship.”160 At the same time, a host of cultural historians have thought through the major institutional transformations for European “authors”: the demise of unquestioned divine authority at the end of the Middle Ages, the impact of the invention of printing, the exploration of the New World, the enforcement of copyright laws, or the rise of new technologies.161 However, more often than not, despite the sophistication of much of this historically oriented scholarship, it cannot escape its own variables: what forms would authorship take if absolute divine authority were irrelevant, if literary competence were a primary attribute of elite status, if printing had been introduced in the early Middle Ages, if copyright laws were minimally enforced, insofar as they existed at all? Then we might find ourselves in China, which, given its vast textual legacy, could serve as an alternate domain for the exploration of institutional variables in the development of authorship. Until recently, such Chinese alternatives were obscured by the adoption of Western terminology, especially in the domain of belleslettres. In an influential study, James Liu maintained that the Chinese had adopted an expressive theory of authorship for the writing of poetry, the privileged genre of belles-lettres as early as the second century B.C.E. According to Liu, in such theories, “the object of expression is variously identified with universal human emotions, or personal nature, or individual genius, or sensibility, or moral character.”162 However, Liu’s post-Enlightenment interpretation of “the object of expression” tends to obscure the socio-political dimension of much early Chinese poetic production. Following the cue of Mark Lewis’s and Chris Connery’s recent work on early Chinese textual authority,163 I chose to coin the term “attestatory authorship,” which highlights the highly situational and socially contingent nature of such literary expression. Until the Tang period, that model of authorship typically mandated that the representation of desire be understood as a form of political allegory. What I have sought to isolate in this chapter is how in the course of the Ming period, Yuan-dynasty figures and the texts attributed to them were enlisted to reconfigure attestatory authorship so as to accommodate non-allegorical representations of romance. It is generally agreed that the late Ming was a period preoccupied with new articulations of sentiment and passion, a debate that often

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coalesced around the term qing. As has been pointed out by scholars of vernacular literature of the period as well as social and intellectual historians, qing was by no means a uniformly defined concept. William T. Rowe notes that in the late Ming although human emotional responses were rehabilitated after having been successfully and systematically denigrated by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and his school, “if the notion of qing was upwardly reevaluated in China’s early modern era, it was also a subject of intense conflict in the discourse community over its precise connotations, and which particular sorts of behavior it might be invoked to legitimate.”164 Other scholars, including Wai-yee Li, Dorothy Ko, Judith Zeitlin, and Catherine Swatek, have examined the impact of contemporary romantic plays, most notably Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1618) spectacularly successful play Peony Pavilion, on the discourse of qing.165 Significantly, Tang Xianzu was known to have been intimately familiar with early Chinese zaju song-drama. He had looked over the same stash of manuscripts that formed the core of Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays, a connection that was not lost on Tang’s contemporaries. Meng Chengshun, the literati editor of Joint Collection of Famous Plays Old and New (Gujin mingju hexuan, 1633), a Yuan and Ming zaju anthology, even went so far as to claim that Peony Pavilion derived from a Yuan play, Qiannü’ s Spirit Leaves Her Body. Although Meng’s assertion might have been rather self-serving since he placed Qiannü’ s Spirit at the beginning of the volume that culminated with three of his own romances, many of Meng’s contemporaries perceived Tang’s plays to embody a “Yuan flavor.” Narrowly understood, such a “Yuan flavor” may point to shared stylistic characteristic between plays,166 but broadly construed, they point to profound changes in the modes of literary production. Yuan art songs and plays represented not simply other peripheral vernacular genres primed for inclusion in an expanding literary canon, but part of their appeal rested on another modality of authorial production. Reconstructing the history of the reception of the attributions of songs and plays to the proper name of Guan Hanqing sheds light on how vernacular genre, romantic representation, and identifiable attribution conspired to form new biographical sensibilities and new literary competencies for literati. The biographical apparatus deployed in the Yuan and Ming created upward mobility for songwriters and playwrights of socially ambiguous standing such as Guan Hanqing. As Guan’s gradual transformation from “medical functionary” to “imperial examination graduate” suggests, the process was successful, creating

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unprecedented social respectability for a man who had nothing more to his credit than songs and plays. Rather than resulting in a politically significant biography, such status markers were deployed with a view toward redeeming a new male sensibility: a man who admired women not just allegorically because they might represent rulers, but because they had the potential to embody beauty, talent, and virtue. Growing out of an urban milieu, Yuan-printed songs painted an unsentimentally earthy and often hyperbolically humorous picture of the trials and tribulations of romance. However, in contrast to earlier song lyrics such as Among the Flowers (Huajian ji 940), a male rather than female point of view predominated, creating the impression that romance was a man’s principal mission in life. In the court milieu of the early and midMing, such an urban quest for pleasure was suffused with the aristocratic sensibilities of a courtly elite. Late Ming literati invested such texts with a new seriousness, elevating the casual compositions of Yuan urbanites to the level of a cultural ideal. As the anthologization of “On Not Succumbing to Old Age” showed, what may have started out as a humorous hyperbole of an exceptional old man was eventually recuperated as an embodiment of typical literati qing. Similarly, in the case of the Xixiang ji, what may have begun as one man’s tale of a youthful indiscretion ended up underwriting the aestheticized passions between late Ming literati and courtesans. Many of the men involved with the publication of early song and song-drama had at one point served in the upper echelons of the government, yet their assimilation of writers such as Guan Hanqing did not necessarily speak of their desire for renewed political recognition. Instead, their productive and reproductive appropriation of Guan’s works allowed them to figure desire as an entity that could be represented as a form of collective connoisseurship or as an education sentimentale. Even if the obsessively ubiquitous, and often totally tacit, presence of fictive emperors and of a phantasmagoric bureaucracy did not vanish from the horizons of the imagination, they were more than ever staged tropes selectively invoked for new authorial ends. Rather than simply lamenting the absence of a responsive king, these new authorial figurations of desire expanded the permeable frontiers of what Lewis and Connery have termed the “empire of the text.” In denouncing such permeability, Lin Chuanjia hoped to rescue the model of conventional attestatory authorship embodied in the civil service examination. However, what Lin might not have been aware of, or perhaps he was all too keenly aware of it, even that bastion of official

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culture had at earlier points been enlisted in the service of the vernacular genres Lin sought to banish outside the bounds of the literary canon. It is to two of the “reader–writers,” who created a fictional world of examination culture through their reproduction of early song-drama, Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun, that we turn in the next chapter.

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Chapter 2 Early Song-Drama Collections, Examination Requirements, and the Exigencies of Desire: Li Kaixian (1502–68), Zang Maoxun (1550–1620), and the Uses of Reproductive Authorship

Introduction In The Theater and Drama of the Chinese (1887), the first European language history of its kind, Rudolf von Gottschall (1832–1909), a then well-known figure in German theatrical, journalistic, and belletristic circles, described what he presumed to have been the process of composition of the plays contained in Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays (Yuanren baizhong qu, 1615/16): “The classical repertory of the Yuan period seems to have been composed in a very workmanlike fashion. The [imperial] Conservatory of Music was the workshop where the assembled talents of the monarchy collectively satisfied the needs of the Chinese stage . . . .”1 The first Chinese-language history of Chinese drama, Wang Guowei’s (1877–1927) History of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu shi, 1913–14), also considered Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays, but arrived at a radically different conclusion about the impact of imperial institutions on Chinese playwrights: “Shen Defu’s and Zang Maoxun’s claim that the Yuan dynasty selected their officials through the composition of drama is completely spurious. I maintain that the reason zaju song-drama developed is precisely because the Yuan had abolished the examinations in the first part of the dynasty.”2 Although Gottschall and Wang Guowei appear to respond to an identical text, they project very different visions of what it means. Looking at Zang’s compendium through the eyes of Gottschall, who

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himself was deeply beholden to aristocratic and imperial forms of patronage, we can imagine the assembled talents rehashing what amounts to unimaginative old fare to please their bureaucratic superiors and aristocratic betters.3 Examining Zang’s anthology from the perspective of Wang Guowei, a writer who was thoroughly disenchanted with the educational system in its traditional and revamped varieties, we see creative talents defying institutional disregard and pursuing the realization of their gifts regardless of official or monetary rewards.4 Neither Gottschall nor Wang Guowei realized that the textualization of early song-drama defied such generalizations. Oblivious to the textual fluidity of marginal genres, the interventionist nature of the editorial process, and the possibilities of print culture in Yuan and Ming China, neither Gottschall nor Wang paid much attention to the roles that Ming literati such as Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun rather than the Yuan playwrights themselves might have assumed in the reproduction of early song-drama. The first known literatus to publish collections of Yuan art songs as well an anthology entitled The Revised Plays of Yuan Worthies (Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi, ca. 1558–68), Li Kaixian was also the first known owner of the earliest extant set of play texts known as Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (Yuankan sanshizhong, ca. 1330). Zang was the editor-cum-publisher of the definitive collection of Yuan zaju plays, the above-mentioned One Hundred Yuan Plays. In these early art song and song-drama publications, print and performance converged to produce not only new literary genres, but also new guises of socio-literary authority. As we shall see, the Imperial Music Academy mattered, but not quite in the way Gottschall had surmised. The princely, professional, and eunuch members of the Ming rather than the Yuan court had a hand in shaping both the textual repertoire and the symbolic aura of Yuan zaju. The examination system mattered, too, but again not quite in the fashion Wang Guowei had proposed. It was cashiered Ming rather than underemployed Yuan literati who fashioned amorphous texts into a viable literary genre. Moreover, rather than being hapless and frustrated scholars at the mercy of the actual bureaucracy, they willfully manipulated the tropes of the examination system. Exploiting the emergent possibilities of reproductive authorship, Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun embedded fantastic, yet oddly plausible fables about examination requirements, drama composition, and the power of aesthetic and social performance into their publications. If Li was intent on proving his virtual viability as local magistrate to regulate

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popular customs, Zang pitted the authority of an imaginary court against the practices of the real court to vindicate elite fetishization of the demimonde. Instead of dismissing their conceits as trivial or false, this chapter will engage them for what they reveal about the relationship each author imagined to have existed between politics, culture, and desire. The scrutiny of such rhetoric adds to our understanding of the sudden appeal of “old” genres such as Yuan songs and plays as well as the transformative power of the “new” material possibilities of private publishing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. It will become evident that such publications neither simply enacted notions of didacticism on the printed page nor did they merely ventriloquize personal or popular ressentiments. Instead, these printed play-texts evinced paradoxical, and at times unintended, aspects of both. The Convergence of Print and Performance Many modern scholars have noted that the market in books expanded from the Jiajing reign period (1522–66) onward.5 The middle of the sixteenth century witnessed a tremendous increase in “private” publishing (jiake, sike). In contrast to “official” (guanke) or “commercial” (fangke) publishing, a private individual retained the necessary personnel to carve the wood blocks rather than entrusting manuscripts to a preexisting printing entity. Certain prosperous areas, most notably the Jiangnan region around the Yangzi delta, saw an exponential growth in the number of such privately produced texts. In terms of print-runs, private publishers often printed few texts, which ranged from canonical works to classical poetry to the serious works of friends and family. By contrast, commercial publishers specialized in works geared toward urban consumption, including encyclopedias, cram books, and fiction and drama.6 Given these variables, literati publications of fiction and drama were situated in a gray zone between conventional private publishing and outright commercial publishing.7 As books increasingly defied neat categorization as a repository of knowledge, an object of collection, a gift item, or a commercial commodity, literary thought, especially that which accompanied privately published books, had to contend with the corollary contradictions. Among literati, the expansion of the bookmarket did not register as a neutral fact, but often gave rise to ambivalent rhetorical stances. Such ambivalence was exacerbated by the emergent possibility of literati publishing for profit. For reasons not unlike the ones James Cahill has identified in the realm of painting,8 it is difficult to gauge

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the precise economic underpinnings of such involvement, but it would appear that an increasing number of literati derived at least part of their livelihood from their publication ventures. At the same time, despite or because of the fact that they might earn at least some income from such publications, literati began rhetorically to circumvent the appearance of pecuniary profit. If early publishers of drama such as Li Kaixian were mildly concerned about the moral self-indulgence evident in the act of private publication, subsequent publishers like Zang Maoxun were more likely to worry about the appearance of monetary self-interest. Literati publishers like Wang Jide (d. ca. 1623) or Li Yu (1610–80) invoked tropes of the destructiveness of the very book market on which they themselves partly depended. Accordingly, an awareness of the public and commercial potential of private publication—the small print-runs notwithstanding—shaped not only individual editorial choices, but also informed acts of literary criticism. The bookmarket was not the only cultural force to reshape literary thought. In the course of the sixteenth century, literati also developed an intense fascination with the theater and theatricality, engaging in a variety of drama-related activities: owning troupes, attending performances, training actors, learning how to sing, writing plays and songs, editing plays, compiling formularies, and writing specialized treatises on drama-related topics.9 Such literati interest in the world of theater flourished despite regulations that prohibited association between scholar-officials and the denizens of the entertainment quarters.10 Literati interest in performance did not simply manifest itself in external ways. Apart from the performative projection found in Mingauthored plays, performative conceptions also structured the rhetoric of drama-related publications.11 Unlike narrative fiction, which was most commonly published under pseudonyms, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury literati were more forthcoming about their involvement with drama-related publications, often revealing their actual name in the publication itself. At the same time, they also chose a sanctioned role or an imaginary persona in whose name they chose to undertake new and risqué publication ventures. To be sure, not everyone involved in the publication of performance-related texts chose to imprint their personalities on the published material. For instance, the editor of the largest body of published Yuan and Ming zaju, the commercial Gu mingjia (The masters of old) edition, merely attached his pen name to the project, dispensing with a clearly articulated editorial persona or a publishing program. As a result, modern scholars have been unable to unmask the person behind this linguistic guise.12

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However, the two figures at the heart of this chapter—Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun—did invent editorial personae and thereby redefined the relationship between official, private, and commercial literary culture. Both men had attained the highest examination degree, both were forced to resign from public office, and both made drama a focal point of their post-official careers. In addition to cultivating an interest in theatrical performance, both men also published zaju anthologies, which played upon the rhetoric of court and examination culture, albeit in strikingly different ways. Li and Zang did not naively transpose zaju from one medium to another—for example, from manuscript text to printed text, from performed to literary text, or from literary to visual text. Rather, they actively manipulated the evolving conventions of these different media through their attention to the process of publication as well as through the creation of particularized editorial roles for themselves. As we shall see, Li’s and Zang’s projective role-playing amounts to what Richard Schechner has termed “restored behavior.”13 In Schechner’s formulation, a performance evokes strips of experience, elaborating on them through reenactment in an aesthetically or ritually defined form. Li and Zang’s “performance” did not take place on an actual stage, but within the bounds of a book. Arguably, in both cases, their editorial personae, however inchoately, harked back to two sequences: first, their experience as relatively high-placed officials at the Ming court, and second, their exposure to zaju performances and texts during that time. However, neither Li nor Zang simply became what they once were, but, in keeping with Schechner’s notion of a “restoration of past that never was,” they rebecame what they never were but wished to have been.14 What was at stake for them was not a “transcription” of their roles as officials nor of zaju performance per se, but an “appropriation” of the socio-literary setting in which these sequences had taken place. Hence, in order to understand why these men gravitated toward Yuan zaju, it is necessary to consider how the Ming court had constituted the genre prior to and during their lifetimes. As will become evident, Yuan zaju was not simply one among many vernacular genres, but one that enjoyed considerable sanction at the Ming court. Yuan Zaju Music and Plays at the Ming Court Although modern scholars have been loathe to concede the point, it is hardly a coincidence that virtually all sixteenth-century literati zaju

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enthusiasts—Wang Jiusi (1468–1551), Kang Hai (1475–1541), He Liangjun (1506–73), Li Kaixian, and Zang Maoxun—had at one point in their lives close ties with the theater-oriented Ming court. Virtually all Ming emperors, with the possible exception of Yingzong (r. 1457–64),15 were theater afficionados themselves, even if they were very vigilant about regulating other people’s exposure to drama performances and performers. Indeed, from its inception, the Ming court had taken a great interest in all aspects of Yuan zaju, reflecting a relatively favorable assessment of the cultural institutions of their predecessors, especially in the early days of the dynasty.16 The Ming court also offered support for the Southern forms of drama (xiwen and chuanqi), a predilection that became more pronounced with the popularity of new musical styles of Southern song-drama (kunqu, yiyiang, haiyan) in the sixteenth century. Two separate court agencies concerned themselves with theatricals, the Imperial Academy of Music (Jiaofang si) and the Office of Drums and Bells (Zhonggu si). Membership in each at times numbered in the thousands. The Imperial Academy organized large-scale productions of classical zaju for entertainment of the inner court. The Office of Drums and Bells, in collaboration with other eunuch agencies, produced educational plays for young princes about the life of commoners and farces (yuanben) to alternately entertain, remonstrate with, and glorify the emperors. At other times, the Office mounted plays involving water-puppets for the sheer spectacle of special effects.17 Ming emperors and princes shaped the theatrical legacy of their dynastic predecessors in major ways. Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor Taizu (r. 1368–98), banned public theater ostensibly for economic reasons, enforced humiliating dress codes for the members of the Imperial Academy of Music, forbade the representation of imperial figures on stage, and severely punished amateur singing among the military. In 1398, the Ming court issued draconian proscriptions against the performance and the sponsoring of zaju performances of the roles of emperors, consorts, and political worthies, encouraging the depiction of domestic virtue instead.18 Contrary to earlier scholarly notions that these proscriptions were in essence a dead letter,19 it has been shown that they had a profound impact on Yuan zaju texts. Whole story cycles were supplanted by politically less sensitive story clusters. Most clearly, the previously popular plays surrounding the founding of the Han dynasty by a commoner disappeared, presumably because the parallels for peasant upstart Zhu Yuanzhang were too close for comfort.20 With two notable exceptions, Rain in the Parasol Tree

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(Wutong yu) and Autumn in the Han Palace (Hangong qiu), plays with imperial singing roles were excised from the textual zaju corpus.21 Plays about female emperors, empress dowagers, empresses, and consorts seem to have been summarily excluded from the repertoire,22 creating the modern illusion that Yuan drama features a great number of figures from humble social backgrounds. The next generation of Ming princes was even more actively engaged in the curatorial efforts surrounding Yuan drama. Zhu Di (r. 1403–24), emperor Taizu’s fourth son and the future emperor Chengzu, patronized zaju playwrights when he was still a prince.23 After his usurpation of the throne in 1403, he made at least three significant decisions affecting theater at the court and in the realm at large. First, he commissioned the compilation of an imperial encyclopedia, The Great Canon of the Yongle Era (Yongle dadian, 1403–08), in manuscript form. Only partially extant today, the compendium included a large number of dramatic texts from the zaju and the xiwen theatrical traditions.24 Given that there is no earlier evidence of official commendation of written play texts, the inclusion of these materials implied unprecedented official sanction, even though Great Canon was never printed during the Ming dynasty and rarely perused by anyone at the Ming court.25 Second, in 1413, he seconded Taizu’s edicts that forbade the representation of any imperial figures or eminent officials on stage, thus giving the original proscription a renewed hold over the refashioning of the zaju repertoire. Third, in 1420, he adopted zaju melodies for official banquets and other court ceremonies, a practice that was retained by subsequent Ming emperors.26 Accordingly, officials working at court would be sure to have been exposed to these Yuan tunes on a fairly regular basis, even if the actual staging was quite different from what it had been under the Yuan.27 Going beyond a purely curatorial approach, two early Ming princes not only played an influential role in the critical codification of Yuan song-drama, but carried forward the creative momentum of zaju composition. Zhu Quan (1378–1448), Zhu Di’s younger brother, compiled a miscellany on Northern drama, the Formulary of the Correct Sounds of Great Peace (Taihe zhengyin pu, ca. 1398) discussed in the previous chapter. In addition, he composed twelve zaju plays of his own, two of which survive.28 Another prince, Zhu Youdun (1379–1439), one of Zhu Yuanzhang’s grandsons, wrote no less than thirty-one zaju plays. Separately printed during his lifetime under the identical title Yuefu Songs from the Sincerity Studio (Chengzhai yuefu, ca. 1426–49), his plays and songs set a typographic standard for late Ming editions of

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song-drama.29 Originally designed for the lavish pageantry of court theater, his plays were performed not only within the walls of the imperial compound,30 but, by the early sixteenth century, appear to have made their way into the performance repertoire in the world at large.31 In the mid-fifteenth century, Xuanzong (r. 1426–35) opened the inner court theater to his officials, a practice that met with stern disapproval among more orthodox-minded literati who viewed all such entertainments as frivolous distractions from the serious business of governance. However, subsequent emperors from Xianzong (r. 1465–87), Xiaozong (r. 1488–1505), Wuzong (r. 1506–21), Shizong (r. 1522–67) to Shenzong (r. 1573–1619) were oblivious to such concerns and made theater a part of their everyday lives. Xianzong not only attended the theater daily, but avidly collected scripts of zaju and Southern plays. Xiaozong insisted that zaju be performed at official ceremonies and impersonated another emperor on stage. Wuzong eagerly visited public and private performances during his imperial inspection tours and even composed theater music, which entered the repertoire of Southern performing styles.32 Shizong and Shenzong also sought out theatrical activities, the latter retaining his own personal troupes for the performance of new Southern styles.33 In the sixteenth century, court-related drama and song collections began to circulate in print. The anonymously edited zaju collection Zaju: Ten Pieces of Brocade (Zaju shiduan jin, 1558) included eight of Zhu Youdun’s plays, containing what are most likely changes indicative of stage performance.34 Other early to mid-sixteenth-century publications such as New Sounds of an Efflorescent Age (Shengshi xinsheng, 1517), Choice Melodies from the Forest of Lyrics (Cilin zhaiyan, 1525) and Songs of Harmonious Resplendence (Yongxi yuefu, 1540) contained Yuan songs and plays, which derived from manuscripts owned by the palace. These compendia revealed their association with the court through their imperially deferential typographic conventions or through the uncritically effusive and laudatory words of praise for the glory of the current dynasty.35 In the course of the sixteenth century, imperial demand for newer forms of Southern drama, which had begun to flourish in the economically prosperous and culturally sophisticated area of the Yangzi delta, gradually pushed Northern zaju to the margins of the imperial theatrical repertoire.36 Yet, the inherent conservatism of court etiquette ensured that Northern zaju plays and music did not disappear overnight. Even if zaju theatricals at the court became rare by the late

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sixteenth century, they were neither completely extinct nor did zaju music necessarily disappear from ceremonial occasions.37 Moreover, literati comments about the respective demise and ascent of different styles of theatrical music have to be scrutinized in light of their own preferences for Northern and Southern styles. As sixteenth-century literati became embroiled in debates over the respective merits of Northern and Southern music and theater, comments about court practices became selectively deployed to make a case for the superiority of one musical tradition over another. For those championing the looser and softer form of Southern music, the newly emphasized “barbarian” origins of northern music were a decided stroke against Yuan zaju.38 Those favoring what they saw as the solemn and serious qualities of Northern music did not tire of pointing out that the court itself used such music for important sacrificial occasions.39 Both factions circulated tales about the respective dramatic preferences of early Ming emperors in an effort to gain the rhetorical high ground. Those who championed Southern chuanqi drama claimed that one of the early Southern plays, The Story of the Lute (Pipa ji), had been Zhu Yuanzhang’s daily dramatic fare.40 Those who preferred Northern zaju drama averred that early Ming emperors rewarded imperial princes with the bestowal of zaju manuscript texts.41 Apart from facilitating controversy over stylistic and regional affiliations,42 the imperial prestige attendant upon Yuan songs and plays also allowed literati such as Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun to negotiate their relationship to official culture in a fantastic, yet profoundly enabling fashion. Li Kaixian (1502–68): The Reinvention of Reclusion Li Kaixian was in many ways representative of the new social, intellectual, and cultural trends among the literati of his generation. The product of a county school,43 he was the first member of his scholarly family to pass the jinshi examination in 1529. Li served in a variety of official positions in the provinces as well as at court. Li’s career progressed reasonably well until he was caught up in factional strife in the early 1540s. When serving as a Vice Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, an office that involved, among other things, supervision of court music, a fire broke out in one of the imperial temples. An investigation ensued, and Li’s opponents, most likely the influential Xia Yan (1482–1548), cited what were most likely charges of personal misconduct to force him to resign in 1542. Li returned to his estate in his native place on the outskirts of Ji’nan, never to hold office again.44

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After his self-imposed permanent retirement to his family estate, Li methodically availed himself of all the cultural institutions that were coming within the reach of a greater number of well-to-do late Ming literati:45 the accumulation of private collections of books46 and manuscripts, the acquisition of paintings and of artifacts,47 the establishment of academies, the publication of unorthodox texts, the cementing of social relations through literary societies and joint publication projects, and the ownership of theater troupes.48 A programmatic couplet that adorned Li’s garden encapsulated Li’s post-retirement interests in print and performance: “In the [domain of] books: a collection of three thousand volumes of old imprints,/ In the [realm of] songs: a troupe of forty people skilled in new songs.”49 The inspiration for Li’s post-retirement life derived in significant measure from the examples of Kang Hai and Wang Jiusi. Counted among the Seven Former Masters of Archaism (qian qizi), Kang and Wang had passed their jinshi examinations in 1502 and 1496, respectively, and had served at court. When they were caught up in factional struggles in the first decade of the sixteenth century, both were forced to retire. Kang and Wang returned to their native places in the province of Shaanxi, where they proceeded to devote themselves to the art of sanqu song and zaju drama modeled on Yuan-dynasty precedents.50 On an official journey early in his career in 1531, Li had made the acquaintance of both Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai, an encounter that was to profoundly affect Li’s outlook on official life, retirement, and literary pursuits. By the time Li met them, relatives of Kang and Wang had published their art song collections.51 As Li was later to comment on Wang Jiusi’s art songs: “Not only did he observe the rules of the Yuan writers (Yuanren zhi jiafa), but he also obtained their spirit (Yuanren zhi xinfa),”52 a perception shared by other contemporaries. Some even compared Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai to Guan Hanqing and Ma Zhiyuan.53 As Li was to note later, he had read Yuan art songs in his childhood,54 but evidently the encounter with two of the leading art song writers of his own day prompted him to try his own hand at art song composition.55 However, it was not until 1544 that one of Li’s disciples, Gao Yingqi (fl. 1544), published one of Li’s song cycles written over a decade prior, citing his own abiding infatuation with song genres as the motivation for publication.56 This first song-related publication augured a steady stream of similar ventures, in which Li was either a willing collaborator or the primary sponsor.

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In the first decades of the sixteenth century, private publication could still smack of frivolous self-indulgence. Accordingly, even though Li’s mentors Kang Hai and Wang Jiusi had an abiding interest in zaju plays, they did not publish their own or other people’s plays. Wang in particular hesitated to give consent even for others to publish his own art songs for fear of making a laughing stock of himself.57 By contrast, if official duties had originally left Li little time to devote to matters of drama,58 in his retirement, he pursued publication of all manner of texts, including songs, farces, and plays, with a vengeance. He seemed exhilarated by the new possibilities of print, and while most of his printed works do not survive, his enthusiasm for print, nevertheless, suffuses his writings. Unlike many men of his own and later generations, Li never expressed any genuine misgivings about the impact of print on himself, on others, or on the text themselves. On the contrary, as I will explore in greater detail in the following section, for all the newness of the idea of private publishing in his social circle, he considered it a desirable and virtually unqualified good. Yet, given the newness of private printing, particularly that of performance-related genres, Li revealed some self-consciousness about the unusual number and nature of his publications, an attitude reflected in the extensive, not to say excessive, prefatorial apparatus surrounding many of his publication ventures. As we shall see, his prefaces and postfaces reveal some of the stakes inherent in converting manuscripts into printed texts early in the midsixteenth publication boom. As will become apparent, a collection of his own songs, Love Songs of Markets and Wells (Shijing yanci) as well as his fragmentary zaju edition of The Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies played a major part in allowing him to negotiate the tensions between official and nonofficial literary culture through private publishing. The Remedial Uses of Print As scholars of book history have pointed out, different media construct different textual economies both for the people immediately involved with them as well as for scholars trying to reconstruct them.59 In the case of China, a handful of studies have examined the stakes of converting manuscripts into printed text during the period when print first began to have a major impact on Chinese culture, the Song dynasty (960–1279). Susan Cherniack has examined how repeated printings of the Classics previously circulated as manuscripts destabilized textual authority, thus facilitating the far-reaching reinterpretation of the

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confucian canon during that period.60 Stuart Sargeant has proposed that through a complex process of distancing, the circulation of songs in printed rather than in manuscript form may have contributed to the consolidation of ci lyrics as a literati form.61 Yet, as Ôki Yasushi has rightly noted, manuscript culture has not been given the attention it deserves in the study of late imperial Chinese book culture, especially given that manuscripts played an important role even after the advent of an expanded market in books in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.62 As we shall see, during this period, manuscript and print media interacted in complex, historically contingent ways. Li’s greatest fear with regard to the textual tradition was its loss due to failure to record a given text at all. Some of Li’s contemporaries had begun, in an alarmist fashion, to equate the printing of books with the book burning under the first emperor, Qin Shihuang (r. 221–210 B.C.E.), suggesting that the net effects of hasty, careless, and fraudulent publication did not differ from the outright and deliberate destruction of books.63 By contrast, Li postulated that the failure to print texts was analogous to the burning of books under the Qin.64 In his view, manuscript texts were more susceptible to loss than printed texts, a concern that applied especially to less canonical works.65 For all his faith in the superior durability of printed texts, Li was not oblivious to attestatory concerns over publication. Mid-Ming editors of song collections such as New Sounds of An Efflorescent Age as well as other literati had already warned against the “vulgar”66 and “licentious”67 nature of love songs. In an important miscellany, Lang Ying (1487–ca. 1566), for instance, had cited two negative poetic examples under the heading “Love songs should not be written.”68 Evidently aware of the strictures expressed against writing, let alone publishing, “vulgar” and “licentious” songs, Li appended a great number of prefaces and postfaces to the more risqué publications. He himself noted that he preferred to write such paratexts himself, partly out of reluctance to impose upon others to do so and partly because other people’s stated opinions might not accord with his own.69 Among such “vulgar” ventures, Love Songs70 illustrates Li’s rhetorical approach to the dissemination of texts that conventionally might have impugned the author. Li wrote one preface and three afterwords for Love Songs. He raised the question of whether these works would potentially harm anyone. Li noted that he composed a number of love lyrics in response to one of his guest’s requests. He claimed that he was unaware that someone recorded them in writing. He then proceeded to outline an imaginary statistic, projecting what a hundred people would do with songs of this

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sort. He projected that over ninety would want to record them, over fifty would want to print them, and only a handful would want to burn them. Citing his inability to withstand the demands of the many (zhong), Li proposed that the best attitude is to “simply pass on the texts without any feelings one way or the other (wuxin) to those who invariably want to record and print them.”71 Moreover, he expressed faith in the power of new genres such as songs both in published and performed form to exert a remedial effect on popular customs. As he put it in the postface: “If we did not have [these vulgar songs], there would be nothing on which to base a philological examination of what is appreciated in the vulgar realm, which would leave nothing with which to reign in people’s natural impulses.”72 His private theater troupe played a role in the diffusion of those emended songs.73 In Li’s casual conjunction of love songs, the people, philology, and print, Li borrowed, and improved upon, the personae of the early Ming princes like Zhu Quan and of broadly learned officials such as Qiu Jun (1421–95) who had claimed that songs and theater could, like the music of old, guide people’s sentiments.74 What is new about Li Kaixian is not the purpose of the suasion, but the textual and thematic means he adopted for this form of substitute governance. Neither Zhu Quan nor Qiu Jun appear to have self-reflexively seized upon print to disseminate their didactic agenda among commoners.75 Moreover, in keeping with the imperial rescripts that called for plays about chastity and filiality, Zhu and Qiu had stressed “virtue,” especially female virtue, even in ostensibly romantic tales, without claiming that the sentimental packaging would incite people to act properly.76 By contrast, even though Li himself was not overly fond of romantic songs and plays,77 he felt that the sentimental content would appeal to non-elite audiences. If Zhu Quan and Qiu Jun’s domestic tales had a moral edge, Li’s romantic material favored a parodic rhetoric. Although the complete Love Songs is no longer extant, other publications suggest that he sought to caution against literal or sentimental readings of romance among less educated readers. His preferred means of sobering his readers seemed the lighthearted mockery he had first encountered in Yuan songs and plays. For instance, the three romantic plays contained in Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays, of which Li is said to have been the first identifiable owner, that is, Arranging a Love Match (Tiao fengyue),78 The Moon-Revering Pavilion (Baiyue ting),79 and The Courtyard of Purple Clouds (Ziyun ting),80 make invective directed against the excesses of romance a central facet of their aesthetic. Li’s revealingly titled anthology-cum-critical treatise on Yuan

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and Ming song and drama, Songs For Banter (Cixue), included a large number of satirical Yuan songs.81 As noted in the previous chapter, Li himself composed and published humorous farces, including the abusive sparring match between Li Wa and Cui Yingying.82 Thus, he seized upon the precedent of early songs and plays to create a remedial aesthetic aimed at reforming the customs of the general populace. Through such publications, Li rhetorically challenged the Ming court. Through the conceits of Love Songs, he circumvented the power of the Ming court to appoint a local magistrate responsible for improving local customs. When he wanted to gain more than the adulation of his provincial coterie or the attention of the local populace, he turned to the reproductive publication of Yuan songs and plays in order to address the Ming court. Compiling what were among the first singleauthor art song collections, Li published the songs of literatus Zhang Kejiu (d. ca. 1324–29) and Qiao Ji (1280–1345) in two separate volumes.83 In his prefatory comments on Qiao Ji, the Yuan songwriter, Li hinted that an unnamed critic had not fully grasped the intricacies of that writer’s style. Since he quotes the critic verbatim, the initiated reader knows that the jibe is directed against Zhu Quan, in whose Formulary said comment appears.84 Thus, Li subtly wrested the power to make literary and philological judgments away from one of the recognized court authorities on Yuan song and drama. In his publication of the first literati-sponsored Yuan song-drama collection,85 Li Kaixian went even further in contesting the court’s prerogatives. He selected a genre held in esteem by the Ming court only to conceive of a grandiose editorial persona that would call into question the wisdom of the Ming court’s examination curriculum. The Examination Curriculum In much of the modern writing on Yuan drama, Wang Guowei’s claim that the suspension of the examination system during the Yuan period led to the development of Yuan drama assumed the status of a potent truism. What little research on actual Yuan institution was done focused on the differential treatment of the various ethnic groups within the Yuan elite, most notably the Mongols, the Central Asians, and the Chinese. Subsequently, rather than focusing on ethnic divisions per se, scholarship on Yuan examination practices has identified the Yuan period as the first dynasty when the partisans of Neo-Confucianism (daoxue) had a major influence on the examination content. Although the examinations were suspended for the first half of

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the Yuan dynasty and used only minimally for recruitment after 1313, the new curriculum began to favor Neo-Confucian Cheng-Zhu prose over Tang-Song belles-lettres. Shi poetry was dropped as a subject for all candidates, regardless of their ethnic background. At the provincial and metropolitan level, Chinese candidates were still tested in fu rhyme prose. Mongols and Central Asians, by contrast, only wrote on the Four Books, the Five Classics, and on policy questions.86 The trend toward prose was fully consolidated in the Ming. When the Ming temporarily reinstituted their version of the examination system in 1370 and then permanently in 1384, they did away with all rhymed parts in all sessions of the exams.87 Benjamin Elman concludes that “the most fundamental change in literati examination life and classical curriculum during the Song–Yuan–Ming transition, then, was the complete elimination of the poetry from the civil examination curriculum” by 1370/71.88 In essence then, the Yuan examinations were the last period when some genres of rhymed belles-lettres were still endorsed by the examination system. In the course of the fifteenth century, the Ming further standardized and narrowed examination requirements, which, in combination with the establishment of county schools throughout the empire,89 made examination success more accessible to a broader range of social groups. By the end of the fifteenth century, a regulated form of prose (bagu, the eight-legged essay) had come to define examination writing.90 Furthermore, rather than having to be well-versed in the Four Books and all Five Classics, candidates were allowed to specialize in one classic and virtually ignore the other four.91 Thanks to these measures, many prominent late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century literati were men of relatively modest backgrounds. Yet, such men, Li Dongyang (1447– 1516) and Li Mengyang (1473–1529) among them, not only passed the jinshi examinations, but also assumed political and cultural leadership positions.92 Through his service at court, Li Kaixian was familiar with Li Mengyang. Following in the footsteps of his mentor Li Dongyang, Li Mengyang led the archaist movement that would come to dominate sixteenth-century letters. Rejecting anything but the High Tang as models for poetry and Qin and Han writings for prose, Li Mengyang consolidated a dynastic frame for all forms of literary production with a view toward reviving Chinese literary writings. In his commemorative biography of Li Mengyang, Li Kaixian noted that Li Mengyang “did not obstruct administration through his views on writing, but he restricted the world of letters too narrowly because of his administrative

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concerns.”93 Li Mengyang was perhaps too famous and too intimately connected with Li’s own circle for Li Kaixian to criticize him very pointedly, but an anecdote about another official, who served in the Imperial Academy of Letters, spelled out Li Kaixian’s bias against narrowly learned “nouveaux-intellectuals,” an attitude he shared with other broadly learned figures of his time such as Yang Shen (1488– 1559) and He Liangjun (1506–73).94 The episode in question reveals this academician’s less-thanencyclopedic command of Chinese letters. Seeing a bookseller’s ad announcing the sale of the Xixiang ji under the title of Spring and Autumn Annals of Cui (Cuishi chunqiu), a certain Yin Shizhi bought it, thinking that it was related to the ancient philosophical compendium Spring and Autumn Annals of Lü (Lüshi chunqiu). Li Kaixian wryly commented: “His forebears were of humble origin, but he had made it all the way to the Secretariat. Yet he still did not know about the Songs of Spring and Autumn [i.e., the Xixiang ji]. It would have been appropriate for him to sigh over the fact that he was not nearly as erudite as Qiu Jun [the early Ming member of the Secretariat], who [in addition to being a scholar-official] was also able to author the Southern play The Five Cardinal Relationships Perfected and Completed (Wulun quanbei).”95 From this anecdote, we can see that Li had major reservations about the learning fostered by the mid-Ming curriculum and about the kind of people who succeeded under its auspices. As a self-appointed compiler-cum-author of arcane belles-lettres, a role most evident in his anthology of Yuan zaju plays, The Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies,96 Li offered a remedial proposal for the broadening of the examination curriculum. Interestingly, in the preface to this zaju anthology, Li was completely silent on the contents of the anthology. Neither the titles nor the names of the authors of the sixteen plays were listed in the preface, let alone in the title. Instead, Li not only presented knowledge about Yuan drama as an alternative to the narrowness of the contemporary examination curriculum, but underscored his own imaginary part in the purveyance of such knowledge. In the preface to Revised Plays, Li had a county examiner, a certain Liu Lian, ask the following question on an examination: “The Han is known for its prose, the Tang for its poetry, the Song for its NeoConfucian philosophy, and the Yuan for its arias, but what about our own Ming dynasty?” Li reported that the official in question published the examination essays written in response under the title Record of Popular Suasion (Fengjiao lu).97 In correlating the essays and their potential for administrative benefit through his choice of the title, the

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examiner appears to have made the medium the answer to his own question. In other words, for examiner Liu, examination essays (shiwen) represented the best in Ming writing. Li, by contrast, took Liu’s question as an occasion to point out the shortcomings of his dynasty’s official literary priorities. Noting that books for all other periods were in ample supply, Li bemoaned the lack of excellent Yuan zaju and art song collections, on the basis of which one could have answered the question. According to Li, the anthologies in circulation, including the one containing eight of Zhu Youdun’s plays, Zaju: Ten Pieces of Brocade, were either too plain, too romantic, or too chaotic to give an accurate view of what Li saw as the “Yuan aesthetic.” Propelled by a desire to supply Yuan songs as well as an understanding of why they were famous, he had commissioned his assistant to sift through the more than a thousand zaju texts in Li’s possession to select a small sample for publication. In the preface, Li proceeded to note that the study of the Classics suffered from an excessive emphasis on Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) NeoConfucian explications at the expense of many other equally worthy or superior commentaries on individual classics. He proposed that those other texts be officially committed to print in the capital (jingban) as well as made available through commercial publishers (shufang) in order to avoid being consigned to oblivion. Li concluded his discussion with what, in his view, characterized his dynasty. It was not a matter of having a single representative genre that captured the Zeitgeist, but the ability to have satisfactory models of all great genres of past dynasties simultaneously. This, he noted, was the reason he had supplied these plays with a preface and had them printed despite, as he openly admitted, the limitations of his financial resources, which allowed him to publish no more than sixteen out of the fifty that his assistant had selected. The scarcity of his funds added to the probity of his project, enhancing the value of his very own, erudite contribution to the storehouse of public knowledge. Should the reader miss Li’s intentions in the preface, Li made sure to spell out the full import of his endeavors in the postface. There, after presenting details of the editorial process that involved him and two assistants, he appointed himself both the imperial collator (zongzai) and examination officer (kaoshi guan) in relation to the anthology project. Neither of these two official positions figured among the nine different offices Li had held during his public service.98 The idea of serving as an examination officer for a publication project may well derive from the private practice of organizing poetry competitions in the image of

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examinations,99 a practice to which Li may have been privy through his involvement with local poetry societies. The other office, imperial collator, makes it clear that more was at stake than a rhetorical gesture in the direction of local literary culture. While the term zongzai could also refer to a local or provincial examination official, Li’s simultaneous mention of the examination officer (kaoshi guan) points to the zongzai’s other meaning. The Yuan officials in charge of the dynastic histories of the Song, Jin, and Liao had been designated by that title as had the Ming compilers of the imperial compendium The Great Canon of the Yongle Era.100 Given Li’s encyclopedic disposition and his knowledge of court culture, it is conceivable that he was aware of the fact that the Great Canon included dramatic texts, including zaju, even if it is unlikely that he had access to the encyclopedia itself.101 Through the act of publication, Li simultaneously impersonated a self-appointed imperial collator and a local examination official. Implicitly, such a self-styled role challenged the monopoly of the Ming court over official appointments. In subjecting Yuan zaju to the strictures and regimens of a newly refined philological and imagined administrative expertise, Li made zaju an object of symbolic control, at which he excelled, despite having been removed from the very office at court that oversaw ritual music. Moreover, Li’s imaginary arrogation of imperial prerogatives launched a quiet, if preposterous, broadside at the actual examination and court system for its blind adherence to NeoConfucian Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy. In this mix of encyclopedic acumen and performative impersonation, Li pitted the “restored” symbols of the Ming court against the court itself, making his academy in the suburbs of Ji’nan rather than the Grand Secretariat and the Imperial Academy of Letters in Beijing the center of sensible administrative appointments and sound editorial choices. To be sure, Li’s grandiose stance did not necessarily endear him to literati beyond the purview of his Shandong circle. After Wang Shizhen (1526–90), the leading sixteenth-century statesman and literatus, paid Li a visit, he ridiculed Li as a fraud, who had merely a shabby painting and a handful of third-rate singers at his disposal.102 Wang Jide, the perspicacious connoisseur of the Northern song tradition, wryly noted that he could not find a single commendable line in a one hundred-stanza song cycle that Li had originally published together with the effusively appreciative commentary of dozens of friends and associates.103 Likewise, Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), the well-known editor of Ming poetry, somewhat sarcastically alluded to Li’s tendency to emphasize

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quantity at the expense of quality, when he observed that “whenever [Li] wrote prose pieces, they were always ten thousand words long. Whenever he wrote lyrics, there were always one hundred stanzas.”104 From a modern point of view, the inconsistency, not to say poverty of the production values of Li’s texts differs strikingly from the sophistication of his editorial histrionics.105 However, for all the material failings, Li had, successfully as it turned out, blended editorial rhetoric and a performance genre to produce a nonofficial space nested in the tropes of idealized reclusion and imaginary office-holding. In the late sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century, again and again, we find variants on Li’s bold assertion: “Writing arias is easy, anthologizing them is what is difficult.”106 Subsequent song and play editions echo Li’s imaginative bravado, even if the particulars vary from person to person. Among such anthologies, Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays set not only a new visual standard for drama publications, but it elevated the art of editorial mythmaking to new heights. As we shall see, Zang was able to bring the fictive power of the examination system to bear on the reevaluation of zaju plays and sexual desire alike. Unlike Li, who sought to transform popular disposition toward romance by means of Yuan-inspired songs and farces, Zang attempted to legitimate desire for elite males by ways of the same body of plays. Zang Maoxun (1550–1620): The Power of Editions As Wang Guowei pointed out, Zang Maoxun had famously, and in Wang’s view, erroneously, claimed that during the Yuan dynasty the bureaucracy had constituted itself by virtue of zaju-based examinations. As noted earlier, Wang had gone on to make an equally absolute counterclaim, namely that these Yuan plays were written precisely by men who did not have any official avenues of literary self-realization. Although Wang’s point of view has turned out to be highly influential, Zang’s assertion has found occasional adherents even among modern scholars.107 However, in the wake of more detailed research on actual Yuan examination practices, Zang’s mythmaking has, I believe, been conclusively exposed as such. Nonetheless, what remains to be investigated is what made Zang’s examination fiction so compelling to his contemporaries. Zang was neither a stranger to the actual examination system nor to office-holding. Zang’s family had served in various official capacities for several generations. Zang himself passed the imperial examinations in 1580 and held a couple of administrative posts, including that

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of Learned Scholar in the Directorate of Education of Nanjing. At the same time, Zang was friends with a number of other scholarofficials with interests in the theater such as Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), Wang Shizhen, Mei Dingzuo (1549–1615), Shen Defu (1578–1642), Tu Long (1542–1605), Feng Mengzhen (1546–1605), and Pan Zhiheng (1556–1622). He was also a core member of one of the leading poetry societies active in Nanjing during that time, the Nanjing Poetry Society (Jinling shishe).108 In Nanjing, in 1585, while he was a member of the Directorate of Education, Zang became intimate with a male entertainer, Xiang Silang. His secret excursions and revels in the entertainment quarters enraged his superiors, leading to his and a friend’s dismissal from office in 1587. Thereafter, a ditty circulated in Nanjing, “Seducing young boys is fine, but don’t go near Master Xiang, not only did he bring ruin to Wu [Yongrun the Vice Minister] from the Ministry of War, but he also did in Zang, the Learned Scholar.”109 Subsequently, Zang no longer held office. Instead, he traveled around the major cities in Jiangnan, visiting leading literati, while living in and around Nanjing. After 1602, he took up residence on his family’s estate near Changxing, a place that was roughly equidistant from Nanjing and Hangzhou, allowing him to continue to cultivate ties with these urban centers. It was during this last period that he seems to have derived a modest income from his editorial activities.110 By the time Zang Maoxun became active as a publisher in the early 1600s in the Jiangnan area, the number of literati-sponsored editions of drama had begun to increase.111 Issued under his studio name, Diaochong guan (The repository of carving insects),112 Zang published the first installment of One Hundred Yuan Plays containing only fifty plays in 1615 and a second one with all one hundred plays in 1616.113 From Zang’s correspondence, we know that his financial difficulties were one of the principal reasons he published only fifty plays initially. Only after soliciting funds from a number of his correspondents was he able to produce his lavishly illustrated and carefully carved complete edition.114 Averaging two pictures per play, a total of two-hundred-andtwenty-four pictures preceded the plays as did two prefaces and a group of Yuan and early Ming texts on aria-related matters, including purposefully selected excerpts from Zhou Deqing’s Rhymes and Zhu Quan’s Formulary. Advertised among scholar-official associates through Zang’s correspondence,115 One Hundred Yuan Plays attracted considerable attention far beyond Zang’s immediate circle of close friends. As the reaction to

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Zang’s edition shows, the distinctiveness and novelty of a given print product began to be sufficient grounds to acquire a reputation.116 As Xu Fuzuo (1560–after 1630), a late Ming playwright and critic, put it: “Jinshu [i.e., Zang Maoxun] is not known for having created anything of his own (gouzhuan), but he edited and revised every single play of his printed edition of One Hundred Yuan Plays.”117 Unlike other editions of drama, including Li Kaixian’s, Zang did not disclose his editorial program. Instead, he proceeded by implication, producing an intricately contrived edition that pretends to be an “authentic” representation of Yuan literary practices and texts. Inspired by his disenchantment with the Ming political establishment, Zang pitted an imagined Yuan palace examination against the Ming court in such a bold and subtle fashion that it amounted to a stroke of imaginative genius. Accordingly, the astonishing degree of internal consistency in Zang’s edition is the result of a highly complex, but largely implicit editorial agenda. Through his edition of Yuan zaju plays, Zang Maoxun ingeniously manipulated the categories of manuscript and print culture. A number of modern critics have explored how Zang altered individual plays. They have shown how Zang changed not only the wording, the rhymes, the number and arrangement of arias, and the plots, but shifted the ideological focus of the plays to bring them into line with a ritually ordered universe.118 It is certainly true that Zang imposed fairly conventional linguistic values on a body of recalcitrant materials; however, Zang did not present his efforts in that way. The strategic nature of Zang’s presentation becomes apparent if we compare his correspondence against his prefatory claims. From his letters with a number of correspondents, we gather one set of circumstances about the provenance and making of the anthology and from his prefaces and supplementary materials another. Positioned between court and commercial representations of Yuan zaju, Zang’s Yuan zaju anthology carved out an intermediate space between official and nonofficial literary culture. Thus, by comparing Zang’s choices against other zaju publishing practices, we find that he assembled material and conceptual elements from a cultural repertoire and fashioned them into an idiosyncratic and yet culturally compelling text. Zang’s programmatic choices are most evident in the following domains: the choice of title, the lineage of the texts in the anthology, the provenance and resonance of the visual images, the preferred way to consume the texts, and the thematic implications of the order and selection of plays.

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In each and every instance, Zang conceived of a fictional world of courtly legitimacy designed to validate genre and content alike. As will become evident, Zang leveraged the cachet of a courtly manuscript culture against a still largely implicit market in books in an attempt to redefine the place of male desire in official and literary culture. Rather than overtly appealing to the Confucian literati values outlined by modern scholars, Zang aligned particular representations of male desire not just with a particular dynasty, but with the sanction of its court.119 The conceptual coherence and the superior production values did much to ensure the success of Zang’s creation. As Wang Jide (d. 1623), whose own very fine edition of the Xixiang ji (1614) will be discussed in the next chapter, observed: “Ever since there have been zaju, none has surpassed the sumptuousness (fu) of this [i.e., Zang’s] imprint of selections.”120 The Singularity of the Yuan Dynasty In the course of the late sixteenth century, publishing houses in various regions had contributed greatly to the growth in commercial print products. As Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), a friend of Zang Maoxun’s and a well-known bibliophile, would observe in an oft-quoted assessment of late Ming print commerce: “During the Song, the quality of books produced in Hangzhou was the best. Sichuan was the second best, while the books in Fujian were most inferior. At present, books from Hangzhou do not even deserve mention. Today the refined quality of books engraved in Jinling [i.e., Nanjing], Xin’an [i.e., a town in Anhui province] and Wuxing [i.e., Zang Maoxun’s native place] are equal to Song-dynasty imprints.”121 In the late Ming, among publishers located in Nanjing as well as in other cities, publication of the new Southern-style chuanqi plays far outstripped that of zaju publications. According to some statistics, Nanjing publishers were responsible for producing as many as three hundred different plays.122 Among them, the well-known commercial firms of Fuchuntang, Shidetang, and Wenlinge123 specialized in the publication of Southern-style, multi-scene chuanqi plays illustrated in a “naïve and archaic style.”124 In Hangzhou, the firm of Rongyutang began publishing chuanqi plays after 1610.125 Partly on account of its anomalously long format, the Xixiang ji often formed part of chuanqi publication lists.126 Publishing houses in a variety of locations, including Nanjing and Hangzhou, had produced a smaller number of compendia of Yuan and Ming zaju as well as of art songs.127 Four of these extant zaju editions are conventionally termed “commercial editions,” since they were issued

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by commercial publishing houses. The earliest printed edition, known as Zaju xuan (Refined selections of zaju), has a preface dated 1598 by a certain Xijizi, about whom nothing is known except that he was introduced to He Liangjun, the zaju enthusiast, at a young age.128 The second such anthology is the Yangchun zou (Accompaniments of sunny springs) by Huang Zhengwei (fl. 1609), the owner of a publishing house, the Zunshengguan, with a 1609 preface by Huang.129 The third set of texts is the Gu mingjia edition, which was serially published between 1573 and 1620, possibly in Hangzhou by Chen Yujiao (1544– 1611).130 A fourth commercial text known by the modern name Yuan Ming zaju (Zaju from the Yuan and the Ming) was published between 1615 and 1622 in Nanjing by the Xuzhizhai publishing firm.131 A fifth text, the Gu zaju (Old zaju), also known as Guquzhai edition and published between 1615 and 1621, straddles the boundary between relatively crude commercial and sophisticated literati texts. The actual versions of plays are similar to these found in the Zaju xuan and Gu mingjia editions, but the production values are clearly superior. Wang Jide, the drama critic, is often credited with the compilation of this collection.132 Viewed against these other anthologies, Zang’s choice of title, One Hundred Yuan Plays, was unusual in a number of regards. First, it is true that in its singular dynastic focus, it followed in the footsteps of Li Kaixian’s Revised Plays. However, Zang deviated from the title tropes of the commercial editions published closer to Zang’s own time and place of residence. Such zaju anthologies did not necessarily contain only the plays of a single dynasty. Moreover, if they did, they did not care to define themselves through such an exclusive dynastic allegiance. The titles of Yuan zaju anthologies generally touted different themes. Gu zaju (Old zaju) emphasized the venerable antiquity of the texts; Gu mingjia zaju (The zaju of the masters of old) highlighted the antiquity and accomplishments of the authors contained therein; Zaju xuan (Refined selections of zaju) played on the title of one of the oldest and most authoritative literary anthologies, the Wenxuan (Refined selections of literature); and Yangchun zou (Accompaniments of sunny springs) alluded to the probity of ancient music. The other well-known single-dynasty drama collection, the Ming zaju collection Sheng Ming zaju (Zaju of the High Ming, 1629) clearly emulated Zang’s. As one preface writer to that collection put it, now that Shen Tai, the editor, “has gathered several tens of zaju from the resplendent Ming, they can be transmitted together with One Hundred Yuan Plays.”133 By contrast, intent on establishing a genealogic link between Yuan and Ming zaju, the playwright Meng Chengshun

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(1599–after 1684) who modeled his anthology of zaju on Zang Maoxun’s in other ways,134 chose to include plays from both the Yuan and the Ming period and entitled them collectively Gujin mingju hexuan (Joint collection of famous plays old and new, 1633). Zang’s title bespeaks a desire to bring literary excellence into alignment with a specific historical period. Such a maneuver was underscored by the claims articulated in the preface, which also ran somewhat counter to contemporary critical practice. Many writers still attributed the rise of art song and song-drama to both the Jin and Yuan periods.135 By contrast, in the opening lines of his first preface, Zang reinforced the implications of his programmatic title: “The world speaks of the lyrics (ci) of the Song dynasty and the arias (qu) of the Yuan, but the fact is that superb lyrics (ci) were already written in Tang times by figures such as Li Bai [701–62] and Li Yu [937–78], so why credit the Song dynasty? Arias, however, were entirely the creation of the Yuan dynasty.”136 Zang’s singular dynastic focus has become naturalized in modern times, especially in the wake of Wang Guowei’s declaration of Yuan zaju as the golden age of Chinese drama. However, in Zang’s own day, his singular dynastic concentration was idiosyncratic enough to call for an explanation, especially because Zang’s collection included, as he well knew, six plays written by early Ming playwrights.137 As noted earlier, the sixteenth-century archaist movement consolidated correlations between literary excellence and dynastic periods more firmly than had previously been the case. Therefore, critics were generally more inclined to think in dynastic terms, especially with regard to poetry. Such a dynastic focus was particularly evident in the ever-proliferating number of Tang poetry anthologies,138 of which Zang had edited and printed one earlier in his career.139 Moreover, starting with Li Kaixian, drama critics had compared the styles of individual Yuan writers to that of particular Tang poets.140 Zang’s strategic parallel between the “writers of the Tang” (Tangren) and the “writers of the Yuan” (Yuanren) bestowed a certain amount of prestige on the latter. At the same time, the singular dynastic focus on “writers of the Yuan” also foregrounded the linkage between official and nonofficial literary culture. To strengthen such an alignment, Zang’s edition expanded on the cultural fiction of one of his contemporaries and friends, Shen Def, a figure with a first-hand knowledge of and interest in court culture. Shen had posited an analogy between official validation and particular media that was to resonate with Zang Maoxun in more ways than one.

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As Shen put it in his famous notes, Unofficial Compilations of the Wanli Era (Wanli yehuobian, 1606 and 1619): “When the people of the Yuan had not yet annihilated the Southern Song, they used [zaju] to ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of the educated elite (shi). Whenever they suggested a topic, they asked people to respond to it in the form of arias. [The procedure] was similar to that of the study of painting in the Xuanhe period of the Song. . . . Therefore, Song painting and Yuan arias are without equal.”141 In this fashion, Shen attributed the excellence of Song painting and Yuan arias to their incorporation into an official system of standardized evaluation. If such a state of affairs had been a hypothetical outcome for Li Kaixian’s curriculum reform, Shen presented it as a fait accompli. Zang incorporated both of these genres—Song painting and Yuan arias—in the creation of the anthology that propelled his name from momentary scandal and relative obscurity into the literary limelight. As I will show in detail in the next section, Zang did so precisely because those genres could, with a dash of imaginative flourish, be construed to connote courtly approbation. Zang’s manipulation of courtly sanction is most notable in the presentation of the two prefaces and of the pictures, which, together with the supplementary critical materials, preceded the body of his famous anthology, thus framing the experience of the plays themselves. The Cachet of Manuscripts Zang’s preface to One Hundred Yuan Plays aligned his anthology with a private, court-sanctioned manuscript tradition, as was the case with at least one of his other publications:142 “My family had collected many rare zaju texts (zaju duo miben). After crossing the Yellow River, I borrowed two hundred plays [in manuscript form] from Liu Tingbo’s [i.e., Liu Chengxi’s family], which were said to have been recorded (lu) [from texts] in the Imperial Theatrical Bureau (Yu xijian). They were quite different from the [printed] commercial editions that circulate nowadays. Therefore I collated and revised them. I selected the felicitous ones among them and numbering them, I turned them into ten fascicles [of five plays each].”143 As Sai-shing Yung has pointed out, Zang commonly labeled his publications “secret editions” (miben),144 a habit of which his contemporaries were also aware.145 Although Zang did not explicitly criticize commercial editions, the preface, nonetheless, implied that he gave preference to manuscript texts obtained

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through other channels. Without the impetus of that “difference,” the preface suggested that the anthology would not have come about. Zang’s correspondence, by contrast, sheds a different light on the issue of selection. What Zang did not reveal in his preface is why, according to a letter to a friend, he only chose twenty or so from the cache of two to three hundred texts he received from the Liu family in Hubei: “There were only twenty or so that were even slightly felicitous. The others were so coarse as not to be worth looking at. In fact, they were inferior to the well-crafted imprints circulating in the marketplace.”146 As Xu Shuofang’s tabulations of the sources for Zang’s collection show, it is likely that Zang incorporated plays from earlier commercial editions of zaju such as the Gu mingjia edition, to which he would have had ready access in Nanjing and other cities.147 However, the preface’s exclusive mention of “secret texts” and “records from the Palace Bureau” as the sole stated provenance of the texts in his anthology embedded the collection within familial and courtly channels of transmission. In both instances, select manuscript transmission of an earlier era was implicitly pitted against the current imprints of the marketplace.148 In the eyes of the readers, such privileged access to an otherwise irretrievable world of “different” manuscript texts might have been cemented by the ties of the Zang and Liu families to the court. In Zang Maoxun’s case, Zang’s wife’s grandfather had passed the jinshi examination in 1517 and had served in the Ministry of Rites before his execution in 1524.149 Zang’s father had passed the jinshi exam in 1553 and served at the Ministry of Public Works from 1555 to 1562.150 Similarly, a forebear of Liu Chengxi, a man by the name of Liu Tianhe, had passed the jinshi exams in 1508 and had served at court in the Ministry of War. Therefore, it would have been conceivable that both the Zang and the Liu family had obtained palace-derived zaju manuscripts.151 However, modern scholarship shows that Zang’s claim to textual “difference” on account of the “courtly” origin of his texts was a self-serving fiction. Sun Kaidi and others have demonstrated that all late Ming zaju texts, no matter whether they were commercial, literati, or manuscript editions, can be traced back to the texts that the Ming court began gathering early in the fifteenth century, thoroughly reworked, and then released in the sixteenth century.152 Among the late Ming texts, when multiple versions of the same play are available, all versions bear considerable resemblance to each other except for Zang Maoxun’s.153 Contrary to what his preface would want the reader to

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believe, this difference does not result from his access to “courtly manuscript texts,” but from his own editorial interventions.154 Yet, for all the emphasis on manuscripts, Zang clearly was interested in converting them into print. After all, if Zang had merely wanted to preserve “courtly records” of the past, he could have chosen to transcribe those manuscripts as manuscripts in the manner of Zhao Qimei (1563– 1624), a contemporary of Zang’s.155 The adopted son of a eunuch, Zhao served in various court capacities, most notably as a Vice Minister at the Court of Imperial Sacrifice, the same position that Li Kaixian had held at the end of his career. All his life, he had a passion for Yuan zaju, which inspired him to compile the largest extant compendium of such texts from a variety of sources. The so-called Palace editions (Neifu ben) comprise by far the largest number of the two-hundred-and-forty texts in his collection. A smaller number derives from two commercial editions, the Guming jia and Zaju xuan named earlier. In the fashion of manuscript culture, Zhao Qimei painstakingly copied manuscript texts of Yuan zaju, and for some sixteen plays, he transcribed palace-related performance instructions as well. In some instances, Zhao included the dates of his scribal efforts ranging from 1615 to 1617, in others, he made very minor changes to the texts.156 His compendium of texts did not have a name until it passed into the hands of a Qing bibliophile, Qian Zeng (1629–1701).157 The text as a whole was not published until 1938.158 While Zhao Qimei may have shared Zang’s passion for early song-drama, Zhao’s textual practices do not exhibit the systematic conceits Zang built around the publication of his zaju. Among these, none was more influential than the claim that Yuan zaju and the Yuan examinations were inextricably bound up with each other. The Examination Myth In the preface to the first installment (1615), Zang made the following hesitant observation: “Some say that filling in words [i.e., writing arias] was one of the ways in which the Yuan selected its officials. . . . I don’t arbitrate these matters.”159 Initially presented as a tentative stance,160 Zang’s prefatorial association of the court examination with the composition of songs culminated in an assertion of facts in the second preface (1616): Nowadays, Southern tunes flourish and circulate in the world. Everyone fancies themselves a writer (zuozhe) and does not know how removed

110 / theaters of desire they are from the authors of the Yuan. The Yuan selected its officials by means of arias. They established twelve sections and the likes of Guan Hanqing strove to display their skills. They went so far as to personally step into the performance space (paichang) and put powder and ink on their faces (fufen). They did not refuse just because they occasionally assumed the role of a common entertainer. Perhaps they did this in the spirit of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove of the Western Jin dynasty who entrusted themselves to wine to indulge themselves (zifang). I do not dare to make a pronouncement on the matter.161

In its meretricious amalgamation of passages from court-related texts such as the above-mentioned Unofficial Compilations and Zhu Quan’s Formulary,162 Zang affected the stance of a neutral party. Such neutrality is surprising given that, as a Hanlin scholar, Zang had been involved in the compilation of a historical work on the Yuan, the Yuanshi jishi benmo (Recorded events pertaining to Yuan history, chronologically arranged). In the preface to that work, Zang noted that various Yuan examination practices, including the adoption of Zhu Xi’s annotations, were retained in the Ming. Nowhere in that preface did he allude to drama-based examinations.163 Given Zang’s knowledge of Yuan history, it is even more amazing that, thirty years later, he fashioned, however hesitantly, anecdotal fragments into a suggestive fable. Zang may have consciously chosen to use his credibility as an erstwhile scholar at the Imperial Academy to perpetrate a willful joke on his contemporaries. If such concerted efforts were indeed meant to purposefully deceive, he succeeded beautifully. Zang’s prefatorial affectation of modesty did not stop subsequent generations from believing his artfully contrived fable about drama and dramatic performance as an imperially sanctioned genre. Although some other aspects of Zang’s zaju collection initially met with skepticism among his contemporaries,164 the spurious claim was widely echoed through the Ming and the Qing dynasties. In one of the prefaces to Zaju from the High Ming, one writer, Cheng Yuwen, invoked performance-based examinations to explain the accomplishments of Northern arias.165 In his successor zaju anthology, Meng Chengshun similarly attributed the excellence of Yuan arias to the then-current examination practices.166 Wu Weiye (1609–72), the influential poet and dramatist, would also echo Zang in the preface to another important late Ming/early Qing collection of Yuan arias, The Expanded and Corrected Formulary of Northern Songs (Beici guangzheng pu).167 The late eighteenth-century editors associated with the imperially sponsored Four Treasuries project would expose this story for the

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baseless fiction that it was,168 but other Qing men of letters, insofar as they dealt with Yuan drama at all, continued to accept Zang’s version of events. Clearly, Zang’s fantastic genealogy had touched a nerve, bestowing a courtly sheen of hallowed antiquity on what was a contemporary literati obsession. The Pictorial Program The pictorial elements in Zang’s edition also reinforced Zang’s postulated proximity of court and literati culture. In light of the ambivalence of late Ming literati about figurative representations,169 the presence of pictures in privately printed texts cannot be taken for granted. Some earlier and contemporary editions of zaju had also featured illustrations, but few editions manipulated pictures with such explicit intent. The high-minded Yangchun zou edition, for instance, did not include any illustrations, an absence that is in keeping with that edition’s agenda of a politically oriented didacticism.170 The Zaju xuan was similarly void of pictures. The fragmentary Yuan Ming zaju edition contained a single double-leaf illustration of the first play in the figureoriented, stage-like illustrations typical of Nanjing publishers.171 The Gu mingjia edition incorporated a single one-page picture of a private performance, which preceded a Ming playlet entitled “Spring Outing of the Emperor and his Consort” (Di fei chunyou).172 Only the Gu zaju attributed to the literatus Wang Jide interspersed finely executed, Anhui-style illustrations throughout the twenty plays.173 By contrast, Zang’s edition represents a pictorial extravaganza, in which sheer numbers, the strategic placement, and spurious but calculated attributions all conspired to create a visual counterpart to Zang’s examination myth. Zang commissioned the carving of twohundred-and-twenty-four images, some of which were executed by members of the highly regarded carving family of the Huangs.174 As Yao Dajuin and others have noted, when literati began to pay attention to the pictorial component of their publications, they commonly grouped pictures as a collective initial unit in imitation of a painting album.175 Zang may well have been at the cusp of this development, together with Wang Jide, whose edition of the Xixiang ji (1614) featured a similar arrangement.176 In one regard, Zang’s pictorial program exceeded that of his contemporaries, revealing most pointedly, I believe, why Zang went to such lengths to have these illustrations produced. On the majority of the pictures, an inscription notes that that particular picture was done

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in imitation of a certain painter (fang [painter’s name] bi), resulting in attributions to over eighty different painters.177 As Scarlett Jang has pointed out, Zang’s pictures bear little resemblance to the painters’ actual style.178 Although Jang implies that such a discrepancy created room for visual games among a group of connoisseurs, such obvious violation of attributive norms suggests that the persuasive thrust of these pictures was directed elsewhere, especially since Zang’s pictorial agenda does not conform to the issues most fervently debated among late Ming art critics. Embroiled in debates surrounding the beginnings of art history,179 late Ming art critics were split over whether to favor Song or Yuan paintings. Moreover, they were intent on establishing genealogies based on a scholar–amateur ideal (lijia, wenren hua) that excluded professional and academy painters (hangjia). While these categories came under considerable pressure in the real world of late Ming commercialism, they, nonetheless, were influential in shaping elite perceptions of the field of painting. Most notably, Dong Qichang (1550–1616), the leading theorist of his time, created a powerful dichotomy between an esteemed Southern school of literati painters and a devalued Northern school of professionals.180 Zang’s fake attributions cut across these art historical hierarchies. The vast majority of the painters named in the inscriptions were active in the Song, which may well derive from Shen Defu’s intimation that painting was involved in the selection of Song-dynasty officials. Interestingly, Zang did not distinguish between literati and court painters. No matter whether the painters were scholar-official amateurs or professional court painters, as long as they had received some form of courtly approbation, they were included. The significant contingent of Yuan painters also included both court and literati painters.181 Thus, the theme of court sanction, so eloquently raised in the preface, was amplified in the pictorial section. Zang’s expert manipulation of courtly conventions, no matter how spurious, may also have struck another less exalted note. As other scholars have suggested, Zang’s edition may have, consciously or not, appealed to commercial tastes.182 For all the ostensible emphasis on manuscripts, Zang’s rhetoric capitalized on the possibility of print to cater to an audience that was interested, if only pruriently so, in court matters. In contrast to the modest ambitions of other zaju imprints and Zhao Qimei’s massive, but private manuscript compilation, Zang’s transposition of the medium of manuscript onto the more public medium of print exploited the cachet of the court in a fashion not

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entirely dissimilar from the proliferation of published images of emperors,183 the publication of anecdotal material about court life, and the outpouring of erotic novels about the scandalous exploits of imperial figures.184 Yet, nothing in Zang’s own overt rhetoric betrays any awareness that his imaginative recreation of an earlier period might have commercial appeal. In fact, virtually nothing in his edition points to overt recreation at all. Once again, however, the preface and the correspondence present a different picture of Zang’s role in this process. In a letter to a friend, Zang openly admitted to the intuitive nature of many of his changes: “Since I am getting more enfeebled every day, I playfully took all of these zaju and revised them. Those that did not accord with the [presumed style of the] writer (zuozhe), I revised according to my own intuition. I would say that I have actually captured something of the profound understanding of the people of the Yuan.”185 By contrast, at the end of the second preface, he downplayed any personal involvement, although of course the very denial may adumbrate the possibility of the action denied: “If someone said that I had unjustifiably put my brush (bixiao) to these texts in order to count myself among the accomplished scholar-officials of the people of the Yuan (Yuanren gongchen)—how would I dare do that.”186 Thus, Zang’s modality of impersonation is in many ways diametrically opposed to that of Li Kaixian. Rather than assuming the role of an examination official-cum-imperial compiler, Zang projected himself as a largely invisible “subject-impresario.” To be sure, in a highly unusual gesture, he boldly signed “authored (zhuan) by Zang Maoxun” prior to the body of the calligraphically stylized preface.187 Customarily, prefaces were signed at the end and the word “authored” was generally reserved for the authoring of a major work such as the zaju themselves. Since the preface preceded all other materials, such a verbal gesture took on increased significance. Furthermore, in at least one version, the table of contents did not list the authors of the plays. Only in the body of Zang’s edition did he concede the term “author” (zhuan) to the Yuan playwrights, while coyly assigning himself the subsidiary role of “collator” (jiao).188 Yet, in contrast to his later editions of Ming drama,189 Zang did not incorporate interlinear, page-top, act-opening, or sceneclosing commentary that might personalize the text. Since Zang’s “collation” leaves no visible traces, to him, the simulation of an “authentic text” was more important than to inscribe legible signs of discriminating readership. Accordingly, rather than openly acting as a self-appointed official producing “corrected songs” for

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popular dissemination or “expanded curricula” for aspiring erudites, Zang quietly orchestrated “Yuan drama” as an internalized transaction between those exposed to the plays nowadays and the ones who composed them long ago on a courtly stage. In short, Zang hid all traces of editorial intervention with a view toward all the more authoritatively affirming the authenticity of his recreation of Yuan-dynasty imperial examination performances. A Readerly Simulation of Performance Xu Shuofang has noted that Zang declared the performability of drama an important aesthetic criterion for Yuan and Ming opera alike.190 Other scholars have noted that Zang’s Yuan anthology meant to present drama solely as a “reading” experience.191 A third group has tentatively suggested that Zang might be seeking to bridge reading and performance192 and it is this line of inquiry I want to elaborate here. Unlike Li Kaixian, Zang did not stress his own performative role, but that of the original authors and of the audience. Rather than opting for “performance” or for “reading” per se, Zang’s fiction of aria- and performance-based court examinations allowed him to create a textual embodiment that ingeniously blended “reading” and “performance.” It was in some sense a silent equivalent of another theatrical practice common in Zang’s circle,193 that of “pure singing” (qingchang), which involved the operatic rendition of songs without recourse to other theatrical means. Describing a complicated process of simultaneous mental identification and physical impersonation, Zang’s preface portrayed the twin acts of composition and impersonation during an imperial examination in the following fashion: “The professionals give themselves over to that which they impersonate. In all cases, they take their modeling of arias to the utmost. It is as though they project themselves there in person and virtually forget whether or not the actual event is happening. In this way, they can make people so happy they will stroke their beards, so enraged that they will wring their hands, so sad that they will suppress tears, so enviously admiring that their senses will be stirred. . . . If this were not the supreme form of songwriting, why then would the Yuan have picked the scholars under heaven by means of the twelve sections?”194 In the passage cited above, Zang envisioned a series of imaginary projections at the heart of performance reminiscent of fiction criticism stressing the illusory, yet profoundly emotive identification between author and character. Zang granted the audience the

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sensory and emotional responses typical of surmised and observed responses to live dramatic performance. Yet, the performance described is not actually a performer’s performance. Instead, the reader/viewer witnesses a writer projecting an imagined persona to the point of forgetting himself in the very act of writing drama and enacting such imagined projections during the examinations. Allusion to stage performance in times past notwithstanding, Zang exhorted the reader to recreate the plays as mental spectacles on an invisible courtly stage. Among the supplemental texts included in Zang’s edition, most stress prosodic competence. Furthermore, Zang appended tabulations of rhyme schemes at the end of every act of his zaju plays. Through this arrangement, a reader could, after “reading the act,” revisit it and “perform” it with the aid of prosodic pointers. In the event that the readers might be familiar with what little Yuan zaju music was still performed, they could recreate those songs in imitation of court performances. In the event that they had not heard any Yuan music, they could rehearse them internally or recite them as a form of poetry. Regardless of the exact scenario, Zang’s text would provide the tools for an “authentic” Yuan performance experience. Ignorance abetted such imaginary performance. By the time Zang compiled his anthology, Yuan zaju was rarely performed. Zang’s particular strategy of legitimation valued projective transport for both the writer and his audience above all else, making a purified, internalized form of participatory viewership available to a sophisticated audience. In contrast to Li Kaixian, who literally sought to improve popular performance through his performed and printed songs, Zang took performance out of the realm of performance and made it a readerly event. In this fashion, Zang’s edition creates performance as a textual feat that depends neither on an actual stage nor on real life, but is conceived as a mental spectacle simultaneously engaging author, reader, and text. Thanks to the relative scarcity of staged Yuan plays, the anthology presented itself as the sole and privileged medium through which Yuan plays could be performed. The purpose of such performative identification and internalization suggests itself through Zang’s choice and arrangement of actual plays. The Anatomy of Infatuation In her book-length study of Yuan zaju, Chung-wen Shih notes that love is a “dominant theme in Yüan drama.”195 Such a claim, however, is contingent upon what set of references to Yuan aria-related texts we

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consider. As noted in chapter 1, in Yuan-printed art songs, allusions to Yuan romances abound. By contrast, in the earliest extant set of thirty Yuan-printed zaju texts, the so-called Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (1915), only three plays have a romantic focus. As noted earlier, since these Yuan-printed texts can be traced back to Li Kaixian, the overall lack of romance may be a function of Li’s largely anti-romantic sensibilities. Interestingly, despite the romantic focus of late Ming collections, none of these three Yuan-printed plays, that is, neither Arranging a Love Match (Tiao fengyue), The Moon Pavilion (Baiyue ting), nor The Courtyard of Purple Clouds (Ziyun ting), made it into the late Ming textual repertoire. Among court-related Yuan zaju manuscripts preserved in Zhao Qimei’s compendium, stories such as The Story of the Eastern Wall (Dongqiang ji), a romantic comedy modeled on the famous Story of the Western Wing, are the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of Zhao’s manuscript selections echo the martial themes dominating the Ming court’s performance repertoire.196 A handful of domestic scenarios favor tales about righteous husbands, chaste wives, loyal courtesans, and filial offspring. For instance, as a glance at the extant plays attributed to the ostensibly most romantic of authors, Guan Hanqing, makes clear, Mourning Cunxiao (Ku Cunxiao), Mother Chen Educates Her Son (Chenmu jiaozi), and The Banquet of the Five Dukes (Wuhou yan) all feature women who persevere in their maternal, filial, and wifely virtues in the face of adversity. Interestingly, none of these straightforward morality plays were included in any other collections.197 However, from among the two to three hundred198 or possibly one thousand plays199 that were circulating in printed or manuscript form in the late Ming, late Ming editors did select romantic plots at significantly higher rates than their predecessors, even if late Ming printed anthologies differ among themselves in terms of the percentage and the types of romantic comedies. Of the twenty-some Yuan plays in the Zaju xuan, romantic comedies make up a fourth.200 Among the fortyfour Yuan plays in the Gu mingjia edition, almost half are romantic comedies.201 In compiling the Gu zaju, Wang Jide selected nineteen romantic comedies out of twenty.202 In One Hundred Yuan Plays explicitly romantic storylines constitute about a third of all plots; however, even in story lines that espoused a festive or heroic ethos, romantic elements came to play an important role, thus increasing the overall importance of romance as a theme.203 Moreover, as I will discuss momentarily, the positioning of romantic plays within the anthology amplifies their significance beyond their numbers.

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Zang’s ordering of the plays signals what type of romance was of most concern to him. For the opening play of the anthology, Zang selected Autumn in the Han Palace (Hangong qiu) by Ma Zhiyuan (ca. 1260–ca. 1325). Zang’s choice of Ma Zhiyuan echoed the judgments of the Ming prince, Zhu Quan, whose Formulary ranked Ma first among all Yuan playwrights.204 Significantly, Zang chose a play about an imperial figure, thereby replicating the format of anthologies that placed works connected with imperial figures first. One of the two zaju plays that survived the early Ming prohibition on the portrayal of imperial figures, Autumn featured a besotted emperor, who loses his favorite consort to a Northern steppe ruler through the machinations of an unscrupulous court painter, Mao Yanshou. As Kimberly Besio has pointed out, although based on the well-known legend of Wang Zhaojun, Autumn not only added the love story between the Han emperor Yuandi (r. 49–34 B.C.E.) and Wang Zhaojun to the plot, but made the emperor the focal point of the narrative thanks to his exclusive singing role.205 Playing on the theme of romantic excess, Zang’s initial play staged the theme of imperial male passion in conflict with the exigencies of the highest political office. Such male infatuation was echoed throughout the anthology. Zang published the anthology in fascicles of five plays. In fourteen out of twenty volumes, individual fascicles are headed by romances that most commonly play on the theme of excessive infatuation between superiors and subordinates such as emperors falling for particular consorts and scholars hopelessly beholden to courtesans. Moreover, in contrast to the Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays where romantic stories all feature female lead singers, many of Zang’s plays, especially in the first ten fascicles, focus on male roles. There, the opening plays of the first, second, fifth, and tenth fascicles all showcase male lead singers who are excessively fond of women in subordinate positions,206 a theme also echoed in the opening plays of the second and third fascicle with female lead singers.207 Zang’s choice of authors also bespeaks a concern with romantic infatuation. The preface singled out Guan Hanqing as the primary representative of Yuan “imperial examination performance.” As discussed in the first chapter, by Zang’s time, critical and editorial practices had consolidated Guan Hanqing’s reputation as an expert on romance. Indeed, in the anthology as a whole, Guan’s oeuvre, especially his romances, is better represented than that of any other writer.208 Two romantic plays are clustered among the first ten plays, an honor not accorded to any other playwright. In those plays, The Jade

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Mirror Stand (Yujingtai), the story of the deviously enamored, highly placed scholar-official Wen Jiao (288–329), and Xie Tianxiang (Xie Tianxiang), the story of the love-struck poet Liu Yong (987–1053), male infatuation is explored in descending social order. The initial play of the second fascicle, The Jade Mirror Stand, provides a variant on the themes so eloquently raised in Autumn. Wen Jiao schemes to marry a young woman of a good family against her will and has his machinations validated at a court-sponsored banquet.209 In Xie Tianxiang, Liu Yong, the romantic ci poet par excellence who was roundly condemned by cultural conservatives such as Lang Ying and highly commended by the zaju editor and playwright Meng Chengshun,210 was thoroughly enchanted with the eponymous courtesan Xie Tianxiang. Moved by her poetic talent and by Liu’s successful bid for examination honors, a scholar-official superior condones the unlikely union between Liu and Xie.211 Even though the zaju plots greatly embroidered upon historical fact, the presumed historicity of these plays, nevertheless, invited an imaginary rapport between the characters, the authors, the readers, and of course the editor. Zang’s actual political career had been derailed by his passionate affair with an entertainer. After the fact, Zang himself was to comment on the episode that “my obsessional nature was difficult to let go of (pixing nanchu).”212 In the late Ming, what Zang termed “obsessional nature” (pixing) was a general term for just about any extreme attachment to people, objects, or forms of connoisseurship,213 but it could also refer more specifically to the sexual interest of elite men in younger men.214 As Shen Defu pointed out in a comment about male homoeroticism (nanse), such relationships were exceedingly common, especially in Nanjing: “Accomplished and eminent elite males take young male lovers as slaves . . . . This practice has flourished in the Yangzi delta, even reaching the inner part of the country. Nowadays in the entertainment district in Nanjing, those who have a name for themselves in singing strive to gain as much of this kind of patronage as possible.”215 In his memoirs about the pleasure quarters of Nanjing, Yu Huai (1616–96) included the biographies of male entertainers in addition to those on female courtesans. In contrast to earlier works of this sort, such parallel treatment of men and women similarly positions them as object of male desire (se).216 The erotic fiction of the period often figured both men and women as sexual subordinates of elite men. The issue of who assumed the active and passive role was often more important than the gender of the person involved,217 a distinction subsequently reinforced by legal regulations.218

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Accordingly, Zang’s tales of infatuations between persons of different status could be read either literally as a romance between a man and a woman or as heterosexual metaphors for the status-bound homoeroticism commonly practiced in Zang’s circle. Since so many of his contemporaries shared Zang’s fondness for drama as well as for its female and male performers, such a redemptive tale was bound to resonate widely. In presenting the staging of such “performances” as a largely internalized affair, Zang was able to rarify the desire that in Li Kaixian’s view had merely been a coarse popular disposition. Despite all the editorial meddling with erotic detail,219 Zang created an important literary milestone that was not only meant to “sell,” but to “redeem” passion for elite males. Zang’s particular arrangement of the anthology attest to his desire to borrow the cachet of the court to vindicate romance not just as a viable, but as a valued form of expression. Removed from the bodily realm of life, such plays could simulate happy endings to excessive passions. Moreover, the imaginarily performed text could act as a substitute for the actual consummation of sentiment, thereby potentially furthering rather than undermining one’s official standing. In making the widely repeated and utterly spurious claim that the Yuan selected its officials through the writing and performing of plays such as these, Zang was able to reconcile an interest in the romantic world of entertainers with the approbation of the court. After all, unlike most of the erotic narratives and even some contemporary erotically oriented plays that were published pseudonymously,220 Zang proudly published the anthology under his own name. Conclusion After the demise of what Stephen Greenblatt has called the “total artist,” namely the incarnation of an autonomous author, and the “totalizing society,”221 that is, the actualization of a hierarchical monolith, scholars have sought new ways to explain the enduring appeal of certain literary texts. Greenblatt himself proposed that we turn to what he suggestively termed “social energy”: “The ‘life’ that literary works seem to possess long after both the death of the author and the death of the culture for which the author wrote is the historical consequence, however transformed and refashioned, of the social energy initially encoded in those work.”222 What I have suggested in this chapter is that we examine such possible encoding in the context of the first textualization of the plays of another dramatic tradition, which, though not as influential as Shakespeare’s, nevertheless, circulated far beyond the cultural context for which they were originally conceived.

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In order to explore what social energies might suffuse early Chinese song-drama, the chapter has examined the process of their publication, since texts are “the chief means we have of understanding and reengaging contexts.”223 If we accept Jerome McGann’s pronouncement that a text is not “an object but . . . an action,”224 it becomes imperative to reconstruct the social actors enacting those texts. Such an understanding of drama as “textual action” is even more appropriate for plays, since they often have a double life as text and performance.225 Even performance, however, need not be bound to a theatrical stage. Insofar as the Chinese elite competencies of action were articulated in a highly structured and yet very plastic empire of texts, the textual domain itself offered itself as a means to enact behavior “restored” from other social contexts. Among such contexts, the principal two arenas of elite action, the bureaucracy and the court, figured most prominently. Neither autonomously authorial nor parasitically plagiaristic, in the late Ming, such imagined action often took the form of “reproductive authorship.” As demonstrated in the chapter, Yuan drama was not nearly as peripheral to the literary field as some modern critics have made it out to be. Thanks to the systematic incorporation of Yuan zaju into the Ming court repertoire, the genre was no longer solely in the domain of commercial troupes, which had made an occasional appearance at the Yuan court. At the same time, Zhu Quan, Zhu Youdun, and other members of the Ming court expended further energies in conceptually and textually codifying early song-drama. Given that virtually all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literati with an interest in Yuan zaju had close ties with the Ming court at one point in their lives, they did not need to consider “Yuan zaju” a low-status genre. At the same time, most of these men lost their official position under less than honorable circumstances and pursued their dramatic interests only after their retirement. In light of the mismatch between career expectations and retirement reality, Yuan drama assumed a potent role in their explorations of alternatives to official literary culture. Li’s and Zang’s recreation of Yuan drama defies the idea of the sort of didacticism found in the writings of earlier Yuan and Ming literati figures.226 Although the present chapter in no way denies the didactic potential of their respective anthologies, it highlights the imaginative dimension of their editorial efforts. Rather than focusing on actual performances in front of live audiences, this chapter conceptualized the publication process as a form of imaginative role-playing. Li and Zang realized through drama publication what had been taken away from them in their public careers. In his Yuan aria publications, Li Kaixian

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appointed himself an examiner-cum-imperial compiler in a vain effort to broaden the cultural repertoire for official ends. Zang Maoxun, by contrast, vanished into the text, presenting himself as the invisible impresario of a golden age of aria-based imperial examinations. Both present differing models of “reproductive authorship.” Li’s literal pose as imperial compiler was not widely emulated, but his incipient philological attention offered a general role with which other editors, including Wang Jide discussed in the next chapter, would conduct further experiments. In some ways, Zang’s was the more successful impersonation, precisely because it did not show its guises in the willful fashion of Li Kaixian. Rather than claiming that he was or once had been a court-appointed compiler, Zang simulated a “courtly” approach through the particulars of his text. That Zang availed himself of the repertoire of commercial publishing to embody these “courtly ends” did not detract from the appeal of his textual and visual performance of “court culture.” On the contrary, his successful appropriation of the idiom set a new standard for other publications of its kind. All aspects of his text—the prefaces, the prefatorial materials, the visual accompaniments, the arrangement, and selection of the plays—leveraged courtly culture for all that it was worth: imagined sanction, literary skill, and broad, perhaps even commercial success. As such, Zang’s text reflects an increasing sophistication on the part of literati with regard to the possibilities of private publishing. In Zang’s case, a significant aspect of the power of his anthology lay in its vindication of elite male passion. Zang forms part of a changing discursive landscape, in which erotic desire was gradually rehabilitated as a natural impulse between the sixteenth and eighteenth century.227 The concerted impact of the literary embodiment of the rehabilitation of desire, however, did not make itself felt until the decade in which Zang published his One Hundred Yuan Plays. From about 1600 onward, commentaried imprints of Yuan and Ming plays and novels began to circulate under Li Zhi’s name, with the first datable specimens appearing in 1610.228 Similarly, the Ming zaju plays that aestheticized gender inversions and sexual transgressiveness did not reach a wide audience until the publication of Zaju of the High Ming (1629), an anthology that was modeled on Zang’s. Most fiction, erotic and otherwise, continued to be published under pseudonyms throughout the late Ming. Therefore, the genius of Zang’s edition lay in his ability to create a courtly myth which allowed him to publish tales about male, statusbound infatuation under his own name, thereby expanding the range of what constituted permissible literary representation for elite males.

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To be sure, the official bibliography of Ming-dynasty works compiled by court-appointed editors at the turn of the eighteenth century (1679–1735) mentioned Zang only as an editor of a collection of Tang poetry, ignoring his as well as everybody else’s vernacular compilations.229 However, on the open market and in elite libraries, Zang’s imaginative print-based recreation of an originally manuscriptbound, quasi-courtly idiom of desire eclipsed all other Yuan zaju editions. Furthermore, if Qing-dynasty monarchs remained skeptical about One Hundred Yuan Plays, as noted in the introductory chapter, European rulers enthusiastically supported the publication of Zang’s plays. Thus, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century, when the disciplinary, comparative, and international study of Chinese drama brought forgotten manuscript and print editions back into the purview of scholastic attention that Zang’s fiction could be appreciated for what it reveals about the intricate relationship between power, culture, and texts. In short, Zang’s contribution to actual Yuan historiography has long been consigned to oblivion, whereas his fantastic recreation of Yuan drama spawned continual readjustments of the place of print, performance and desire in the political, cultural and literary imagination in China and beyond. Unbeknownst to Zang Maoxun, the social energy he embedded in his text would outlive the institutions from which the energy was drawn. The next chapter will discuss two other reader– writers, Wang Jide and Jin Shengtan, who were less invested in the court and the bureaucracy, but no less keen on encoding social energies for new affective ends.

Chapter 3

Xixiang ji Editions, the Bookmarket, and the Discourse on Obscenity: Wang Jide (d. 1623), Jin Shengtan (1608–61), and the Creation of Uncommon Readers

Introduction In 1921, Guo Moruo (1892–1978), the writer, translator, and critic, was asked to write a preface for a newly edited, vernacular version of the Xixiang ji (The story of the Western wing) issued by a Shanghai publisher. Arguably, given the increasingly competitive world of the Shanghai bookmarket after 1912, the publisher’s request for the introductory remarks from one of the leading proponents of May Fourth iconoclasm might well have been designed as a clever sales ploy for that particular edition.1 Interestingly, however, despite Guo’s reputation as a firebrand, his observations about the Xixiang ji are colored by considerable ambivalence about its representation of eroticism. Unlike other early Chinese song-dramas, the Xixiang ji portrayed love not simply as a sublime state of mind, but as an erotic passion between two unmarried youngsters, a fact that both exhilarated and troubled Guo. After making an impassioned plea that the Xixiang ji embodied the epitome of a modern, natural, and revolutionary approach to male– female relations and was unjustly reputed to be purveying obscenities, Guo Moruo proceeded to speculate on the sexual life of the play’s author, Wang Shifu. Familiar with the newly translated language of Freud, Guo professed himself to be moved by what he surmised to be the author’s sexual proclivities: “When we carefully read the Xixiang ji, we can know that the author was exceedingly sensitive, in fact, one might say pathologically so . . . . In the sexual life of this person, I can

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sense an enormous lack. He is a person who has committed illicit acts. . . . Therefore I surmise that Wang Shifu must have suffered various restrictions and taunts, which forced him to become a pervert whose natural feelings were stunted. Therefore, he could not embark on a normal course of sexual development. He was mired in the bitter entanglements of carnal lust while yearning for pure love.”2 In this contradictory appraisal of the play’s revolutionary spirit and the author’s sexual pathology, Guo’s ambivalence replicated similarly conflicted attitudes of earlier generations of literati, most notably Wang Jide (d. 1623) and Jin Shengtan (1608–61), who had produced enduringly influential Xixiang ji versions. However, for these late Ming and post-Ming reader–writers of the Xixiang ji, common readers, rather than original authors such as Wang Shifu and Guan Hanqing, or reproductive authors such as themselves, represented the crux of the problem. Their misgivings about “obscenity” derived from the nearuniversal dissemination of the play among all strata of the population from the Yuan period on. From the late thirteenth century onward, the Xixiang ji appears to have been a household word among emperors, literati, and commoners alike. It was performed in both private and public venues in the Northern musical style. Even when Northern-style music went out of fashion in the course of the sixteenth century, the story was being adapted to practically every other performing genre, including Southern music drama.3 By the second half of the sixteenth century, the Xixiang ji had already been widely published in commercial and court-sponsored venues. From then on into the late seventeenth century, as literati began to take an interest in reproducing the play, dozens more editions of the Xixiang ji were issued, making it the most frequently printed play of the period. Yet, in the eyes of literati publishers, the very popularity of the Xixiang ji in performance and print venues called for rhetorical and material measures to position their texts carefully within the literary field. Two of the most influential Xixiang ji editions, Wang Jide’s late Ming luxury edition The Newly Collated and Annotated, Ancient Textbased Story of the Western Wing (Xin jiaozhu guben Xixiang ji, 1614) and Jin Shengtan’s post-Ming The Story of the Western Wing, the Sixth Book of Genius from the Flower-Dispersing Hall (Guanhuatang Diliu caizi shu Xixiang ji, ca. 1656), embody these dynamics in contrasting, but complementary fashion. Unlike Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun, neither Wang nor Jin defined their editorial activities primarily against official culture. In Wang’s case, his interest in the demimonde supplied

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the conceptual frame and social context for much of his work. For Jin, Buddhist clergy and practitioners as well as his own family members constituted his reading circle. The editions were privately published by friends of theirs,4 but widely emulated after their initial appearance.5 Both Wang and Jin conceived of the caizi as the ideal reader, even if their respective implied communities differ in their dispositions. As in Li’s and Zang’s cases, Wang and Jin resorted to imaginative selfprojections to straddle the imagined world of their desired uncommon reader and the spectral world of the common consumer. Moreover, both men deployed deliberately archaizing rhetorical measures designed to remove the Xixiang ji from the vagaries of commercialism that were allegedly reducing it to the status of an “obscene text,” although WangJide at the very least was involved with high-end publishing for financial gain.6 For all their monetary or conceptual dependence on the bookmarket, their professed horror about the profit-driven reproduction of texts created a form of symbolic capital that ingeniously cloaked their own potential accumulation of financial gain.7 Ironically, in choosing one of the commercially most viable imprints of their day, men like Wang Jide and Jin Shengtan abetted the very forces their rhetoric was ostensibly meant to combat. Yet, thanks to their reproduction of the Xixiang ji, for a time, obscenity could be redefined as a function of proper and improper channels of circulation rather than as a quality inherent in a writer, a musical piece, or a text. Carefully positioning themselves against presumed attestatory elite readings and against indiscriminate public consumption, Wang and Jin developed a variety of reproductive strategies to carve out an intermediate literary space between the propagation of the Confucian canon and the proliferation of erotica. Situated between an ossified classicism and commercial opportunism, these reader–writers seized upon the ruptures of the literary field, selfconsciously proclaiming that their aesthetic was “neither elegant nor vulgar” (buya busu). In the name of curtailing readership, they may well have expanded the audience for such texts, especially among the literati, the socio-literary group that set the greatest store by the transformative powers of reading. Imprints of the Xixiang ji, 1300–1680 Given the sheer number of Xixiang ji imprints, scholars have attempted to categorize the various types of editions. Jiang Xingyu, Denda Akira, and Tan Fan have organized the several dozen editions around two

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principal axes of differentiation, that is, reading texts and performance texts.8 It is certainly true that the prospect and practice of public, private, and individual performances of the play formed an important backdrop to which printed texts more or less overtly addressed themselves.9 However, given my interest in the literati discourse on reading and writing and its relationship to social stratification, my discussion will focus on interaction between different strands of print versions. Accordingly, I will distinguish between “commercial,” “literati,” and “quasi-literati” editions, even though, as we shall see, such distinctions are not only provisional, but due to the amount of cross-borrowing and cross-referencing among all manner of editions, the material reality of these designations changes over time. Commercial editions are the oldest known Xixiang ji publications. Commercial editions borrow heavily from each other, even if they ostensibly claim to differ from their competitors. When literati editions began to appear, they also borrowed from each other. Such editions often explicitly defined themselves against “commercial editions” (fangke, fangben), although some literati published with a view toward selling their edition. Nothing illustrates the flux of editorial practices more vividly than the rise of “quasi-literati” editions, which capitalized on the cachet of literati rhetoric for commercial ends. Thus, each edition, no matter its editorial provenance or implied target audience, ranges across a repertoire of texts, pictures, and presentation styles, creating its own variant of a “text–system.”10 The Xixiang ji appears to have been a staple of commercial publishing long before the printing boom of drama-related texts during the Wanli period (1573–1619). No editions of the play survive from the Yuan and the early Ming era, but circumstantial evidence suggests that they once existed. For instance, Zhou Deqing’s Rhymes of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan yinyun, 1324) contains short excerpts from the Xixiang ji.11 In Yuan art songs, references to the Xixiang ji are ubiquitous. It is conceivable that such songs point to the performed versions of the play, but since some of the other plays named in art songs figure among the Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays,12 it is arguable that the allusion to the Xixiang ji may also have referred to a printed text. As noted previously, the Xixiang ji was also included in the early Ming imperial encyclopedia The Great Canon of the Yongle Era (Yongle dadian, 1403–08). Although no longer extant, that manuscript version may have derived from performances at court, but it is also possible that it was based on other earlier written, perhaps even printed, texts. A fragmentary Xixiang ji of uncertain date but typographically similar to early

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fifteenth-century imprints points to the existence of commercial edition then.13 If our evidence for the Yuan and the early Ming is largely conjectural, by the late fifteenth century, the supporting evidence is incontrovertible. In 1498, eight decades before literati editions appeared and over a century before quasi-literati ones were printed, the Yue family of Beijing produced a commercial edition of high quality. This so-called Hongzhi edition forms the basis for the leading English-language translation of the Xixiang ji, The Moon and the Zither.14 The publisher claimed that his version surpassed the many shoddy editions of the Xixiang ji then circulating in print.15 Even though the handscroll-like illustration across the top of each page was to remain an isolated example of a certain pictorial style, the Hongzhi edition defined what would become recurring features of subsequent commercial editions: the inclusion of certain prefatorial materials, the presence of in-text illustrations, annotations for sounds, and glosses for simple literary allusions. All in all, the edition appears to be designed for a reasonably well-to-do and itinerant audience of the sort described in the publisher’s colophon: “Now the songs and the pictures match. So people lodged in inns or traveling in boats—whether they be roaming for pleasure or sitting down in some distant place—can get a copy of this text, look it over, sing it correctly from beginning to end and thereby refresh their hearts.”16 By the mid-sixteenth century, the play was further disseminated through court-related, commercial, and literati editions. The arias of the Xixiang ji were printed at least twice in two different art song and drama miscellanies, that is, Songs of Harmonious Resplendence (Yongxi yuefu, 1540),17 the anthology in which Guan Hanqing’s “On Not Succumbing” had first appeared, and Brocade Sachet of Romance (Fengyue jinnang, 1553).18 Around the same time, Li Kaixian (1502–68) provided a tantalizing glimpse of how commercial publishers cleverly advertised their Xixiang ji imprints.19 Such publishers may have catered, in addition to other target audiences, to an emergent female readership,20 among whom the play was popular, according to Li.21 Li also suggested that broadly educated scholar-officials ought to know the play,22 a hope that proved increasingly realized. Other mid-century literati are also said to have compiled and printed appreciative comments on the Xixiang ji, none of which, however, are extant.23 By the Wanli period, we start to witness a rapid increase in literati, quasi-literati, and commercial imprints of the Xixiang ji. Extant literati editions date to 1580 and on. They were produced by more or less

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well-known individuals, most notably Xu Shifan (1580), Wang Jide (1614), He Bi (1616), Ling Mengchu (1622), and eventually Jin Shengtan (ca. 1656). With the exception of Jin Shengtan, who despite his obvious debts does not refer to any previous editions, such “literati” credentials can partly be established through the high degree of explicit self-referentiality among such editions.24 Moreover, in keeping with the individualizing tendencies inherent in “reproductive authorship,” these texts exhibit a great degree of control over editorial choices and production values. Not only are the editorial values often programmatically disclosed in meticulous guidelines (fanli), but the production quality shows internal consistency—the table of contents and the actual contents match, for example—as well as visual uniformity—carving style and quality, for instance, remain identical throughout. Commercial editions designate titles that were produced by professional publishing houses (fangben) often in emulation of the Hongzhi edition. Among commercial Wanli imprints, a now lost 1582 edition stands out. Not only did it become the basis for subsequent commercial and quasi-literati editions, but it also supplied Li Zhi (1527–1602) with the opening quote for his most famous literary essay, the “Explanation of the Child’s Heart” (Tongxin shuo): “The Longdong shannong edition of the Xixiang ji contains the following words by the male mo role [who announces and summarizes the play]: ‘For those in the know it is acceptable not to call me one who still has the heart of a child.’ ” 25 Given Li Zhi’s endorsement of the Xixiang ji as a form of “authentic” literature in that as well as other essays,26 it is perhaps not surprising that the subsequent commercial Xuzhizhai edition (1598) would include Li’s remarks about the play from his prose text A Book for Burning (Fenshu, 1590). This two-way traffic across published commercial and literati works would eventually result in a new phenomenon, what I call the “quasi-literati edition.” Around 1610, publishers began to produce quasi-literati editions, that is, commercial editions spuriously attributed to famous individuals, most notably Li Zhi, Wang Shizhen (1526–90), Xu Wei (1521–93),27 Chen Jiru (1558–1639),28 Tang Xianzu (1550–1616),29 and Wei Wanchu (fl. 1596).30 Beginning with Li Zhi, such literati were what Maram Epstein has termed “cross-over figures,”31 that is, men who combined gentry status with an interest in new philosophical trends and in literary experimentation. In 1610, Qifengguan, a publishing outfit run by a certain Cao Yidu, produced a high quality quasi-literati Xixiang ji. Based in large measure on the Xuzhizhai edition, the Qifengguan created eyebrow commentary for both Li Zhi and Wang

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Shizhen, scrupulously justifying the provenance of those materials.32 In 1610, the commercial publishing house Rongyutang in Hangzhou also began to issue quasi-literati plays and novels in Li Zhuowu’s (i.e., Li Zhi) name.33 The Rongyutang edition of the Xixiang ji edition influenced many subsequent quasi-literati editions, even those issued under other literati’s names.34 Literati editions of the Xixiang ji defined themselves by the quality of and nature of the explanations offered. At first, they simply changed the arrangement of pre-existing commercial explanatory materials. For instance, in the Hongzhi edition, all glosses, both semantic and phonetic, were incorporated into the body of the text, suggesting that the reader may be lost without them. By contrast, the 1580 Xu Shifan edition retained these glosses, but grouped them together under two separate headings and appended them to the play.35 Being a quasiliterati edition, the 1610 Qifengguan text placed both the semantic and phonetic glosses at the end of each act.36 Literati editions were often very deliberate in their choice of supplementary materials. They deliberately excised certain supplementary materials associated with commercial editions, either because they deemed them vulgar or because their irreverent and mocking tone might have defeated the self-consciously serious portrayal of the two main protagonists. Li Kaixian’s humorous spoof on Cui Yingying and Li Wa may have owed its entry into the Xixiang ji publishing stream to Xu Shifan’s literati edition,37 but thereafter, it was mostly commercial editions that featured Li’s farce. The Qifengguan edition summarily declared such supplementary materials to be “village scholarship” (cunxue), a common put-down for inferior forms of learning among literati editors. Expanding on a Qifengguan’s section on “evidential approaches” (kao) to authorship, roles types, and related issues, Wang Jide’s literati edition took inspiration from a quasi-literati text. Wang brought the investigative tradition to new heights by appending a whole chapter of Xixiang ji-related materials.38 Modeled on Wang Jide’s text, subsequent editions similarly presented a more or less exhaustive apparatus of literati commentary from the Tang through the Ming.39 In some cases, reacting against the surfeit of materials and annotations, literati chose to include virtually nothing in order to set their Xixiang ji apart from overly crowded “vulgar” and “commercial” editions. Emulating the practices of Song and Yuan commentators who produced “blank editions” (baiwen) of the classics,40 an edition like He Bi’s (fl. 1607–16) Northern Xixiang ji (Bei Xixiang ji, 1616) aspired to produce a similarly clean text for a play that He considered “a marvelous

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text for the members of gentry (shi).”41 In an attempt to distinguish his edition from “market imprints” (shike), He deleted performance notation, punctuation, marginal commentary, sound glosses, and poetic supplementary materials all with a view toward allowing discriminating readers “to have their own insights” (zi you fayan).42 However, for all the anti-commercial rhetoric, at least two features of He’s edition, including editorial guidelines and illustrations, originally derived from commercial editions. A feature still commonly found in modern Chinese texts, the first editorial guidelines (fanli) for a Xixiang ji stemmed from a commercial edition. Working for the commercial publisher Xuzhizhai, one of the Nanjing firms that produced numerous drama editions,43 Chen Bangtai, a Nanjing literary figure, edited The Collated Northern Western Wing (Chongjiao Bei Xixiang ji, 1598). He explained his editorial principles in detailed guidelines (fanli).44 Subsequent quasi-literati editions, including the Qifengguan version, as well as literati editions such as those issued by Wang Jide, He Bi, and Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), commonly included such editorial guidelines, which varied greatly in number, detail, and theme. Jin Shengtan’s “How to Read” section of over eighty short items can be considered a spoof on these earlier, often pedantic, if informative, accounts of editorial housekeeping. Literati editions also adopted the practice of accompanying text with illustrations from the commercial editions. The earliest extant literati edition, the Xu Shifan edition dating to 1580, does not include any illustrations. Commercial editions from that period do, often interspersing pictures with texts, a practice also retained by later commercial editions.45 The first quasi-literati editions, the Qifengguan edition (1610) and the Rongyutang edition (1610), set a new standard for illustrations, partly by putting the pictures up front in the manner of a painting album. With a certain whimsical flair, the Qifengguan depicts highly decorated and sophisticated interiors in the Anhui style with the size of the figures significantly reduced compared to earlier Nanjing drama-related publications.46 By contrast, the Rongyutang adopted the visual vocabulary of landscape painting, initiating a trend to divorce narrative plot from visual content. Thereafter, literati and pseudoliterati editions routinely featured pictures, albeit often seeking to distinguish their illustrations by placement, subject matter, calligraphic inscriptions, or style. The 1630s and early 1640s witnessed a series of innovative literati and quasi-literati editions focusing on “authenticity” and “illusion.” Given the glut of quasi-literati editions, one of the overriding

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concerns of such new editions was to present themselves as an “authentic texts” (zhenben) in contrast to the many fake texts circulating at the time.47 At the same time, some literati Xixiang ji editions made the complex relationship between “reality” and “illusion” their main concern. A member of one of the most renowned publishing families in Jiangnan, Min Qiji (1580–after 1661) issued three versions of Xixiang ji-related materials, all of which evince a high degree of fascination with illusionistic themes and techniques.48 The most remarkable of these is a set of twenty-one prints, which Wu Hong has characterized as “the most amazing metapictures from traditional China.”49 These multicolor prints use scenes from the play as real and imagined decoration on other media such as porcelain, stationery, astronomical chart, lantern, bronze vessel, screen, folding fan, and puppet show among others.50 It would appear that in addition to a philosophical interest in illusion,51 the very material infrastructure—that is, the seemingly endless proliferation of different versions of Xixiang ji texts and of related illustrations in books, on porcelain and on other artifacts52—also contributed to the exuberant probing of the boundaries between the real and the representational. In the immediate aftermath of the Ming/Qing transition in 1644, there was a lull in the production of new Xixiang ji editions. Yet, the cultural space created by late Ming practices did not disappear overnight, especially among literati who had come of age before the fall of the Ming. During the post-Ming moment (1644–83), some members of the elite discourse community, including Jin Shengtan and Mao Qiling, produced further literati editions.53 Paradoxically perhaps, at the very moment when the imperial state sought to assert greater control over cultural production and to facilitate the revival of more orthodox strands of Neo-Confucianism, Jin Shengtan created what would become the most influential version of the Xixiang ji. Despite Jin’s claim for the singularity of his edition,54 his version would have been inconceivable without the upward literary mobility that preceding literati editions had engineered for the play. If the material configurations of Xixiang ji editions changed significantly over time, the generic definition of the text and its audience also shifted. Although the traffic between all manner of editions always threatened to mire the Xixiang ji in a world of shoddy editions read and performed by “village schoolmasters” and “vulgar actors,” Ming and post-Ming literati expended considerable intellectual effort to define what was a generically ambiguous form with a view toward incorporating it into a generically stratified literary canon. In this

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process, evolving definitions of “licentiousness” (yin) demarcated the contested terrain where the role of writing and reading in the formation of socio-literary identities was being continuously renegotiated. Bibliography, Licentiousness, and Other Such Categorical Quandaries Given the intensely genre-oriented structure of the Chinese literary field, the issue of classification was always a pressing matter. Bibliographic categorization constituted a major disciplinary regime. Ever since their introduction in the seventh century, the four bibliographic categories known as “the four compartments” (sibu) had played an important role in imposing a conceptual hierarchy on textual output. Confucian classics (jing), histories (shi), miscellaneous philosophers (zi), and belles-lettres (ji), represented a hierarchy of prestige based on the ethical purport of each category and the texts included therein. Book catalogues contained in the official histories reflected both the holdings of the imperial library as well as other works, which the court deemed representative in terms of a previous dynasty’s textual works. Moreover, within the bibliographic field, genre consciousness was very pronounced, embodied both through critical and anthologizing practices. Contrary to what we may assume based on modern views derived from Stanilas Julien, Sasagawa Rinpu, or Wang Guowei, it was not immediately obvious to what category a play like the Xixiang ji would belong. Was it a form of poetry? Song? Drama? A narrative? A literary text comparable to an examination essay? A Confucian classic? Opinion was by no means unanimous. Cheng Juyuan compared the Xixiang ji to the first song in the Book of Odes.55 Ling Mengchu boldly asserted that the Xixiang ji was not a staged song-drama (xiqu) at all, but a refined piece of literature (wenzhang).56 As we shall see, Jin Shengtan claimed that it was a classic comparable to philosophical texts, historical narrative, and various poetic genres. Such generic ambiguity was both an asset and a liability. On the one hand, the Xixiang ji signaled a greater flexibility for a certain group of readers—perspicacious literati—to exercise literary judgment over a newly emergent genre. On the other hand, such categorical open-endedness was a double-edged blessing. It also meant that other social groups—orthodox Confucians or common readers—could adjudicate such texts on moral or pragmatic grounds. It is in this context of anticipated readings that we observe the surfacing of a discourse of “obscenity” (yin). The Chinese term

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“licentiousness” or “obscenity” (yin) had long been associated with excess, especially in the domain of music. In the Warring States Period, two states, Zheng and Wei, had invented half tones, which offended classical ritual musical sensibilities. Theirs was considered the “excessive” (yin) music of “doomed states” (wangguo).57 Paradoxically, however, Confucius had enshrined their songs in what was to become the canonical Book of Odes. As Song-dynasty controversies surrounding the Book of Odes show, when the music was long forgotten, the legitimacy of those songs became a matter of intense debate. Describing the texts of the songs rather than their music as “licentious poetry” (yinshi), Zhu Xi (1130–1200) explicitly defined “licentiousness” in sexual terms. Moreover, he located the origins of “sexual excess” in the authors, preserving Confucius’s pedigree as a judicious editor inclined toward propagating self-cultivation,58 even if one of Zhu’s own disciples later on wanted to excise some of the offending poems.59 Since Zhu Xi’s explication of the Book of Odes formed part of the standard commentary for the civil service examinations after 1313, his sexualized understanding of yin would become part of every student’s understanding of the classic. It would seem that elite publishing of songs foregrounded the issue of “licentiousness” in ways that other sources did not. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century elite sources, the key distinction appears to be one between “performance” or “music” and “text.” Whereas the former could be construed as being inherently “licentious,” the latter could be redeemed by the very fact of its textuality thanks to the powerful precedent of the Book of Odes. In his privately published collection of songs, Yuefu Songs from the Sincerity Studio (Chengzhai yuefu, 1434) the Ming prince Zhu Youdun (1379–1449) had expressed misgivings over printing his songs. When pressed about whether or not songs represented the music of Zheng and Wei, he countered that it was only plays such as the Xixiang ji and the plays based on the Shuihu story that unjustly gave songs a bad name. In the end, he justified the publication of his songs by selectively invoking the famous anecdote about Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), who had claimed that his own erotic songs were “nothing but empty words.”60 In Li Kaixian’s musings on his own revisions of popular songs, he had also referred to the controversy surrounding Zheng and Wei. He decided that it was the music rather than the poems that had been considered objectionable. In an attempt to ameliorate such performancerelated obscenity, Li Kaixian believed that there was no harm in supplying revised textual materials for popular consumption.61 When it

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came to the Xixiang ji, however, Li Kaixian once again took issue with the opinions of the Ming court establishment. As is obvious from his literal interpretation of the alternate title under which the Xixiang ji circulated, Spring and Autumn Annals of Cui (Cuishi chunqiu), Li did not favor an allegorical interpretation of the play in the manner of the narrative techniques of indirection for which Confucius’s Spring and Autumn Annals were known.62 Yet, in line with his objections against the mid-Ming examination curriculum, he considered knowledge of the Xixiang ji an attribute of genuine rather than simply statesanctioned elite learning. In light of these elite discussions, it is perhaps not surprising that the first extant literati edition of the Xixiang ji, the so-called Xu Shifan edition (preface dated 1580), should raise the issue of licentiousness.63 To be sure, the Xixiang ji offered some advantages over other texts. Since it had been in the public realm for centuries, the threshold for reproducing the text was lower than that of producing a new text without any pedigree such as, say for example, the Jin Ping Mei.64 Furthermore, the men reputed to have been involved with one version or another of the Xixiang ji, be that Yuan Zhen, Master Dong, Guan Hanqing, or Wang Shifu, had by the late Ming period been recuperated as shi literati, thus providing an authorizing precedent for aspiring reader–writers. Yet, Xu Fengji, the editor, framed “licentiousness” as an attestatory problem as he traced four different textual versions of the Xixiang ji story from Yuan Zhen to Guan Hanqing, He contrasted Yuan Zhen’s “licentious intent” (yinzhi) in writing “Encountering the Transcendent” with Guan Hanqing’s “highminded purity” (jiegao) in writing at least the final of the five books of the play. In his mind, the extraordinary combination of these two contrasting elements contributed to the transmission of what he called the “biographies of Zhang and Cui” and justified the printing of the Xixiang ji.65 In the other preface to that same edition, Cheng Juyuan (fl. 1580) addressed his remarks to the ubiquitous performance of the Xixiang ji. He alluded to anonymous critics who might take issue with the Xixiang ji on account of its reputedly harmful impact on audiences: “Today there are those who object to the Xixiang ji on the grounds that it incites licentiousness and induces people to indulge in lust (daoyin zongyu).”66 Cheng proceeded to defend the Xixiang ji by analogy to the songs of the states of Zheng and Wei in the Book of Odes as well as to the works of literati figures such as Xie An (320–85), a scholar-official known for his post-official life with courtesans. For Cheng, transmission (chuan)

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was justified because of the aesthetic quality of the text both in terms of the play’s focus on a central facet of human existence, that is, feeling (qing), and the sublime effect its performance exerted on an audience (liaoji wangjuan). Accordingly, these prefaces together defended the Xixiang ji against both author- and viewer-related forms of “obscenity” through the aesthetics of the text and through the universal appeal of its theme. In his 1616 literati edition of the Xixiang ji, He Bi proceeded to expand on the notion of qing. On the one hand, drawing on the Buddhist ideas about the generative force of desire, he considered qing to be a universal force that inhered in everything. That the Xixiang ji was principally concerned with qing explained its universal and spontaneous appeal to all social groups from monarchs to clerks to women and children. When pressed by an interlocutor to explain whether qing was identical to sex, He placed eroticism on a spectrum, ranging from licentiousness (yin) to lust (haose) to romance (fengliu). Only the last kind was related to qing. In defining the term fengliu, which he considered both desirable and difficult to explain, he gestured in the direction of classical precedent by ways of earlier literati famous for their rhapsodies and noted for their romantic exploits. He thought unless one had either the reputation of Sima Xiangru (d. 117 B.C.E.) or the talent of Cao Zhi (192–232), one could not possibly dare either to seduce a woman by playing the zither or linger in her presence. In refining what previously had all been dismissed as “licentiousness,” He Bi invoked literary talent to vouchsafe for this new, more sophisticated erotic sensibility. Literary elites were thus increasingly inclined to read erotic texts more as a discourse on human nature rather than as an allegorical comment on historical particulars. For literati, the possibility of various non-allegorical readings created conceptual quandaries. As Anne McLaren has observed, the dissemination of vernacular print led to the emergence of a hierarchy of reading based on distinctions of gender, status, and education.67 Thus, literati began to entertain the fear that ordinary readers would read texts such as the Xixiang ji even more “literally” than they themselves did. Given the intense penetration of didactic materials into Ming society, it was not unreasonable for elite readers to assume that common readers would read “new” erotic representations in the same vein in which they were trained to read “old” moral texts, that is, in an emulatory fashion. Thus, social elites might surmise that such imitative reading habits would backfire in the case of a categorically ambiguous

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and erotically explicit text such as the Xixiang ji, precipitating a form of inverse or perverse didacticism. Such anxieties were not entirely the name recognition of famous, didactically oriented Confucians such as Qiu Jun (1421–95) and turned them into authors for explicitly sexual materials.68 So who then was to stop anyone from reading the Xixiang ji as a “lover’s bible” and engage in “licentious behavior”? Given that the Hongzhi edition already offered what some might have considered a mildly erotic form of presentation,69 print alone was not sufficient to redeem the text. Hence, rather than being able to count on textuality as such, the text had to be carefully managed to set it apart from the “obscenity” of lesser print productions. Some maneuvers were designed to control access of low-status persons’ intrusion onto the newly redeemable Xixiang ji. However, no gesture would foreclose attestatory innuendo more effectively than the claim that “obscenity” resided in the eye of a lettered, but literalist reader. Thus, concerns over emulative readings by low-status readers eventually were reconfigured as an attribute of unimaginative readers of both low and high status. In short, late Ming and post-Ming literati such as Jin Shengtan sought to overturn the attestatory, author-centered paradigm articulated by Zhu Xi and create a reproductive, reader-centered model of “licentiousness” instead. Elite reproductions of the widely circulated Xixiang ji allow us to investigate the internal variations and gradual evolution of the discursive construction of “licentiousness.” Published in 1614 during the first peak of literati drama-publishing, Wang Jide’s edition signals a moment when the “licentiousness” of acting was enjoined with “vulgar texts.” Wang sought to reposition the Xixiang ji within what he construed as a philologically grounded and ariatically expressed private world of urbane sophisticates. Written in 1656 in the aftermath of the wrenching Ming/Qing transition, Jin Shengtan’s Xixiang ji speaks to a different moment, namely the peculiar post-Ming confluence of aesthetic connoisseurship and of moral self-cultivation. In its emphasis on literary composition and reading, Jin’s Xixiang ji located “licentiousness” solely in the socio-moral response of the reader rather than in the author, in the venue of articulation, or in the text itself. Eventually, the Qing state would seek to restore order in what the Qing rulers and many of their Chinese subjects considered a perversely distorted bibliographic field, but in the interim, figures such as Wang Jide and Jin Shengtan did their best to reconstruct a possibly licentious text for potential inclusion in the literary canon.

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Wang Jide (d. 1623): The Enchantment of Art Song and Song-Drama Wang Jide had an unsentimental relationship with official culture.70 Unlike Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun, Wang did not take the examinations, let alone get involved in the contentious world of day-to-day governmental administration. In a telling comment, Wang noted that his contemporaries had neither the administrative savvy of a Guan Yunshi (1286–1324), the eminent Yuan scholar-official and songwriter, nor the literary talent of a Guan Hanqing, a fact he attributed to the corrosive specialization in essay-writing.71 Wang himself devoted his life to the study, editing, and writing of drama in his native town of Shaoxing.72 Unlike Wang’s grandfather who, like a sizable contingent of Ming figures, wrote one play, but did not publish it, Wang made his interest in drama the public focal point of his literary activities. As his posthumously published and highly regarded treatise on drama shows, Wang acquainted himself with the breadth of the dramatic tradition. Such lifelong devotion to drama not only yielded a great deal of expertise, but also considerable freedom from the constraints of official culture. When Li Kaixian disagreed with Zhu Quan’s literary assessments, he felt compelled to hide Zhu’s identity behind that of an anonymous “critic” (pingzhe).73 When Wang Jide did so, he openly and blatantly remarked, “Han xuzi [i.e., Zhu Quan]’s literary judgments are not reliable because he was not very knowledgeable in the matter of literary principles. Many of his critical comments [in the Formulary] are outright ridiculous.”74 If other people went to Beijing on official business, Wang ventured there on more than one occasion to do fieldwork on the Northern dialect in order to produce better Yuan zaju editions. Although such endeavors did not secure him any official recognition, he established friendships with a number of leading dramatists and editors, including Xu Wei, Tang Xianzu, Shen Jing (1553–1610), Lü Tiancheng (1580–ca. 1619), and Feng Menglong (1574–1646).75 Wang’s lavish and meticulous edition of the Xixiang ji is in many ways the most eloquent testimony for Wang’s high regard for the worlds of art song and drama. To be sure, for all his fondness for drama, Wang was not entirely immune to attestatory concerns over his involvement with a “licentious” play.76 He noted that “upright people did not talk about [licentious lyrics], narrow-minded Confucians were incapable of talking about them, and the new fangled and phony NeoConfucians appreciated them, but did not dare say so.”77 Nevertheless,

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aware of the Yuan authorial precedents of Guan Yunshi and Guan Hanqing, Wang indicated his actual name as well as one of his pen names (Fangzhu sheng) in the preface to the Xixiang ji. Moreover, when asked by an interlocutor whether he was not wasting his talents with “licentious songs,” he countered by invoking the Book of Odes. He also observed that even though everyone was rushing to praise the Xixiang ji, he was still concerned with the loss of the song-drama tradition precisely because people did not value it as much as they should.78 Prepared by Wang and published by a friend,79 Wang’s Xixiang ji was a landmark achievement,80 whose impact was felt among subsequent literati and commercial editions. Wang’s efforts were designed to position his Xixiang ji at a remove from the worlds of politics and cultural commerce. By ways of Li Zhi, Wang defined the dangers attendant upon circulating Xixiang ji in the wrong contexts. A famous and notorious advocate of vernacular texts, Li Zhi had died by his own hand in a prison cell in Beijing in 1602 after being charged with sexual misconduct and a host of other infractions against Confucian morality.81 Wang made the following observations: Now as for the Xixiang ji: when a refined songwriter (yunshi) composes such licentious lyrics (yinci), at best, he can gladden the hearts and the eyes of poets and itinerant swordsmen, and at the very least, he can supply materials to entertain their ears. . . . Li Zhi used [the Xixiang ji] to advocate an extreme position. . . . Given the extremity of his stance, why did he not kill himself sooner? . . . As of late, based on Li Zhi’s favorable appraisal of the Xixiang ji, the Pipa ji, the Baiyue ting, the Hongfu ji, and the Yuhe ji in [Li Zhi’s] Book for Burning (Fenshu),82 actors perform these [plays] and thereby confound the order of the world (dao). They pollute entire volumes [of Li Zhuowu versions of these plays] with performance notations and seek profit by [posing as] blind performers. I said in jest to one of my guests, who laughed, “This is the retribution that the [Buddhist] Avici Hell [has meted out to Li Zhi].”83

Wang’s pointed critique illuminates the early seventeenth-century nexus of questions associated with “obscene songs.” The passage juxtaposed refined songwriters and righteous swordsmen with actors and blind performers. For a man who spent his life in the demimonde and married an actress in his old age, Wang’s assessment of performers was surprisingly unkind, but not atypical of literati publishers. What concerned him further were the motives of those who engaged such materials. Songs provided enjoyment and entertainment for his preferred group, the songwriters, whereas for performers, songs merely

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served to make money under false pretenses. Thus, Wang pitted a moral and literary economy against a commercial and performative one. What would merely entertain ears in one context would pervert the world in another. Wang thought it fitting that the man whose name accompanied the commercial texts that, as I will discuss later on, Wang abhorred, would find his plays disgraced by the scribbling of actors. In his view, such texts were doubly defiled by low-status publishers and by low-status performers. Thus, for Wang, “obscenity” did not reside in the Xixiang ji per se, but in the particulars of its textual and performative enactment. The “commercial performance texts” attributed to Li Zhi combined the worst of all worlds. Rejecting both a philosophical and a commercialized approach to the Xixiang ji, Wang sought to create a self-contained world of erudition and entertainment instead. An Imaginary Community of Erudites Through the careful manipulation of all aspects of his Xixiang ji edition, Wang made sure that his plays would not be similarly “polluted.” In appealing to a group of “erudites” (boyazhe), Wang rhetorically positioned his Xixiang ji beyond the world of factional politics and the realm of commercial interests. In his preface to the Xixiang ji,84 he provided two rationales for his engagement with drama. On the one hand, in claiming that it was an obsession (pi) going back to his childhood years, Wang invoked a pervasive new rationale for late Ming literati behavior.85 On the other hand, he was hoping to right the wrongs done to both Wang Shifu and Cui Yingying, a trope other literati editors would adopt.86 Wang played the corrective role of the magistrate implied in that phrase casually,87 without the rhetorical fanfare that accompanied Li Kaixian’s or Zang Maoxun’s pretensions to an editorial role with official overtones. As is evident from the material particulars, Wang’s edition defined its audience as a sophisticated set interested in the arts and letters. First, Wang’s edition contained several prefaces, all carved in different calligraphic styles. As Robert Hegel has rightly noted, such carved calligraphy still tended to be fairly standardized, most commonly featuring an identical number of characters per column.88 Nevertheless, calligraphy was more difficult to read than the newly standardized craftsman-style characters. Second, just as Zang Maoxun would do, Wang placed the illustrations in an album-like fashion after the preface, the title, and a reproduction of a portrait of Yingying attributed to a

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Song-dynasty academy painter, Chen Juzhong. As Yao Dajuin has observed, Wang’s pictures, one per act, model themselves on landscape painting rather than on early figure-oriented drama illustrations.89 Third, Wang did not supply basic explanatory interlinear glosses of the sort that the Hongzhi edition provided for the common reader. Instead he offered detailed, but selective discussion of philological points— textual discrepancies, alternate usage, questions of rhyme, and the like—in appendices to individual acts as well as to the volume as a whole. Compared to the Hongzhi edition’s elementary explanations, Wang’s disquisitions presupposed considerable scholarly curiosity on the part of the reader. Primary among the values that Wang sought to impart to his readers was a high regard for “ancient texts.” The title of the Xixiang ji edition, The Newly Collated and Annotated, Ancient Text-based Story of the Western Wing (Xin jiaozhu guben Xixiang ji), announced the premium placed on “antiquity.” Arguably, as the owner of several hundred zaju manuscripts, Wang was in a position to gauge the relative merits of early song-drama texts.90 Wang’s operative distinctions revolve around authoritative “ancient texts” (guben) and more or less corrupted “modern texts” or “vulgar texts” (jinben, suziben, suben). Like Zang Maoxun, Wang subscribed to the notion that play texts had deteriorated over time. He blamed ignorant actors for the licentious quality of the wording and greedy commercial publishing houses for the proliferation of errors.91 As Wang himself was aware, however, “old texts” had acquired such cachet that many commercial editions claimed to be “old texts” ( guben).92 Compared with commercial or literati posturing vis-à-vis the provenance of their texts,93 Wang’s appeal to ancient texts was not merely a ploy. His is undoubtedly one of the most methodical and philologically sound editions among all Ming and Qing editions of the Xixiang ji. In contrast to Li Kaixian,94 Wang Jide did not historicize Yuan arias in a general way. He applied his knowledge of individual texts of the song tradition in order to reconstruct individual arias of the play. Wang collated newer versions of the Xixiang ji 95 against other texts, namely Dong Jieyuan’s (fl. 1190–1208) chantefable (zhugongdiao) version of the Xixiang ji story,96 many other zaju plays, the occasional Yuan song suite (taoshu), and Zhou Deqing’s Rhymes. Throughout his comments, Wang Jide quoted liberally from different Yuan arias, usually in order to show why he changed a certain word or expression in accordance with Yuan usage. He also often traced a certain expression back to lines of Tang poetry. Accordingly, unlike many other writers and critics who

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invoked “Yuan writing” as a generic concept,97 Wang sought to document it in an evidential manner. His is a simultaneously imaginative and recuperative impulse that brings classical scholarship to bear on a body of materials conventionally deemed beyond the pale of such serious and sustained attention. Li Kaixian had used explicit editorial revision to expand an imaginary examination curriculum; Zang Maoxun had relied on emendations as tacit as they were willful to simulate historically authentic examination practices. By contrast, Wang deployed philological methods to bring a dubious romantic drama within the mainstream of belles-lettres. After reading Wang’s edition, his friend and fellow dramatist Shen Jing observed that Wang’s editorial methods had synthesized the fictionality of the play and the historicity of the prose precedent by using other Yuan plays to substantiate the language and by relying on classics and history to corroborate the facts.98 Such a reconciliation of competing modes of discourse was not accidental, but a result of Wang’s orchestrated efforts to make plausible what some critics considered “slanderous lies.” The Problem of Historicity To a philologically minded literatus, more troubling perhaps than the linguistic inconsistencies of the Xixiang ji were the conflicting versions surrounding the story of the main protagonists of the play, Cui Yingying, Zhang Gong, and Zheng Heng. In the original version of the tale alternately entitled “Story of Yingying” (Yingying zhuan) or “Encountering a Transcendent” (Huizhen ji), the story had ended on a mixed note, with both lovers married off to different parties. By contrast, later performance-oriented adaptations such as the chantefable version (zhugongdiao) by Dong Jieyuan and the zaju version often jointly attributed to Wang Shifu and Guan Hanqing had recast this denouement into a happy ending. Historiographically inclined Ming and Qing critics insisted that a tomb inscription discovered in the Chenghua (1465–87) period proved once and for all that Cui Yingying had married the person to whom she had originally been betrothed, Zheng Heng, rather than the student with whom she had had an affair. Accordingly, Cui’s reputation had been unjustly besmirched by the fibs of storytellers and dramatists alike. Some critics went so far as to author their own version of the Xixiang ji in accordance with what they perceived to be historical reality. As the playwright Zhuo Renyue (1606–36?) noted in the

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preface to his chuanqi play, the New Western Wing (Xin Xixiang): “The Xixiang [ ji] does not accord with tradition at all. As far as Wang Shifu goes, he still retained its intent. However, Guan Hanqing’s sequel completely lost the original meaning. Therefore, I have written another Xin Xixiang (New Western wing), which abides by the original Huizhen [ ji] [Story of] ‘Encountering a Transcendent.’ In addition, I have accorded [the facts of my play] with the epitaphs of Cui and Zheng and have also corroborated it against the annualized biography of Weizhi [i.e., Yuan Zhen].”99 Wang Jide was not favorably disposed toward the fantastic, but was not opposed to the intelligent use of fictional elements either. In his dramatic treatise Rules for Songs (Qulü, ca. 1620), Wang outlined a tripartite and largely accurate history of the uses of fictionality in drama. He divided the use of fact and embellishment into three periods. The Song and the Yuan periods were neither overtly interested in facts nor in principles and retained only a semblance of factuality while emphasizing rhetorical embellishments. By contrast, the midMing was more historically oriented, and the late Ming witnessed the emergence of completely fictional plays put on by performers and lower class people, especially for an audience of women and children.100 On more than one occasion, he chided Yuan authors for the fictional or even fantastic elements in their plays. Yet, he did not favor a mindless factualism. On the contrary, he allowed for the use of aesthetic liberties (xu) to convey the real (shi), which he considered to be a more difficult form of playwrighting than simply authoring a historically based play.101 In the case of the Xixiang ji, Wang solved the dilemma of fiction and facts in an original fashion. In at least two regards, he ignored the solutions of other Xixiang ji editions. First, his historical inquiries did not lead him to a common contemporary conclusion, namely that the last play was a continuation by another hand.102 While he took note of Dong Jieyuan’s fabrications in the appendix, he treated the play version as an integral unit, insisting that drama was a viable genre in its own right. Second, the very fact that he relegated the chuanqi tale and relevant Tang poems to a sixth chapter with a separate heading is significant. Many other editions placed the Huizhen ji at the beginning, thus setting the tale up as an authoritative prior-text against which to read the play. Wang’s reversed sequence reinforced his attempts to vindicate drama as its own literary art form. It is undeniable that Wang included many supplementary materials pertaining to the original story. Yet the particulars of the edition reveal

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that he was less concerned with the reconstruction of the story than he was with creating material testimony to female beauty. Wang Jide was acutely conscious that the Tang tale and the Yuan zaju were in conflict with each other, but, when faced with hard choices between facts and fiction, Wang improvised. He invented a new imaginary role in the process. He paired the archaizing philological approach of an erudite scholar with the sensual capability of a caizi capable of appreciating female beauty in all its historical, fictional, and legendary guises. The Sexing of Philology Such appreciation of female beauty resonated with what Wang elsewhere described as the process of songwriting. In Rules for Songs, Wang compared the actual act of songwriting to that of appreciating female beauty: “To write songs is like [painting] a beautiful woman. One must start from the eyebrows and eyes, teeth and hair, until one gets to the ten bamboo sprout[-like fingers] and the two hook[-like feet]. In each seductive detail, it ought to be appealing. Then again [beginning with] the hairpins and the mascara, the garments and shoes, one gets to the words, the laughter and the movements, carefully noting each aspect. Only then can one begin to call it a song.”103 In his Xixiang ji, Wang literalized this analogy. Not only did he rename the play Qianqiu jueyan (The supreme beauty of all times), but he also had the four characters individually carved on the verso and recto pages of the first four pages of the text followed by Cui Yingying’s portrait.104 The organization of the philological apparatus also stressed the appreciation of female beauty. The appended materials were not organized chronologically, but structured around the person of Yingying: her portrait, the Tang tale Huizhen ji, which Wang renamed Cui niang benzhuan (The basic biography of Mrs. Cui), and appreciative poems on Cui Yingying from the Tang through the Ming dynasty, even if, as Jiang Xingyu has pointed out, Wang excluded the more popular lyrical Xixiang ji story cycles included in the commercial Hongzhi edition.105 Other biographical materials (tomb inscriptions, biographies, and so on) followed. At the end of the Xixiang ji, Wang appended his own literary appreciations of the text, most notably a rhapsody named after the title of the play, “The Supreme Beauty of All Times” (Qianqiu jueyan). As Wai-yee Li has noted, the Han and early post-Han fu articulate the conflict between the moral order and sensual desire. At the level of rhetoric, the genre wavers between seduction and instruction, placing

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the poet in the morally ambiguous position of either representing a “concubine” currying the ruler’s favor or a “jester” offering moral advice.106 In the two rhapsodies to which Wang’s alluded, most notably Song Yu’s Gaotang fu (Rhapsody of the Gaotang terrace) and Cao Zhi’s Luoshen fu (Rhapsody of the Luo river goddess), ambiguous divine women had presented themselves to royal and imperial men, initiating them sexually in one case and promising ardent love in the other.107 In Song Yu’s tale, the king responded to the goddess’ seduction, but in Cao Zhi’s case, he rejected her entreaties. The erotic innuendo of these earlier tales only carried over into Wang’s appraisal, but also raised the issue of appropriate male response. In Wang’s rhapsodic retelling of the encounter between Cui and Zhang, he made the events themselves a prelude to their retelling in different song genres: “There were the poets of the Southern palace and the lyricists of the Northern courtesan quarters who in novel ways embroidered upon these sentiments with their multi-colored brushes. Their rhyming of pure musical modes was more melodious than the love songs of Ziye [of times past] and their crafting of amorous songs was superior to the Yangchun songs [of old].”108 Although Wang ostensibly referred to the Tang poets who versified Yingying’s story,109 his careful juxtaposition of “Southern” and “Northern” poets implied that the subsequent dramatic adaptations of the Northern Xixiang ji and its Southern counterpart also formed part of this continuous literary appreciation of female beauty. In fact, in tracing a literary history of such appreciation beginning with the early fu all the way to the later song forms, Wang offered an answer to the dilemma of male desire. Such desire found commensurate and appropriate expression in the composition of song forms. Moreover, even though Wang invoked the Gaotang fu and the Luoshen fu, he did not primarily authorize desire through reference to august imperial precedents in the manner of Zang Maoxun or Shen Tai, the editor of the Zaju of the High Ming (Sheng Ming zaju, 1629).110 Instead, he paired the ethereal, but devoted goddess of the Luo River with Qu Yuan, the maligned author of the Lisao: “Our kind sighs over Mrs. Cui, that heavenly person endowed with virtue and beauty (yaotiao tianren) and we [also] sigh over her mate Zhang whose talent rivals that of Qu Yuan. We are dismayed over the ill-fatedness of female beauties, and we are aggrieved by the isolation of male talents.”111 By matching Qu Yuan with Cui Yingying, Wang overwrote the suicide scenario associated with Qu Yuan with a different denouement.

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Rather than bemoaning his fate as a rejected “minister-concubine” in relation to a “king-master,” a latter-day Qu Yuan could find a new vocation as a “song-writer” rhapsodizing about actual “female beauties” with whom one could be united at least at the textual level, if not in real life.112 Such an analogy was not lost on Wang’s contemporaries. Wang Jide would later recollect one of his friends’ characterization of Wang and his publication efforts: “Qu Yuan carried some stones to drown himself in a deep gorge, but now two thousand years later, he has found a fisherman to bring him back with a net. . . . Thus, my printing of Xixiang ji and Pipa ji (The story of the lute) are really due to my friend’s encouragement.”113 Despite his penchant for philological precision and historical accuracy, Wang Jide substituted a literary formula as the framework for the production of his Xixiang ji. Such concerted redirection of a literary man’s energies was perhaps most apparent in Wang’s use of the term siwen at the end of his fu rhapsody: “If he sends beautiful lines to her with the frowning eyebrows [such as those of the ancient beauty of Xishe] and if there were indeed a rupture in feeling, one would have to sigh three times over this culture of ours (siwen).”114 In Wang’s reading, elite culture was no longer bounded by the participation in the reproduction of conventional classics,115 but extended into the realm of the song-based appreciation of feminine charms. Such appreciation operated at many levels over a historical continuum. Within the tale, there was of course student Zhang. Within Wang’s appendix, there were many others who felt compelled to share in the celebration of Yingying’s beauty. And, there was, of course, Wang himself, who had created a genealogic filiation, assuming a place as reproductive author, philologist, and rhapsodizer. Pairing both the talented scholar inside the story and the editor inside the text with their object of appreciation made it possible to circumvent historical contingency. Such a textual scenario put a caizi jiaren logic in place of the arbitrary limits of the real world. Echoing Tang Xianzu’s preface to Peony Pavilion, Wang Jide noted in his rhapsodic appreciation of the play: “Li has limits, but qing is without bounds.”116 While Tang’s heroine Du Liniang might have defied the boundaries between life and death, the match between Cui and Zhang transcended those between historicity and fictionality.117 Therefore, for all its philological seriousness, Wang Jide’s Xixiang ji insinuated itself into the realm of the late Ming connoisseurship of women.118 It suggested that no matter how superfluous a nonofficial might be, however much he may be lacking in political, social, or

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moral capital, however much he may have felt adrift or subject to adverse circumstances, he could inscribe a sense of textually produced inevitability through the gendered caizi jiaren formula. Through the reconciliation of a classically oriented philological apparatus with the newly popular literary formula of the caizi jiaren pattern,119 Wang could provide a refined precedent for the literary relations with women in the contemporary demimonde. In the act of creating a historically filiated and philologically intricate song tradition as the overt token of erotic appreciation, the caizi proved himself to be above “mere licentiousness and lust.” In the end, such labors of appreciation, far from having negative implications, created cultural capital for Wang Jide. As Wang recalled, when he was working on the Xixiang ji in the early 1600s, he simply wrote his commentary down without bringing it up in conversation. Nevertheless, on one of his trips to Beijing, he was invited by scholarofficials to lecture on the meaning of the Xixiang ji in front of over thirty guests, all of whom were evidently delighted by what they heard. One guest commented that if Wang Shifu knew about this, he would laugh in his grave. After getting drunk, everyone was assigned a rhyme and then proceeded to compose a poem. The poems were recorded and promptly published with a foreword under the title Poems on Sensuality (Yanqing shi). For a time this was regarded as an unusual matter, but, according to Wang, subsequently busybodies from all over bought copies of that book in order to have something to talk about.120 Possibly such contemporary acclaim came as a surprise to Wang Jide, who boldly stated that he had not prepared his Xixiang ji for his contemporaries, but for future generations.121 Among his readers would be a man, Jin Shengtan, whom Wang might have considered all but disqualified from engaging the song tradition because of his religious beliefs. Wang had specified that everyone, including monarchs, aristocrats, recluses, and women, be allowed to compose songs with the sole exception of monks.122 To be sure, Jin Shengtan only said in jest that he would have liked to have become a monk, choosing to live instead as a Buddhist lay person.123 However, if Jin’s commitment to the “study of the way” set him apart from Wang’s life in the “green bowers,” Jin nevertheless amplified Wang’s concern that “stupid editors” (cangfu) and “vulgar actors” (suzi) would detract from the greatness of “a seamless piece of writing” (yibu pianduan hao wenzi) destined for future “talented men” (caizi).124 Given the plasticity of the notion of the caizi, it is perhaps not so surprising that Jin Shengtan would coin the term caizi shu to embody a literary agenda positioned between

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official disregard and commercial interests, an effort that would earn him the reputation of having frittered away his talents by producing nothing but “licentious books.”125 Jin Shengtan (1608–61): Books of Genius In an early Qing miscellany, Dong Han (fl. 1630–97), scion of a distinguished scholar-official family and recipient of the palace degree in 1661,126 took it upon himself to comment upon one of his contemporaries, Jin Shengtan, who in that same year, rather than rising to the pinnacle of examination success, found himself led to the execution ground in Suzhou. Although Jin Shengtan had not held office at any point in his life, he numbered among a group of literati who protested the appointment of a corrupt official in Suzhou. A petition followed by a public rally was met with swift retaliation on the part of the local authorities. The episode later known as the Incident of Lamenting at the Temple of Confucius shook up all of Jiangnan, stifling expression of political dissent for years to come.127 What irked Dong about Jin Shengtan was not Jin’s rather accidental involvement in a famous show trial of the young Qing state eager to cow recalcitrant Southern literati into submission, but the literary legacy that Jin left behind: Jin Shengtan, a native of Wu [i.e., Suzhou], wrote “Books of Genius,” which can be found among the works in the bookstalls. . . . Now as for the Xixiang ji, a critic [i.e., Zhu Quan] who discussed songwriters noted that “among the 187 Yuan songwriters, Wang Shifu was like a beauty among flowers, hence [his play] is unmatched.” That is all that there was to that person’s [i.e., Zhu Quan’s] appraisal. [By contrast,] Jin Shengtan gave reign to his personal opinions. Although he offered no real explanations, he himself said that [his insights] were of a different order. As he chose among sections and lines, he wrenched the text apart. Among the eighty or so comments that precede the body of the text, he said things like “Ever since there has been heaven and earth, there has been this marvelous text. It can be paired with the Air of the States and the Elegantiae of the Book of Odes as well as with Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian (Shiji) and the Zhuangzi.” In some cases, he proved his points by resorting to Chan Buddhist terminology, in other instances, he compared [the Xixiang ji] to other texts, one moment touching upon the songs of Wu [i.e., songs and plays], one moment invoking the classics, mixing them all together without distinction. And then he said: “When you read the Xixiang ji commentaried by Shengtan, then that is Shengtan’s text (wenzi), not the text of the Xixiang ji.” He simply wants to steal (qie) it and declare it his own. What nerve!128

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Dong’s entry reveals that Jin’s texts had become a commercial success. Among these widely disseminated “books of genius,” all of which were commentaries on still other books, Dong reserved his most detailed and acerbic comments for Jin’s version of the Xixiang ji. In Dong’s view, not only was the play’s subject matter trivial, but Jin’s fanciful and abstruse reinterpretation bordered on plagiarism, demarcating the outer limits of reproductive authorship. Most outrageous of all, perhaps, Jin’s Xixiang ji did not respect the hierarchies that should obtain between different types of writing. Although Dong’s literary tastes were clearly of the orthodox variety, his assessment of Jin’s unprecedented commentatorial practices is quite astute. Unlike earlier literati editions of the Xixiang ji, Jin’s commentary dispensed with any philological pretensions. Instead, his comments were primarily of an evaluative nature. In fact, rather than just contenting himself with an occasional marginal comment (meipi) as Ling Mengchu or a fu rhapsody as Wang Jide had done, Jin developed multiple and lengthy prefaces. He also crafted pre-chapter or pre-act comments that amounted to extended meditations on the writing and reading process. As Dong Han intimated, Jin presented the Xixiang ji as a “natural and primordial text” whose decipherment had awaited Jin’s self-declared acumen. In fact, Jin’s self-inscription was so selfaggrandizing that some modern critics have accused him of a form of “vanity and arrogance.”129 However, such ad hominem readings of authorial pathology obscure the particular cultural matrix that impinged upon Jin’s post-Ming context of literary production. Modern scholars have focused on outlining the internal characteristics of Jin’s reading methods for both the Shuihu zhuan (Water margin) and the Xixiang ji.130 In an effort to contextualize the peculiarities of Jin Shengtan’s first vernacular commentary, the Shuihu zhuan, Naifei Ding has argued that the expanding market in fiction inflected Jin’s commentatorial stance.131 In what follows, I will expand on Ding’s suggestion that Jin’s paradoxical relationship to the bookmarket accounted not only for the reputed megalomania of Jin Shengtan’s style, but also underwrote his creation of the category of “books by and for geniuses” (caizi shu). It will become clear that the invention of this category brilliantly reconciled the proliferative dynamics of the bookmarket with an elite desire for restricted access to cultural artifacts. Furthermore, Jin’s simultaneous interest in vernacular literature and Buddhism converged in the contentious and complex relationship between popularly disseminated knowledge and the knowledge of initiates. The emphasis on the relativization of all

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distinctions—social, literary, and otherwise—found in Chan Buddhist thought allowed Jin to position his vernacular classic-to-be above any suspicion of “obscenity.”132 Jin’s invocation of the most famous and authoritative editor, Confucius, consolidated the possibility of authoritatively distinguishing between what was “licentious” and what was not. The Origins of the New Canon Writing around 1671, Li Yu gave Jin Shengtan sole credit for making literary masterpieces out of the two vernacular works with which Jin’s name became indelibly associated: “Ordinarily, people considered Shi Nai’an’s Shuihu and Wang Shifu’s Xixiang ji as a novel and as a play respectively; only Jin Shengtan saw it fit to single them out with the designations of Fifth and Sixth Book of Genius respectively. What was Jin’s intent? He was aggrieved that the world made light of the substance of these works and did not recognize that they were literary creations of the first order. Therefore, he chose these kinds of startling names in order to make his views known.”133 In distinguishing between “substance” and “literary quality,” Li Yu pointed to the tight genrebound hierarchy of the Chinese literary field discussed earlier. Li rightly noted that Jin’s inventiveness lay in assimilating two works of fiction and drama to a standard of literary excellence that was not genre-bound, but instead relied on demonstrating the formal richness and intricacy of these “collective treasures.”134 Jin had created the notion of “the six books of genius” in one of his prefaces to the Shuihu. There, Jin Shengtan had declared that there were six “books of genius” just as there used to be six classics.135 The six books encompassed the philosophical text of the Zhuangzi, the historical text of Records of the Historian and the poetic texts of Encountering Sorrow (Lisao) and of Du Fu as well as the vernacular texts of the Shuihu and the Xixiang ji. Jin worked on all of these, but of the first four, only posthumously published fragments exist. The Shuihu and the Xixiang ji were both published during Jin’s lifetime, although of the latter no edition earlier than the 1660s has survived. In addition, Jin’s son, Jin Yong, posthumously published Jin’s annotations of Tang poetry and Chen Mu, a literatus, issued Jin’s comments on prose throughout the ages.136 These latter efforts were also subsumed under the rubric of “books of genius,” a term that began to be applied to other vernacular classics such as the Jin Ping Mei, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi) and the Story of the Lute.137

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Contrary to Li Yu’s intimations, Jin’s lifelong attempts to redefine the contours of the literary canon drew upon the ideas of earlier generations of late and post-Ming literati. Certain literati resorted to a new way of classifying widely divergent texts. Li Zhi called the Shuihu, the Shiji, the poetry of Du Fu and Su Shi, and the writings of Li Mengyang “great works of literature” and Wang Shizhen termed the Shiji, Zhuangzi, Shuihu, and the Xixiang ji “extraordinary books.” A later-day follower of the Yuan brothers, who published a series of his own observations while attributing authorship to Yuan Zhonglang in the 1610s,138 recommended that one read the following books in the pursuit of pleasure: Zhuangzi, Lisao, the entertainers’ biographies in the Shiji, the Xixiang ji, the Shuihu, and Li Bai’s poetry.139 Among certain late Ming literati at least, the hierarchical structure between bibliographic and generic categories had begun to erode. It was not until Jin Shengtan, however, that the four texts listed by Wang Shizhen plus two additional ones, namely the Lisao and the Zhuangzi, became consolidated under a single overarching category, namely the caizi shu. Jin numerically correlated the texts in question, thus labeling Zhuangzi, Shiji, Lisao, Du Fu’s poetry, Shuihu, and the Xixiang ji as the first through the sixth “book of genius,” respectively. On the one hand, this sequence can be read in hierarchical terms, with the most canonical texts ranking at the top. In fact, in the preface to the Shuihu zhuan, Jin mentioned the talents of the authors of the first four works and then proceeded to note “and going down from there, there was the talent of Shi Nai’an and that of Dong Jieyuan.”140 On the other hand, a finite and numerically defined list correlated with a finite number of six canonical classics, to which he alluded in no uncertain terms in the preface to the Shuihu. Yet, Jin’s new canon owed a debt to the prominence of each of those six texts within the world of publishing. Far from being an accidental or idiosyncratic medley, Jin’s choices reflect a broad consensus on some of the best and bestselling titles of the age.141 Outside of the standard texts of the examination curriculum, the Zhuangzi attracted considerable interest among both literati and commercial publishers. After being reissued by Kang Hai (1475–1541),142 Records of the Historian appears to have become one of the most widely printed historical texts in official, literati and commercial venues alike. Among early collections of poetry, with the possible exception of the Book of Odes, Encountering Sorrow was by far the most widely reprinted text, with interest among literati peaking as early as the Zhengde (1506–21) and then again in the Wanli period (1573–1619). Commercial interest in

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the text was not entirely lacking, with various Jianyang publishers issuing versions of the text. Among later collections of poetry, recensions of Du Fu’s works outstripped anyone else’s.143 Starting as early as the Hongzhi (1488–1505) period, but with a particular emphasis in the Jiajing (1522–66) and the Wanli (1573–1620) eras, literati, often after having passed the jinshi exam, and occasionally before publishing a collection of their own, published Du Fu’s verse. The Shuihu had also been widely reprinted144 as had the Xixiang ji. What makes Jin’s choices fascinating is that he dared subsume texts belonging to different bibliographic categories under a single label. Interestingly, there was precedent for such conceptual proximity in the publishing world. Commercial publishers had issued some of the texts belonging to different bibliographic areas as part of their list of titles. For instance, a Jianyang publisher, Zixinzhai, issued the Shiji (1590), the Zhuangzi (1593), and a Zhuangzi Nanhua jing (1614). The publisher of one of the Yuan zaju anthologies Yangchun zou previously discussed, Huang Zhengwei, also published fiction, drama, as well as an edition of the Zhuangzi. The commercial house Wenxiutang in Nanjing produced a Zhuangzi-related text and a Xixiang ji in the Wanli period.145 Wu Mianxue a publisher active in Nanjing and in Huizhou, published medical texts, Ming poetry and casual jottings, various encyclopedias and almanacs, historical texts, letters, books on strategy and philosophy, and Buddhist sutras. Wu’s list included both the Shiji and the Chuci.146 Arguably, the incipient habit of presenting these titles as part of a single list, especially among commercial publishers, diminished the generic distinctions between the individual works. The assimilation of all manner texts to similar formats may also have contributed to the leveling of differences. As Robert Hegel has shown, material conditions of books both reflect and constitute generic hierarchies. According to his tabulations, materially speaking, vernacular texts became virtually indistinguishable from other more highly valued types of texts in terms of size and format over the course of the Ming. Hegel argues persuasively that such material similarity both indicates and reinforces the increasing regard for vernacular texts.147 With the production of lavish editions such as Wang Jide’s or Ling Mengchu’s Xixiang ji, a vernacular text was not necessarily defined as such just by its shoddy production values. If an accomplished artist such as Chen Hongshou (1598–1652) illustrated the Chuci as well as the Shuihu and the Xixiang ji,148 then their visual similarity suggested that these texts were alike in other ways as well.

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Even though both Dong Han and Li Yu were willing to give Jin Shengtan sole credit for his invention of “books of genius,” Jin’s coinage in fact represented a synthesis of earlier literary thought and publishing practices. With regard to a newly defined and numerically limited canon, Jin drew on late Ming literati ideas. In the realm of publishing, he exploited the accumulated propensities of literati and commercial publishing to settle for what were some of the most popular, and increasingly similar looking, titles of the age. Like other literati who had chosen to reproduce vernacular texts, Jin assumed various guises in order to authorize the reproduction of his two vernacular works. Among such roles, Confucius as an editorially circumspect, all-knowing censor assumed a prominent place. Gifts of Pure Literature Many editors of noncanonical texts had explicitly or implicitly alluded to Confucius’s editing of the Book of Odes in order to address the question of transgressive anthologization. In Jin’s case, the evocation of Confucius expressed nostalgia for an era of few books—a golden age of uncompromised classical canonicity. Jin believed that only a finite number of books were deserving of approbation and that only qualified individuals should exert the role of moral arbiter. In fact, through his alignment with Confucius both through his name and his emphasis on Confucius’s commoner status, he claimed that role for himself.149 While many vernacular editors empowered themselves by referring to Confucius’s compilatory efforts, Jin Shengtan drew on Confucius’s role as a censor— not the sage who had put together the three hundred songs of the Book of Odes, but the one who had left out two thousand and seven hundred. In his Xixiang ji commentary, Jin gave this simultaneously censorious and inclusive Confucius a new face, pitting Neo-Confucian clichés against a more sophisticated version of a Confucian-cum-Buddhist respect for textual exegesis. As noted earlier, the phrase that the Xixiang ji might be thought of as a book that “incites debauchment and abandon” had appeared in one of the first literati editions in 1580, without, however, defining the people who might be susceptible to such influences. As Sally Church has noted, Jin went to great lengths to denounce other people involved in the printed or performed transmission of the Xixiang ji as “fools” (cangfu, wunu), a category that contrasted with the caizi. Such “fools” could denote contemporary playwrights, commentators, actors, village schoolteachers, theatrical audiences, editors, and readers. The greatest single failing of the fools, no matter what

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their precise profession, was their inability to decipher the implied moral meaning of the text.150 In Jin’s view, the literate, but unlettered common reader was most likely to succumb to an obscene interpretation. As Jin was to formulate it succinctly in his prefatory comments: “Those who are lettered will read [the Xixiang ji] that way; those who are licentious will read it accordingly.”151 Jin pursued a dual strategy with regard to potential “licentiousness.” On the one hand, he altered details of the text in order to tone down the eroticism. For instance, Jin named the erotic scene in act 13 “The Matching of Letters” (choujian) rather than alluding to the sexual union as even other literati editions had done.152 On the other hand, he diminished not only the relative importance of sexual content, but he also insisted on the literary integrity of the text. Accordingly, in his commentary preceding act 13, Jin pointed out that naïve readers, of whom he considered village schoolmasters the prime representatives, would seek to redeem the erotic songs of the Book of Odes by making a distinction between “lust” (haose) and “licentiousness” (yin). In what followed, he not only downplayed the difference between the two, but he ridiculed Zhu Xi’s insistence on the cautionary quality of the “licentious poems” of the Book of Odes. Rather than quibble over whether certain poems should have been left out, Jin proceeded to laud Confucius’s sagacious judgment in “cutting and revising” (shan’gai) the songs. In Jin’s view, every single one of the ones Confucius had chosen to include belonged to the “flourishing songs” (shengshi) of the period. If literati such as Li Kaixian and Cheng Juyuan had playfully called the Xixiang ji the Spring and Autumn Annals of Cui, Jin transposed the solemn seriousness and the interpretive indirection characteristic of Confucius’ Spring and Autumn Annals to the Xixiang ji. Unlike earlier literati critics such as Cheng Juyuan who compared the Xixiang ji to certain erotic songs in the Book of Odes or such as He Bi who hierarchically distinguished between different kinds of eroticisms, Jin Shengtan wanted the reader to respect the integrity of Xixiang ji as a textual formation much like that of conventional classic. Given that according to Jin “this thing” [i.e., sex] was natural and ubiquitous, it was patently absurd to single out the Xixiang ji for containing sexual representations. Only poorly educated and wholly unimaginative readers would fixate on the sexual content rather than on recognizing the Xixiang ji as a “marvelous text” that turned even the feelings between men and women into a “marvelous affair” by virtue of its literary powers.153 In Jin Shengtan’s view, writing and reading transformed “this thing” into the currency of homosocial bonding between aspiring geniuses.

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Jin’s commentary on the first meeting between Zhang Gong and Cui Yingying modeled this process of transformation for the ideal reader. Jin’s commentary subdivided the initial encounter between Cui and Zhang into fifteen segments, pointedly disrupting the momentum of the narrative with explicatory asides. Jin maintained that any attempts at reading Yingying’s face, hair ornaments, eyebrows, and chignons as such, were tantamount to turning Yingying into an inanimate piece of clay. By contrast, for the caizi cognoscenti, encountering her on paper in written form was as vivid an experience as watching a startled and majestic bird flap its wings. Moreover, in a bold projection of his readers’ desires, Jin predicted that at least the caizi would be just as enamored of him as they would be of Yingying, thanks to his painstaking analysis of what he called the heart of the text.154 Thus, Jin’s systematic digressions, dissection, and disassociation model for the novice reader how to produce their socio-ethical selves through the very act of reading itself. In his desire to control the prospective readership, Jin imagined both his relationship to future readers as well as their social profile. Jin cast textual transmission as a form of “gift-giving.” As Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, gift-giving is a strategy by which commodities can be enclaved, or, to put it otherwise, can ostensibly be withdrawn from the socially promiscuous web of relations of the marketplace.155 In the opening line to the first preface, Jin at first feigned ignorance about his own motivation for dealing with this work: “I don’t know why [I critiqued and printed the Xixiang ji], but I could not contain my impulse to do so (yu wo xin ze cheng bu neng zi yi ye).”156 However, as we progress through the various prefatorial essays, Jin supplied a number of reasons for his undertaking, culminating in the assertion that the Xixiang ji was his very own gift (zeng) to posterity.157 In a prelude to this assertion, Jin imagined his own future rebirths, thereby imputing a number of social habits to his imaginary posterity. Jin envisioned his readership to be refined men freed from financial and worldly cares. They would cultivate friendships, enjoy travel to scenic sights, cherish strange trees and rare plants, and indulge in good tea, incense, wines, and medicines. Jin’s repeated insistence that he wishes to transform himself into these things as a gift in order to be part of their lives suggests that he sought to avoid any taint of the marketplace.158 In the end, Jin settled on his preferred incarnation, a book. Thanks to its capacity to masquerade as a repository of learning transmitted from the ancients, the object of a book had, despite the economic force that print had acquired by virtue of the seventeenth-century

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bookmarket, a quaint and traditionalist aura surrounding it. Furthermore, through an inventive invocation of kinship between him and future generations,159 Jin rhetorically evaded the random, if not licentious, readers of commercially purchased books. The most radical move on Jin’s part, though, may well be the seemingly most conventional, namely Jin’s decision to address his junior relatives, including his son, in three of his works. More curiously still, in a post-Ming move that hybridizes elements of late Ming connoisseurship with aspects of the early Qing Confucian revival,160 Jin recommended that the very texts that other members of the gentry considered licentious filth fit for burning should be the centerpiece of elite male selfcultivation. The Creation of a Textual Patriline After the fall of the Ming in 1644, a family-oriented revival of the Confucian values of ritual, lineage, and the study of a set number of classics assumed greater importance.161 With regard to one conventionally Confucian domain, the family, Dorothy Ko has observed how the seventeenth century bore witness to a privatization of Chinese cultural life: “The most prominent aspect of this trend was the family’s emergence as a repository of knowledge and learning. This accompanied an increase in the importance and variety of the family’s cultural capital, of which printed books constituted a prevalent form.”162 At first glance, then, embedding textual transmission in a father/son relation does not strike us as something out of the ordinary. However, as some scholars have cautioned, for all their seeming surface similarity, Confucian categories were more plastic and subtly accented than one customarily assumes.163 For all the Confucian emphasis on parent/child relations, a childoriented pedagogical impulse does not figure prominently in the prefaces to Ming editions and anthologies of literary works.164 Thus, Jin’s framing of some of his texts in terms of familial bonds calls for an explanation. Among the three of Jin’s surviving texts that address his younger male relatives as a potential audience, the collection of prose writings, A Must-Read Book for Geniuses (Caizi bidushu), falls within the bounds of generally approved reading materials for youngsters. However, as Wu Guoping and Wang Zhenyuan have noted, Jin’s recommendation that Shuihu and Xixiang ji be presented to one’s male juniors at the ages of ten and fourteen, respectively, grossly violated customary reading practices.165

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For all the apparent Confucian paternalism, Jin’s rhetoric transcended simple father/son hierarchies. In making texts the primary content of father/son relations, Jin treated his son as a caizi in the making, that is, a potential fellow genius rather than simply a generational subordinate. Just as the notion of caizi shu could mitigate hierarchical distinctions between select books, the notion of a caizi could attenuate familial hierarchies. Furthermore, in addition to a well-defined posterity of caizi friends, Jin Shengtan’s assumption of the role of textual fatherhood created a phantasmagoric inversion of the retributive scenario envisioned by conventional moralists. Far from dying without issue because of his books of genius, Jin projected the possibility of having an unlimited number of “textual sons.”166 Thus, the flexible category of caizi provided a conceptual tool for Jin Shengtan to reinvent himself as a fatherly sage in an era that appeared to disparage everything the sages had stood for. If the erstwhile sages had offered carefully calibrated classics, Jin was to supply similarly instructive and limited reading for his imagined posterity: “I surmise that one or two hundred years hence, only those books that have the brilliance of ten suns simultaneously shining will still exist between heaven and earth and all the other books that are unessential, unworthy, and unbearable reading will have been gotten rid of in toto, which would be a major cause for celebration. I offer this Xixiang ji as a first instance of such a trend.”167 Despite reservations on the part of conservatives such as Dong Han or sympathetic experts such as Li Yu who cautioned that Jin had a purely literary rather than a performative understanding of the play,168 Jin’s Xixiang ji eclipsed competing Xixiang ji editions just as Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays largely supplanted other zaju anthologies. If late Ming editors were intent on producing their own version of the Xixiang ji, Qing editors sought to create their own version of the Sixth Book of Genius. As Tan Fan has pointed out, at various points in the Qing dynasty, new versions of Jin’s text appeared, yielding as many as sixty different recensions despite periodic proscription of the text as a “licentious book.”169 Such was the dominance of this version that Wu Mei (1884–1939), the drama critic, was moved to observe at the end of the late imperial period: “What is currently being circulated is not Wang Shifu’s Xixiang ji, but Jin Shengtan’s Xixiang ji, which readers take to be Wang’s Xixiang ji. . . .”170 Thus, more than anyone else, Jin Shengtan had been able to instate himself as the ultimate reproductive author, who had found the perfect balance

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between pedigree and originality to recommend himself to a readership larger than even the most paranoid of detractors could have anticipated. Conclusion The examination of reading practices, implied readers, and readers’ responses has been one of the most fruitful areas of cultural inquiry. One area of interest has involved the question of how reading practices reproduce social stratification. As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, writing and reading are often construed in opposition to each other, with one being conceived to be a creative action, the other a passive act of assimilation. De Certeau asserted that reading is “situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and the poetic operations (the practitioner’s constructions of a text) intersect.”171 Whereas elites always want to “condemn consumers to subjection because they are always going to be guilty of infidelity or ignorance when confronted by the ‘mute’ riches of the treasury [of a text],” readers in turn may strive to be nomadic, escaping “from the law of each text in particular, and from that of the social milieu.”172 The reading of sexually explicit texts has been one particularly contested arena of stratification. As Lynn Hunt has pointed out, what we now define as “pornography,” that is, “the explicit depiction of sexual organs and sexual practices with the aim of arousing sexual feelings . . . was almost always an adjunct to something else until the middle or end of the eighteenth century.”173 Most often, that “something else” involved use of sex to criticize religious or political authorities. Only around 1800 did “pornography” without any political or religious iconoclasm become both a separate literary and regulatory category, a circumstance that leads Hunt to conclude that it came into existence “only when print culture opened the possibility of the masses gaining access to writing and pictures.”174 At that point, the protection of society, especially its less literate members, in the name of decency, powered political concerns over this purely sexual “pornography.” Although Hunt’s and others’ research historicized the emergence of pornography as a “category of thinking, representation and regulation,” it is undoubtedly an overstatement for her to claim that “pornography as a legal and artistic category seems to be an especially Western idea with a specific chronology and geography.”175 From the discussion in this chapter, it is apparent that ever since Zhu Xi’s reconfiguration of the Book of Odes in the twelfth century, yin

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had been at the very least an artistic category in the realm of print and from the thirteenth century on, a regulatory one in the context of performance. Whatever parallels, differences or incommensurabilities further detailed study of yin in China will reveal, it is already apparent that the emergence of yin in China is tied to what one might call, following Hunt, the problem of managing the real and imagined availability of cultural resources for broader segments of the population. If this process began in the Song, it was decidedly accelerated in the wake of the publishing boom in the late Ming. Thus, the notion of “obscenity” began to structure what John Guillory has defined as the essence of canon formation, that is the “problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption.”176 Labeling a text such as the consistently popular Xixiang ji as “licentious” or “obscene” registers something of the complex pressures on late Ming and post-Ming cultural practitioners. In the middle of the sixteenth century, as Li Kaixian suggested, mere knowledge about a play like the Xixiang ji could carry a certain cachet, especially in the eyes of those who set store by broad learning rather than mere examination success. However, with the proliferation of Xixiang ji editions in all possible publication venues after 1580, “obscurity” could no longer serve as a litmus test for “genuine” knowledge. Instead, because, as Wang Jide and others pointed out, by the early seventeenth century, the Xixiang ji was too well-known, appreciation per se was insufficient to create socio-literary distinction. Characterizing the Xixiang ji as a “licentious” text, however, allowed for the articulation of socio-literary hierarchies. In proving themselves capable of navigating through such treacherous textual terrain, sophisticated reader–writers of the Xixiang ji could demonstrate their readerly expertise to the civil servants, fellow critics, and the common reader, with all of whom they might find themselves in competition for cultural capital. Editions distinguished themselves from the presumed socio-literary limitations of these groups: the narrow-mindedness of orthodox civil servants, the petty philological mistakes of “village schoolmasters,” and the perversely inverted didacticism of common readers. At the same time, ironically, literati adapted conceptual and material resources from these groups to restrict access to the newly forming canon for a purely cultural elite. In the name of purveying something intrinsically difficult to fathom, they appropriated the notion of yin from Confucian discourse, they seized upon materials from other “village” editions upon which they improved, and they emulated strategies of presentation from commercial print culture

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that catered to ordinary readers. In disseminating non-canonical texts among selectively construed readerships, late Ming and post-Ming literati created a discourse of the “obscene” that enabled them to read their erotic texts and print them too. Unlike other books designated as “licentious texts,” the Xixiang ji exists in many different individual reproductions, allowing us to examine the trajectory of the elite quest for socio-literary distinction. In keeping with his respective historical moment, Wang Jide authorized himself by reference to antiquity. However, his antiquity was considerably closer in time than that of previous “antiquities.” In Wang’s case, the Yuan dynasty could serve as a legitimate backdrop for his editorial and appreciative activities in performance-related domains. Unlike Li Kaixian and Zang Maoxun, who sought to reimagine the relationship between official belles-lettres and private life, Wang seized upon these early texts to make his private life more private. To be sure, Zang Maoxun had had a penchant for the romantic side of early songdrama. The near-exclusive preponderance of romantic plays in the zaju collection attributed to Wang Jide as well as the romantic ideology embedded in his Xixiang ji shows that Wang took this interest to another level. Wang put the “beauty-scholar” (caizi jiaren) pattern at the heart of cultural reproduction (siwen). Amplifying on Wang Jide, Jin Shengtan sought refuge not only in antiquity, but also in posterity. By the time he edited the Xixiang ji, he no longer relied on any “ancient texts” as he had done in the case of Shuihu. Instead, projecting the Xixiang ji as a future incarnation of himself, Jin appropriated the posterity usually reserved for higher status works for a mere “play.” Afraid of undisciplined readers who would “contaminate” the text with received opinions about “licentiousness,” Jin felt obliged to explicitly exclude them. His exclusionary practices incorporated desirable readers into quasi-familial networks of homosocial bonds between male family members or Buddhist master–disciples. Such privatization of readership put Jin above any suspicion of catering to popular or commercial appetites despite the fact that he attempted to create “a textual empire.”177 In one of the many ironies in the history of early song-drama, the very terms late Ming literati had deployed to bring certain texts out of the realm of manuscripts became, in the hands of another elite intent on securing a position within the cultural field of production, retroactively used to attempt to suppress those texts. This process resulted in some cases in secret or limited manuscript circulation. As is wellknown, starting in the early Qing, the textual legacy of the Ming began

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to be systematically reexamined and repressed. This reconstruction of the immediate past culminated in Qianlong’s inquisition in the late eighteenth century. The notion of “obscene texts” (yinshu) became one of the key terms the Qing administration used to distinguish between legal and illegal texts in the name of “sedition.”178 Although further research is needed, it seems possible that, in contrast to Europe, where “licentiousness” was initially a political as much as a sexual category, in China, yin appears to have deployed as a sexual category before being turned into a more overtly politicized category of “seditious books.” Despite the attempts of the Qing state to stamp out such licentious works, even non-Chinese observers would begin to filter Chinese literature through Jin’s category of “genius.” The East India Company’s John Francis Davis (1795–1890) noted that among innumerable works of fiction “some have grown more famous than others, and a very few are ranked under the title Tsae-tsze, or ‘works of genius.’ ”179 Rudolf von Gottschall (1832–1909) observed that the term caizi, which he spells as Thai-tseu and glosses as “children of genius,” referred to Chinese writers of the first order, an honor, as he pointed out, generally reserved for those who find a sympathetic commentator such as Jin Shengtan.180 Similarly, Jin Shengtan’s caizi shu made their way to Japan, where Sasagawa Rinpu would draw attention to the Xixiang ji and to Jin Shengtan, allowing Sasagawa to recuperate Chinese drama at a point when Chinese elites were just on the cusp of rediscovering the lure of drama. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of Xixiang ji imprints within China partly in the name of anti-Qing politics. Since the Qing had executed the play’s most famous commentator and had proscribed the book itself, publication of such a text could demonstrate political defiance.181 Such late Qing efforts to redefine Chinese literature prepared the way to recruit traditional drama in the service of modern politics. After the fall of empire in 1911, intellectuals had high hopes for the restorative powers of old literature. Yet, the specter of “licentiousness” did not disappear, but was newly sexualized in the wake of the translation of Western sexology. For all his seemingly traditionalist ambivalence about “licentiousness,” Guo Moruo’s defensive probing of Wang Shifu’s sexual life, discussed in the opening of this chapter, points to peculiarly modern ways of producing and containing “obscenity.” When portraying Wang’s sexual excesses as a tortured artist’s response to the ubiquitous pressures of a Confucianized ritualism (lijiao), Guo exclaimed that the

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Chinese past was nothing but “a gigantic asylum of sexual perverts.”182 However, rather than harking back to any historical reality, Guo’s hyperbolic image adumbrated a modernity where state-based institutions such as hospitals, schools, and work units instead of commentaried editions of questionable texts would monitor access to the privileges of normative socio-sexual identities. Yet, the very fact that Guo, Tian Han, and others continued to use the Xixiang ji to articulate new arrangements of desire, attests to the fact that contrary to Foucault’s claim that China produced the “truth of sex” through ars erotica,183 song-drama also played a major part in this process.

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Conclusion Thinking Through Authors, Readers, and Desire

Introduction Questions of authorship are fundamental to a culture’s perception of self and other. Writing in the later half of the nineteenth century, Rudolf von Gottschall (1832–1909) filtered his understanding of classical Chinese authorship through relatively newly conceived European authorial norms: “The [imperial] Conservatory of Music was the workshop where the talents of the monarchy were convened in order to collectively satisfy the needs of the Chinese stage. . . . Apart from the verses of a few principal playwrights such as those of Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing, all other [plays] were products of plagiarism that resulted from the pilfering of the works of older dramatists.”1 As von Gottschall vociferously derided early Chinese song-drama, one senses that he was still giddy with the eighteenth-century discovery of a seemingly universal individual author. In theory at least, this new author was no longer dependent on a transcendent God for inspiration, a worldly ruler for patronage, a contemporaneous community of readers for validation, nor on tradition as a measure of craftsmanship. Instead, such an author relied on the institution of copyright, an interiorized imagination and an aesthetics of distinctiveness to leave his or occasionally her indelibly original and handsomely remunerated mark in the world of letters.2 What eluded von Gottschall and his cohort was the historical specificity of their elaborations. For them, it was not possible to reflect upon the tacitly assumed social constructs embedded in their myth of individual authorship—gender, class, region, to name a few—not to mention legal, economic, and technological factors. Most importantly, for our purposes here, von Gottschall failed to realize to what extent his individual author was predicated upon his supposition of a faceless

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Chinese other, taking the shape of “members of a play factory [who] mass-produced plays like piece work under the supervision of their superior.”3 So necessary was this fiction of a mechanistic and sexless dramatist enslaved to the demands of history and morality that, to von Gottschall and company, it became inconceivable that alternate forms of individual authorship could have operated within a non-theistic, socially based, and historically oriented framework of textual production. The author implicitly touted by von Gottschall as the proud quintessence of European, and more particularly German, civilization has since been declared dead. Even if in the world at large the author is not as dead as postmodern theorists have made him out to be, in the academy at least, what one scholar has termed the “hypnotic fascination with the isolated author”4 has come under considerable scrutiny. Reacting against the notion of a legally guaranteed, print-based form of literary ownership as the sole measure of authorship,5 critics have sought to restore a social dimension to literary creation, proposing alternative conceptions such as “social,”6 “socialized,”7 “trans-individual,”8 and “collective”9 authorship. Such critical moves undoubtedly constitute a much needed corrective to the modern Euro-American preoccupation with the author as originator and owner of distinctive and published verbal forms. In order to further historicize this peculiar, albeit by now internationalized, form of authorship, it should also be assessed against a historically grounded rather than a preemptively mythologized examination of the authorial practices of other cultures. If we take Nietzsche’s, Barthes’s, and other theorists’ postulate of the absence of a transcendent founding authority seriously, no matter how little popular resonance such an idea may have, it is particularly apposite to examine concepts of authorship in a textual culture that has always functioned in an immanent universe devoid of a transcendent creator-god. In imperial China, questions of human authority, agency, personality and their instantiation in the act of textual production loomed much larger than the inspirational vagaries of gods and God alike, giving rise to what I have called attestatory authorship. Furthermore, if we acknowledge the importance of Foucault’s and Chartier’s emphasis on the legal and material factors for the creation of the modern European author, then it is equally important to consider an authorial culture where, despite a burgeoning print commerce, authorial and publishing practices did not coalesce around a legally actionable form of proprietary authorship until the early twentieth-century.10 Instead, in China, the expansion of print commerce contributed, among other factors, to the diffusion of what I have termed reproductive authorship.

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The concepts of attestatory and reproductive authorship revisited in this conclusion are an attempt to imagine what Zhang Longxi terms “difference,”11 allowing for the possibility that Chinese practices are neither totally identical to nor absolutely dissimilar from European models. A brief survey of these particular Chinese authorial formations sheds light on changes within the Chinese tradition, most notably on how conceptions of authorship and the reading of desire affected each other over time. A subsequent glimpse at modern Chinese authorial practices enables us not only to further historicize the impact of the European literary legacy on China, but also hints at new ways of viewing the selective adaptation of early Chinese authorial practices for the construction of Chinese modernity. Finally, an understanding of historically situated Chinese concepts can provide an alternate vantage point from which to ponder the quandaries that have beset EuroAmerican thinking about authors and readers alike. The Question of Attestation Long before Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) claimed that “any poem is a tremendous betrayer of its creator”12 and before Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) pronounced poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the World,”13 a particular form of individual, but socially grounded authorship, that is, what I have called attestatory authorship, began to take shape in early China. The locus classicus of attestation occurs in the “Great Preface” to the Book of Odes (Shijing), the earliest collection of Chinese poetry: “Poetry verbalizes intent” (shi yan zhi). Given that the “intent” enunciated in the Book of Odes denoted both public ambition and moral character,14 writing in general and poetry in particular was not the province of a privileged group of inspired individuals, but the social duty of all aspiring administrators. The importance of writing was closely tied to the reproduction of the shi as an elite class. Even in the heyday of feudalism, the Zhou period, the shi were not sufficiently grounded in legal and material privilege to count as an a priori social aristocracy. Instead, they felt obliged to embody themselves through socially appropriate virtue, actions, and words (sanbuxiu). In the volatile political climate of the late Zhou, members of the shi elite increasingly saw textual production as their prerogative, regardless of an individual’s access to and participation in the existing institutions of royal patronage. Most famously, Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.) was temporarily employed at various courts, but his main legacy was the textual classics he was alternately said to have “transmitted” or “created.”

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Accordingly, the significance of writing also lay in its power to foreground an individual’s character irrespective of validation by social and political institutions. Arguably, such a contrary or even negative dialectic of writing as a compensatory form of public service owed much to the fact that its first individually identifiable practitioners, Qu Yuan (343?–290 B.C.E.) and Sima Qian (ca. 145–90 B.C.E.), were spectacular political failures. After being sent into exile on account of slanderous charges against him and before drowning himself, Qu Yuan was said to have written his laments in the form of rhapsodies later collected in Songs of the South (Chuci). In the wake of a courageous intervention at court on behalf of a defeated general, Sima Qian bore the stigma of castration in order to finish his father’s history, the monumental Records of the Historian (Shiji). These two foundational texts of poetry and historiography, respectively, contributed to the mystique and enduring fascination of attestation. In particular, following the cue of Sima Qian’s biographies of Confucius, Qu Yuan and of other well-intentioned, but unsuccessful public servants, their authorial efforts were thought to express virtues that were neither bloodless abstractions nor hagiographic embellishments. Despite the common belief that the universe was animated by inherently moral forces, such writings bore witness to the flawed human actualization of what were often capriciously elusive cosmic patterns. The fortitude required of likely, but eloquently documented, individual failure in the face of insurmountable public odds created the socioliterary standing of Confucius, Qu Yuan, and Sima Qian, if not in their lifetimes, then at least posthumously. As Mark Lewis has elegantly argued, early Chinese elites did not write as the “most dedicated and obedient servants” of the fallible rulers under whom they served or were unable to serve in real life, but of those ideal ones whom they imagined in their texts. Thus, writing embodied a parallel universe of an idealized empire and attested to the moral qualities of its most virtuous, if underappreciated, representatives, that is, the writers themselves.15 In the Tang dynasty, the incipient institutionalization of civil service examinations privileged literary composition, especially that of poetry, as evidence for suitability of an official post. Such overt cooptation of the literary voice by the state created new opportunities and new contradictions for individual male writers. Insofar as one circulated one’s writing to secure an official position, it was necessary to attest to one’s moral capacities. Self-conscious about poetry’s capacity to shape one’s reputation both during and after one’s life, poets began to

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take an active role in the selection of their work. For instance, Bai Juyi (772–846) set a precedent by editing his own poetry during his lifetime. Such editorial intervention eventually resulted in a greater number of single-author anthologies, thus creating greater unity between an author and a corresponding codicological or textual unit. At the same time, since many recognized poets did not succeed in the examinations, exceptional literary talent also began to be construed as the proximate cause for official failure.16 By the time of the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, the range of rhymed genres embraced by literati expanded considerably, paving the way for a gradual transformation of what could fall within the bounds of attestation. To be sure, classical poetry and prose remained paramount in one’s collected works, but very gradually song genres also found their way into print. On the one hand, unattributed plays such as those contained in Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (Yuankan sanshizhong, ca. 1330) almost certainly catered to a theater-going public, providing entertainment rather than attestation. On the other hand, Yang Zhaoying (fl. 1320–51), the otherwise unknown editor of the two foundational art songs anthologies, Sunny Spring, White Snow (Yangchun baixue, before 1324) and Songs of Great Peace (Taiping yuefu, 1351), secured the prefatorial services of two of the leading scholarofficials of his own day, Guan Yunshi (1286–1324) and Yu Ji (1272– 1348). Importantly, however, these early anthologies were collective ones, being principally arranged by tunes rather than by authors. It was perhaps no coincidence that the first work to systematically correlate songs and plays with authorial proper names, Zhong Sicheng’s (ca. 1277–after 1345) Register of Ghosts (Lugui bu, 1330), invoked an attestatory paradigm in order to situate the new genres of song and drama within the bounds of the literary field. By the early Ming, Zhu Youdun (1379–1439), the imperial prince, set a new precedent by publishing both his songs and his plays in two extant single-author anthologies, an example subsequently emulated by literati with close ties to the Ming court. Li Kaixian (1502–68), for instance, no longer considered it presumptuous to print his farces, his own plays, and art song and song-drama of his Yuan-dynasty predecessors. On the contrary, after being forced out of court, Li used his publications to weld together extensive social networks among his local community and beyond. Through his publication The Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies (Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi, ca. 1558–68), in particular, he sought to upstage the narrow-minded court bureaucracy with the dazzling display of his wide-ranging erudition.

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By the post-Ming, the reasons for publishing art song and song-drama went well beyond demonstrating one’s hypothetical qualifications for official employment. Yet no matter how idiosyncratic such publications, they were still awash in an intense awareness of a historically continuous community of readers. To be sure, the rhetorically implied audiences changed, but even when Jin Shengtan (1608–61) conceived his six new classics by/for “geniuses” (caizi), he did so in the context of thinking through his bonds with ancient, present, and future readers. Neither solitary nor unique, his circles of geniuses were forged through reading an unorthodox canon of six classics conceived in distinction to the conventional examination curriculum of Four Books and Five Classics. The outrage of Jin’s new canon lay not so much in the aesthetics of his choices as in the educational uses to which he put the vernacular texts among them, Shuihu zhuan (Water margin) and Xixiang ji (Story of the Western wing), two popular works known for their representation of violent brigandry and premarital sex, respectively.17 That young elite men should prove their worth by reading such “trash” seemed a perverse distortion of what traditional training for attestation had been all about. Beginning in the Qing, some of the critics who found the six books of genius objectionable would claim that Jin’s own life was similarly marred by violent acts and sexual transgressions, ultimately resulting in his premature death on the execution ground. For them, Jin’s new canon constituted a form of perversely inverted attestation. Most interestingly, perhaps, one critic of Jin, Dong Han (fl. 1630–97), accused him of plagiarism, denying that the six works of genius, which were after all the compositions of other well-known authors, could possibly be claimed by Jin as his own. This claim takes us into the heart of what I have termed reproductive authorship. The Problem of Reproduction At first glance, von Gottschall’s and Dong Han’s charges of plagiarism may seem identical. However, upon closer examination, it is clear that for von Gottschall, what he saw as the mechanically mindless plagiarism of Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays (Yuanren baizhong qu, 1615/16) was evidence of what he considered the characteristic lack of imagination on the part of Chinese authors. Insofar as such authors were completely beholden to the past, to him, they were all plagiarists. For Dong Han, however, Jin Shengtan overstepped his bounds vis-à-vis the original authors. To him, it was inconceivable that

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a mere commentator could rightfully claim as much credit for explaining other people’s work, no matter how fanciful and farfetched those explications might be. Thus, for Dong, Jin was excessively imaginative, falsifying the historical facts of correct attribution and corresponding interpretation. In China, despite the reputed dominance of a history-centered interpretive framework, dialectical tensions between history and the imagination go back at least as far as Confucius’s well-known dictum “I transmit, but do not create” (shu er buzuo).18 On the one hand, apropos his works, the Confucius of the Analects (Lunyu) articulated a purely “transmissive” or “emulative” stance, famously noting that “I transmit, but do not create.”19 By contrast, Mencius (372–289 B.C.E.), Confucius’s most influential disciple, not only claimed that Confucius “created” (zuo) the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), a historical chronicle of Confucius’s native state of Lu, but also averred that writing allowed one to know the person.20 Sima Qian (ca. 145–90 B.C.E.) individualized Mencius’s creative premise further, characterizing Confucius as one who “created” (zuo) the Spring and Autumn Annals in the face of political adversity.21 Thus, as early as the Han dynasty, a canonical text such as the Spring and Autumn Annals was already positioned in the contested terrain between unadulterated reproduction of actual events and the deliberate creation of an idealized past. Such imaginative uses of the past were not limited to historiography, but extended to other forms of literary production as well. For example, in the late Zhou period, it was common for learned men to quote songs from the Book of Odes, while giving them a new situational twist.22 In the Song period, the poet and scholar-official Huang Tingjian (1045–1105) formulated an entire poetic program based on the notion of adaptive transformation of existing poetic phraseology.23 In the midMing, Li Mengyang (1472–1529) proposed and practiced a poetics informed by the desire to simulate and impersonate the ancients of the Tang dynasty.24 Far from simply replicating old texts or uncritically appealing to their authority, such practices presupposed at the very least a dialogic relationship with the texts of the past, and more commonly, amounted to an act of creative reimagination. An imaginatively transformative relationship not only manifested at a conceptual level. It also expressed itself in the material arrangement of texts. In the context of Han-dynasty textual culture, “copying” (xie) was an important activity for many people involved in literary culture, both as public servants and as private individuals. Given the importance of intertextuality, one modern scholar concludes that “the boundary

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between copying, annotating, commenting, and composing must have been quite fluid.”25 In the transition from manuscript to print, such boundaries also proved to be quite flexible, even with regard to canonical texts. For example, when Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the great Neo-Confucian thinker, published the classics attributed to Confucius, he felt free to excerpt some classics and rearrange the order of certain other texts in addition to supplying his own annotations for all of them. However, in contrast to later reproductive authors, he did not tamper with individual lines of text. In the late Ming, the reproductive imagination extended to new genres and availed itself of the expanded opportunities of print culture and commerce. Such efforts were situated along a continuum of primarily curatorial and imitatively creative endeavors. Drama and song miscellanies such as Songs of Harmonious Resplendence (Yongxi yuefu, 1540) or Brocade Sachet of Romance (Fengyue jinnang, 1553), for instance, included excerpts from Yuan plays and songs, but their editorial program was too vague and too diffuse to qualify as a form of authorship. Similarly, Zhao Qimei’s (1563–1624) compendium of both manuscript and print versions of early song-drama was principally inspired by a collector’s impulse to preserve rare plays. At the same time, literati such as Kang Hai (1475–1541), Wang Jiusi (1468–1551), and Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), who were intimately familiar with Yuan zaju, produced individualized authorial efforts based on Yuan models. Their plays and songs were lauded by some as embodying the spirit of the Yuan, but criticized by others for falling short of their Yuan predecessors. Hence, reproductive authorship offered a way out of the dilemma of indiscriminate collecting and imperfect imitation. Reproductive authorship as practiced by Zang Maoxun was situated at the confluence of history and imagination. Rather than mechanically duplicating the past, such reproductive acts of reading–writing allowed for the individual imagination to authoritatively assert itself in the name of a plausibly simulated historical authenticity. Not all texts were equally suited to such reading–writing. Relatively peripheral rhymed genres lent themselves far more readily for such efforts than genres with a high degree of attestatory authorial pedigree. Given that such texts hovered at the margins of the literary field both in terms of genre and authorial paradigm, reproductive authors invoked external social or textual authorities to invest their textual enterprise with social potency. Through the creation of elaborately conceived paratexts, revision, commentary, order, pairing, and illustrations, they could translate a consummately construed vision of the past into the detailed materiality of

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particular editions. Ready access to a decentralized and relatively lowcost technology, xylography, gave literati considerable control over the publication process, allowing them to make their own publishing and marketing decisions in the absence of strong legal regulation over book production. Zang Maoxun’s One Hundred Yuan Plays not only definitively recreated Yuan plays, but also set a new standard for reproductive authorship. Despite the fact that Zang had authored nothing of his own, the painstaking efforts and sumptuous production values of One Hundred Yuan Plays ensured Zang’s literary fame even among his contemporaries. Depending on the relative scarcity of original plays in circulation and on the audience’s curiosity about new literary genres, Zang’s adaptations appealed partly by virtue of a convincing simulation of an ancient literary artifact. Although some of his peers readily recognized his texts as approximations, none of them dismissed One Hundred Yuan Plays as a random collection, a poor imitation, a forgery, or as plagiarism. Zang’s plays and paratexts successfully blurred the boundaries between a plausibly recreated antiquity and an individual act of imaginative recreation. In particular, Zang famously created an apologia for the contemporary literati obsession with the theater, claiming that the Yuan court selected its officials by means of playwrighting, even if historical evidence to that effect, as Zang well knew, was nonexistent. Imperial precedent, no matter how fictitious, was only one of a number of ways to leverage tradition for new ends. In the interest of creating textual authority for their reproductive enterprise, late Ming authors adduced human or textual institutions to make their case. Wang Jide (d. 1623) conceived of himself as a latter-day Qu Yuan, an identity celebrated in his Xixiang ji edition as well as in his only surviving play, The Male Queen (Nan wanghou),26 a witty persiflage of the rhapsodic tradition represented by Qu Yuan and others. From all we can tell, Wang Jide adopted this persona not because of frustrated political ambition, but out of reverence for a new cultural ideal: the male genius capable of appreciating feminine beauty in female and in some cases male guises. To this end, Wang Jide’s Xixiang ji invoked the prestige of “old texts” (guben) to imagine shi literati appreciation of feminine charms as a socially meaningful form of connoisseurship. Yet, it is also true that Wang only attached his name to the Xixiang ji edition, choosing a pseudonym for his own zaju play. Although the late Ming witnessed unprecedented curiosity about all manner of sentiment and passion, desire continued to be a problematic dimension of authorship.

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The Reading of Desire As noted in the prologue, John Francis Davis (1795–1890) expressed surprise over the forthright representation of imperial male passion found in Zang’s signature play, Autumn in the Han Palace. However, more extensive knowledge of the literary tradition would have alerted him to the fact that desire and politics had long since been enmeshed. In the earliest poetic classic, the Book of Odes, the language of amatory delight and despair and the tropes of political adoration and lament show considerable overlap.27 The Mao commentary attached to the Book of Odes placed such love songs in a simultaneously domestic and political biographical setting by reading them as documents about the exemplary conduct of particular figures of the ruling class. In the case of the Songs of the South, in large measure as a result of Sima Qian’s contextualizing biography, Qu Yuan’s erotically tinged, if unsuccessful, quest for goddesses hinted at the precarious relationship between the honest, dedicated, and loyal servant and the remote and elusive ruler. As Paul Rouzer has shown, from the Han through the Tang periods, such subtle political echoes continued to animate the erotic tropes of elite authors.28 Beginning in the mid-Tang dynasty, the tight allegorical grip on erotic representation gradually began to loosen with the rise of an urban culture outside of the purview of the court. Although such a reading never completely lost its hold on the elite imagination, other non-allegorical possibilities also began to take shape. With the rise of the song genres of ci in the Song period and of sanqu art song in the Yuan dynasty, for instance, the courtesan became a fixture of elite writing. Given the continuous interaction of literati and courtesans in cities around China, the force of actual social relations gradually diluted the imperially centered allegoristic reading of love songs. If early ci lyrics collections such as the foundational and frequently reprinted nostalgic collection Among the Flowers (Huajian ji, 940) still gestured toward a refined court culture, the songs of Sunny Spring, White Snow (before 1324) and Songs of Great Peace (1351) were not only couched in direct, humorous and, at times, crude language, but featured authors such as Guan Hanqing, who were at that point by and large too déclassé to warrant a serious political reading of their lyrics. Such song collections codified a new male sensibility, which had begun to surface since the mid-Tang dynasty, embodying what Stephen Owen has termed “a culture of romance.”29 According to this new and contested ethos, rather than simply attesting to his qualifications as

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a loyal political servant, a man also had to show himself to be capable of romantic sensibility and sophistication. Many short tales, most notably “The Story of Yingying,” explored the conflicting demands placed on elite males. These tales formed the backbone of the new performing genres that developed in the entertainment quarters of Song and Yuan China. Eventually, members of the Ming court, Zhu Quan (1378– 1448) and Jia Zhongming (ca. 1343–after 1424) among them, transmitted, albeit in modified form, some aspects of the urban culture of their dynastic predecessors. In addition to their own, often romantically themed zaju plays, Zhu and Jia produced the Formulary (Taihe zhengyin pu, ca. 1398) and a revised Register (ca. 1422), respectively, both works that brought song and drama within the purview of a gallant gentleman. By the late Ming, disenchanted with the actual court, but enthralled by the lure of aestheticized pleasures, the shi literati greatly expanded what they deemed acceptable pursuits commensurate with their social standing. If previously the theater and the demimonde had been relatively incidental to one’s self-perception, now, at least in some literati quarters, they assumed pride of place. Despite continuing pressures to the contrary, masculine self-representation became more openly and approvingly sensual. A famous scholar-official such as Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) had written erotic songs about courtesans. However, it would have been unlikely that he would publish his own romantic songs in an anthology together with the works of relatively obscure authors as well as with those of members of the imperial family under the rather vainglorious title “Famous Songs.” This, however, is precisely what Meng Chengshun (1599–after 1684) did in his Joint Selection of Famous Plays Old and New (Gujin mingju hexuan, 1633). In the post-Ming period, Li Yu (1610–80) gave many literary practices of the late Ming a new twist. If earlier forms of attestation had limited themselves to proving one’s suitability for office, Li Yu’s oeuvre was designed to show him as a man of wit, learning, invention, and broadminded connoisseurship of the twists and turns of romance. Li Yu recommended that aspiring dramatists purchase and thoroughly familiarize themselves with earlier dramatic texts, most notably Xixiang ji, Pipa ji (The story of the lute), and One Hundred Yuan Plays.30 Yet, while paying lip service to the supposed excellence of “Yuan drama,” in the end, Li held it up as an imperfect and flawed model in need of improvement by the current generation of chuanqi writers.31 In marked contrast to the predominantly reproductive approach of an earlier generation of drama editors, Li Yu claimed authorship for his new chuanqi plays, no

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matter how much or how little he reworked earlier materials. He also took the rather unusual step of publishing his plays as a single-author anthology, boldly announcing his own name in the title.32 Moreover, all ten of Li Yu’s plays contained in Li Liweng’s Ten Plays (Li Liweng shizhong qu) are romantic comedies, providing eloquent evidence for the expansion of attestatory authorship begun in the Ming dynasty. In keeping with the late Ming revival of the rhapsodic erotics represented by Qu Yuan and others, Li Yu humorously played upon a literalized, literati family-centered understanding of the eroticism in his critical as well as his creative writings. What was an acceptable reconciliation of familial ideology and erotic license in the post-Ming and even the Qing periods proved, however, to be an object of contention during the Republican era. Guided by traditionalist attestatory concerns, some Qing critics, including Jin Shengtan’s detractor Dong Han, had already objected to Li’s supposed licentiousness, his association with actors, and the vulgar diction of his plays.33 Such ad hominem aspersions would continue to be cast in modern times.34 With the introduction of Western ideas about desire and drama, Li Yu’s fortunes changed. On the one hand, in the wake of the introduction of Western sexology and the implementation of Chinese socio-sexual reform in the early twentieth century,35 the content of certain plays began to be classified as sexually pathological. As Zhao Jingshen, a leading authority on traditional literature, put it in 1930, “Li Yu’s plays such as Cherishing the Fragrant Companion (Lian xiangban), which describes female homosexuality (nüzi de tongxing lian’ai), often describe abnormal psychological states (biantai xinli).”36 At the same time, nineteenth-century European and Japanese critics’s attention to Li Yu’s plays, fiction,37 as well his treatise on drama militated against oblivion.38 Confronted with European and Japanese pressures and perspectives, twentieth-century Chinese elites selectively adopted early song-dramas and some of the authorial practices surrounding them to construct Chinese modernity. The Construction of Modernity As the introductory chapter showed, the nineteenth-century geopolitical ascendance of Europe that instilled such supreme confidence in men like von Gottschall also left, through the diffusion of the category of “tragedy,” a powerful imprint on modern Chinese literary theorizing. In the first half of the twentieth century, Wang Guowei (1877– 1927) assimilated the genre of early Chinese song-drama to the idea of

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“tragedy.” Despite the occasional comment about individual zaju authors, he was principally concerned with the musical origins and the poetic language of the plays. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the productive reception of early song-drama began to focus on the problematic of authorship and authorial intent. Rather than understanding the preoccupation with authorship solely as a replica of an individualistically conceived variant of European-style dramatic authorship, even a cursory examination of the dialogic relationship between modern and classical drama points to the presence of earlier attestatory pressures and reproductive dispositions among modern Chinese playwrights and critics alike. The modern dramatist Tian Han (1898–1968), for one, adopted many traditional plays for modern ends. In preparation for a speech he was going to deliver in conjunction with the Guan Hanqing festivities in 1958, Tian read many critical and primary materials about Guan Hanqing. Moved by what he saw as a spirit of political defiance embodied in the image of the intractable “bronze bean” of “On Not Succumbing,” Tian Han decided to write an eponymous play about Guan Hanqing, Guan Hanqing.39 In Guan Hanqing, Guan Hanqing works as an imperial physician and is an acclaimed writer among fellow playwrights and ordinary people alike. Guan observes the execution of a young woman, who is, as he learns from a neighbor, innocent of the murder for which she is being put to death. While continuing his services as a doctor, he resolves to write a play about this case, that is, the play Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan). Tian’s plot alluded to one of the founding moment of modern Chinese literature, that is, Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) decision to abandon his medical studies and become a writer after watching the impassive reaction of a group of Chinese toward the execution of one of their own by the Japanese.40 For all the evident parallels to Lu Xun’s personal narrative, Tian’s play modifies the story, by among other things, introducing sexual violence into Lu Xun’s original scenario. In Guan Hanqing, most instances of oppression involve predatory acts of sexual aggression. In Guan Hanqing, the villains who precipitate Dou E’s death both have sexual designs on her. By contrast, Guan Hanqing and the actress Zhu Lianxiu are considered a couple based on the loyalty they have shown to each other and to their common political cause without any hint of sexual intimacy. In a 1959 Xixiang ji adaptation for the Beijing opera repertoire of what Tian called “the masterpiece by Wang Shifu and Guan Hanqing,”41 Tian Han similarly deeroticized the story and presented it instead as an anachronistic protest against the

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“tragedy” of arranged marriages, an issue hotly debated during that decade.42 Ironically, for all of Tian’s writerly attempts to attest to Guan Hanqing’s and his own loyalties to both “the people” and the moral code of their principal representative, the Communist Party, neither Guan nor Tian himself remained unscathed during the ensuing campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the interpretive allegorization of Guan Hanqing’s life and oeuvre in the 1950s, Guan Hanqing was branded a reactionary libertine shortly before the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.43 The critic in question singled out “On Not Succumbing” to discredit Guan Hanqing’s moral character, anticipating the common Cultural Revolution practice of using sexual innuendo as a weapon against political enemies.44 More tragically, early in the Cultural Revolution, before being tortured to death in prison in 1968, Tian Han was accused of having used historical characters such as Guan Hanqing to indict contemporary Party politics.45 In the wake of the rehabilitation of Guan Hanqing, Tian Han, and other major authors in the 1980s, a new generation of playwrights began to produce their own versions of Yuan plays. Situated between commerce and politics, materialism and idealism, love and desire, these post-1989 plays address contemporary concerns. Lin Zhaohua, a leading spoken-drama director, combined Voltaire’s Orphan of China with the Chinese zaju version to create a new play that explores the strengths and limits of Western “humanism” and Eastern “brutality.” Another director, Hu Zhifeng, blended Brecht’s and the zaju version of the Chalk Circle in order to critique the current wave of materialism. Writing principally for an acclaimed female performer of young male operatic roles, Mao Weitao, another playwright, Zeng Zhaohong (1935–), conceived a controversial, yet acclaimed version of the Xixiang ji. This new adaptation portrayed a caring and sensitive Zhang Gong, who treasures his love for Yingying above any considerations for official approbation and commercial success.46 What is striking is that in the spirit of reproductive authorship, each generation of modern playwrights has felt it necessary and appropriate to significantly change these old plays while retaining the title, the characters, and the principal plot. To be sure, neither Tian Han nor Zeng Zhaohong conceded the privilege of authorship to the original authors the way Zang Maoxun had done despite his significant changes in wording, order, and plot—instead, their approach resonates more closely with Jin Shengtan’s assertion that “the Xixiang ji critiqued by Shengtan is Shengtan’s text, not the Xixiang ji,” while insisting that the

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text was a “collective treasure” ( gonggong zhi bao) rather than an individual person’s collected writing.47 Needless to say perhaps, the implied readership has changed. As we know, Jin Shengtan imagined a select group of young male geniuses as the most desirable readers for his new canon, whereas Tian Han and Zeng Zhaohong envisioned either a socialist or a post-socialist people as their ideal viewers.48 Nevertheless, the longevity as well as the changeability of these old plays suggests that early Chinese authorship has reinvented itself in modern guises. If in the European case, the transcendence of God and capitalist proprietorship have obscured the social nature of authorship, in China, a social, if profoundly interventionist and imaginative, dimension has remained one of the principal raisons d’être for authorial production, even if in the course of the twentieth century, issues of individual copyright have come to assume much greater importance. Although the hypostasized locus of textual authority has shifted from the fictitious cast of Zang’s imperial state and from the imagined community of Jin’s geniuses to the equally fictitious “people” or to “popular” audiences, social calibration remains fundamental to the authorial enterprise. The imaginative impulse that compelled Zang to invent his public examinations and prompted Jin to create his private canon remains pertinent to these newer versions: neither Tian Han nor Zeng Zhaohong aspired merely to make the past legible—they wanted to reimagine the past in order to change the present, albeit with vastly different aims. In his own way, each of these authors relied on a historicized imagination and on an aesthetics of accessibility to leave his socially restorative mark in the lives of his readers or viewers. From this vantage point, proprietary authorship, no matter how financially remunerative, appears immeasurably diminished. Coda In sum, the long and continuing history of early Chinese song-drama reminds us that texts are indeed “made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,”49 but, in defiance of Barthes’s optimistic desire for totality, the reader is not “the space on which all quotations . . . are inscribed without any of them being lost.”50 When Zang Maoxun convinced one of his correspondents to part with some of his money to print the refined plays attributed to Guan Hanqing and other Yuan playwrights, he did not know that Joseph de

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Prémare (1666–1736) would purchase a volume of said plays to investigate colloquial Chinese—nor could the Jesuit Prémare anticipate that his hastily produced and underhandedly published translation of one such play would inspire the anti-religious monarchist Voltaire (1694– 1778), whose version in turn would be revived in a dialogic play by the post-socialist Lin Zhaohua on a Chinese stage centuries later. And even though Jin Shengtan boldly projected that his Xixiang ji would have readers one or two hundred years hence, could he truly have foreseen the colonial ambitions of John Francis Davis and Aoki Masaru (1887– 1964) or the reformist aspirations of Tian Han or Zeng Zhaohong voiced through their adaptations of that and other romantic Chinese plays? As the extraordinary trajectory of early Chinese song-drama reveals, it is precisely the selectivity of quotations and misquotations that continues to create the spaces in which new authors and new readers are born. Theaters of Desire shows that the birth of the reader is not contingent upon the death of the author—instead, their lives are inextricably and unpredictably intertwined.

Notes

Prologue 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Davis, The Chinese, 2: 173. Davis, “Han Koong Tsew,” The Quarterly Review 41 (1829): 87. For the regional development of zaju, see Ji, Yuan zaju fazhan shi. Liao, Zhongguo xiqu shengqiang yuanliu shi and Lin, Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu. Gong, Wan Ming sichao, 404. For portraiture, see Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self; for the simulated storyteller’s rhetoric, see Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction and Ge, Out of the Margins. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 35–45. Prompted by the findings of social, cultural, and literary historians, I am using the term “post-Ming” (1644–1683) to describe an era marked by the sensibilities of the late Ming as well as by the profound changes resulting from the demise of the Ming dynasty and its aftermath. Epstein, Competing Discourses, 61–119 and Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative, 5–22. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 67–78 and 84–91; Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy,” 1–43; Zeitlin, “Shared Dreams,” 127–79; Epstein, Competing Discourses, 92–103; Swatek, Peony Pavilion Onstage, 25–98. Xu, Mudanting yanjiu ziliao kaoshi, 40–41. Major sinological studies have addressed the issue of literary or textual authority more than questions of authorship. For a detailed discussion of literary authority in Han and pre-Han China, see Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China; for the post-Han Jin period, see Connery, The Empire of the Text; for the Tang, see McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China; for the Song, see Bol, This Culture of Ours; for the Ming and the Qing, see Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction. Stallybrass, “Editing as Cultural Formation,” 91–103. My thanks to Kimberly Besio for bringing this article to my attention. See her “Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction,” 252–54 for the first use of that term in conjunction with Yuan drama. On the spectrum of self-revelation and authorial “ownership” in the context of short fiction, see Yang, Appropriation and Representation, 13–18. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 45. See also Huang, “Author(ity) and Reader,” 53 and 62.

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Introduction Rewriting Early Chinese Zaju Song-Drama for Transnational, National, and Local Contexts 1. Aoki, Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, 1: 2. Translations from all languages into English are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Lefèvere, Translation, 9. I am adding performance to Lefèvere’s definition of “rewriting.” 3. Bourdieu, In Other Words, 104. 4. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 89. 5. Liu, Translingual Practice, 26. 6. Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 1–45. 7. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 33–50; Clunas, Fruitful Sites, 9–15. 8. Liu, Translingual Practice, 33–35. 9. For later references to these European translations, see Xie, Zhongguo dawenxue, 9: 21–22; Aoki, Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, 2: 725–27; Lu, Zhongguo xiju gailun, 58–59; Shionoya, Kokuyaku Genkyoku sen, 40 and 75. In the 1930s, Chinese scholars also began to study the European diffusion of these plays. See, for example, Chen, “The Chinese Orphan.” 10. Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 165. Though not completely accurate in terms of publication dates and spellings of the translators’ names, Wang’s list is in the main on target. Wang most likely had access to the relevant European publications at Kyoto University. In his quest to establish Yuan drama as the sole legitimate form of Chinese drama, Wang did not mention that these and other scholars had also translated later Ming and Qing chuanqi plays. See for example, Bazin, tr., Le Pi-Pa-Ki, ou L’histoire du luth. 11. Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 142–43. 12. Antoine Bazin was responsible for two-thirds of the translations listed by Wang. The vast majority appeared in 1851 in the Journal asiatique. 13. For an exception, see Wilhelm Grube, ed. and tr., Chinesische Schattenspiele (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1915). However, retranslation or adaptation of existing dramatic translations for different media was common. 14. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912, 114–16 and 122. Wang Guowei was a graduate of Luo Zhenyu’s Japanese Language School in Shanghai, which had been inaugurated in 1898 with a view toward training Chinese translators, especially for technical subjects such as agriculture. 15. West, “Jurchen Elements,” 273–95. 16. Fang Linggui produces a short list of one-hundred-and-fourteen Mongolian-derived words in Yuan and Ming drama (Yuan Ming xiqu zhong de Menggu yu). The inclusion of such words in plays was also subject to late Ming editorial manipulation. Kimberly Besio has pointed out that, in some cases, Zang Maoxun retroactively introduced Mongolian terms (“Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction,” 266–73). In other instances, Zang removed ethnic markers (Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 219). 17. Yu Ji, “Preface,” TPYF, 1.

notes / 181 18. See Gong, Wan Ming sichao, 381–99. 19. Chen Yuan identifies sixteen songwriters of non-Chinese descent. See Chen, Western and Central Asians in China, 178–85. 20. The two most polemical proponents of Southern drama, Xu Wei (1521– 93) and Wang Shizhen (1526–90), both rank the Uighur Guan Yunshi among the best Yuan-dynasty songwriters. See Xu, Nanci xulu, XQLZJC, 3: 242–43 and Wang, Quzao, XQLZJC, 4: 25. 21. See Chen, Western and Central Asians. 22. On the introduction of the idea of “national history” in the National Essence circles with which Wang was affiliated, see Yü, “Changing Conceptions,” 155–74; on their conceptions of race, see Dikötter, The Discourse of Race, 97–125. 23. Among other recent scholarship on the Qing empire, Pamela Crossley, Translucent Mirror, compellingly argues that the Qing state pursued its own policies of “racialization,” particularly in the eighteenth century under Qianlong’s (r. 1736–96) long rule, which in turn affected the thought of late Qing critics. To what extent imperial Qing ideas about race and ethnicity inflected Wang’s and others’ conception of classical drama remains to be investigated. 24. Said, Orientalism, 12. 25. Zhang, Mighty Opposites, 26–27. 26. Pao, The Orient of the Boulevards, 2. 27. See, for example, Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism. 28. Basil, French Image, 51–52. 29. du Halde, Description. The Description was first published in Paris by P. G. Le Mercier, a major printer–publisher active in the eighteenth century. A first installment of the Lettres was published in 1717 by N. Le Clerc, another commercial publishing house, followed by another volume issued by Mercier in 1731. 30. Voltaire, quoted in Guy, French Image, 56. 31. On Fourmont, see Rémusat, Nouveaux mélanges, 2: 291–304. 32. See Prémare, Notitiae Linguae Sinicae and Lundbaek, Joseph de Prémare, 64. 33. du Halde, Description, 3: 341–43. 34. See Prémare’s letter to Fourmont published together with the play in Bibliothèque des théâ tres, 83–91. 35. A century later, John Francis Davis would claim that a large number of Yuan plays had five acts (Han Koong Tsew, vi) and Antoine Bazin would summarily define all zaju as “drama in five acts” (Le siècle de Yuen, 11). 36. On the latter point, see Idema, “Orphan of Zhao,” 161. 37. Idema, “Orphan of Zhao,” 159–84. 38. See also Porter, Ideographia, 234 and 239. 39. I am indebted to Christopher A. Reed for this line of thinking. 40. Guy, The French Image, 23 and Abel-Rémusat, Nouveaux Mélanges, 1: 381–412. 41. Basing himself on Chinese sources, Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759), the greatest French sinologist of the eighteenth century, published History of Gentchiscan and of the Entire Mongol Dynasty in Paris in 1739. Joseph de

182 / notes

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

Guignes (1721–1800), a professor of Syrian studies, devoted a separate monograph to the histories of different Central Asian peoples entitled Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongols, et des autres Tartares occidentaux (1756–58). See Demiéville, “Aperçu,” 70–71 and 77. Eberstein, Das Chinesische Theater, xiii–xiv. Hatchett, The Chinese Orphan. For a brief discussion of the plot, see Chen, “The Chinese Orphan,” 366–68. Voltaire, L’orphelin de la Chine, Oeuvres complètes, 5: 300–56. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, 2: 397. Voltaire, “É pitre dédicatoire,” L’orphelin de la Chine, Oeuvres complètes, 5: 296–99. Murphy, The Orphan of China, 91. Hsia, “The Orphan of the House Zhao,” 391–93. Niranjana, Siting Translation, 11–35. My thanks to Steven G. Yao for bringing this reference to my attention. Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, 91. For an example of general discussion, see Samuel Johnson, Oriental Religions and their Relation to Universal Religion: China (Boston: Osgood, 1877), 448–49; for an anthologization of Sorrows of Han, see Edmund Wilson, ed., Chinese Literature (New York: P. F. Collier, 1901), 281–302; for an adaptation of Sorrows, see Laloy, Trois drames de l’Asie, 105–41. Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, 68. Ibid., 94. In another more general publication, Davis was even blunter: “In another specimen of the Chinese theatre, which is of a tragic case, and turns on the misfortunes of one of the native emperors against the Mongol Tartars, . . .” Davis, The Chinese, 2: 185. Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, 93. See also Davis, “Preface,” Han Koong Tsew, v. Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, iii–v. Ibid., 91–92. For a scathing but justified critique of Davis’s ahistorical, incomplete, and error-ridden translation as well as of Robert Morrison’s dictionary on which Davis relied, see Julius Klaproth, “Observations critiques sur la traduction anglaise d’un drame chinois,” Journal asiatique ser. 2, 4 (1829): 3–21 and ser. 2, 5 (1830): 97–144. Said, Orientalism, 123–48. Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, 55. The Chalk Circle resonated with the biblical story of Salomon’s wise judgment in the allocation of a disputed child’s parentage, thus hinting at the importance of extending the study of the “Orient” to include the furthest terrain of the Eurasian continent. Cf. Davis, The Chinese, 2: 189. Said, Orientalism, 129–30. A professor at the College de France, Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) was also interested in China. Demiévielle, “Aperçu,” 78 and Zurndorfer, “Orientalism, Sinology and Public Policy.” Bazin, Le siècle de Yuen, 5–6. For Bazin’s attempts to reconcile popular and royal perspectives in light of the 1838 revolution, see especially his prefatory comments in Bazin,

notes / 183

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

Théâtre chinois, i–liv. The publication of Bazin’s Le siècle de Yuan in 1850, in which he condoned Chinese censorship of the theater, coincided with the reenactment of such censorship in France after reactionary forces, including the elected king, defeated the 1848 revolution through a coup. See Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 44–54 and 204–25. For Klaproth’s classificatory endeavors, see his Tableaux historique de l’Asie depuis la Monarchie de Cyrus jusqu’à nos jours; accompagnés de recherches historiques et ethnographiques sur cette partie de monde. For a discussion of its impact on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese scholarship, see Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 79–93. Silvestre de Sacy published the Chréstomathie arabe (1806 and 1827), a foundational text for the philologically oriented, “scientific” and “rational” production of the “Orient.” See Said, Orientalism, 123–30. See Klaproth, Chréstomathie mandchou (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1828) and Chréstomathie chinoise. Prémare, “Lettre à Fourmont,” 86–87; Davis, Laou-seng-urh, xliii and “Preface,” Han Koong Tsew, vi–vii; Julien, L’orphelin de Tchao. Julien, L’orphelin de Tchao, viii. For Julien’s remarks on wanting to provide materials for “persons who occupy themselves with comparative literature,” see Julien, L’orphelin de Tchao, 138. For the new discipline of comparative literature emerging in the 1830s in France, see Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 22. On Schall, see Rémusat, Nouveaux mélanges, 2: 217–21. On the German Jesuits in general, see Franke, Sinology at German Universities, 4–7; on Leibniz and Wolff, see Ching, Moral Enlightenment. Reichwein, China and Europe, 139. Journal asiatique, ser. 1, 3 (1823): 123. Reichwein, China and Europe, 129–46 and Hsia, The Orphan of the House Zhao, 390–91. For Thoms’s career as a printer, see Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, forthcoming. Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, 53–68. Reichwein, China and Europe, 146. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 197. Ibid., 198. On Goethe’s interest in promoting foreign rather than simply a national German theater, see Fischer-Lichte, Das eigene und das fremde Theater, 10–12. Docherty, Criticism and Modernity, 1. Hubert, Les grandes théories du théâtre, 46–114. By the nineteenth century, even a non-specialist such as John Francis Davis pointed out that Aristotle had only elaborated at length on the unity of action, had merely hinted at that of time, and had made no mention of place (The Chinese, 2: 181). Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 112–140. Alt, Tragödie der Aufklärung, 290–322; Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 163–196. du Halde, Description, 3: 341–43. Voltaire, “Épitre dédicatoire,” L’orphelin de Chine, Oeuvres complètes, 5: 296–97. On Lope de Vega (1562–1635) and his flexible approach to

184 / notes

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

classical rules, see Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 61–64. Voltaire’s comments would be echoed as late as Giles, A History of Chinese Literature, 269–70, the first general Western language history of Chinese literature. Percy, Miscellaneous Pieces, 1: 217. Davis, Laou-seng-urh, xli–xlv. Davis, Han Koong Tsew, vi. Klein, Die Geschichte des Dramas, 3: 396–97. Gottschall, Das Theater und Drama der Chinesen, 84–120. For a rehashing of this view, see the first general German language history of Chinese literature, Grube, Geschichte der chinesischen Litteratur, 359–96. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 2: 551. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 46. For a historical perspective on Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy, see Alt, Tragödie der Aufklärung, 310–13. For a discussion of Japanese forms of drama, see Mikami and Takatsu, Nihon bungaku shi, 2: 431–58. For the canonical status of that work, see Brownstein, “From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku,” 444–56. Lee, “Chikamatsu,” 179–98. Sasagawa, Shina shôshetsu gikyoku shôshi, 47–65. My thanks to Leo Yip for clarification of this point. Evidently, the first general literary history was written by the Russian sinologist V. P. Vasil’ev (1818–1900) under the title Ocherk istorii kitajskoj literatury (History of Chinese literature: an outline) in 1880. See Dolezelová-Velingerová, “Literary Historiography,” 130, n. 3. I have not had access to this work, but it does not seem to have had an impact outside of Russia. Sasagawa, Shina bungaku shi, 262–68. Chen, Zhongguo wenxue shi jiuban shumu tiyao, 128–29. Later, the history was retranslated and plagiaristically issued under his own name by a certain Tong Xingbai under the title Zhongguo wenxue shigang. Lin, Zhongguo wenxue shi, 182. Bonner, Wang Guowei, 56–95. Wang, “Honglou meng pinglun,” Wan Qing wenxue congchao, 103–25. The essay originally appeared in Jiaoyu congshu in 1904 and in Jing’an wenji in 1905. Bonner, Wang Guowei, 130. For references to Japanese newspapers articles that denounced Chinese theater as immature and crude, see Jiang Guanyun, “Zhongguo zhi yanjujie,” Wan Qing wenxue congchao, 50. Bonner, Wang Guowei, 101–02. Wang, Lugui bu jiaozhu, Wang Guowei xiqu lunwen ji, 319–81. “Xiqu kaoyuan” (On the orgins of drama) appeared in Guocui xuebao 48 and 50 (1908–09); “Tang Song daqu kao” (On the daqu melodies in the Tang and Song dynasties) was published in Guocui xuebao 67–68 (1910); “Guqu jiaose kao” (On the role types of ancient opera) was issued in Luo Zhenyu’s Guoxue congkan 1 (1911). Wang also published other,

notes / 185

108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129.

traditional compilations of drama-related materials in Guocui xuebao. See Bonner, Wang Guowei, 243, n. 6. On the contents of the journal and the people affiliated with it, see Schneider, “National Essence,” 57–89, esp. 64. On “national learning,” see Liu, Translingual Practice, 242–46. The Shanghai-based Fulunshe, for example, published many works by Ming loyalists and other victims of Qing politics, including those of Chen Jiru and Jin Shengtan. See Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, forthcoming. Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 147–48 and Lefèvere, Translation, 1–10. See Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories. For Wang’s positive attitude toward translated neologisms, see Zou, “Travel and Translation,” 145–48. Ye, Quxue yu xiju xue, 31–34. See Liu, Translingual Practice, 17–18. For a list of such classical Chinese loan words reimported from Japan, see ibid., 302–42. Liu’s list does not include the word gikyoku discussed here. Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 43 and 82. See also Ye, Quxue yu xiju xue, 427. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 41. Qian, Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi, 313. Ibid., 325. This appears to be true even though the Commercial Press brought out several of Wu’s studies: Yimotashi quhua (1907), Guqu chentan (1914), and Quxue tonglun (1932). See the various studies gathered in Wu, Wu Mei xiqu lunwen ji. He commemorated Qiu Jin (1875–1907), the revolutionary woman martyr, and he was a member of the reformist Southern Society (Nanshe). See Qian, Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi, 313–14 and 327. See also Ye, Quxue yu xiju xue, 435–37. See, for example, Tan, Zhongguo jinhua shi, 4, which lists sixteen major sources, Wang’s History among them. For these sources, see Wang Guowei, Song Yuan xiqu kao, Zengbu quyuan geji (Shanghai: Liuyi shiju, 1922) and Luo Zhenyu, ed. Song Yuan xiqu kao, Haining Wang Zhongque gong yishu (N.p.: N.p., 1927), vol. 3. Following the cue of “specialized scholarship” that was neither overtly ideological nor activist in post-Tian’anmen Beijing as embodied by the magazine Xueren (Scholars), Commercial Press’s 1999 commemorative volume on Wang Guowei refers to Wang’s History as Song Yuan xiqu kao. Invoking the paragon of the Xueren circle, Chen Yinque (1890–1969), the editorial remarks characterize Wang’s work as the first and successful application of Western research methods in the domain of Chinese drama. See Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei wenxue lunzhu sanzhong (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2001). My thanks to Dai Jinhua for bringing Xueren to my attention. Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 3. Li Zhi (1527–1602) was perhaps the first Chinese critic to treat the dynastic correlation as a neutral attribute of a different age. For the

186 / notes

130.

131. 132.

133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146.

paradigmatic statement, see his “Tongxin shuo,” Fenshu, 98. Earlier critics had often seen the changes as a form of devolution rather than evolution. See Gong, Wan Ming sichao, 399–401. Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 123–24. The plays singled out for the lack of a happy ending are: Autumn in the Han Palace (Hangong qiu), Rain on the Palownia Tree (Wutong yu), The Dream of Western Shu (Xi Shu meng), Huoshao Jie Zitui (Burning Jie Zitui), Zhang Qian Kills the Wife [of His Sworn Brother] Instead [of His Sworn Brother] (Ti shaqi). On Wang being the first to introduce the notion of tragedy, see Ye, Quxue yu xiju xue, 429. For an early Chinese example of concurrence, see Xie, Luo Guanzhong yu Ma Zhiyuan, 87. For a Japanese literary history by one of the foremost Japanese translators of zaju that endorses Wang’s list, albeit without acknowledgment, see Miyahara, Shina shôsetsu gikyoku shi gaisetsu, 157. Another major Japanese authority on Yuan drama, Shionoya On, disagreed, noting that most Chinese plays were comedies and that even the so-called tragedies such as Autumn in the Han Palace and Injustice to Dou E ultimately incorporated redemption or retribution (Shionoya, Kokuyaku Genkyoku sen, 100). Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 164–65. The first Western-language history of Chinese literature formalizes earlier views on the subject, attributing the rise of Chinese drama to the “Tartars” (Giles, History of Chinese Literature, 258), as does the first Japanese history (Sasagawa, Shina bungaku shi, 262–63). Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 97. For a historical assessment of Chinese literati under the Jin, see Bol, “Seeking Common Ground,” 461–538. Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 98. Both Zhong himself commented on having repeatedly failed the examinations as did subsequent preface writers for Zhong’s Register. Liu, Translingual Practice, 242–46, esp. 244. Hu, “Yuanqu,” Zhenzhu chuan, 31: 4: 43–44 and “Beiqu,” Zhenzhu chuan, 31: 3: 32. Crossley, The Translucent Mirror, 337–61. Owen, “The End of the Past,” 169. For an exception, see Zhou Zuoren, Zhongguo xinwenxue de yuanliu (Beijing: Beiping renwen, 1934), passim. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 1–26 and Denton, “Introdution,” 1–68. Ip, Life and Times, 141. My thanks to Christopher A. Reed for bringing this book to my attention. The essay was later included in the influential ten-volume canon-forming compendium of modern Chinese literature. See Hu, “Wenxue jinhua guan yu xiju gailiang,” Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, 1: 376–86. Taking Marian Galik to task for mistakenly referring to “shijie wenxue,” Liu, Translingual Practice, 188 notes that Hu Shi uses the phrase “shijie de xiju wenxue.” The actual phrase used is “history of world literature” (shijie wenxue shi). Hu, “Wenxue jinhua guannian yu xiju gailiang,” Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, 1: 381.

notes / 187 147. Gong, Wan Ming sichao, 422–23. 148. Xie, Luo Guanzhong yu Ma Zhiyuan, 67. 149. For a critique of that notion as wholly inadequate to describe Chinese/non-Chinese relations in historical times, see Crossley, Orphan Warriors, 221–28. 150. He, Yuanqu gailun, 81. 151. For the importance of “Menggu” (“Mongol”) inferiority as a foil for Han inferiority in the international arena after 1949, see Alamz Khan, “Who Are the Mongols?,” 125–59. 152. Liu, Zhongguo wenxue fada shi (Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua, 1968 [1941– 49]), 799. For the relevant section in the post-PRC version, see Liu Dajie, Zhongguo wenxue fazhan shi (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1982 [1963]), 3: 831– 32. My thanks to Mark Halperin for providing access to that latter edition. 153. Guo, “Lu Xun yu Wang Guowei,” Guo Moruo quanji, 20: 303. 154. Guo, “Xixiang ji yishu shang de panduan yu qi zuozhe de xingge,” Guo Moruo quanji, 15: 321. 155. For the three plays in question, that is, Zhuo Wenjun, Wang Zhaojun, and Nieying, see Guo, Juben quanji, 1: 84–188. 156. Guo, “Xie zai Sange panni de nüxing houmian,” Juben quanji, 1: 196. 157. Cai, “Yi meiyu dai zongjiao shuo,” Cai Yuanpei meixue wenxuan, 68–73. 158. Cheung, Nietzsche in China, 1904–1992, v and 27. 159. See “Fakan xuanyan,” Guoxue jikan, 1:1 (1923), 1–16. 160. For a facsimile edition with the preface by Kano Naoki dated 1914, see Beijing Library, Ricang Yuankan ben gujin zaju sanshizhong. For Wang’s preface dated 1915, see Wang, Wang Guowei xiqu lunwen ji, 387. 161. See, for example, Sui Shusen’s preface to his translation of Shionoya, Yuanqu gaishuo. 162. On the history and uses of the term “Shina,” see Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 3–7. 163. Brownstein, “From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku.” 164. Fogel, Politics and Sinology, 5–16. 165. On the construction of “Oriental History” (tôyô shi), see Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 47–49 and 58–67. 166. For Kano’s biography, see Fogel, The Literature of Travel, 103–119. 167. Fogel, The Literature of Travel, 104. On the Japanese reconstruction of Confucianism at Kyoto’s rival institution, Tokyo University, see Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 122–52. 168. Kano, Riben zang Yuankanben gujin zaju sanshizhong, 1: 1a–3b. 169. See his preface in Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, 1: 1–3. 170. In a newspaper article published after World War II, Aoki defended the use of this term as a neutral designation for China. See Aoki, “Shina to yobu meibyo ni tsuite,” Aoki Masaru zenshu, 8: 88–91. 171. Fogel, Politics and Sinology, 205–10. 172. Aoki, Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, 1: 66–70. For a Japanese view that endorses Xie Wuliang’s negative view of the Mongols, see Shionoya, Kokuyaku Genkyoku sen, 30–31. 173. Aoki, Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, 2: 468–90. 174. Aoki, Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, 1: 2.

188 / notes 175. Mikami and Takatsu, Nihon bungaku shi, 2: 431–58. 176. Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, 226–27. 177. Shangwu yinshu guan tushu mulu, 1897–1949, 202 and 210–11. My thanks to Christopher A. Reed for bringing this work to my attention. For further confirmation, see Chen, Zhongguo wenxue shi jiuban shumu tiyao, 128–37, 186–88, and 319–38. 178. Shina bungaku gaisetsu (Tokyo: Kôbundo, 1935) was translated twice, once by Guo Xuzhong, Zhongguo wenxue fafan (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936) and under the same title by Sui Shusen (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1938); Shina bungei shichô (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1928) was translated by Wang Junyu, Zhongguo gudai wenyi shichao lun (Beijing: Renwen shudian, 1933). 179. Shina kindai gikyoku shi (1930) was translated twice, once as Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi (Shanghai: Beixin, 1933) and once by Wang Gulu, Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936). See also the partial translation by Jiang Xia’an, Nanbei xiqu yuanliu kao (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1928) and (Changsha: Commercial Press, 1939). 180. For instance, Lu Qian noted that what he claimed to be the first complete history of Chinese drama, ranging from early performance to modern spoken drama, was indebted in major ways to Aoki Masaru’s History as well as Wang Guowei’s History. See Lu, Zhongguo xiju gailun, 2–3. 181. Lu, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi lüe, Lu Xun quanji, 9: 4. 182. Aoki’s Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi was published at least twice in the People’s Republic of China (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1956) and (Beijing: Zuojia, 1958). 183. Sui Shusen, “Translator’s Prefaces,” Yuanren zaju gaishuo. The earlier edition was published under the title Yuanren zaju xushuo (Shanghai: Kaiming, 1941). 184. Wang, Inventing China Through History, 6–10. 185. Ciyuan (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1964 [1916]) defines tragedy as “one of the forms of Western drama.” Cihai (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1936 and 1947 rev. ed.) cites only Shakespearean plays such as King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet, noting that tragedy “expressed the conflict between good and evil, was serious and somber in nature, and invariably ended badly.” I am indebted to Christopher A. Reed for this particular line of inquiry. On the diffusion of Shakespeare into Republican China, see Hsiao Yang Zhang, Shakespeare in China: A Comparative Study of Two Traditions and Cultures (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 117–22. 186. Hanyu dazidian jianbian (N.p.: Hanyu dazidian, 1998), 1: 1743. Identified as one of the important forms of drama, the subdefinition of tragedy reads: “The basic characteristics are an irreconcilable conflict between the protagonist and reality as well as an unhappy ending as illustrated by Injustice to Dou E.” In addition to dictionary definitions, the notion of tragedy was also naturalized through popular anthologies such as Wang Jisi et al. ed., Zhongguo shida gudian beiju ji (Shanghai: Shanghai

notes / 189

187.

188. 189. 190. 191.

192. 193. 194. 195. 196.

197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205.

wenyi, 1982) and a plethora of scholarly studies such as Jiao Wenbin, Zhongguo gudian beiju lun (Xi’an: Xibei daxue, 1990), Hong Suzhen, Yuan zaju de beiju guan (Taipei: Xuehai, 1993), and Xie Boliang, Zhongguo beiju shigang (Shanghai: Xuelin, 1993). For the first instance I am aware of, see the prefaces to Zheng Zhenduo, Shijie wenku. Cai Yuanpei calls for the importance of the “worldwide appeal” (shijie xing) as a literary criteria while Zheng taps into a discourse of “masterpieces” (mingzhu), singling out Guan Hanqing as a representative Chinese author among a host of foreign writers. Zhu, “Jiu fengchen,” 126–32. Hu, Zhongguo wenxue shi, 215–34, esp. 223. Zhang, “The Institutionalization of Modern Literary History in China,” 357–58. My thanks to Kirk A. Denton for bringing this article to my attention. In Feng Yuanjun’s Zhongguo gudian xiqu yanjiu (N.p.: Xueyi, n.d. [1945]), Feng takes a highly philological approach to Yuan zaju. In the revised Zhongguo gudian wenxue jianshi (Singapore: Xinhua jiaoyu, n.d. [1956]), Lu Kanru and Feng Yuanjun claim that Yuan zaju is full of a spirit of resistance against oppression (66–70). See, for example, the Chinese Literature Editorial Group of the Academy of Social Sciences, ed., Zhongguo wenxue shi (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1984 [1962]), which was designed as a textbook for higher education. Ye, Quxue yu xiju xue, 324. Holm, “Lu Xun in the Period 1936–1949,” 160. My thanks to Kirk A. Denton for bringing this essay to my attention. For Qu Yuan in the PRC, see Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u, 160–64. The 250th anniversary of Hong Sheng’s (1646?–1704) was officially celebrated in 1954. See Eberstein, Das Chinesische Theater, 261. For excerpts of the various points of view, see Li and Yuan, Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao, 363–79 and Xu, Guan Hanqing yanjiu, 43–51. As Zhao Jingshen noted, because of the uncertainty of Guan’s dates, it was decided that a seven-hundred-year celebration would coincide with Guan’s active years rather than either his birthday or his death. See Zhao, “Guan Hanqing he ta de zaju,” 67–68. For details on the festivities, see Oberstenfeld, Chinas bedeutendster Dramatiker, 7–12. Guo, “Xuexi Guan Hanqing, bing chaoguo Guan Hanqing,” Guo Moruo quanji, 17: 91–95. I am indebted to Dai Jinhua for this insight. See Cohen, Discovering History in China, 149–86. Ren, Xin quyuan, 3: 632a–b. See also Wu Mei, Qu’an duqu ji, Wu Mei xiqu lunwen ji, 390. McGann, The Textual Condition, 10. Sun, Yeshi yuan gujin zaju kao. Zheng, Jiaoding Yuankan zaju sanshi zhong and “Zang Maoxun gaiding Yuan zaju pingyi,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 408–21. Denda, Min kan Gen zatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku.

190 / notes 206. Issei, “The Social and Historical Context,” 143–60. 207. Idema, “The Ideological Manipulation,” 50–70. 208. Fischer-Lichte, Das eigene und das fremde Theater, 76–77 and Laloy, Trois drames de l’Asie, 16 and 106. 209. Du, “Traditional Chinese Theatre on Broadway,” 192–214. 210. On Brecht and Chinese theater, see Tatlow, The Mask of Evil, 270–303. 211. Drama-related studies published in the first half of the twentieth century in European Languages were typically written by connoisseurs of Beijing opera, Chinese overseas students, or generalists. See Wang, Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo xiqu mingzhu zai guowai, 540–51. 212. In the 1950s and 1960s, Crump, Chinese Theater, and later Johnson, Yuarn Music Drama and A Glossary of Words and Phrases, pursued this line of inquiry. 213. On the question of authorship, see West, “A Study in Appropriation,” 284–302. On the question of readers, see, for example, Idema, Orphan of Zhao. 214. Genette, Paratexts, 1–15. I am indebted to Cynthia J. Brokaw for this reference. 215. Connery, The Empire of the Text, 46. 216. Qian, “Tragedy,” 38. For a brief discussion of the article in question, see Huters, Qian Zhongshu, 21–23.

Chapter 1 Art Song Anthologies, Editorial Attributions, and the Cult of Affect: Guan Hanqing (ca. 1220–ca. 1300) and the Transformation of Attestatory Authorship 1. Lin, Zhongguo wenxue shi, 182. 2. Dolezelová-Velingerová, “Literary Historiography,” 129–34. Lin wrote the history in response to a 1904 edict issued by the Ministry of Education in order to supply a textbook for a new humanities (wenxue) curriculum. Though conservative in outlook, the History was not only reprinted, but also enshrined by May Fourth figures such as Zheng Zhenduo as the first history of Chinese literature. 3. Chartier, The Order of Books, 58. 4. Luo Zongxin, “Xu,” Zhongyuan yiyun, XQLZJC, 1: 177. 5. Hu, Zhongguo xiaoxue shi, 185–199. Other related works appearing in the fourteenth century include Liu Jian, Jingshi zhengyun qieyun zhinan (1336); Zhuo Congzhi, Zhongzhou yuefu yinyun leibian (1356). Subsequent works include Zhu Quan, Qionglin yayun (1398); Chen Duo, Cilin yaoyun (1493); and Wang Wenbi, Zhongzhou yinyun (before 1503). 6. Both the preface and postface enumerate Zhou’s criteria, which favored the current pronunciation over the ancient, the standard over the dialect, the natural over the contrived. See Zhou Deqing, “Zixu” and “Houxu,” Zhongyuan yinyun, XQXBHB, 1: 8–11. The question of what actual “standard” Zhou Deqing proposed is hotly debated among historical linguists. See, for example, Wang Jiexin, Zhongyuan yinyun xinkao (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1988).

notes / 191 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

See, for example, Zhou, Zhongyuan yiyun, XQLZJC, 1: 233. Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 65–197. Kang Hai, “Xu,” XQXBHB, 1: 27. Lang, “Yuefu,” Qixiu leigao, 2: 561–63. Li, “Xiye chunyou ci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 334–35. Li, “Xianlü nanqu bangzhuangtai,” LKXJ, 3: 871. This series of songs became something of a hit, with dozens of people writing often multiple afterwords for it. Li’s abidance by Zhou’s rhyme scheme attracted favorable attention among the commentators (see the comments by Gu Shaodai and Gu Qiushan, LKXJ, 3: 885–86). See Gu, Zhou Deqing ji qi quxue yanjiu, 1. Chen, “Ke Beigong ciji fanli,” NBGCJ, 3: 353. Shen, “Xixiang,” Wanli yehuobian, 2: 639. Shen, Duqu xuzhi, XQLZJC, 5: 191. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 146. For a related argument in the context of fiction, see Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 114–24, esp. 116. For the extraordinarily complicated textual history of this collection, see Sieber, “Romance, Rhetoric, and Intertextuality,” 36, n. 39. Anne McLaren notes that the layout of these Yuan texts embodied a “performance-style” format (Chinese Popular Culture, 49). On Guan Yunshi, see Lynn, Kuan Yün-shih, esp. 129–45. Guan Yunshi, “Yangchun baixue xu,” Yangchun baixue, 1. Geng Tianxi (better known by his style name Jipu) belonged to Guan’s generation; only a handful of his songs survive and all of his plays are lost. See Li, Zhongguo gudai sanqu shi, 509–12. For a list of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing pronouncements on the identity of the four, see Zeng, “Suowei Yuanqu sidajia,” 132–36. Zhou Deqing, “Zixu,” XQXBHB, 1: 8. Yoshikawa, Five Hundred Years, 78–84. Yang Weizhen, “Zhouyuehu jin yuefu xu,” Dong Weizi wenji, 11: 1b. On Yang Weizhen’s drama criticism, see Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 150–69. My thanks to Xiaomei Chen for bringing this book to my attention. Lu Zhi passed the palace examinations in 1268, rising all the way to the Imperial Academy of Letters. See Li, Zhongguo gudai sanqu shi, 513–18. Cf. Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 265–88. None of his plays survive, but thirty-one short xiaoling songs and one multi-stanza taoshu song-suite are extant. See Sui, QYSQ, 2: 1351–75 and Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 100–01. For Zhong’s biography, see Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 95–113. For the complicated textual situation, see Wang Gang’s preface to Zhong, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 15–20. Zhong, “Xu,” Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 3. Interestingly, in a number of cases, Zhong Sicheng emphasizes that these geniuses died prematurely, as though their talent had precipitated their early demise. It is conceivable that Zhong implicitly drew upon the trope of Yan Hui, Confucius’s most talented disciple, who also died young.

192 / notes 33. Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 113–18. More specifically, in the first volume, two sections focused on songwriters, one on those already deceased of a previous generation, the other on those still alive. A third section concerned already deceased playwrights of a previous generation. In a second volume, Zhong distinguished between four groups of people: playwrights of his own acquaintance who had passed away, those songwriters who had passed away whom he had not known personally, playwrights and songwriters of his acquaintance who were still alive, and those who were famous and alive, but unknown to him. 34. “Famous gentlemen” (minggong) originally designated the elite of the Six Dynasties. “Talented person” (cairen) presumably was a Song/Yuan neologism. Long Qian’an contended that cairen designated somebody of a status lower than minggong (Song Yuan yuyan cidian, 43). In Ming writings, the terms were both recirculated in the proximity of words denoting higher status. For instance, Jia Zhongmin adhered in some instances to Zhong’s terminology of minggong and cairen, but liberally admixed these categories with terms designating literati and scholar-officials (shifu, dashifu, and gongqing). See his “Shu Luguibu hou,” Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 127 and the discussion below. On this point of terminology, see also Ge, Out of the Margins, 164–65. 35. Li, Zhongguo gudai quxue shi, 90–92. 36. See Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 266 on the use of “talent” (cai) in the prefaces to the Rhymes. 37. Tao, Chuogeng lu, 23: 333. 38. Zhou, Zhongyuan yinyun, XQLZJC, 1: 240–51. Cf. Lu Lin, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 54. 39. Zhong, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 75–84. 40. In two instances, Zhong Sicheng used military metaphors for the stylistic impact of two playwrights, namely Fan Kang (Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 77) and Wu Ben (Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 83); however, none of the playwrights’ lives in the demimonde were conceptualized in such a manner. 41. For a convenient tabulation of the salient biographical features, see Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 130. 42. Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 110–12. 43. Zhong, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 6. For the discussion surrounding the office, see Tan, Yuandai xiju jia Guan Hanqing, 2–3; Xu, Guan Hanqing yanjiu, 35–43. 44. Zhong, “Xu,” Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 3. 45. Xia, Qinglou ji jianzhu, 21–23. 46. Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement. 47. On reclusion in the Yuan, see Mote, “Confucian Eremitism in the Yüan Period,” 202–40; for the Ming, see Chen, Wan Ming xiaopin yu Mingji wenren shenghuo. 48. Quoted in Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 99–100. 49. Zhu Jing, “Qinglou ji xu,” in Xia, Qinglou ji jianzhu, 20. Stephen West has pointed out that this claim for reclusion in the context of drama constitutes an attempt to assign merit conventionally reserved for political action or literary production in canonical genres (“Mongol Influence,” 437).

notes / 193 50. Xiong Zide (fl. 1341–68), the compiler of a local gazetteer, also pursued the opposition between public service and the pursuit of new genres. Xiong described Guan Hanqing as “having refined restraint and urbanity,” claiming that he had resorted to writing song and plays as a result of the general state of literary decline. Quoted in Li and Yuan, Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao, 8. 51. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 6. 52. Based on biographical and internal evidence, Zeng Yongyi argues that the Taihe zhengyin pu was composed by a member of Zhu Quan’s retinue between 1429 and 1448, who then proceeded to attribute the work to his patron. Based on a list of the extant Ming and Qing editions of the Taihe zhengyin pu and of late Ming comments referring to that work, Zeng suggests that late Ming literati may not have known that the named author of the work, Danqiu xiansheng with the style name Hanxu zi may have been the imperial prince Zhu Quan. However, even Zeng concedes that the work is permeated by an aristocratic perspective. So for the purposes of this discussion, I will retain Wang Guowei’s attribution to Zhu Quan. See Zeng, Lunshuo xiqu, 51–69. 53. Yan’nan, Changlun, XQLZJC, 1: 153–66. The latter was the opening segment in Yang Zhaoying’s Yangchun baixue. 54. Iwaki, Chûgoku gikyoku kenkyû, 655–57. 55. Wang, Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang ji qi yishu, 21–130; Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 63–110. 56. Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 17. 57. Ibid., 3: 24–25. 58. For Zhao Mengfu, see Yu Ji, “Xu,” Zhongyuan yinyun, XQLZJC, 1: 174 and Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 39–47, esp. 41; for Guan see above. 59. Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 118–30. 60. Zhong, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 5; Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 20. 61. On the pro and cons of Jia Zhongmin’s authorship of the Lugui bu xubian, see Zeng, Ming zaju gailun, 100–01 and Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 365–67. On Jia’s life and oeuvre, see Zeng, Ming zaju gailun, 100–07 and Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 215–33. 62. Kang Hai designated songwriters and playwrights as “the writers of ancient and contemporary times” (gujin zuozhe). See Kang, “Xu,” XQXBHB, 1: 27; cf. also Li, “Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi xu,” LKXJ, 1: 316–17. The 1566 preface to Yongxi yuefu also refers to songwriters as “writers” (zuozhe) (YXYF, 1: 1a–5b). 63. In a preface dated 1580, Cheng Juyuan notes that it is generally said that there are many accomplished writers (mingjia) among those who wrote the songs of the Yuan and the Jin. Quoted in Denda, Minkan Gen zatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku, 23. In another 1604 preface to Beigong ciji, Xia Longdong gives a (pseudo)etymology of the term, noting that two Ming songwriters, Chen Duo and Jin Luan, were able to make their household famous (neng ming qi jia). In another 1604 preface to the Beigong ciji, Zhu Zhifan claims that an earlier song and song-drama collection, the Yongxi yuefu, had contained only three or four masters. In the 1605 preface to the Nangong ciji, the

194 / notes

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

writer claims that all the accomplished authors are gathered in this collection. For all of these, see Chen, NBGZJ, 3: 351, 3: 352, and 1: 3. In a 1525 preface to Cilin zhaiyan, Yuan and Ming authors were described as “lyricists” (ciren) and “rhapsodists” (saoke). See Liu Ji, “Xu,” XQXBHB, 4: 2690. In another preface to Cilin zhaiyan, Yuan, Liao, and Jin song and songdrama writers were described as “men of letters” and “talented literati” (wenren caishi). See Zhang Lu, “Zixu,” XQXBHB, 4: 2692. Jia, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 127. Two other playwrights whose works are correlated with the demimonde are Bai Pu and Gao Wenxiu. See Jia, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 133 and 135. Ibid., 131. Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 226. Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 361–62. Wang, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao, 11–14. Lu Lin acknowledges Zhu Quan’s work as a synthesis of much Yuandynasty drama criticism, but faults him for his bias against performers. See Lu, Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 355–61. Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 11. On the Formulary in that period, see Zeng, Lunshuo xiqu, 55–58; for the impact of the different versions of the Register, see Wang, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 18–34. Luo, “Yujing shuhui Yuanzhen shuhui yibian,” 32. Yang, Lunyu shizhu, 5. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 6. Ibid., 11. Yu, “Canon Formation,” 83–104. Zhang Huiyan, quoted in Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu, 138. The first art song anthology, Sunny Spring White Snow (Yangchun baixue), did not only model its title after a Song-dynasty ci song lyric collection of the same name, but included ten song lyrics in its opening segment. Furthermore, the writer of the preface to the Taiping yuefu, Deng Zijin, averred that all poetic forms, including art songs, were a variant on the poems in the Shijing. See his “Taiping yuefu xu,” TPYF, 1. “Double-Six” was a game played with fifty-four tiles inscribed with the names of horses, “Hiding-Fists” was a game that involved guessing what was hidden in a hand. The preceding three lines sound extremely awkward. The awkwardness is not a function of my translation, but of the original’s excessive use of so-called “padding words.” The term denotes a good-for-nothing. My translation follows YXYF, 10: 20a–21a. Other translations include William Dolby, “Kuan Han-ch’ing,” 50–52, n. 123; Jerome P. Seaton, tr., “Not Bowing to Old Age,” in Sunflower Splendor, edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo (New York: Anchor Books, 1975), 415–17 and Wayne Schlepp, “The Refusal to Get Old,” The Columbia Anthology of

notes / 195

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

98. 99.

Traditional Chinese Literature, edited by Victor Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 349–50. Dolby, “Kuan Han-ch’ing,” 27, n. 75. For a discussion of the terms associated with the pleasure quarters in Yuan drama, including a list of designations for clients, see Luo, “Zidi yu dizi jie,” 113–24. For a more detailed discussion of the song’s differences from Yuan sources, see Sieber, “Rhetoric, Romance, and Intertextuality,” 105–23. Li, Beici guangzheng pu, 80: 1: 272. Examples include: Shi Zichang, to the tune [Xianlü] Basheng ganzhou, Yangchun baixue, houji, 2: 68; anonymous, to the tune [Yuediao] Dou anchun, Yangchun baixue, houji, 4: 87–88; Zhao Yanhui, “Xingwu” (Enlightenment), TPYF, 2: 6: 6–7; Zhao Mingdao, “Huiwu” (Repentance), TPYF, 2: 6: 31–32; Zhu Tingyu, “Jiqing” (Entrusting one’s feelings), TPYF, 2: 6: 40–41; Ma Zhiyuan, “Wumi” (Disillusionment), TPYF, 2: 7: 52–53; Lu Zhongliang, “Huiwu” (Repentance), TPYF, 2: 8: 26–27. YXYF, 435: 20a–21a. Cao, Zhongguo guji banben xue, 320. For the Yuan version, see “Zixu Chouzhai” (A self-description of Mr. Ugly Studio), TPYF, 2: 8: 6–8; for the Ming version, see “Chouzhai zixu,” YXYF, 435: 21a. For a translation and a discussion of Zhong Sicheng’s song as an expression of the author’s inferiority complex, see Tanaka, “Gendai sankyoku no kenkyû,” 41–46. For the Yuan play on an old general leading a battle, see Yang Xin, Jingde bu fulao (General Yuchi Gong does not submit to old age), in Sui, Yuanqu xuan waibian, 2: 604–16, for the Ming play Bu fulao on an examination candidate passing at age eighty-two, see Feng Weimin, Bu fulao, in Shen, Sheng Ming zaju, 2: 21: 1–34b. Anonymous, “Shubao bu fulao,” YXYF, 434: 9: 3b–4b. Written in the first person, the song-suite describes the early Tang general Qin Qiong (d. 638, styled Shubao) lamenting his ill health and recalling his erstwhile match with the legendary Yuchi Gong. The following of Guan Hanqing’s Yuan song-suites were anthologized in the Yongxi yuefu: “Feelings of Separation” under the title “Siqing” (Thinking of love) (15: 15a–b); “Boudoir Lament” under the title “Menyuan” (Laments of despondence) (4: 81a–b); “Views of Hangzhou” (10: 6a–b); “Sex on the Terrace of Chu” (12: 56a–57a); “Twenty Turns” under the title “Fuma huan zhao” (The imperial son-in-law returns to court) (11: 51b–54a); “The Woman Captain” under the title “Cujiu” (Kickball) (13: 9b–10a). In addition, a song first anthologized in the midMing collection Shengshi xinsheng was included under the title “Guisi” (Boudoir thoughts) (7: 52a–53b). For the laudatory version, see YXYF, 19: 2a–b, for the satirical one, see YXYF, 19: 2b–4a. Xinkan qimiao quanxiang zhushi Xixiang ji, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 1, 1: 2a.

196 / notes 100. Fengsao refers to the Guofeng and the Lisao; conceivably, the former pointed to the romantic content, the latter to the hyperbolic tone of his writings. 101. YXYF, 19: 4a. The translation is slightly modified from West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 165. 102. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 255–56. 103. Chang, The Late-Ming Poet Ch’en Tzu-lung, 11–18. 104. Epstein, Competing Discourses, 69–79. 105. Zhang, “Xu,” CBQC, 75: 1. 106. The collection has a preface dated 1616. See Qinglou yunyu, 10. 107. “On Not Succumbing to Old Age,” CBQC, 75: 5: 395–98; “Indulging in Feeling,” CBQC, 75: 5: 406–08; “Feelings of Separation” under the title “Yehuai” (Night thoughts), CBQC, 76: 9: 691–94. 108. In TPYF and THZYP, the song entitled “Chenghuai” (Indulging in feeling) was ascribed to Zeng Rui. 109. Represented with one song each are the Yuan writers Qiao Ji, Tang Shi, Jing Yuanqi, Zhang Yanghao, and three Ming writers. Also included are four anonymous songs from the Yuan and two from the Ming. 110. CBQC, 75: 5: 395–98. 111. It was anthologized in NBGZJ, 6: 633–34 and in CBQZ under the title “Yehuai” (Night thoughts), 76: 9: 691–94. 112. It was the collected in NBGCJ, 6: 641. 113. It was included in Shengshi xinsheng (7: 341–44) without authorial attribution, in Cilin zhaiyan with attribution to Guan Hanqing under the title “Tiqing” (Describing feelings), 5: 603–10, and in NBGCJ under the title “Yibie” (Reminiscing on the separation), 6: 669–71. 114. The song entitled “Shusuojian” ([The beauty] who was seen in a book)” first appeared in TPYF, 1: 4: 39–40 under Zhou Deqing’s name. In Cilin zhaiyan, it continued to be attributed to Zhou, but Yaoshan tangwai ji and Cipin ascribed it to Guan Hanqing. See Li and Zhou, Guan Hanqing sanqu ji, 92. 115. The song entitled “Tu zhijia” (Bare fingernails) first appeared anonymously in the Zhongyuan yinyuan. Although other anthologies kept it anonymous, the Yaoshan tangwai ji attributed it to Guan Hanqing. See Li and Zhou, Guan Hanqing sanqu ji, 76–77 and Li and Yuan, Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao, 10. 116. The song set to the tune Zhonglü gudiao shiliu hua was first collected in Shengshi xinsheng (5: 206–07) without a title or an authorial attribution. In Zhang, Cilin zhaiyan, the song in question was entitled “Yuanbie” (Lamenting the separation) and attributed to Guan Hanqing (3: 322–24). 117. The song also appeared anonymously in NBGZJ, 3: 147. 118. Roughly a third of the romantic comedies contained in the earliest strata of late Ming “Yuan zaju,” namely those found in the Gu mingjia edition, were Guan Hanqing’s: the three extant prostitute plays, that is, The Pond of the Golden Threads (Jinxianchi), Rescuing a Coquette (Jiu fengchen), and Xie Tianxiang (Xie Tianxiang), as well as The Jade Mirror Stand (Yujingtai) and the lesser known and misattributed The Dream About the

notes / 197

119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132.

133. 134.

Meaning of the Characters of Fei and Yi (Feiyimeng). In the Zaju xuan, only one of his works, The River-Gazing Pavilion (Wangjiangting), was included. In the Guquzhai, all of the romantic plays found in the Gumingjia and the Zaju xuan except for Rescuing a Coquette were incorporated. Similarly, Zang Maoxun also included them save for The Dream About the Characters of Fei and Yi. Meng Chengshun included Jade Mirror Stand and The Pond of the Golden Threads. Among the three plots, the story of Liu Yong and Xie Tianxiang, though apocryphal, had gained some currency in Yuan songs. For details, see chapter 2. Quoted in Zhang, “Xixiang ji lunzha,” 9. West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 38–41. For a list of pertinent comments on the question of authorship from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, see Zhang, “Xixiang ji lunzha,” 8–13; Li, Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao, 388–414; Chen, “Xixiang ji zuozhe xintan,” 369–79. Yuefu qunzhu, 2: 74, 2: 75 and 4: 254–57. Both sets of songs were set to the tune Sikuaiyu, one entitled “Bieqing” (Feelings of separation), TPYF, 2: 5: 8 and the series of four entitled “Xianshi” (Idle leisure), TPYF, 2: 5: 8–9. See West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 41. Fengyue jinnang jianjiao, 5. Ibid., 68–69. Qiu, Wulun quanbei, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 40–41. Carlitz, “Desire, Danger, and the Body,” 101–04. Xie, Zhongguo fenlei xiqu xueshi gang, 463. Echoing others who thought that Qiu’s language was extremely cliched, Lü Tiancheng, the author of Qupin (Classifying drama), placed three of Qiu’s plays in the lowest category. Shen, “Qiu Wenzhuang tianci,” Wanli yuehuobian, 2: 641. Not everyone denied Qiu Jun’s purely didactic intent (see Wang, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao, 178–79). On Kang, see Wilkerson, “Shih and Historical Consciousness in Ming Drama,” 65–92. On Wang, see Zeng, Ming zaju gailun, 212–15. Wilt Idema observed that Zhu Quan’s deliverance play Master BoundlessMystery Alone Ascends to the Heaven of Great Bliss (Chongmozi dubu daletian) was characterized by outspoken self-projection. Similarly, Zhu’s play on the Sima Xiangru/Zhuo Wenjun love story might have been an implicit allegory for Zhu Quan’s relationship with his brother Zhu Di. See Idema, “The Story of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chün,” 84–85 and 94. Wilkerson, “Shih and Historical Consciousness in Ming Drama,” 122–23. For Kang’s play Zhongshan lang (The wolf of Zhongshan), see Shen, Sheng Ming zaju, v. 1, ch. 19. Both authorship and intent of this play have been in dispute. Zeng Yongyi notes that Li Kaixian attributed the play to Kang, thus making the claim of attribution of what was an anonymous play fairly reliable (Ming zaju gailun, 202). In the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that the play was a veiled

198 / notes

135.

136. 137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

attack against Li Mengyang (1473–1529), on whose behalf Kang had interceded, but who did not return the favor when Kang was cashiered later on. However, Yagisawa Hajime shows that the play was unlikely to be directed at Li, since the friendship between Kang and Li continued long after these events transpired (Mingdai juzuojia yanjiu, 100–08). The authorship of this play has been in dispute, but Douglas Wilkerson argues convincingly that the play emerged from of Wang’s circle, especially in light of Wang’s other song-related works (“Shih and Historical Consciousness in Ming Drama,” 238–64). For a revisionist reading of Wang’s play as a serious intervention in the political discussion about the dangers of absolutism rather than as a simple diatribe against specific individuals, see Dieter Tschanz, “History and Meaning in the Late Ming Drama Ming feng ji,” Ming Studies 35 (1995): 1–31. Li, “Jie fengci,” Li Yu quanji, 11: 5–8. Anonymous, “Ji hao shui” (A prostitute loves sleep), TPYF, 2: 7: 21. In an anonymous song-suite first published in the late Yuan/early Ming collection Liyuan yuefu, the pairing of Zhang Junrui and Cui Yingying is also mentioned among a string of mostly prostitute and scholar matches. See QYSQ, 2: 1711–12. The song was first collected in Zhang, Cilin zhaiyan, 6: 715–17. See West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 8. Li, Funü shuangming ji, Ming Qing biji shiliao, 50: 87–105. It may be no coincidence that Jin Shengtan, who sought to enhance Yingying’s respectability, changed her name from “Yingying” to “Shuangwen.” Mei, Qingni lianhua ji, 107–08. Xu, Mudan ting yanjiu ziliao kaoshi, 38–39. Li, “Yuanlin wumeng yuanben,” LKXJ, 3: 858–60. Manting xianshi, Shuangying zhuan, in Shen, Sheng Ming zaju, 2: 20: 1a–23b. Feng, Taixia xinzou, Feng Menglong quanji, 8: 88–91. Ibid., 8: 133–36. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 256–61. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 147. Jiang, Mingkanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 271–78. Lin, Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu, 286–91. Su Shi, “Niannu qiao,” and Liu Yong, “Yu lin ling,” in Yang, Yangchun baixue zhushi ben, 10–11 and 15. Xu, Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 2: 539–40. Xu Shuofang points out that The Bewitching Eye (Yan’er mei) in particular is modeled on Guan Hanqing’s Xie Tianxiang. Meng, “Xu,” Gujin mingju hexuan, 1: 3a–b. For the defense of fictionality in the context of fiction, see Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 131–88. Ibid., 4: 148. Li, Xianqing ouji, Li Yu quanji, 11: 64–65. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Burke, Authorship, 125–26. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 24. Ibid., 21.

notes / 199 160. Ezell, Social Authorship, 19. 161. See Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship; Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, 98–107. 162. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, 67. 163. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China; Connery, The Empire of the Text. 164. Rowe, “Women and the Family in Mid-Qing Social Thought,” 31. 165. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 67–78 and 84–91; Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy,” 1–43; Zeitlin, “Shared Dreams,” 127–79; Epstein, Competing Discourses, 92–103; Swatek, Peony Pavilion Onstage, 5–7. 166. Jiang, Xixiang ji kaozheng, 210–21.

Chapter 2 Early Song-Drama Collections, Examination Requirements, and the Exigencies of Desire: Li Kaixian (1502–68), Zang Maoxun (1550–1620), and the Uses of Reproductive Authorship 1. Gottschall, Das Theater und Drama der Chinesen, 34–35. 2. Wang, Song Yuan xiqu kao, 97. 3. Gottschall was knighted for his cultural endeavors by the German emperor in 1877 and assumed the “von” in his name. His Deutsche Nationalliteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Breslau: Trewendt, 1875) is “dedicated to His Highness the Duke Ernst II, the princely protector of modern German literature and art, as a sign of high reverence by the author.” On the meaning of such princely dedications, see Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 25–42. 4. On Wang Guowei’s aversion to the traditional civil service examination, see Bonner, Wang Guowei, 10–16; for his critique of the new educational system after the abolition of the civil service examination, see ibid., 21– 44; for his contempt for cultural professionalism, see ibid., 44 and 104. 5. See Ôki, “Minmatsu Konan ni okeru shuppan bunka no kenkyu;” Ji, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 147–50, and Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street.” 6. Ji, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 151–55. 7. Ding, Obscene Things, 55. 8. Cahill, The Painter’s Practice. 9. Wang, Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang ji qi yishu; Lin, Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu; Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 126–225. 10. Shen, “Xiaochang,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 621. See also Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, 222–21. 11. My thinking on this point has benefited from forthcoming research by Carlitz, “Print as Performance” and from a presentation by Sophie Volpp at the First International Conference for Asia Scholars, Leiden, The Netherlands, 1998.

200 / notes 12. No complete copy of the collection remains; hence it is difficult to establish the format and content of the edition, which was published by the Xu family of Longfeng. The two figures most commonly associated with the editing (bian) of this collection are the 1574 jinshi and playwright Chen Yujiao (1544–1611) and Wang Jide (d. 1623), the drama critic and playwright. Since the pen name under which the Guming jia edition was published, Yuyang xianshi, also appears as the signature of a preface to Wang Jide’s Gu zaju, some scholars have concluded that Wang was responsible for both the Gu zaju and the Gu mingjia edition. Another contingent of modern scholars holds that the pen name Yuyang xianshi can be traced to Chen Yujiao because of some of his alternate pen names. See Yagisawa, Mingdai juzuojia yanjiu, 277–94. With regard to the inclusion of Wang Jide’s seal in the Gu mingjia collection, Zheng Qian concluded that the attribution to one of the foremost scholars of drama was a commercial ploy. See Zheng Qian, “Yuan Ming chaokeben Yuanren zaju jiuzhong tiyao,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 427. In light of the sloppiness of the Gu mingjia edition and the sophistication of all of Wang Jide’s extant editions of drama, Stephen H. West has similarly suggested that the commercial Gu ming jia editors seized upon Wang Jide’s fame and falsely attached his name to the project for promotion purposes. See West, “Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E,” 285. 13. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 35–37. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Wang, Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang ji qi yishu, 122–23. 16. On the continuity of Jin and Yuan musical forms at the Ming court, see Shen, “Jinzhong yanxi,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 798. 17. Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 33–38 and 41–43. The members of the troupes of the Imperial Academy of Music were recruited from hereditary music families (yuehu). The members of the Office of Drums and Bells were all eunuchs. 18. See Wang, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao, 11–13. 19. Iwaki, Chûgoku gikyoku kenkyû, 607–08. Iwaki assumed that because Wutong yu and Hangong qiu were extant, the prohibition could not have been all that effective. However, those two plays were the exception rather than the rule. 20. Idema, “The Founding of the Han Dynasty in Early Drama,” 183–207. 21. Takahashi, “Gen zatsugeki no kaihen to bungakusei no kôtai,” 136. Guan Hanqing’s corpus is a case in point. Among the plays listed in the early play catalogues, at least five appear to have featured emperors prominently: Bing Ji jiaozi li Xuandi (Bing Ji teaches his son to stand next to Xuandi), Jiamaying jiangsheng Zhao Taizu (At the camp of armor and horses Zhao [Song] Taizu is sent down and born), Sui Yangdi qian longzhou (Sui Yangdi pulls the dragon boat), Tang Minghuang ku xiangnan (Tang Xuanzong mourns the perfumed sachet), and Han Wudi ku Zhaojun (Han Wudi mourns [Wang] Zhaojun). None of these plays is extant except for a few arias of Ku xiangnan. See Zhong, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 59–60. In the play Yujingtai (The jade mirror stand), the last scene takes place at court, but features an imperial representative rather than the emperor himself.

notes / 201 22. Guan Hanqing’s oeuvre again provides a particularly salient example of this process. Among the over sixty plays listed in the play catalogue Register, at least six plays appear to have featured primarily imperial women: Taichang gongzhu ren xianghuang (Princess Taichang recognizes the former emperor), Qukan Xuanhua fei (Unjustly investigating the Xuanhua Consort), Bo taihou zouma jiu Zhou Bo (On horseback Empress Dowager Bo saves Zhou Bo), Cao taihou siku Liu furen (Empress Dowager Cao dies of grief over Lady Liu), Cuihua fei dui yuchai (The Cuihua Consort faces the jade hairpin), Wu Zetian rouzui Wang huanghou (Wu Zetian uses meat to make Empress Wang drunk). See Zhong, Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong, 59–60. None of these plays is extant. 23. Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 22–23. 24. The Yongle dadian included zaju texts in volumes 20737 through 20757, and xiwen in volumes 13965 through 13991, only the last one of which is extant. Zhang, Yongle dadian shihua, 28. 25. Shen, “Zongcai Yongle dadian” and “Guoxue kexue,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 788–89 and 2: 637; Qian, “Taizong wenhuang di,” Liechao shiji xiaozhuan, 1: 2. 26. Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 16–18. 27. Wang, “Ming zaju de yanchu changhe yu wutai yishu,” 112–40. 28. Idema, “The Story of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chün,” 83–95. 29. Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 34–62. 30. For the purported popularity of Zhu’s plays at court, see Qian, “Zhou Xian Wang,” Liechao shiji xiaozhuan, 1: 8. 31. Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 234–35. 32. See Wang, Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang ji qi yishu, 121–30 and Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming Dynasty,” 1–90. 33. Shenzong (r. 1573–1619), for instance, created new troupes in order to perform the newest theatre with yiyang, haiyan, and kun style music at court, which became his favorite ensemble. See Shen, “Jinzhong yanxi,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 798. 34. Idema, The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun, 234–39. For more evidence on how court-related theatrical pieces affected the local rural repertoire, see Wang, “Ming zaju de yanchu changhe yu wutai yishu,” 111–12. 35. See, for example, the anonymous preface to Shengshi xinsheng (7–8), Zhang Lu’s 1525 preface to Cilin zhaiyan (11–14), and Guo Xun’s 1566 preface to the Yongxi yuefu (YXYF, 1: 1a–5b). 36. By the mid-sixteenth century, Dun Ren, a member of the Southern Imperial Music Academy in Nanjing, had learned to sing Northern music during Wuzong’s (r. 1506–21) imperial inspection tour in Beijing, but he had, according to his own testimony, no opportunity to present his newly acquired skills due to the popularity of contemporary Southern songs (shiqu). See He, Siyou zhai congshuo, 340 and Shen, “Xuansuo ruqu,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 641. On He Liangjun’s and Dun’s collaboration, see Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 20 and 159–60. 37. Many writers comment in passim about the obsolescence of Yuan zaju. Yang Shen (1488–1559) already pointed to the gradual disappearance of

202 / notes

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Yuan zaju music. For the general tenor of the loss of zaju music in the Wanli, see, for example, Huang Zhengwei’s 1609 preface to Yangchun zou. By that point even at court, zaju performance had become rare. See Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 39–41 and Lin, “Li Kaixian yu Yuan zaju,” 425–37, esp. 427–28. Liao Ben has studied an interesting manuscript play bill performed on ritual occasions in rural Shaanxi (dated 1574), a former center of theatrical activity in the Yuan, suggesting that Yuan zaju may have survived in certain areas and contexts. See Liao, Song Yuan xiqu fengsu yu wenwu, 355–421. For this position, see Xu, Nanci xulu, XQLZJC, 3: 241–42. For that position, see Hu, Zhenzhu chuan, Ming Qing biji shiliao, 31: 3: 32; Li, “Qiao Longxi ci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 297. Xu, Nanci xulu, XQLZJC, 3: 239–40. See Li, “Zhang Xiaoshan xiaoling houxu,” LKXJ, 1: 370. I am indebted to Wilt L. Idema for this line of argumentation. Gong, Wan Ming sichao, 381–434. Li noted that he attended the local public school (xiangxiao). See Li, “Zhang Xiaoshan xiaoling houxu,” LKXJ, 1: 369. On the events leading up to Li’s resignation, see Bu, Li Kaixian zhuan, 36–44. For Li’s interest in painting, see Li, “Huapin,” LKXJ, 3: 999–1011; for the establishment of his academy, see Li, “Zhongli shuyuan ji,” LKXJ, 2: 667– 69. For all other facets, see the discussion below. Brook, “Edifying Knowledge,” 93. Clunas, Superfluous Things, passim. Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, 135–38. Wang Jiusi, “Shu Baojian ji hou,” LKXJ, 3: 852. For Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai’s life and works, see Zeng Yongyi, Ming zaju gailun, 197–217 and Yagisawa, Mingdai juzuojia yanjiu, 89–144. Before leaving office, Kang Hai married an actress from the Imperial Academy of Music, a highly unusual course of action. She helped him train and manage their private troupe. See Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 141. Li, “Meibo Wang jiaotan zhuan,” LKXJ, 2: 600. See Li, “Meibo Wang jiaotan zhuan,” LKXJ, 2: 600. Wang Shizhen noted that critics commonly evaluated Wang and Kang on a par with Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing, whereas Wang Jide objected to that appraisal. For a modern assessment of the resemblance and the differences between Wang and Kang’s songs and those of their Yuan forbears, see Li, Zhongguo gudai sanqu shi, 616–17 and 621–24. Li, “Zhang Xiaoshan xiaoling houxu,” LKXJ, 1: 369 and “Nanbei chake ci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 320. The piece was evidently highly praised by the attending guests. See Li, “Duishan Kang xiuzhao zhuan,” LKXJ, 2: 601. Gao Yingqi, “Wobing Jiang gao xu,” LKXJ, 3: 903. Wang Jiusi, “Shu Baojian ji hou,” LKXJ, 3: 853. Li, “Nanbei chake ci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 320. Ezell, Social Authorship, 1–20.

notes / 203 60. Cherniack, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China,” 5–125. 61. Sargent, “Context of the Song Lyric in Sung Times,” 253–56. 62. Among these various functions are the following: original draft manuscript; personal copies of expensive or rare books; draft copies to be circulated among a restricted audience; unofficial copies of prohibited books; commercial copies of manuscripts. See Ôki Yasushi, “Manuscript Editions in Ming-Qing China.” Paper presented at the Conference on Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, Mt. Hood, Oregon, 1998. 63. Lang, “Shuce,” Qixiu leigao, 2: 664–65. 64. Li, “Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi xu,” LKXJ, 1: 317. 65. Ibid., 1: 316 and Li, “Yuanben duanyin,” LKXJ, 3: 857. 66. The anonymous editor of the Shengshi xinsheng claims that much of what he had to work with was couched in vulgar language. See Shengshi xinsheng, 7–8. 67. The Shengshi xinsheng defends itself against the charge of containing “licentious songs of doomed states” (Shengshi xinsheng, 7–8). 68. Lang, “Yanci bu ke tian,” Qiuxiu leigao, 2: 478. In one instance, he related an anecdote about Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), who was said to have stopped writing love songs (yanci) at the urging of his Buddhist teacher. The teacher had cited concerns that such songs might incite people to lustful behavior. In the second instance, Lang reproduced one of Liu Yong’s (987–1053) love lyrics only to condemn it. 69. See Li, “Cunyou xulu houxu,” LKXJ, 1: 309. 70. For a sampling of short excerpts in the collection, see Li, Cixue, XQLZJC, 3: 287–88. 71. Li, “Shijing yanci you xu,” LKXJ, 1: 321–22. 72. Ibid., 1: 320–21. 73. Li gives one example involving his private theater troupe singing his songs and thus transmitting them to the “street and the wells.” See Li, “Shijing yanci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 320–21. 74. Zhu, “Xu,” THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 11 and Qiu, Wulun quanbei, 40: 2a–b. 75. Zhu Quan falls back upon the established trope of being merely a “busybody” (haoshizhe); his target audience for the text, whose “life” he wants to prolong through print, is beginning learners (chuxuezhe). THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 11. The prologue to Qiu Jun’s play Wulun quanbei only alludes to performance, not to print, to disseminate its edifying message. See Qiu, Wulun quanbei, 40: 1a–2b. 76. Idema, “The Story of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chün,” 93–94. 77. Li, “Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi xu,” LKXJ, 1: 317–18. 78. For a photolithographic edition of the Tiao fengyue, see Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, v. 1. For emended editions, see Wu et al., Guan Hanqing xiqu quan ji, 689–711; Zheng, Jiaoding Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, 29–43; Xu, Xinjiao Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, 27–56; Ning, Yuankan zaju sanshizhong xinjiao, 18–33; Wang, Wu, and Wang, Guan Hanqing quan ji, 109–154. The play was one of sixteen zaju included in ch. 20752 of the Yongle dadian. For a discussion, see Sieber, “Rhetoric, Romance, and Intertextuality,” 164–79.

204 / notes 79. For a photolithographic edition of Baiyueting, see Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, v. 1. For emended editions, see Wu et al., Guan Hanqing xiqu quan ji, 713–33; Zheng, Jiaoding Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, 45–61; Xu, Xinjiao Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, 27–56; Ning, Yuankan zaju sanshizhong xinjiao, 18–33; Wang, Wu, and Wang, Guan Hanqing quan ji, 72–108. For a discussion, see Sieber, “Rhetoric, Romance, and Intertextuality,” 190–213. 80. For a photolithographic edition, see Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, Guben xiqu congkan ser. 4, v. 1. For emended editions, see Xu, Xinjiao Yuankan zaju sanshizhong, 328–58; Ning, Yuankan zaju sanshizhong xinjiao, 195–210. For a discussion of authorship and a translation, see Idema and West, Chinese Theater 1100–1450, 236–78. 81. Li, Cixue, XQLZJC, 3: 273–91. 82. Li, “Yuanlin wumeng yuanben,” LKXJ, 3: 858–61. For a translation of the farce, see West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 429–36. 83. Li, Qiao Mengfu xiaoling and Zhang Xiaoshan xiaoling. 84. Li, “Qiao Mengfu xiaoling xu,” LKXJ, 1: 299. 85. For an expanded discussion of Li’s Yuan-related publications, see Sieber, “Thinking Through the Yuan Dynasty: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Case of Li Kaixian (1502–68),” unpublished manuscript. 86. Elman, A Cultural History, 29–38. My thanks to Christopher A. Reed for bringing this book to my attention. The first Ming emperor temporarily suspended the examinations from 1373 to 1384. See Dreyer, Early Ming China, 132. 87. Elman, A Cultural History, 29–38. 88. Ibid., 37. 89. See Dreyer, Early Ming China, 133–34. 90. Elman, A Cultural History, 383–91. 91. Ibid., 37. 92. Yoshikawa, Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 140–49. 93. Li, “Li Kongdong zhuan,” LKXJ, 2: 602–07, esp. 603. 94. On Yang Shen, see the exemplary study by Schorr, “Connoisseurship and the Defense Against Vulgarity,” 89–128. 95. Li, Cixue, XQLZJC, 3: 271. On the origin of that particular alternate title for the Xixiang ji, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 619–27. Incidentally, Xu Shuofang doubts that Wulun quanbei was written by Qiu Jun. See his Shuo xiqu (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2000), 97–101. However, for our purposes here, what matters is that, despite modern evidence to the contrary, Li Kaixian and most other Ming figures believed that the eminent official Qiu Jun had authored that work. 96. Li Kaixian’s anthology is only extant as a fragment in the Nanjing Library. 97. Li, “Gaiding Yuanxian Chuanqi Xu.” LKXJ, 1: 317–18. The term lu indicates that this set of essays was to be submitted to the Imperial Hanlin Academy of Letters for review. See Elman, A Cultural History, 400. 98. Bu, Li Kaixian zhuan, 20–21. 99. Yoshikawa, Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 67–68.

notes / 205 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

112.

113.

114.

Li, Zhongguo lidai guanzhi dacidian, 635 and Ji, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 140. Tsai, Perpetual Happiness, 133–36. Zhuang, Ming Qing sanqu zuojia huikao, 87–88. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 180. Qian, “Li Shaoqing Kaixian,” Liechao shiji xiaozhuan, 2: 377. In the biography, Qian alluded three times to what he sees as Li’s proclivity for numerical superlatives. I have consulted works by Li in the Beijing National Library and in the National Central Library in Taipei, including in Beijing, Cixue no. 4460; Zhonglu shanren zhuodui no. 4459; Li Zhonglu xianju ji no. 13399; the Baojian ji; and in Taipei, Zhang Xiaoshang xiaoling no. 14979 and Qiao Mengfu xiaoling no. 14985. Li, Cixue, XOLZJC, 3: 331. Xie Wuliang affirmed Zang Maoxun’s examination claim as one of three social contexts in which Yuan plays might have been composed (Luo Guanzhong yu Ma Zhiyuan, 66–67). For another Republican-era scholar who favored this position, see Yu Pingbo, “Ciqu tongyi qianshuo,” Yu Pingbo quanji (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi, 1997), 4: 461; for a contemporary scholar, see Zhu Jianming, “Lun Yuandai yi qu qushi,” Hebei shifan xuebao (1986: 4): 65–70. For a description of Zang’s activities in the context of poetry societies in Nanjing, see Qian, “Jinling shiji zhu shiren,” Liechao shiji xiaozhuan 2: 462–465. See Shen, “Xiang Silang,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 676. For a biographical account that contextualizes Zang’s life in the broader cultural sphere of Nanjing, see Yung, “A Critical Study,” 150–168. For a list of Zang’s works, see Yung, “A Critical Study,” 169–70. The range of topics included poetry (shi and ci), games, chess, prosimetric tanci narratives, chuanqi plays, and the Yuan zaju collection. The editions that can be dated to an exact year in the Wanli period (1573–1619) reign period are few and far between. For a listing of plays, publishers, and dates, see Lin, Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu, 109–24. In a letter to a certain Yao Tongcan, Zang referred to himself as “having an addiction to the carving of insects” (diaochong zhi shi) (Zang, “Ji Yao Tongcan shu,” Fubao tang ji, 88). However, Zang found himself in fine imperial company. Some officials reproached Shizong, the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522–66) for his fondness for extended singing (xuchang) as a preoccupation with the “small arts of carving insects.” See Qian, “Shizong Xiao huangdi,” Liechao shiji xiaozhuan, 1: 5. Several versions of Zang’s Yuanren baizhong qu edition are kept in the National Central Library, Taipei. Minor discrepancies include the order of the supplementary materials and certain lacunae. For detailed descriptions, see Zhang, Shanben xiqu jingyan lu, 177–99. I have also consulted the copy kept at the Beijing National Library, SB 1099. Zang, “Ji Huang Zhenfu shu,” Fubao tang ji, 84–85.

206 / notes 115. In the letter to Huang Ruting (1558–1626), Zang noted that the circulation of the first half of the anthology among friends was “a ploy to buy paper” (Zang, “Ji Huang Zhenfu shu,” Fubao tang ji, 85). On this point, see also Jang, “Form, Content, and Audience,” 25, n. 51. My thanks to Kimberly Besio for bringing this article to my attention. 116. Cf. Ding, Obscene Things, 53–54 and Yung, “A Critical Study,” 198–99. 117. Xu, Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 483. 118. Zheng, “Zang Maoxun gaiding Yuan zaju pingyi,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 408–21; West, “Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E,” 284–302; Besio, “Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction,” 251–82. 119. At no point does Zang suggest that the composition of arias determined the outcome of local or provincial examinations. 120. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 164. 121. Xie, Wu za zu, Ming Qing biji shiliao, 53: 301–02. The translation follows Yung, “A Critical Study,” 156. 122. Lucille Chia’s statistics on commercial Nanjing publishers show that drama and song made up a fourth of their total output. See Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street,” forthcoming. 123. Luo, Zhongguo gudai yinshua shi, 333–34. See also Zhang, Lidai keshu gaikuang, 272–82. 124. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 233 and 285. 125. On Rongyutang and other Hangzhou publishers, see Zhang, Zhongguo yinshua shi, 366–67. 126. For details, see Lin, Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu, 109–24. Lucille Chia’s statistics on commercial Nanjing publishers show that the Xixiang ji outpaced all other drama-related titles. See Chia, “Of Three Mountain Street,” forthcoming. 127. In some instances, the locale of publication has not been identified. For an overview of the Yuan zaju editions discussed later, see Zheng, “Yuan Ming chaokeben Yuanren zaju jiuzhong tiyao,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 422–32. 128. Of the thirty plays, twenty-nine are Yuan plays. However, the text is not extant in its entirety. Fifteen of the plays were included in the Mowangguan edition, others were independently preserved, bringing the total of extant plays to twenty-six. See Zaju xuan, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4., vols. 96–98. 129. The collection included thirty-nine plays from both the Yuan and the Ming, of which only three are still extant. See Yangchun zou, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vol. 99. For Huang Zhengwei’s other extant publications, most of them drama and fiction, see Du, Mingdai banke zonglu, no. 199. 130. The total number of plays published in that series is unknown. Currently, forty-four Yuan texts are extant, mostly in the Mowangguan edition. The collection was published by a Xu family in Longfeng. See Gu mingjia zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4., vols. 93–95. 131. It is not known how many texts were contained in this collection. Only four plays are extant. See Yuan Ming zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vol. 100. 132. All twenty of these plays are extant. The text is also known as Guquzhai edition. These plays are better cut version of plays appearing in Zaju xuan

notes / 207

133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155.

and the Gu mingjia edition. See Gu zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 4–8. Zhang Yuanzheng, “Xu,” XQXBHB, 1: 461. See Zheng, “Zang Maoxun gaiding Yuan zaju pingyi,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 410. See He, Qulun, XQLZJC, 4: 5–14, passim; Shen Defu, Guqu zayan, XQLZJC, 4: 199–221, passim; Wang, Qulü and GBXXJ, passim; Mei, Qingni lianhua ji, 2. Zang, “Yuanqu xuan xu,” YQX 1, 1: 3. Xu, Yuan Ming xiqu tansuo, 1. The reason Zang knew about it is because Zhu Quan had identified them as such in his Taihe zhengyin pu (XQLZJC, 3: 22–23). In Zang’s excerpt from Zhu’s work, he deliberately left out that section in order to simulate dynastic coherence. See Zang, YQX 2, 10. See Yu, “Canon Formation,” 92–104 and Sieber, “Getting at it in a Single Genuine Invocation.” In 1603, he published Gushi suo (A repository of old poems), a collection of poetry. In 1606, he undertook work on a collection of Tang poetry, the Tangshi suo (A repository of Tang poetry). See Zang, “Ji Xie Zaihang shu,” Fubao tang ji, 92. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 148 and 157. Shen, “Zaju yuanben,” Wanli yehuobian, 2: 648. Yung, “A Critical Study,” 196 and Zang, Fubao tang ji, 83. Zang, “Yuanqu xuan xu,” YQX 1, 3. Yung, “A Critical Study,” 195. See Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 170; Ling, Tanchu zacha, XQLZJC, 4: 260. Zang, “Ji Xie Zaihang shu,” Fubao tang ji, 91. Xu, Yuanqu xuan jia Zang Maoxun, 12–14. Cf. Yung, “A Critical Study,” 198. Xu, Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 2: 444. Ibid., 2: 443–45. Zang also visited other zaju collectors in other parts of the country and also entrusted his friends with the task of copying plays. See Xu, Yuan Ming xiqu tansuo, 5–6. Sun, Yeshi yuan gujin zaju; Komatsu, “Naifuhon sei shohonko,” 125–28. See Zheng, “Zang Maoxun gaiding Yuan zaju pingyi,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 418 and West, “Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E,” 286. Zang’s implicit appeal to the court as a reliable institution of transmission is in direct contrast to He Liangjun’s assessment of the role of the Imperial Music Academy in Nanjing, whose members, with the exception of the music master Dun Ren, he believed to be ignorant about the kind of Yuan zaju that he had in his possession. See He, Siyou zhai congshuo, 340. Originally, there were 300 plays in the collection, but now only 242 remain. Of these 105 are Yuan plays, 135 Ming plays, and two are duplicates. Out of those 70 are printed, namely 15 from Xijizi’s edition and 55 from the Gu mingjia edition. One-hundred-and-seventy-two are manuscripts.

208 / notes

156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

163. 164.

165. 166. 167. 168.

The sources for the manuscripts were Palace editions on the one hand, and a certain Yu Xiaogu on the other. See Mowangguan chaojiaoben gujin zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4 vols. 9–92. On Zhao’s collection, see Sun, Yeshiyuan gujin zaju kao and Zhao, Zhongguo xiju xue tonglun, 984–90. For the transcriptions of the comments, see Cai, XQXBHB, 1: 363–415. The name of the collection varied because of the different studio names of the collectors involved in its transmission. Mowangguan was the name of Zhao Qimei’s studio, but the collection acquired the name only in modern times. For a reconstruction of the lineage of transmission, see Sun, Yeshiyuan gujin zaju kao, 48. Mowangguan gujin zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 9–92. Zang, “Yuanqu xuan xu,” YQX 1, 3. Xu Shuofang points to this rhetorical hedging (Yuanqu xuan jia Zang Maoxun, 5) as does James Crump (“Giants in the Earth,” 22). Zang, “Yuanqu xuan xu,” YQX 1, 3. For Guan Hanqing’s reported reserve vis-à-vis actors, see Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 24–25. Minimally, the two texts in question are Zhu Quan’s Taihe zhengyin pu and Shen Defu’s Wanli yehuobian. Zang alludes to Zhu Quan’s section called the “The Twelve Sections of Zaju” (zaju shi’er ke). From the subcategories, it is evident that Zhu discussed the twelve major themes of zaju. In what followed, Zhu distinguished between the plays of entertainers and those of sons of respectable families (liangjia zidi). While Zhu was intent on attributing zaju to the latter, at no point did he mention anything about playwrighting forming part of the examination. Zang’s comment about Guan Hanqing also derived from this passage, but he put it into a separate section attributed to Zhao Mengfu, the famous Yuan statesman and calligrapher. However, far from declaring that he would step on stage, Guan was said to distinguish between actors and people like himself. See Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 24–25. Zang, “Yuanshi jishi benmo xu,” Fubao tang ji, 40–41. Wang Jide was critical, noting that many of Zang’s emendations for phrasing and rhymes were cause for regret. See his Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 170. Ling Mengchu, while noting that Zang’s prosodic expertise exceeded that of Shen Jing, observed that Zang’s emendations were often too subjective, thereby obscuring the original meaning. See his Tanqu zacha, XQLZJC, 4: 260. Cheng Yuwen, “Xu,” XQXBHB, 1: 462. Meng Chengshun, “Gujin mingju hexuan xu,” XQXBHB, 1: 445. Wu Weiye, “Xu,” in Li, Beici guangzheng pu, 80: 4–5. The earliest extant edition dates to the Kangxi era. They did not criticize Zang’s opinion, since as I will discuss later, his drama-related endeavors never fell within the purview of their compilation, but they took Shen Defu, the compiler of the influential miscellany Wanli yehuobian, to task for his unsubstantiated claim that the Yuan selected their officials through arias. For the Siku quanshu comments, see Shen Defu, Guqu zayan, XQLZJC, 4: 195. Other private Qing critics

notes / 209

169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176.

177.

178. 179. 180. 181.

182. 183. 184.

185. 186.

such as Liang Yusheng (1745–1819) also pointed to the lack of evidence in Yuan records to substantiate any such claim. See Crump, “Giants in the Earth,” 22. Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, 149–71. Yangchun zou, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, v. 99. Yuan Ming zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, v. 100. Gu mingjia zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, v. 95. On the characteristics of the Anhui style, see Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 233. Originally from Shexian in Anhui, members of the Huang family settled in other major publishing centers such as Nanjing and Hangzhou. See Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 192. Yao, “The Pleasure of Reading Drama,” 444; Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 198–200. The examples that Hegel cites all postdate Zang’s 1615/16 publication. See Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 201. Xu Shuofang also points out that Zang’s illustrations for the plays by Tang Xianzu were the finest of any produced for that particular play. See Xu, Yuanqu xuan jia Zang Maoxun, 37. Printed painting albums also include attributions of this sort. Xiao Yuncong (1596–1673), a master of the Anhui school, produced prints in imitation of painters from the Song through the Ming in his 1648 Taiping shanshui tu (Landscape pictures of Great Peace). While the details of the landscapes differ, they do not necessarily represent a close approximation of the original painters’ style. Partly such a gap was due to the shortage of actual paintings as well as the translation into the medium of woodblock carving. See Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 264–66. Jang, “Form, Content, and Audience,” 16. Jang notes that the pictures themselves are characterized by relative visual simplicity (ibid., 18). Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 149–79. Cahill, Distant Mountains, 3–30. See also Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 253–54 and 273–86. Sources used to identify the painters include the following: Guo, Song Yuan Ming Qing shuhuajia nianpu; Sun, Zhongguo huajia renming dacidian; Yu, Zhongguo meishujia renming cidian. My thanks to Leo Yip for assistance with the tabulation of this information. See Xu, Yuanqu xuan jia Zang Maoxun, 37–42; Yung, “A Critical Study,” 188–206; Besio, “Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction,” 277. Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, 98. McMahon, Causality and Containment, 62, 68–69; Lang, “Diwang yinluan,” Qixiu leigao, 2: 726–27. See also Lang, “Chunhua yinju,” Qixiu leigao, 2: 381 and Shen, “Chunhua,” Wanli yehuobian, 3: 659, both of which are discussed by Clunas, Pictures and Visuality, 150–51; Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, 106–11. Zang, “Yuanqu xuan xu,” YQX 1, 3. Ibid., 3. Zheng Qian quotes Wu Mei who observed that Zang’s final comment obliquely intimated that he had in fact altered the plays (“Zang Maoxun gaiding Yuan zaju pingyi,” Jingwu congbian, 1: 411–12).

210 / notes 187. See Zang, YQX 2, 1–4. 188. See Zang, Yuanren baizhong qu, Beijing National Library, SB 1099. 189. For Zang’s edition of Tang Xianzu’s plays, especially Peony Pavilion, see Swatek, Peony Pavilion Onstage, 25–52. 190. Xu, Yuanqu xuan jia Zang Maoxun, 5–7. 191. Besio, “Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction,” passim. 192. For Zang’s systematization of role types with a view toward suggesting performability, see Akamatsu, “Genkyokusen ga mezashita mono,” 182–83. 193. On the popularity of “pure singing” in Zang’s circle, see Yung, “A Critical Study,” 163–64. 194. Zang, “Yuanqu xuan xu,” YQX 1, 4. 195. Shih, The Golden Age, 70. 196. For a list of the plays in question preserved only as court manuscripts, see Sun, Yeshi yuan gujin zaju kao, 206–09, for the court performance percentages (50 percent martial, 25 percent religious, 25 percent other), see Shen, “Theatre Performance During the Ming,” 71. 197. For the plays in question, see the Mowangguan collection, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 13, 15. 198. When late Ming zaju collectors mention the number of texts in their possession, the number averages between two and three hundred plays. See He, Qulun, XQLZJC, 4: 6 and Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 169. 199. Li Kaixian claimed that he had over one thousand zaju plays in his possession (Li, “Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi xu,” LKXJ, 1: 316). One might be inclined to chalk this number off to Li’s documented penchant for exaggeration were it not for the fact that Shen Defu also noted that a thousand plays were in circulation (Shen, Guqu zayan, XQLZJC, 4: 214–15). 200. Zaju xuan, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 96–98. 201. Gu mingjia zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 9–92. 202. Gu zaju, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4, vols. 4–6. The only exception is the penultimate play in the collection, Fengyunhui (The meeting of wind and clouds), which is a historical drama. 203. For a tabulation of the themes of all plays, see Shionoya, Kokuyaku Genkyoku sen. Although Shionoya only identified twenty plays as “romances,” a closer look reveals that many of the plays he placed in other categories also have a major romantic element. For instance, of the many Sanguo plays in the Ming court repertoire, Zang included only those that contained some romantic aspect or elaborated on the theme of the frustrated scholar. See Besio, “The Disposition of Defiance,” 20–21. 204. Zhu, THZYP, XQLZJC, 3: 16. What had intrigued Zhu Quan, who had an abiding interest in Taoism, was most likely Ma’s skill in handling the theme of religious deliverance. 205. For a detailed analysis of the Wang Zhaojun legend in seventeenthcentury sources, see Besio, “Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction,” 255–75, for the changes the play made, see ibid., 262.

notes / 211 206. In addition to Hangong qiu, the plays in question are: Yujing tai (The jade mirror stand), Wutong yu (Rain in the parasol tree) and Yangzhou meng (The dream of Yangzhou). 207. The plays in question are Zhang Tianshi (Heavenly Master Zhang) and Qujiang chi (Winding river pond). 208. Guan Hanqing was represented with eight plays followed by Ma Zhiyuan with seven. 209. For the anecdote on which the play was based, see the episode found under the section “Guile and Chicanery” (jiajue) in Liu, Shishuo xinyu jiaojian, 2: 458. 210. Meng Chengshun, “Xu,” XQHBHB 1: 444. 211. For a brief references in art song to Liu and Xie’s marriage, see, for example, TPYF, 2: 6: 7. Although some other late Ming sources record pairings with other courtesans (see Li and Yuan, Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao, 133–46), the ci lyric at the heart of the play was indisputably written by Liu Yong (see Chang, The Evolution of Chinese T’zu Poetry, 113–17). 212. Xu, Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 456. 213. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 69–74. 214. Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites,” 56–57. 215. Shen, “Nanse zhi mi,” Wanli yehuobian, 2: 622. 216. Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites,” 54. Yu Huai himself mentioned Dongjing meng Hua lu (A record of the dream of the Land of Hua of the Eastern capital, 1143), Meng Yuanlao’s memoirs about urban life prior to 1127 in the then-capital Kaifeng, as an inspiration for his work. However, for all its details on the pleasure quarters, Dongjing meng Hua lu does not list any male performers-cum-prostitutes. Similarly, the brief Yuan compendium of biographical notices on actresses, the Qinglou ji (The green bower collection, 1364) does not contain biographies of men. 217. Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites,” 30 and 34. 218. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 162–65. 219. West, “Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E,” 291–94. 220. Xu, Mudanting yanjiu ziliao kaoshi, 40–41. 221. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 2. 222. Ibid., 6. 223. McGann, The Textual Condition, 184. 224. Ibid., 183. 225. Osborne, “Rethinking the Performance Editions,” 170. 226. See for example, Lu Lin’s discussion of Hu Zhiyu (1227–95) (Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu, 10–26). 227. Epstein, Competing Discourses, 79–87. 228. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 3. 229. Ming shi, 8: 2498. In the History of the Ming, Zang was not granted his own biography, but touched upon in passing in his friend’s Mao Kun’s biography. However, he was mentioned in certain Qing local gazetteers. See Yagisawa, Mingdai juzuojia yanjiu, 435–36, 440.

212 / notes

Chapter 3 Xixiang ji Editions, the Bookmarket, and the Discourse on Obscenity: Wang Jide (d. 1623), Jin Shengtan (1608–61), and the Creation of Uncommon Readers 1. For the cutthroat competition among Shanghai print capitalists, see Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, forthcoming. 2. Guo, “Xixiang ji yishu shang de panduan yu qi zuozhe de xingge,” Guo Moruo quanji, 15: 325. 3. See Tan, Quhai lice, 8–30; Tanaka, “Zatsugeki Seishôki no nangekika,” 542–74. 4. In Wang Jide’s case, the Xixiang ji was published by the Xiangxue ju studio of his friend Zhu Chaoying, in Jin’s case, by Guanhua tang, the studio of his friend and fellow Buddhist, Han Zhu. 5. On the many dozens of Xixiang ji editions based on Jin’s version published during the Qing, see Tan, Jin Shengtan yu Zhongguo xiqu piping, 127–49. Based on all the different versions of the Sixth Book of Genius editions I have consulted at the National Central Library in Taipei, it is clear that the presentation of these materials varies considerably. For a brief description of those editions, see Zhang, Shanben juqu jingyan lu, 17–20. Numerically, Wang’s lineage of texts does not rival Jin’s, yet it clearly had an impact on several later editions. The most obvious example is Ling Mengchu’s 1622 edition, which often takes issue with Wang (see Ling, Xixiang ji, Beijing National Library, no. 16233). Other examples include Zhu ding Xixiang ji otherwise known as the Sun Yuefeng edition, Beijing National Library, SB 829 and Xixiang ji kao wujuan, Beijing National Library, no. 11742. 6. West, “Text and Ideology,” 43. 7. My discussion here is indebted to the suggestions of Cynthia J. Brokaw and two reviewers. 8. Based on his analysis of the formal characteristics and filiations, Jiang Xingyu has grouped Xixiang ji editions into three major categories, namely those that respect the formal features of Yuan zaju, those that only retain songs, and those that have been influenced, to varying degrees, by the Southern theatrical conventions. Among these, the latter greatly outnumber the other two (Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 20–24). Examining editions from the point of view of their provenance and the two purposes of performance and reading, Denda Akira differentiates between “performance” and “desktop” editions (“Manreki ban Seishôki no keitô to sono seikaku,” 93–106). Refining Denda’s categories, Tan Fan distinguishes between scholarly editions (xueshuxing), appreciative editions (xinshangxing) and performance-oriented editions (yanjuxing) (Jin Shengtan yu Zhongguo xiqu piping, 158). For an overview of specific Xixiang ji editions, see also West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 7–23. 9. In the course of the sixteenth century, the Northern style of ariatic music was increasingly rarely performed, yet the Xixiang ji may well have been one of the plays to have a longer musical afterlife than some of the other zaju. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Nanjing was one of the few

notes / 213

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

cities in the South where Northern style plays were still being performed, which, as Shen Defu indirectly suggests, was partly due to the presence of a court entertainment bureau there. Shen saw the Xixiang ji professionally performed there in its entirety in 1604 (“Beici chuanshou,” Wanli yehuobian, 2: 646–47). Connery, The Empire of the Text, 46. Connery’s definition reads: “Textsystem refers to the material text, including appended exegeses, the contents of that text and its exegeses, the transmission mechanisms for the textual material, and the teachers and students involved in that transmission.” Since Ming publishing does not typically involve teachers and students, my use of the term broadly refers to everyone involved in the process of transmission. Zhou, Zhongyuan yinyun, XQLZJC, 1: 233, 244–45. Sun Jichang, “Ji zajuming yongqing,” TPYF, 2: 6: 18–21. Four plays mentioned in the suite, Arranging for a Love Match (Tiao fengyue), The Moon-Revering Pavilion (Baiyueting), Moholo Doll (Moholuo), and Xue Rengui (Xue Rengui), are extant among the Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays. Jiang, Ming kanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 20–22. For an analysis of related fifteenth-century texts, see McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture. West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither. Xinkan dazi kuiben xuanxiang canding qimiao zhushi Xixiang ji, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 1, 2: 161b. The translation follows West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 414. West and Idema, The Moon and the Zither, 414–15. See Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 44–52. Fengyue jinnang jianjiao, 340–77. Li, Cixue, XQLZJC, 3: 271. On the emergence of a female readership in the fifteenth century, see McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture, 67–76. Li, “Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi xu,” LKXJ, 1: 316. Li, Cixue, XQLZJC, 3: 271. In his 1580 preface to the Xu Shifan edition, Cheng Juyuan noted that “a member of my lineage, [Cheng] Zhongren, learnt how to sing lyrics and songs. He told me that among the lyrics of the writers of the Jin and the Yuan, many stemmed from famous men, but one simply could not disregard this story [of the Xixiang]. Hence he gathered all the comments by all the critics and showed them to me after he printed them” (“Cuishi chunqiu xu,” in Denda, Minkan Genzatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku, 23). Ling Mengchu, for example, repeatedly refers to the following literati and literati editions: Wang Jide’s edition, Xu Wenzhang edition, Xu Shifan’s edition, Yang Shen, He Liangjun, Wang Shizhen, and Zhou Deqing. See Ling Mengchu, Xixiang ji, Beijing National Library, no. 16233. Li, “Tongxin shuo,” Fenshu, 97. On Li Zhi and the child-like mind, see Chou, Yüan Hung-tao and the Kung-an School, 21–26; Epstein, Competing Discourses, 74–79. See also his “Zashuo,” Fenshu, 96–97. See Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 298–312.

214 / notes 28. For editions attributed to Chen, see Chen Meigong xiansheng piping Xixiang ji published by the commercial Fujian firm Shijiantang in 1614 (Beijing National Library, no. 12422 and National Central Library, no. 15162). For a discussion, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 188–206. 29. Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 114–22. 30. For editions attributed to Wei Wanchu, see the copies kept in the National Central Library, no. 15061 and in the Beijing National Library, both of which are entitled Xinke Wei Zhongxue xiansheng pidian Xixiang ji (ca. 1640). See also Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 106–12. 31. Epstein, Competing Discourses, 76. 32. I have consulted the copy kept in the Beijing National Library, no. 16274. The full title runs: Yuanben chuxiang Bei Xixiang ji. On the features of this edition, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 126–45. Jiang concludes that the Qifengguan edition was in many ways modeled on the commercial Xuzhizhai edition (1598). 33. Jiang, Mingkanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 88–103. It is believed that most of the Li Zhuowu commentaries from Rongyutang derive from the hand of the same man, Ye Zhou. See Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 32 and Ye, Zhongguo xiaoshuo meixue, 27–49. 34. For a comparison of five different Li Zhuowu Xixiang ji commentaries and their influence, see Jiang, Mingkan ben Xixiang ji yanjiu yanjiu, 88–103. 35. Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 227. The sole remaining copy of the Xu Shifan edition is kept in the Shanghai Library. 36. Yuanben chuxiang Bei Xixiang ji, Beijing National Library, no. 16274. 37. Jiang, Mingkanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 60–62. 38. On Wang Jide’s apparatus, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian yanjiu, 153–54. 39. See, for example, the Wanhuxuan edition by Wang Yunpeng, a commercial publisher active in Nanjing and Huizhou in the Wanli period. The actual edition contains an afterword by another party signed 1634 as well as an extensive selection of appreciative Ming commentary on the Xixiang ji. Wang not only explicitly referred to Wang Jide’s material, but also appended his own song of appreciation. Thus, what in Wang Jide’s day clearly represented a literati edition could subsequently become a commercial imprint. See Beijing National Library, no. 16237/2206. On Wang Yunpeng’s activities as a publisher, see Chia, “Of Three Mountain Street,” forthcoming. 40. Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian yanjiu, 177. 41. He Bi, “Fanli,” XQXBHB, 2: 642. For a facsimile edition that shows high production values, see Ming He Bi jiaoben Xixiang ji. For a discussion of He Bi’s life, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian yanjiu, 167–71. 42. He Bi, “Fanli,” XQXBHB, 2: 642. 43. For Xuzhizhai’s other publications, see Du, Mingdai banke zonglu, no. 055. The vast majority of extant titles are dramas. 44. Such guidelines also precede the song anthology, the Nanbei gongci ji, which Chen Bangtai co-edited with Chen Suowen in 1604/05 (NBGCJ, 1: 5–6). 45. See, for example, Luo Moudeng, ed., Quanxiang zhushi Xixiang ji, Beijing National Library, no. 735.

notes / 215 46. Yuanben chuxiang Bei Xixiang ji erjuan, Beijing National Library, no. 16274. The carver Huang Yikai belonged to the famous Huang carving family originating in She-xian in Anhui. 47. See Jiang, Mingkanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 113–21 and Xixiang ji kaozheng, 93–103. 48. For the facsimile reprint of the first, see Min, Xixiang ji Huizhen zhuan; for a discussion of the second entitled the Six Illusions of the Western Wing (Liu huan Xixiang), see Jiang, Xixiang ji wenxian xue yanjiu, 272–97. 49. Wu, The Double Screen, 246. 50. Dittrich, Hsi hsiang chi. My thanks to Rania Huntington and to Colleen Lye for providing access to this text on various occasions. I would add stage performance (act 7) and book illustrations (act 16) to the media that Dittrich has identified. 51. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 132–99. 52. Hsu, “Fictional Scenes,” 10–28. 53. For the scholarly Mao Qiling edition, see Mao, Mao Xihe lunding Xixiang ji. Its preface is dated 1676. For a description, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 422–39. 54. As David Rolston has pointed out, even in its particulars, Jin’s Shuihu commentary was greatly indebted to earlier commentaries (Traditional Chinese Fiction, 32–35). 55. Cheng Juyuan, “Cuishi chunqiu xu,” in Denda, Minkan Gen zatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku, 22–23. 56. Ling Mengchu, “Xixiang ji fanli shize,” XQXBHB, 2: 678. Incidentally, this passage contains one of the pre-twentieth-century uses of the term xiqu discussed at length in the introductory chapter. 57. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 155–56. 58. Wong and Lee, “Poems of Depravity,” 209–15. 59. Cheng, Wang Bo zhi Shijing xue, 25–53 and 133–42. 60. Zhu, Chengzhai yuefu, Beijing National Library, no. 4899. 61. Li, “Shijing yanci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 320–21. 62. Li, Cixue, XQLZJC, 3: 271. That is also the title by which Cheng Juyuan, one of the two preface writers for the 1580 Xu Shifan edition refers to the Xixiang ji. On this designation for the Xixiang ji, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 619–27. 63. The date occurs in somewhat garbled fashion in the second preface by Cheng Juyuan. Xu Fengji with the style Shifan refers to himself as a mountain recluse (shanren), thus most likely belonging to the literati class, a fact also confirmed by the likelihood of being a relative of a jinshi by the name of Xu Changji hailing from Changzhou. The edition follows at least some of the conventions of literati texts. For instance, the preface by Xu Gengji is carved in a slightly more cursive style than the text itself. See Jiang, Ming kanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 38–81. The edition elicited some positive comments by subsequent literati editors, including Wang Jide. 64. Ding, Obscene Things, 90–94.

216 / notes 65. Xu Fengji, “Chongke Yuanben Xixiang ji xu,” in Denda, Minkan Gen zatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku, 22. For a brief discussion of the two prefaces, see Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 56–59. 66. Cheng Juyuan, “Cuishi chunqiu xu,” in Denda, Minkan Gen zatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku, 22–23. 67. McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture, 32. 68. See Wang, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao, 178–79. 69. Yao, “The Pleasure of Reading Drama,” 465–68. 70. On Wang Jide’s life, see Xu, Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 2: 237–89. On his major critical terms, see Ye, Zhongguo xiju xue shi, 259–98 and Quxue yu xiju xue, 400–18 as well as Li, “Wang Jide qulun yanjiu.” 71. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 147. 72. On Wang’s own plays, see Volpp, “The Male Queen,” 58–110. 73. Li, “Qiao Mengfu xiaoling houxu,” LKXJ, 1: 299. 74. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 147. 75. Xu, Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 240–41 and Luo, Zhongguo sanqu shi, 179. 76. He did express some misgivings about the presumed lasciviousness (xie) of a set of songs he had written about Cui Yingying, but his interlocutor assured him that based on historical precedents, no one would denigrate him because of those songs. Hence he agreed to have them included. See Wang, “Dai Cuiniang jiechao sijue,” GBXXJ, 6: 56a. 77. Wang, “Pingyu,” GBXXJ, 6: 58b–59a. 78. Wang, “Xu,” GBXXJ, 6a. 79. See the afterword by Zhu Chaoying, XQHBHB, 2: 665–66. 80. Wang published the Xixiang ji together with the Story of the Lute (Pipa ji), generally considered the foremost play of the early southern dramatic tradition. He considered them complementary, with the Xixiang ji representing the romantic side embodied in the folk songs of the Book of Odes and Li Bai’s poetry and the Pipa ji representing the rational side embodied in the aristocratic songs of the Book of Odes and Du Fu’s poetry. However, he makes it clear that he considers the Xixiang ji artistically superior. See Wang, “Pingyu,” GBXXJ, 6: 56a–b. Wang was not the only person to publish the two plays together. For other such joint publications, see Jiang, Xixiang ji wenxian xue yanjiu, 241. 81. See Jiang, “Heresy and Persecution in Late Ming Society.” 82. These were most likely the titles issued by the commercial publisher Rongyutang in Hangzhou. In addition to the chuanqi titles mentioned above, Rongyutang also issued Li Zhuowu xiansheng piping Yougui ji. The only one of these with a date attached is the Li Zhuowu xiansheng piping Bei Xixiang ji (1610). For a list of all the plays with Li Zhuowu commentaries, see Lin, Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu, 102. 83. Wang, “Pingyu,” GBXXJ, 6: 58b–59a. 84. For a discussion of the general features of this edition, see Jiang, Mingkan ben Xixiang ji, 128–47. 85. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 69–74. 86. See, for example, Ling Mengchu, “Fanli,” XQXBHB, 2: 678. 87. See Wang, “Xu,” GBXXJ, 6a–b.

notes / 217 88. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 110–13. 89. Yao, “The Pleasure of Reading Drama,” 445. Hsiao Li-ling has pointed out that it may well have been commercial publishers such as Rongyutang in Hangzhou that led the trend of landscape-painting related illustrations. See Carlitz, “Print as Performance,” forthcoming. 90. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 169. 91. Ibid., 4: 148, 154 and 169 and Wang, “Pingyu,” GBXXJ, 6: 58b. 92. Wang, “Pingyu,” GBXXJ, 6: 58b. 93. Substituting the “texts of the Yuan” in the editorial guidelines of the Xuzhizhai edition, the Qifengguan edition had already favored “old texts.” Modeled on Wang’s edition, the Xixiang kao draws a distinction between “commercial” (fangke) and “ancient editions” (guben). Other examples include Ling Mengchu’s Xixiang ji, which he modeled on a text said to have been in the possession of Zhu Youdun. On the value of “antiquity” in material culture, see Clunas, Superfluous Things, 80–82. 94. See Li, “Xiye chunyou ci xu,” LKXJ, 1: 334–35. 95. In his preface, he pointed to two editions of Xixiang ji that got him started, namely the Bijunzhai edition (1544) and the Zhu Shijin edition (1588). Like Li Kaixian, he lamented the scarcity of old Yuan texts. There were three editions he found relatively acceptable (shan) (Xu Shifan, Jin Zaiheng, and Xi Shangu), but he thought that they all suffered from the influence of “vulgar editions” (suben). 96. A number of late Ming literati edited the chantefable version of the Xixiang ji, including Zhang Yu, Zang Maoxun, and Tu Long. For a copy of Zang’s version, see Zang, Dong Jieyuan Xixiang ji, National Central Library, no. 15049. 97. For a critique of facile comparisons to a supposed Yuan aesthetic, see Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 152. 98. Shen Jing, “Shouzha ertong,” in Wang, GBXXJ, 51b–54a. 99. Quoted in Tanaka, “Seishôki no nangekika,” 573–74. On Zhuo’s “tragic” sensibility, see Ye, Zhongguo xiju xueshi, 363–67. 100. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 147. 101. Ibid., 4: 154. See also Ye, Zhongguo xiju xueshi, 263–70; Li, “Wang Jide qulun yanjiu,” 169–73. 102. See Ye, Quxue yu xiju xue, 311–21. For Wang’s stance on the controversy around the authorship of Xixiang ji, see GBXXJ, 6: 49b–50b. 103. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 179. 104. Wang, “Fanli,” GBXXJ, 8b–9a. 105. Jiang, Mingkanben Xixiang ji yanjiu, 137. 106. Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 19–20. 107. The rhapsodies were collected in Xiao, Wenxuan, 1: 19: 393–405. 108. Wang, “Qianqiu jueyan fu,” GBXXJ, 6: 54b–55a. 109. See Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, passim. 110. The first play included in Zaju from the High Ming is an adaptation of the Gaotang story entitled Dream of Gaotang (Gaotang meng). The fourth play represented a version of the Luofu story entitled Sadness at the Luo River (Luoshui bei). See Shen, Sheng Ming zaju, vol. 1, ch. 1 and 4.

218 / notes 111. Wang, “Qianqiu jueyan fu,” GBXXJ, 6: 55a. 112. In the Yuan, Qu Yuan was the subject of zaju, none of which survive. After the fall of the Ming, Qu Yuan became the subject of literati zaju, but in keeping with the loyalist tenor of the times, most such plays focus on Qu Yuan’s suicide. See Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u, 79–84. 113. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 181. 114. Wang, “Qianqiu jueyan fu,” GBXXJ, 6: 55b. 115. Bol, This Culture of Ours, 1. 116. Wang, “Qianqiu jueyan fu,” GBXXJ, 6: 55a. 117. On this point, see also Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 148 and 154. 118. Carlitz, “The Social Uses of Female Virtue,” 117–52. 119. McMahon, Causality and Containment, passim. 120. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 181. Xu Shuofang dates this event to 1608, the same year Shen Jing critically examined Wang’s Xixiang ji edition (Wan Ming qujia nianpu, 2: 272–73). 121. Wang, “Pingyu,” GBXXJ, 6: 58b. Ling Mengchu, who thought that only 20–30 percent of Wang’s comments were apt, considered this appeal to posterity to be presumptuous. 122. Wang, Qulü, XQLZJC, 4: 179. 123. On Jin’s desire to become a monk, see Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 7: 175. On his Buddhist commitments, see Sieber, “Getting at it in a Single Genuine Invocation,” 36–56. 124. The terminology is all Wang Jide’s, but it would be appropriated by Jin Shengtan. 125. See, for example, Wang, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao, 378. 126. On Dong Han, see Chang, Crisis and Transformation, 10–12. 127. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 2: 1067–73. 128. Dong, “Caizi shu,” in Wang, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao, 215–16. 129. Wang, Chin Sheng-t’an, 38 and passim. 130. See Guo, Jin Shengtan xiaoshuo lilun yu xiju lilun; Ye, Zhongguo xiju xue shi, 426–46; Li, Zhongguo gudai quxue shi, 619–73; Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 25–50; Church, “Beyond the Words,” 5–77. 131. Ding, Obscene Things, 75–78. 132. Sieber, “Remaking the Canon,” 51–68 and Church, “Beyond the Words,” 45–46 and passim. 133. Li, Xianqing ouji, Li Yu quanji, 11: 24. 134. Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 19. 135. As both David Rolston and Robert Hegel observe, the term caizi shu is most likely deliberately ambiguous, that is, “books of/for geniuses” (Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 48 and Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 52). 136. For Jin Yong’s title, see Sieber, “Getting at it in a Single Genuine Invocation,” 36–56. The second book was published under the title Zengbu tianxia caizi bidushu in 1677. For the preface explaining the circumstances of its publication, see Chen Mu, “Zengbu caizi shu yin,” in Zhu Yiqing

notes / 219

137. 138. 139.

140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147. 148.

149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158.

and Cheng Zixin, ed., Jin Shengtan xuanpi caizi bidu xinzhu (Hefei: Anhui wenyi, 1988), 1: 7. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 51–73. For the details of the texts in questions, see Chen, Wan Ming xiaopin yu Ming ji wenren shenghuo, 117–42. Ibid., 129 and n. 21. Chen notes that this list to a certain degree already anticipates Jin Shengtan’s, with two major differences, namely the selective emphasis with regard to the Shiji and the preference for Li Bai instead of Du Fu. Jin, “Xu yi,” DWCZS, JSTQJ, 1: 4. For a similar qualifying statement, see “Xu yi,” DWCZS, JSTQJ, 1: 5: “Thus the books of Zhuang Zhou, Qu Ping, Sima Qian, Du Fu and even of Shi Nai’an and Dong Jieyuan all came about through utmost exertion.” My observations are based on the extant works listed in Du, Mingdai banke zonglu. Yoshikawa, Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 173–74. For a discussion of some of the late Ming Tang poetry collections and the place of pride they accorded to Du Fu, see Yu, “The Chinese Poetic Canon and its Boundaries,” 120–21. Plaks, The Four Masterworks, 279–93; Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel, 404–30; Farrer, “The Shui-hu chuan.” That particular Xixiang ji entitled Xinkan gaizheng quanxiang pingshi Xixiang ji is held in the Beijing National Library, no. 12653. Despite its prefatorial pretensions to the contrary, it is a commercial edition. See also Jiang, Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu, 233–41. On Wu Mianxue, see Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street,” forthcoming. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 78–97. Chen Hongshou illustrated the Hangzhou firm Zuigengtang’s edition of Guanhua tang Diwu caizi shu pinglun chuxiang, which appeared in 1657. See Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 240. For Chen’s illustration of the Chuci, see Lisao tu, which was published in 1638. Chen illustrated at least two different versions of the Xixiang ji, one of which is the 1639 Zhang Shenzhi edition. See Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 1, vol. 6. Cf. Huang, “Author(ity) and Reader,” 43–44. Church, “Beyond the Words,” 54–62. Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 10. In Wang Jide’s edition, for example, the scene is entitled “Reaching Pleasure” (jiuhuan). See Wang, GBXXJ, table of contents. Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 161–63. Ibid., 3: 47. Appadurai, “Introduction,” 11–12 and 22. Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 5. Ibid., 3: 8–9. On tea and incense as categories of late Ming elite connoisseurship, see Clunas, Superfluous Things, 26–30. For the commerce in such items, see Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure, 222–29.

220 / notes 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181.

182. 183.

Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 8–9. See also Huang “Author(ity) and Reader,” 67. Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism, 44–70. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 154. Wong, Huters, and Yu, “Introduction,” 6. Yu, “The Chinese Poetic Canon and Its Boundaries,” 122. Wang, Zhongguo wenxue piping tongshi, 6: 192. For a more detailed argument regarding this point, see Sieber, “From Lethal Slander to Generative Instruction,” forthcoming. Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 12. Li, Xianqing ouji, Li Yu quanji, 11: 24. Tan, Jin Shengtan yu Zhongguo xiqu piping, 127–29. Quoted in ibid., 135. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 172. Ibid., 171 and 174. Hunt, “Introduction,” 10. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 10. Guillory, Cultural Capital, ix. Ding, Obscene Things, 67. Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-lung. Davis, The Chinese, 2: 195–96. Gottschall, Das Theater und Drama der Chinesen, 36. The anti-Qing Shanghai-based Guoxue Fulunshe issued at least two Xixiang ji reprints, one being the Sixth Book of Genius, the other a quasi-literati edition attributed to Chen Jiru, the Chen Meigong pi Xixiang ji (1911). Some of Chen Jiru’s writings had been banned during the Qianlong inquisition. See Chao-ying Fang, “Ch’en Chi-ju,” Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, edited by Arthur W. Hummel (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 1: 82. Guo, “Xixiang ji yishu shang de panduan yu qi zuozhe de xingge,” Guo Moruo quanji, 15: 322–23. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 57.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4.

Thinking Through Authors, Readers, and Desire

Gottschall, Das Theater und Drama der Chinesen, 34–35. Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright.” Gottschall, Das Theater und Drama der Chinesen, 36. Jerome McGann, quoted in York, Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing, 27. 5. Rose, Authors and Owners. 6. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print, defines “social” authors as those who prefer to disseminate their work through manuscript circulation among a group of intimates.

notes / 221 7. “Socialized” authorship is Jerome McGann’s term, reflecting the central role editors play in the “socialization of texts.” See McGann, The Textual Condition, 69–87. 8. For the notion of “trans-individual” authorship mediating between the purely individual and social, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 192–98. 9. Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 62–66, argues that translators should be acknowledged as making an “authorial” contribution to a text. 10. Copyright protection became a pressing issue among Chinese print capitalist in the wake of the introduction of expensive letterpress machinery. See Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, forthcoming. 11. Zhang, Mighty Opposites. 12. Herder, quoted in Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright,” 447. 13. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Burke, Authorship, 50. 14. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 162. 15. Ibid. 16. See McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China. 17. Gui, “Zhu xiegui,” Gui Zhuang ji, 2: 449–50. In Gui’s view, the violence and lust embodied in the two books Jin commentaried were reflected in similarly lustful and violent deeds in Jin’s life. 18. On the extensive debates surrounding the idea of “creation” and “artifice” during the Zhou and Han period, see Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation. 19. Yang, Lunyu shizhu, 66. For a discussion of this passage, see Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation, 40–51. 20. Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation, 56–59. 21. Sima Qian, in Xiao, Wenxuan, 2: 908. 22. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 155–63. 23. See David Palumbo-Liu, The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 24. Wilkerson, “Shih and Historical Consciousness in Ming drama,” 15–39. 25. Connery, The Empire of the Text, 71. 26. On the play more generally, see Volpp, “The Male Queen,” 58–110. 27. Lewis, Writing and Authority in China, 154–55. 28. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies. 29. Owen, The End of the Chinese “Middle Ages,” 130. 30. Li, Xianqing ouji, Li Yu quanji, 11: 19. 31. On Li’s relation to Yuan drama, see Zhang, Li Yu chuangzuo lungao, 37–40. 32. On the particulars of the various editions, see Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, 20 and 219, n. 70. 33. See Chang and Chang, Crisis and Transformation, 10–15 and Shen, Li Yu pingzhuan, 196–201. 34. See Chang and Chang, Crisis and Transformation, 15 and 21. 35. For two different views on such translations and their impact on reform efforts, see Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity and Sang, “Translating Homosexuality.” 36. Zhao Jingshen, Zhongguo wenxue xiaoshi (Shanghai: Guanghua, 1930), 190.

222 / notes 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Chang and Chang, Crisis and Transformation, 15–20. See Chang and Chang, Crisis and Transformation, 22 and 41 n. 40. Wagner, The Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies, 10–11. Lu, Nahan, Lu Xun quanji, 1: 416–17. Tian, “Xixiang ji qianji,” Tian Han wenji, 10: 449. Tian, Xixiang ji: Shiliu chang Jingju, Tian Han wenji, 10: 261–327. Qi Senhua, “Dui Guan Hanqing Bu fulao sanqu pingjia de zhiyi,” Guangming ribao (January 31, 1965): 4. Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family, 281–312. Chen, Acting the Right Part, 208–09. Du, “Historicity and Contemporaneity,” 223–37. My thanks to Leo Yip for bringing this article to my attention. Jin, DLCZS, JSTQJ, 3: 19. See Tian, “Xixiang ji qianji,” Tian Han wenji, 10: 449–50; Zeng, “Xixiang ji gaibian suotan,” 15–17. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Burke, Authorship, 129. Ibid.

Select Bibliography Abbreviations GBXXJ

Wang Jide. Xin jiaozhu guben Xixiang ji. Taipei: Gugong, 1988.

CBQZ

Zhang Xu, comp. Caibi qingci. Vols. 75–76, Shanben xiqu congkan. Edited by Wang Qiugui. Taipei: Xuesheng, 1988.

LKXJ

Li Kaixian. Li Kaixian ji. 3 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959.

DWCZS, JSTQ J

Jin Shengtan. Guanhua tang Diliu caizi shu. Vol. 3, Jin Shengtan quanji. Edited by Cao Fangren and Zhou Xishan. Yangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1985.

DLCZS, JSTQ J

Jin Shengtan. Guanhua tang Diwu caizi shu. Vols. 1–2, Jin Shengtan quanji. Edited by Cao Fangren and Zhou Xishan. Yangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1985.

NBGCJ

Chen Suowen, comp. Nanbei gongci ji. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959.

QYSQ

Sui Shusen, ed. Quan Yuan sanqu. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1989.

THZYP

Zhu Quan. Taihe zhengyin pu. Vol. 3, Zhongguo gudian xiqu lunzhu jicheng. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1958.

TPYF

Yang Zhaoying, comp. Chaoye xinsheng Taiping yuefu. Edited by Lu Qian. Beijing: Wenxue guji, 1955.

XQLZJC

Zhongguo gudian xiqu lunzhu jicheng. 10 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1958.

XQXBHB

Cai Yi, ed. Zhongguo gudian xiqu xuba huibian. 4 vols. Jinan: Ji Lu she, 1989.

YQX 1

Zang Maoxun. Yuanqu xuan. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1989.

YQX 2

Zang Maoxun. Yuanqu xuan. Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1998.

YCBX

Yang Zhaoying, comp. Commercial Press, 1930.

YXYF

Guo Xun, comp. Yongxi yuefu. Vols. 426–45, Sibu congkan xubian. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933–36.

Yangchun

baixue.

N.p.:

224 / select bibliography

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select bibliography / 225 ——. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Culture. Edited and introduced by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. — — . In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Translated by Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Brook, Timothy. “Censorship in Eighteenth-Century China: A View from the Book Trade.” Canadian Journal of History 22 (1988): 177–96. — — . The Confusions of Pleasure. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. — — . “Edifying Knowledge: The Building of School Libraries in Ming China.” Late Imperial China 17 (1996): 93–119. — — . Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, 1993. Brownstein, Michael C. “From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku: Canon-Formation in the Meiji Period.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47 (1987): 435–60. Bu Jian. Li Kaixian zhuan. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1989. Burke, Sean, ed. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. Bush, Susan. The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636). Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1971. Cahill, James. Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644. New York: Weatherhill, 1982. Cai Yi, ed. Zhongguo gudian xiqu xuba huibian. 4 vols. Jinan: Ji Lu shushe, 1989. Cai Yuanpei. Cai Yuanpei meixue wenxuan. Beijing: Beijing daxue, 1983. Cao Zhi. Zhongguo guji banben xue. Taipei: Hongye wenhua, 1994. Carlitz, Katherine. “Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in Late Ming China.” In Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, edited by Christina Gilmartin et al., 101–24. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. — — . “Print as Performance: Late Ming Literati Drama Publishing.” In Book Culture and Publishing in Late Imperial China, edited by Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow. Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming. — — . “The Social Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienü zhuan.” Late Imperial China 12 (1991): 117–52. Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Catalogue des livres imprimés et manuscrits de la bibliothèque de feu M. AbelRémusat. Paris: Merlin, 1833. Catalogue des livres imprimés, des manuscrits et des ouvrages chinois, tartares, japonais, etc., composant la bibliothèque de feu M. Klaproth. Paris: Merlin, 1839. Cheung, Chiu-yee, ed. Nietzsche in China, 1904–1992: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian National University, 1992.

226 / select bibliography Chang Chun-shu and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang. Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yü ’ s World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Chang, Kang-i Sun. The Evolution of Chinese T’zu Poetry: From Late T’ang to Northern Sung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. — — . The Late-Ming Poet Ch’en Tzu-lung: Crises of Love and Loyalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. — — . The Order of Books. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Chen Meixue. Tang Xianzu yanjiu wenxian mulu. Taipei: Xuesheng, 1996. Chen Qinghuang. “Xixiang ji zuozhe xintan.” Hanxue yanjiu 7 (1989): 369–79. Chen Shouyi. “The Chinese Orphan: A Yuan Play, Its Influence on European Drama of the Eighteenth Century.” In The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Adrian Hsia, 359–82. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998. Chen Suowen, comp. Nanbei gongci ji. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959. Chen Wanyi. Wan Ming xiaopin yu Mingji wenren shenghuo. Taipei: Da’an, 1988. Chen Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002. Chen Yüan. Western and Central Asians in China Under the Mongols: Their Transformation into Chinese. Translated by Qian Xianghai and L. Carrington Goodrich. Los Angeles: Monumenta Serica, 1966. Chen Yutang. Zhongguo wenxue shi jiuban shumu tiyao. Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, 1985. Cheng Yuanmin. Wang Bo zhi Shijing xue. Taipei: Culture Foundation, 1966. Cherniack, Susan. “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54 (1994): 5–125. Chia, Lucille. “Of Three Mountains Street: The Commercial Publishers of Ming Nanjing.” In Book Culture and Publishing in Late Imperial China, edited by Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow. Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming. Ching, Julia and Willard G. Oxtoby. Moral Enlightenment: Leibniz und Wolff on China. Sankt Augustin: Steyler Verlag, 1992. Chou, Chih-p’ing. Yüan Hung-tao and the Kung-an School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Chow, Kai-wing. The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Church, Sally. “Beyond the Words: Jin Shengtan’s Perception of Hidden Meaning in the Xixiang ji.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59 (1999): 5–77. Clunas, Craig. Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

select bibliography / 227 ——. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. — — . Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1991. Cohen, Paul A. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Connnery, Christopher Leigh. The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Crossley, Pamela K. Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. — — . “Thinking about Ethnicity in Early Modern China.” Late Imperial China 11 (1990): 1–35. — — . The Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Crump, James I. Chinese Theater in the Days of Kubilai Khan. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1980. — — . “Giants in the Earth: Yüan Drama as Seen by Ming Critics.” In Chinese and Japanese Music Dramas, edited by James I. Crump and William P. Malm, 1–38. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1975. Davis, John Francis. The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants. New York: Bradley, 1901 [1836]. — — . Chinese Miscellanies: A Collection of Essays and Notes. London: John Murray, 1865. — — . Han Koong Tsew. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968 [1829]. — — . Laou-seng-urh, or An Heir in His Old Age. London: John Murray, 1817. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. De Grazia, Margareta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Demiéville, Paul. “Aperçu historique des études sinologiques en France.” Acta Asiatica 11 (1966): 56–110. Denda Akira. “Manreki ban Seishôki no keitô to sono seikaku.” Tôhô gaku 31 (1965): 93–106. — — . Minkan Gen zatsugeki Seishôki mokuroku. Tokyo: Kyûko sho’in, 1979. Denton, Kirk A. “Introduction.” In Modern Chinese Literary Thought, edited by Kirk A. Denton, 1–68. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Diamant, Neil J. Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Dikötter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. — — . Sex, Culture and Modernity in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Ding, Naifei. Obscene Things: The Sexual Politics of the Jin Ping Mei. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Dittrich, Edith. Hsi-hsiang chi: Chinesische Farbholzschnitte von Min Ch’i-chi, 1640. Cologne: Museum für ostasiatische Kunst, 1977.

228 / select bibliography Docherty, Thomas. Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and Its Academies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dolby, William. “Kuan Han-ch’ing.” Asia Major 26 (1971): 1–60. Dolezelová-Velingerová, Milena. “Literary Historiography in Early TwentiethCentury China (1904–1928): Constructions of Cultural Memory.” In The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, edited by Milena Dolezelová-Velingerová and Oldrich Král, 123–66. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Dreyer, Edward L. Early Ming China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982. Du Halde, J-B. Description . . . de l’empire de la Chine et de la tartarie chinoise. Paris: N. L. Moutard, 1770 [1735]. Du, Wenwei. “Historicity and Contemporaneity: Adaptations of Yuan Plays in the 1990s.” Asian Theatre Journal 18 (2001): 223–37. — — . “Traditional Chinese Theatre on Broadway.” In Cultural Encounters: China, Japan, and the West, edited by Soren Clausen, Roy Starrs and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, 192–214. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995. Du Xinfu. Mingdai banke zonglu. Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling keyinshe, 1983. Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Eberstein, Bernd. Das Chinesische Theater im 20. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahres seines Lebens. Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1982. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Epstein, Maram. Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Ezell, Margaret. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Fang Linggui. Yuan Ming xiqu zhong de Menggu yu. Shanghai: Hanyu dacidian, 1991. Farrer, Anne. “The Shui-hu Chuan: A Study in the Development of Late Ming Woodblock Illustration.” Ph.D. diss., University of London, SOAS, 1984. Feng Menglong. Taixia xinzou. Vol. 8, Feng Menglong quanji. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1993. Fengyue jinnang jianjiao. Edited by Sun Chongtao and Huang Renzhong. Beijing: Zhonghua, 2000. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Das eigene und das fremde Theater. Tübingen: Francke, 1999. Fogel, Joshua A. The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

select bibliography / 229 ——. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitô Konan (1866–1934). Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, 1984. Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. — — . The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. — — . “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–20. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Franke, Herbert. Sinology at German Universities. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1968. Furth. Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960– 1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. — — . “Rethinking Van Gulik: Sexuality and Reproduction in Traditional Chinese Medicine.” In Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, edited by Christina K. Gilmartin et al., 125–46. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Galik, Marian. The Genesis of Modern Literary Criticism (1917–30). London: Curzon Press, 1980. Ge Liangyan. Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gentzler, Edwin. Contemporary Translation Theories. New York: Routledge, 1993. Giles, Herbert A. A History of Chinese Literature. New York: D. Appleton, 1909 [1901]. Gong Pengcheng. Wan Ming sichao. Taipei: Liren, 1994. Goodrich, L. Carrington. The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-lung. New York: Paragon, 1966 [1935]. Gottschall, Rudolf von. Das Theater und Drama der Chinesen. Breslau: Trewendt, 1887. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Grube, Wilhelm. Geschichte der chinesischen Litteratur. Leipzig: C. Amelangs, 1909 [1902]. Gu Lingguang. Zhou Deqing ji qi quxue yanjiu. Taipei: Wenshizhe, 1992. Gu mingjia zaju. Vols. 93–95, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958. Gu Xueji and Wang Xueqi, ed. Yuanqu shici. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1983. Gu zaju. Vols. 4–8, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958. Gui Zhuang. Gui Zhuang ji. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1962. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Guo Moruo. Guo Moruo quanji. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1982. — — . Juben quanji. Beijing: Xiju, 1982. Guo Rui. Jin Shengtan xiaoshuo lilun yu xiju lilun. Beijing: Wenlian, 1993.

230 / select bibliography Guo Weiqu, ed. Song Yuan Ming Qing shuhuajia nianpu. Beijing: Renmin meishu, 1962. Guo Xun, comp. Yongxi yuefu. Vols. 426–45, Sibu congkan xubian. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933–36. Guy, Basil. The French Image of China Before and After Voltaire. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1963. Guy, R. Kent. The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ien-lung Era. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, 1987. Hanan, Patrick. The Invention of Li Yu. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Hatchett, William. The Chinese Orphan: A Chinese Tragedy. London: Charles Corbett, 1741. He Changqun. Yuanqu gailun. Taipei: Liren, 1984 [1929]. He Liangjun. Qulun. Vol. 4, XQLZJC. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1959. — — . Siyou zhai congshuo. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959. Hegel, Robert E. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. — — . Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Hemmings, F. W. J. Theatre and State in France, 1760–1905. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Henri, Eric. Chinese Amusement: The Lively Plays of Li Yü. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980. Holm, David. “Lu Xun in the Period 1936–1949: The Making of a Chinese Gorki.” In Lu Xun and His Legacy, edited by Leo Lee, 153–79. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Hong Bian. Qingping shantang huaben. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1987. Hsia, Adrian. “The Orphan of the House Zhao in French, English, German, and Hong Kong Literature.” In The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, edited by Adrian Hsia, 383–99. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998. Hsu, Wen-chin. “Fictional Scenes On Chinese Transitional Porcelain (1620–ca. 1683) and Their Sources of Decoration.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 58 (1986): 1–146. Hu Qiguang. Zhongguo xiaoxue shi. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1987. Hu Shi. “Wenxue jinhua guan yu xiju gailiang.” In Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi. Edited by Zhao Jiabi, 1: 376–86. Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935. — — . Zhenzhu chuan. Vol. 31, Ming Qing biji shiliao. N.p.: Zhongguo shudian, 2000. Hu Yunyi. Zhongguo wenxue shi. Taipei: Sanmin, 1966 [1932]. Huang Lizhen. Li Yu yanjiu. Taipei: Guojia, 1995. Huang, Martin W. “Author(ity) and Reader in Traditional Chinese Xiaoshuo Commentary.” Chinese Literature: Essays Articles Reviews 16 (1994): 41–67. — — . Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Hubert, Marie-Claude. Les grandes théories du théâ tre. Paris: Armand Colin, 1998.

select bibliography / 231 Hunt, Lynn. “Introduction.” In The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, edited by Lynn Hunt, 9–45. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Huters, Theodore. Qian Zhongshu. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Idema, Wilt L. Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. — — . The Dramatic Oeuvre of Chu Yu-tun (1379–1439). Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985. — — . “The Founding of the Han Dynasty in Early Drama: The Autocratic Suppression of Popular Debunking.” In Thought and Law in Qin and Han China, edited by Wilt L. Idema and Erik Zürcher, 183–207. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. — — . “The Ideological Manipulation of Traditional Drama in Ming Times: Some Comments on the Work of Tanaka Issei.” In Norms and the State in China, edited by Chun-Chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, 50–70. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993. — — . “The Orphan of Zhao: Self-Sacrifice, Tragic Choice and Revenge and the Confucianization of Mongol Drama at the Ming Court.” Cina 21 (1988): 159–84. — — . “The Story of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chün,” T’oung Pao 70 (1984): 60–109. Idema, Wilt L. and Stephen H. West. Chinese Theater 1100–1450: A Source Book. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1982. Ip, Manying. The Life and Times of Zhang Yuanji, (1867–1959). Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985. Iwaki Hideo. Chûgoku gikyoku kenkyû. Tokyo: Sôbunsha, 1972. — — . “Genealogy of Yüan-ch’ü Admirers in the Ming Play World.” Acta Asiatica 32 (1977): 14–33. Jang, Scarlett. “Form, Content, and Audience: A Common Theme in Painting and Woodblock-Printed Books of the Ming Dynasty.” Ars Orientalis 27 (1997): 1–26. Jensen, Lionel M. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Tradition and Universal Civilization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Ji Guoping. Yuan zaju fazhan shi. Taipei: Wenjin, 1993. Ji Shaopu. Zhongguo chuban jianshi. Shanghai: Xuelin, 1991. Jia Zhongmin. “Zengbuben Luguibu.” In Jiaoding Luguibu sanzhong, edited by Wang Gang, 121–238. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou wenxian, 1991. Jiang, Jin. “Heresy and Persecution in Late Ming Society: Reinterpreting the Case of Li Zhi.” Late Imperial China 22 (2001): 1–34. Jiang Xingyu. Mingkanben Xixiang ji yanjiu. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1982. — — . Xixiang ji de wenxian xue yanjiu. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1997. — — . Xixiang ji kaozheng. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1988. Jin Shengtan. Guanhua tang Diliu caizi shu. Vol. 3, Jin Shengtan quanji. Edited by Cao Fangren and Zhou Xishan. Yangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1985. — — . Diliu caizi shu. Edited by Zou Shengmai. National Central Library, no. 15063. — — . Diliu caizi shu. Jinguyuan edition. National Central Library, no. 15064.

232 / select bibliography Jin Shengtan. Guanhua tang Diwu caizi shu. Vols. 1–2, Jin Shengtan quanji. Edited by Cao Fangren and Zhou Xishan. Yangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1985. Johnson, Dale R. A Glossary of the Words and Phrases of the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000. — — . Yuarn Music Drama: Studies in Prosody and Structure and a Complete Catalogue of Northern Arias. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1980. Julien, Stanilas, ed. and tr. Hoei-lan-ki, ou L’histoire du cercle de craie. London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832. — — , ed. and tr. L’orphelin de Tchao. Paris: Moutardier, 1834. Khan, Alamz. “Who Are the Mongols? State, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representation in the PRC.” In Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, edited by Melissa J. Brown, 125–59. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1996. Klaproth, Julius Heinrich. Tableaux historique de l’Asie depuis la Monarchie de Cyrus jusqu’à nos jours; accompagnés de recherches historiques et ethnographiques sur cette partie de monde. Paris: Schubart, 1826. — — , ed. Chréstomathie chinoise. Paris: Société Asiatique, 1833. Klein, Julius Leopold. Die Geschichte des Dramas. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1865–76. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Komatsu Ken. “Naifuhon sei shohonko.” In Chûgoku koten gikyoku ronshu: Tanaka Kenji hakushi shoju kinen, 125–60. Tokyo: Kyûko sho’in, 1991. Laloy, Louis, ed. Trois drames de l’Asie. Neuchâtel: Edition de la Baconnière, 1943. Lang Ying. Qiuxiu leigao. Taipei: Shijie, 1984. Lanling xiaoxiao sheng. Jin Ping Mei cihua. Hong Kong: Taiping shuju, 1993. Lee, William. “Chikamatsu and Dramatic Literature in the Meiji Period.” In Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, 179–198. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Lefèvere, André. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. New York: Routledge, 1992. Lewis, Mark Edward. Writing and Authority in Early China. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Li Changji. Zhongguo gudai quxue shi. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue, 1997. — — . Zhongguo gudai sanqu shi. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue, 1991. Li Hanqiu and Yuan Youfen, ed. Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1988. Li Hanqiu and Zhou Weipei, ed. Guan Hanqing sanqu ji. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1990. Li Huimian. “Wang Jide qulun yanjiu.” Ph.D. diss., National Taiwan University, 1992. Li Kaixian. Li Kaixian ji. 3 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959. — — . Baojian ji. Beijing National Library. — — . Cixue. Vol. 3, XQLZJC. Beijing: Xiju, 1959.

select bibliography / 233 ——. Cixue (Jiajing imprint). Beijing National Library, no. 4460. — — . Qiao Mengfu xiaoling (1567). National Central Library, no. 14985. — — . Li Zhonglu xianju ji. 3 vols. Beijing National Library, no. 13399. — — . Zhang Xiaoshan xiaoling (1566). National Central Library, no. 14979. Li, Wai-yee. “The Collector, the Connoisseur, and Late-Ming Sensibility.” T’oung Pao 86 (1995): 269–302. — — . Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Li Yu, ed. Beici guangzheng pu. Vols. 80–81, Shanben xiqu congkan. Edited by Wang Qiugui. Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1987. Li Yu. Li Yu quanji. Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1992. Li Zhaoheng. Funü shuangming ji. Vol. 50, Ming Qing biji shiliao. N.p.: Zhongguo shudian, 2000. Li Zhi. Fenshu. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1961. Li Zongli. Zhongguo lidai guanzhi dacidian. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1994. Liang Yang and Yang Dongfu. Zhongguo sanqu shi. Nanning: Guangxi renmin, 1995. Liang Yizhen. Yuan Ming sanqu xiaoshi. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1934. Liao Ben. Song Yuan xiqu wenwu yu minsu. Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1989. — — . Zhongguo xiqu shengqiang yuanliu shi. Taipei: Guanya, 1992. Lin Chuanjia. Zhongguo wenxue shi. Taipei: Xuehai, 1986 [1904]. Lin Fengxiong. “Li Kaixian yu Yuan zaju.” Hanxue yanjiu 16 (1988): 425–37. Lin Heyi. Wan Ming xiqu juzhong ji shengqiang yanjiu. Taipei: Xuehai, 1994. Ling Mengchu. Tanchu zacha. Vol. 4, XQLZJC. Beijing: Xiju, 1959. Lidai keshu gaikuang. Beijing: Yinshua gongye, 1991. Lisao tu. Taipei: Gugong, 1988 [1638]. Liu Dajie. Zhongguo wenxue fada shi. Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua, 1968 [1941–49]. — — . Zhongguo wenxue fazhan shi. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1982 [1963]. Liu, James J. Y. Chinese Theories of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Liu, James T. C. Ou-yang Hsiu: An Eleventh-Century Confucianist. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Liu, Lydia H. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Liu Yiqing. Shishuo xinyu jiaojian. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1984. Liyuan anshi yuefu xinsheng. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1958. Long Qian’an. Song Yuan yuyan cidian. Shanghai: Shanghai cishu, 1985. Lu Lin. Yuandai xiju xue yanjiu. Hefei: Anhui wenyi, 1999. Lu Qian. Yuan Ming sanqu xuan. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1947. — — . Zhongguo xiju gailun. Shanghai: Shijie, 1934. Lu Xun. Lu Xun quanji. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1989. Lundbaek, Knud. Joseph de Prémare (1666–1736), S. J.: Chinese Philology and Figurism. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1991. Luo Shubao. Zhongguo gudai yinshua shi. Beijing: Yinshua gongye, 1993. Luo Di. “Yujing shuhui Yuanzhen shuhui yibian.” Xiju yishu 37 (1987: 1): 23–33.

234 / select bibliography Luo Jintang. Zhongguo sanqu shi. Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua daxue, 1983. — — . “Zidi yu dizi jie.” In his Jintang lunqu, 113–24. Taipei: Lianjing, 1977. Luo Kanglie. “Guan Hanqing he tade sanqu.” In his Shi ci qu lunwen ji, 63–80. Hong Kong: Sanlian, 1982. Lynn, Richard John. Kuan Yün-shih. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Mao Jin. Liushizhong qu. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1990. McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. McLaren, Anne E. Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998. — — . “Ming Audiences and Vernacular Hermeneutics: The Uses of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” T’oung Pao 81 (1995): 51–80. McMahon, Keith. Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988. McMullen, David. State and Scholars in T’ang China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Mei Dingzuo. Qingni lianhua ji. Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 1998. Meng Chengshun. Gujin mingju hexuan. Vols. 101–20, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958. Ming shi. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1974. Miyahara Mimpei. Shina shôsetsu gikyoku shi gaisetsu. Tokyo: Kyoritsu, 1925. Mikami Sanji and Takatsu Kuwasuburô. Nihon bungaku shi. Tokyo: Nihon tosho, 1982 [1890]. Mote, Frederick W. “Confucian Eremitism in the Yüan Period.” In The Confucian Persuasion, edited by Arthur F. Wright, 202–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960. Mowangguan chaojiaoben gujin zaju. Vols. 9–92, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958. Murphy, Arthur. The Orphan of China: a tragedy, as it is perform’d at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury-Lane. London: P. Vaillant, 1759. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Edited by Manfred Landfester. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1994. Ning Xiyuan. Yuankan zaju sanshizhong xinjiao. Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue, 1988. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Oberstenfeld, Werner. Chinas bedeutendster Dramatiker der Mongolenzeit (1280–1368), Kuan Han-ch’ing. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983. Ôki Yasushi. “Minmatsu Konan ni okeru shuppan bunka no kenkyu.” Hiroshima daigaku bungakubu kiyo 50 (1991), special issue no. 1. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Osborne, Laurie E. “Rethinking the Performance Editions: Theatrical and Textual Productions of Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, edited by James C. Bulman, 168–92. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ôta Tatsuo. “Genkanpon Chôfûgetsu.” Nihon Chûgoku gakkai hô 35 (1983): 177–90.

select bibliography / 235 Owen, Stephen. The End of the Chinese “Middle Ages”: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. ——. “The End of the Past: Rewriting Chinese Literary History in the Early Republic.” In The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, edited by Milena Dolezelová-Velingerová and Oldrich Král, 167–92. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. ——, ed. and tr. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, 1992. Pao, Angela C. The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and NineteenthCentury French Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Percy, Thomas. Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762. Plaks, Andrew H. The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Porter, David. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Puett, Michael. The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Prémare, Joseph de. “Lettre à M. Fourmont.” Tchao-chi-cou-eulh. Vol. 39, Bibliothèque des théâtres. Paris: Duchesne, 1784. ——. Notitia Linguae Sinicae. Hong Kong: Imprimerie de la Société des Missions-Étrangères, 1893 [1831]. Qian Qianyi. Liechao shiji xiaozhuan 2 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1983. Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu). “Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama.” T’ien Hsia Monthly 1 (1935): 37–46. Qinglou yunyu. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1994. Qiu Jun. Wulun quanbei. Vols. 40–41, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 1. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1954. Reed, Christopher A. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876– 1937. Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming 2003. Reichwein, Adolf. China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century. New York: A. Knopf, 1925. Ren Na. Xin quyuan. Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua, 1970 [1940]. Reynolds, Douglas R. China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, 1993. Rolston, David L. Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ——, ed. How To Read the Chinese Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Rouzer, Paul. Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Rowe, William T. “Women and the Family in Mid-Qing Social Thought: The Case of Chen Hongmou.” Late Imperial China 13 (1992): 1–41. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1979 [1978].

236 / select bibliography Sang, Deborah Tze-lang. “Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912–1949).” In Tokens of Exchange, edited by Lydia H. Liu, 276–304. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Sargent, Stuart H. “Context of the Song Lyric in Sung Times: Communication Technology, Social Change, Morality.” In Voices of the Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu, 226–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Sasagawa, Rinpu. Shina bungaku shi. Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1898. ——. Shina shôsetsu gikyoku shôshi. Tokyo: Tokato, 1897. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Schneider, Laurence. A Madman of Ch’u: The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. ——. “National Essence and the New Intelligentsia.” In The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China, edited by Charlotte Furth, 57–89. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Frankfurt am Main: Cotta Verlag, 1960. Schorr, Adam. “Connoisseurship and the Defense Against Vulgarity: Yang Shen (1488–1559) and His Work.” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 89–128. Shangwu yinshuguan tushu mulu, 1897–1949. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1981. Shen Defu. Guqu zayan. Vol. 4, XQLZJC. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1959. ——. Wanli yehuobian. 3 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997 [1959]. Shen, Guangren. “Theatre Performance in the Ming.” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1994. Shen Pansui. Duqu xuzhi. Vol. 5, XQLZJC. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1959. Shen Xinlin. Li Yu pingzhuan. Nanjing: Nanjing shifan daxue, 1998. Shen Tai. Sheng Ming zaju. 2 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1958. Shengshi xinsheng. Beijing: Wenxue guji, 1955 [1517]. Shih, Chung-wen. The Golden Age of Chinese Drama: Yüan Tsa-chü. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semi-Colonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Shionoya On. Kokuyaku Genkyoku sen. Tokyo: Meguro shoten, 1941. ——. Yuanqu gaishuo. Translated by Sui Shushen. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1947. Sieber, Patricia. “Getting at it in a Single Genuine Invocation: Tang Anthologies, Buddhist Rhetorical Practices, and Jin Shengtan’s (1608–1661) Conception of Poetry.” Monumenta Serica 49 (2001): 33–56. ——. “Remaking the Canon: Buddhism, Vernacular Literature, and the Case of Jin Shengtan (1608–1661).” Journal of Chinese Religions 28 (2000): 51–68. ——. “Rhetoric, Romance, and Intertextuality: The Making and Remaking of Guan Hanqing in Yuan and Ming China.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994.

select bibliography / 237 ——. “Seeing the World Through Xianqing ouji (1671): Performance, Visuality and Narratives of Modernity.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12 (2000): 1–43. — — . “Turning Lethal Slander Into Generative Instruction: Laws, Ledgers, and the Changing Taxonomies of Vernacular Production in Late Imperial China.” In The Magnitude of Ming: Essays on Command, Allotment, Life and Fate in Chinese Culture, edited by Christopher Lupke. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming. Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Stallybrass, Peter. “Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 91–103. Sui Shusen. Yongxi yuefu quwen zuozhe kao. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1985. — — , ed. Quan Yuan sanqu. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1989. — — , ed. Yuanqu xuan waibian. 3 vols. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1959. Sun Chongtao. Fengyue jinnang kaoshi. Beijing: Zhonghua, 2000. Sun Da. Zhongguo huajia renming dacidian. Taipei: Taiwan Dongfang, 1962. Sun Kaidi. Yeshi yuan gujin zaju kao. Shanghai: Shangza, 1953. Swatek, Catherine C. Peony Pavilion Onstage: Four Hundred Years in the Career of a Chinese Drama. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 2002. Takahashi Shigeki. “Gen zatsugeki no kaihen to bungakusei no kôtai.” Chûgoku bungaku kenkyû 16 (1990): 134–44. Tan Fan. Jin Shengtan yu Zhongguo xiqu piping. Shanghai: Huadong, 1992. Tan Zhengbi. Yuandai xiju jia Guan Hanqing. Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua, 1957. — — . Yuanqu liudajia lüezhuan. Shanghai: Gudian wenxue, 1957. — — . Zhongguo jinhua shi. Shanghai: Guangming, 1935 [1929]. Tan Zhengbi and Tan Xun. Quhai lice. Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin, 1983. Tanaka Issei. “The Social and Historical Context of Ming-Ch’ing Local Drama.” In Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, 143–60. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Tanaka Kenji. “Gendai sankyoku no kenkyû.” Tôhô gakuho 40 (1969): 1–114. — — . “Zatsugeki Seishôki no nangekika.” Tôhô gakuho 36 (1964): 559–70. Tanaka, Stefan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Tao Zongyi. Chuogeng lu. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1987. Tatlow, Antony. The Mask of Evil: Brecht’s Reponse to the Poetry, Theatre and Thought of China and Japan: A Comparative and Critical Evaluation. Bern: Peter Lang, 1977. Tian Han. Tian Han wenji. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1983. Tong Fei, ed. Yuanqu. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1967 [1927]. Tong Xingbai. Zhongguo wenxue shigang. Shanghai: Dongda, 1933. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation. New York: Routledge, 1998.

238 / select bibliography Vinograd, Richard. Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Vitiello, Giovanni. “Exemplary Sodomites: Male Homosexuality in Late Ming Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994. Voltaire. Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. Paris: Garnier, 1963. — — . L’orphelin de la Chine. Vol. 5, Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Garnier, 1877. Volpp, Sophie. “The Male Queen: Boy Actors and Literati Libertines.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995. Wagner, Marsha. The Lotus Boat. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Wagner, Rudolf. G. The Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Wakeman, Frederic. The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Waltner, Ann. “On Not Becoming a Heroine: Lin Dai-yu and Cui Ying-ying.” Signs 15 (1989): 69–85. Wan Qing wenxue congchao: Xiaoshuo xiqu yanjiu juan, edited by Liang Qichao et al. Taipei: Xinfeng, 1989. Wang Anqi. Mingdai chuanqi zhi juchang ji qi yishu. Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1986. — — . “Ming zaju de yanchu changhe yu wutai yishu.” In her Mingdai xiqu wulun, 112–40. Taipei: Da’an, 1990. Wang, Edward Q. Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Wang Gang, ed. Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao huikao. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1988. — — , ed. Jiaoding Lugui bu sanzhong. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji, 1991. Wang Guowei. “Honglou meng pinglun.” In Wan Qing wenxue congchao, edited by Liang Qichao et al., 103–25. Taipei: Xinwenfeng, 1989. — — . Song Yuan xiqu kao. Wang Guowei xiqu lunwen ji. Taipei: Liren, 1992. — — . Wang Guowei xiqu lunwen ji. Taipei: Liren, 1992. Wang Jide. Qulü. Vol. 4, XQLZJC. Beijing: Xiju, 1959. — — . Xin jiaozhu guben Xixiang ji. Taipei: Gugong, 1988 [1614]. Wang, John C. Y. Chin Sheng-t’an. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Wang Lina. “Guan Wang Ma Bai mingju zai guowai.” Hebei shifan xuebao (1990: 2): 10–14. — — . Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo xiqu mingzhu zai guowai. Shanghai: Xuelin, 1988. Wang Liqi, ed. Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1981. Wang Shifu. Chen Meigong xiansheng piping Xixiang ji (1614). Beijing National Library no. 12422 and National Central Library, no. 15162. — — -. Chongke Yuanben tiping yinshe Xixiang ji. Vols. 3–4, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 1, and Beijing National Library, SB 830. — — -. Mao Xihe lunding Xixiang ji. Edited by Mao Qiling. N.p.: Songfenshi, 1900.

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select bibliography / 241 Yang Weizhen. Dong Weizi wenji. Sibu congkan. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1929. Yang Zhaoying, comp. Yangchun baixue. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1930. — — . Yangchun baixue zhushi ben. Edited by Xu Jinbang. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji, 1991. — — . Chaoye xinsheng Taiping yuefu. Edited by Lu Qian. Beijing: Wenxue guji, 1955. — — . Chaoye xinsheng Taiping yuefu. Edited by Sui Shushen. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958. — — . Xinjiao jiujuan ben Yangchun baixue. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1957. Yang Zhenliang. Wang Jide lunqu zhenyi. Taipei: Liren, 1994. Yao Dajuin. “The Pleasure of Reading Drama: Illustrations of the Hongzhi Edition of The Story of the Western Wing.” In The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the Western Wing, edited by Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema, 437–68. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Ye Changhai. Quxue yu xijuxue. Shanghai: Xuelin, 1999. — — . Zhongguo xiquxue shi. Taipei: Luotuo, 1993. Ye Lang. Zhongguo xiaoshuo meixue. Taipei: Liren, 1987. York, Lorraine. Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing: Power, Difference, Property. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Yoshikawa Kôjirô. Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150–1650. Translated by John Timothy Wixted. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Yu Huai. Banqiao zaji. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2000. Yu Jianhua. Zhongguo meishujia renming cidian. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1981. Yuankan sanshizhong. Vols. 1–3, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958. Yuan Ming zaju. Vol. 100, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958. Yuefu qunyu. In Lidai sanqu huicuan. Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1998. Yuefu qunzhu. Edited by Lu Qian. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1957. Yu, Pauline. “Canon Formation in Late Imperial China.” In Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques, edited by R. Bin Wong, Theodore Huters, and Pauline Yu, 83–104. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. — — . “The Chinese Poetic Canon and Its Boundaries.” In Boundaries in China, edited by John Hay, 105–23. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Yü, Ying-shih. “Changing Conceptions of National History in Twentieth-Century China.” In Conceptions of National History, edited by Erik Lönnroth, Karl Molin, and Ragnar Björk, 155–74. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Yung, Sai-shing. “A Critical Study of the Han-tan-chi.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1992. Zaju xuan. Vols. 96–98, Guben xiqu congkan, ser. 4. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1958.

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select bibliography / 243 Zou, John Y. “Travel and Translation: An Aspect of China’s Cultural Modernity, 1862–1926.” In China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, edited by Yingjin Zhang, 133–51. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Zurndorfer, Harriet. “Orientalism, Sinology and Public Policy: Baron Antoine Silvestre de Sacy and the Foundation of Chinese Studies in Post-Revolutionary France.” In Image de la Chine, edited by Edward Malatesta and Yves Raguin, 175–92. San Francisco: Ricci Institute, 1995.

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Glossary

Aoki Masaru ॹֵ‫׆ٳ‬ Bai Juyi ‫࣐ࡺػ‬ Bai Pu ‫ػ‬ᖦ baiwen ‫֮ػ‬ Baiyue ting ਈִॼ Bei Xixiang ji ‫۫ק‬༖ಖ Beici guangzheng pu ‫ဲק‬ᐖ‫إ‬ᢜ beiju ༟Ꮳ biantai xinli ᧢ኪ֨෻ bixiao ࿝চ boyazhe ໑ႁृ Bu fulao լٗ‫۔‬ buya busu լႁլঋ Caibi qingci ൑࿝ൣဲ cai թ Cai Yuanpei ᓐցഛ cairen թԳ caizi թ՗ Caizi bidushu թ՗‫ᦰؘ‬஼ caizi jiaren թ՗ࠋԳ caizi shu թ՗஼ cangfu ໅֛ Cao Zhi ඦཬ changfu ଠ֛ Chen Bangtai ຫ߶௠ Chen Hongshou ຫੋፅ Chen Juzhong ຫࡺխ Chen Suowen ຫࢬፊ Chen Yi ຫᑞ Chen Yujiao ຫፖ૳ Cheng Juyuan ࿓؎ᄭ Cheng Yuwen ࿓‫֮ۓ‬

Chengzhai yuefu ᇨសᑗࢌ Chengzu ‫ګ‬ల Chenmu jiaozi 䱇↡ᬭᄤ Chikamatsu २࣪ Chongjiao Bei Xixiang ji ૹீ‫۫ק‬༖ಖ choujian ሟ១ chuan ႚ chuanqi ႚ࡛ Chuci ᄑ᢯ Chûgoku խഏ Chunqiu ਞટ Chuogeng lu ᔗౙᙕ ci ဲ Cilin baixue ဲࣥ‫ػ‬ຳ Cilin zhaiyan ဲࣥኴᨆ ciren ဲԳ ciqu ဲ‫ڴ‬ Cui Hui ാᚧ Cui niang benzhuan ാ୞‫ء‬ႚ Cui Yingying ാᦉᦉ Cuishi chunqiu ാּਞટ cunxue ‫ޘ‬ᖂ dan ‫؟‬ danlian ᜬ᧐ dao ሐ daoyin zongyu ᖄෞ᜕ᐥ Dapo Xixiang ‫ؚ‬ధ۫༖ Denda Akira ႚ‫ີض‬ Di fei chunyou ০‫ڒ‬ਞሏ Diliu caizi shu รքթ՗஼ Dong Han ᇀܶ Dong Jieyuan ᇀᇞց

246 / glossary Dong Qichang ᇀ࣑ࠡ Dongfang zazhi ֱࣟᠧ፾ Dongqiang ji ࣟᛥಖ Dou E yuan ᤀ୧ବ Du Fu ‫߉ޙ‬ Du Mu ຟᗪ Du Shanfu ‫ޙ‬࿳֛ e’lie xiju ༞‫٭‬ᚭᏣ fang bi ଎࿝ fangben ܽ‫ء‬ fangke ܽࠥ fangshi ֱՓ Fangzhu sheng ֱᓯ‫س‬ fanli Յࠏ Feng Menglong ႑ኄᚊ Feng Mengzhen ᖇኄጜ fengliu ଅੌ fengsu ଅঋ Fengjiao lu ଅඒᙕ Fengyue jinnang ଅִᙘᦖ Fenshu ྡ஼ fu ༄ fu ೫ fu ᓿ Fuchuntang ༄ਞഘ fufen ‫ב‬ృ Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi ‫ࡳޏ‬ցᔃႚ࡛ gaocai fengliu ren ೏թଅੌԳ Gaotang fu ೏ାᓿ geju ዚᏣ Genjin zatsugeki josetsu ցԳᠧᏣ‫ݧ‬ᎅ Geng Tianxi ࢊ֚ᙔ gequ ዚ‫ڴ‬ gikyoku ᚭ‫ڴ‬ gonggong zhi bao ٥ֆհᣪ gongming ‫ټפ‬ gouzhuan ዌᐷ Gu mingjia ‫ټײ‬୮ Gu zaju ‫ײ‬ᠧᏣ

Guan Hanqing ᣂዧହ Guan Yunshi ຃ႆ‫ف‬ Guangyun ᐖᣉ Guanhuatang Diliu caizi shu Xixiang ji ຃क़ഘรքթ՗஼ guben ‫ءײ‬ gudian xiaoshuo ‫ࠢײ‬՛ᎅ guixiu Ꮇߐ Gujin mingju hexuan ‫ײ‬վ‫ټ‬Ꮳ‫ٽ‬ᙇ Guo Moruo ພःૉ Guo Xun ພ໐ Guocui xuebao ഏጰᖂ໴ guojia ഏ୮ guoxue ഏᖂ Guoxue jikan ഏᖂࡱ‫ע‬ Guquzhai ᥽‫ڴ‬ស haiyan ௧ᨖ hangjia ۩୮ Hangong qiu ዧ୰ટ Hanyu da cidian ዧ፿Օ᢯ࠢ Haoqiu zhuan ‫ړ‬⍜ႚ haose ‫ۥړ‬ He Bi ۶់ He Changqun ၅࣑ᆢ He Liangjun ۶ߜঊ Hongfu ji દࢲಖ Honglou meng દᑔኄ hongru shuoshi ពᕢጚՓ Hongzhi ‫ؖ‬ए hu ઺ Hu Shi ઺ᔞ Hu Shi ઺ࠊ Hu Yunyi ઺ႆᜠ Huajian ji क़ၴႃ huaju ᇩᏣ Huang Tingjian ႓அഒ Huang Zhengwei ႓‫ۯإ‬ Hudiemeng ᓗᓘኄ Huilan ji ‫ۊ‬ᥞಖ “Huizhen ji” ᄎటಖ ji ႃ

glossary /247 “Ji hao shui” ‫ړݒ‬ጕ Jia Zhongming ᇸ٘ࣔ jiake ୮ࠥ jiao ீ Jiaofang si ඒܽ‫׹‬ Jiaoyu shijie ඒߛ‫੺׈‬ jie suowei yidai zhi wenxue ઃࢬᘯԫ‫ז‬հ֮ᖂ jiegao ᆏ೏ Jin Ping Mei ८෿ම Jin Shengtan ८ᆣቮ jinben վ‫ء‬ jing ᆖ jinhua ၞ֏ jinhua de shidai ၞ֏ऱழ‫ז‬ Jinling shishe ८ສᇣष jinshi ၞՓ Jinxian chi ၞᒵ‫ۃ‬ Jiu fengchen එଅቺ juxi Ꮳᚭ Kang Hai ൈ௧ Kang Sheng ൈ‫س‬ Kangaku ዧᖂ Kano Naoki ੭ມऴ໛ kabuki ዚፘ᪍ kao ‫ە‬ kaoshi guan ‫ە‬ᇢࡴ kaozheng ‫ە‬ᢞ kokubungaku ഏ֮ᖂ kokugaku ഏᖂ Ku Cunxiao ୈ‫ݕژ‬ kunqu ࣒‫ڴ‬ Lang Ying ૴૎ Laosheng’er ‫ࠝس۔‬ Leijiang ji ⬇‫ۂ‬ႃ li ෻ Li Bai ‫ػޕ‬ Li Dongyang ‫ࣟޕ‬ၺ Li Kaixian ‫ޕ‬ၲ٣ Li Liweng shizhongqu ‫ޕ‬ภౖԼጟ‫ڴ‬ Li Mengyang ‫ޕ‬ኄၺ

Li Rihua ‫ֲޕ‬ဎ Li Yu ‫ޕ‬ᅄ Li Yu ‫ޕ‬ድ Li Wa ‫ޕ‬৑ Li Zhi ‫ޕ‬㋁ Li Zhifu ‫ޕ‬ऴ֛ Li Zhuowu ‫ܠ࠱ޕ‬ Lian xiangban ᐧଉ۴ liangjia zhi zi ߜ୮հ՗ liaoji wangjuan ᛭ᤱ‫ݱ‬ଐ lijiao ៖ඒ Lin Chuanjia ࣥႚ‫ظ‬ Lin Zhaohua ࣥ٢ဎ Ling Mengchu ର፞ॣ Lisao ᠦᤵ Liu Dajie Ꮵሒໃ Liu Tianhe Ꮵ֚ࡉ Liu Chengxi Ꮵࢭ᛼ Liu Yong Ꮵ‫ة‬ Liuzhi ji ਻ࣤႃ Longdong shannong ᚊ੐՞ል lu ᙕ Lu Xun ᕙ߰ Lu Qian ሁছ Lü Tiancheng ‫ګ֚ܨ‬ Lu Zhailang ᕙស૴ Lu Zhi ᗝᐱ Lugui bu ᙕ೒᡻ Lunyu ᓵ፿ Lüshi chunqiu ‫ּܨ‬ਞટ Luo Guanzhong ᢅ຃խ Luo Zhenyu ᢅ஡‫د‬ Luo Zongxin ᢅࡲॾ “Luoshen fu” ੖ళᓿ Ma Zhiyuan ್ી᎛ Mao Qiling ֻ࡛᤿ Mao Weitao ૄ৖ᛑ Mei Dingzuo මቓశ Mei Lanfang මᥞ॑ meipi ઍ‫ޅ‬ Meng Chengshun ࡯ጠစ

248 / glossary Min Qiji ၰᏘٟ Mingfeng ji ᏓᏕಖ Mingshi ࣔ‫׾‬ ming ‫ټ‬ minggong cairen ‫ټ‬ֆթԳ mingjia ‫ټ‬୮ minzu ‫ا‬ග mo ‫أ‬ Mowangguan gujin zaju ౧ඨᙴ‫ײ‬վᠧᏣ Mudanting ߃կॼ Nan wanghou ߊ‫ٿ׆‬ Nanbei gongci ji ত‫ק‬୰ဲધ Nanhao shihua তᛏᇣᇩ nanse ߊ‫ۥ‬ nanxi তᚭ nanqu ত‫ڴ‬ neifu ben փࢌ‫ء‬ Nihon bungaku shi ֲ‫֮ء‬ᖂ‫׾‬ nüzi de tongxing lian’ai Ֆ՗ऱ‫᧐ࢤٵ‬ფ Ouyang Xiu ᑛၺଥ Ouyang Xuan ᑛၺ‫خ‬ Ouyang Yuqian ᑛၺղଓ paichang ତഀ paiyou ତᚌ Pan Zhiheng ᑰհਁ pi ៎ Pipa ji ྴྵಖ pingzhe ေृ pixing nanchu ៎ࢤᣄೈ Qian Jibo ᙒഗ໑ Qian Qianyi ᙒᑨఛ qian qizi ছԮ՗ Qian Zhongshu ᙒᤪ஼ Qian Zeng Տམ Qiannü lihun ଓՖᠦᏒ Qianqiu jueyan Տટ࿪ᨻ Qiao Ji ໨‫ٳ‬ qie ᧗ Qieyun ֊ᣉ

Qifengguan ದᏕᙴ Qin Shihuang ఻ࡨ઄ qing ൣ Qinglou ji ॹᑔႃ Qinglou yunyu ॹᑔᣉ፿ Qingni lianhua ji ෎ࣽᓊक़ಖ Qiu Jun ५ᛕ Qixiu leigao Ԯଥ㗆ᒚ qu ‫ڴ‬ Qu Yuan ࡹ଺ Qulü ‫ڴ‬৳ qunying ᆢ૎ Ren Na ٚ౏ Renmin ribao Գ‫ֲا‬໴ Rongyutang ୲ፖഘ Sange panni de nüxing ԿጮধಭऱՖࢤ Sanguo yanyi Կഏዝᆠ sanqu ཋ‫ڴ‬ se ‫ۥ‬ sewamono ‫׈‬ᇩढ shan’gai ‫ޏܔ‬ Shaonian Zhongguo ֟‫ڣ‬խഏ Shen Defu ިᐚฤ Shen Jing ިᗕ Shen Pangsui ިᡓᆚ Shen Tai ި௠ Sheng Ming zaju ฐࣔᠧᏣ shengshi ฐᇣ Shengshi xinsheng ฐ‫׈‬ᄅᜢ Shenzong ళࡲ shi Փ shi ‫׾‬ shi ᇣ shi ኔ Shi Nai’an ਜર‫ڜ‬ shi yan zhi ᇣߢ‫ݳ‬ Shidetang ‫׈‬ᐚഘ Shiji ‫׾‬ಖ shijie dabeiju ‫੺׈‬Օ༟Ꮳ shijie wenxue shi ‫֮੺׈‬ᖂ‫׾‬

glossary /249 Shijing ᇣᆖ Shijing yanci ؑմᨆဲ shike ؑࠥ Shina ֭߷ Shina bungaku shi ֭߷֮ᖂ‫׾‬ Shinagaku ֭߷ᖂ Shina kinsei gikyoku shi ֭߷२‫ז‬ᚭ‫׾ڴ‬ Shina shôsetsu gikyoku shi ֭߷՛ᎅᚭ‫׾ڴ‬ shiwen ழ֮ Shizong ‫ࡲ׈‬ shu er buzuo ૪ۖլ‫܂‬ Shuang Ying zhuan ᠨᦉႚ Shuihu zhuan ֽ⧊ႚ sibu ؄ຝ sike ߏࠥ Sima Xiangru ‫್׹‬ઌ‫ڕ‬ siwen ཎ֮ Song Yu ‫دݚ‬ Song Yuan xiqu kao ‫ݚ‬ցᚭ‫ەڴ‬ Song Yuan xiqu shi ‫ݚ‬ցᚭ‫׾ڴ‬ Su Qing ᤕହ Su Shi ᤕሊ Sui Shusen ၹᖫཤ Sun Kaidi ୪ᄒร suben ঋ‫ء‬ suzi ঋ՗ suziben ঋ՗‫ء‬ Taihe zhengyin pu ֜ࡉ‫إ‬ଃᢜ Taiping yuefu ֜ؓᑗࢌ Taizu ֜ల Tanaka Issei ‫٘ض‬ԫ‫ګ‬ Tang Xianzu ྏ᧩ల Tangren ାԳ Tao Zongyi ຯࡲᏚ taoshu ୚ᑇ Teikoku bungaku ০ഏ֮ᖂ Tian Han ‫ض‬ዧ Tiao fengyue ᓳଅִ “Tongxin shuo” ࿙֨ᎅ

Tôyô shi ࣟࠅ‫׾‬ Tu Long ളၼ Wang Fuzhi ‫֛׆‬ᆜ Wang Guowei ‫׆‬ഏፂ Wang Jide ‫׆‬ᨰᐚ Wang Jiusi ‫׆‬԰৸ Wang Shifu ‫׆‬ኔ֛ Wang Shizhen ‫׆‬Փጜ Wang Zhaojun ‫׆‬ਟ‫ܩ‬ wangguo Ջഏ Wanli yehuobian ᆄᖟມᛧᒳ Wei Wanchu ᠿ῏ॣ wen ֮ Wen Jiao ᄵ⮙ wenhua ֮֏ Wenlin ge ֮ࣥᎹ wenren ֮Գ wenren hua ֮Գ྽ wenyuan ֮૒ Wenxiutang ֮ߐഘ wenxue ֮ᖂ “Wenxue jinhua guannian yu xiju gailiang” ֮ᖂၞ֏ᨠ࢚ፖᚭᏣ‫ߜޏ‬ wenzhang ֮ີ wenzi ֮‫ڗ‬ Wu Changlin ‫᤿࣑ܦ‬ Wu houyan նଢ୯ Wu Mei ‫ܦ‬ම Wu Mianxue ‫ܦ‬ঠᖂ Wu Weiye ‫␌ܦ‬ᄐ Wulun quanbei ն଩٤ໂ wunu ᭝؉ Wutong yu න௏ॸ wuxin ྤ֨ Wuzong ࣳࡲ Xia Yan ୙ߢ Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi ෼‫ז‬խഏ֮ᖂ‫׾‬ Xiang Silang ႈ؄૴ Xiaozong ‫ࡲݕ‬ xie ᐊ

250 / glossary Xie Tianxiang ᝔֚ଉ Xie Wuliang ᝔ྤၦ Xie Zhaozhe ᝔ፌ∲ xieshi ᐊኔ Xijizi ஒᖲ՗ xiju ᚭᏣ xiju gailiang ᚭᏣ‫ߜޏ‬ xin ֨ Xin jiaozhu guben Xixiang ji ᄅீࣹ‫۫ءײ‬༖ಖ Xin qingnian ᮄ䴦ᑈ Xin Xixiang ᄅ۫༖ xiqu ᠆᳆ Xiqu jiaxuan ᚭ‫ظڴ‬ᙇ Xiuying ⾔㣅 xiwen ᚭ֮ Xixiang ji 㽓ᒖ㿬 xizi ᚭ՗ xu 㰯 Xu Fengji ஊນ‫ٳ‬ Xu Fuzuo ᕤᕽ⼮ Xu Shifan ஊՓᒤ Xu Wei ᕤ␁ Xu Zhimo ஊ‫ݳ‬ᐰ Xuanzong ⥘ᅫ Xuzhizhai ᥛ‫ݳ‬Ꮨ Yan’an Zhi’an ➩फ㡱㧈 Yanqing shi ᨆൣᇣ Yang Shen ἞ᜢ Yang Weizhen ᄘፂᄙ Yang Yichao ἞ϔ╂ Yang Zhaoying ᄘᅃ૎ Yangchun baixue 䱑᯹ⱑ䲾 Yangchun zou ၺਞ৉ yaotiao tianren ぜど໽Ҏ Yeshiyuan gujin zaju ՈਢႼ‫ײ‬վᠧᏣ yin ⎿ Yin Shizhi ձՓऴ yinci ⎿䀲 yinshi ෞᇣ

yinshu ⎿᳌ yinzhi ෞ‫ݳ‬ “Yingying suyuan” 厃厃䀈‫ݸ‬ “Yingying zhuan” ᦉᦉႚ Yingzong 㣅ᅫ yibu pianduan hao wenzi ԫຝׂ੄‫ڗ֮ړ‬ yiyang էၺ yizu ⭄⼪ Yongle dadian ‫ة‬ᑗՕࠢ Yongxi yuefu 䲡❭ῖᑰ Yu Huai ‫܇‬ᡖ Yu Ji 㰲䲚 Yu Jiao Li ‫د‬ᐅ‫ޕ‬ yu wo xin ze cheng bu neng zi yi ye ៥ᖗࠛ䁴ϡ㛑㞾Ꮖг Yu xijian ᗧᚭ጑ Yuan Ming zaju ‫ܗ‬ᯢ䲰࡛ Yuan Zhen ցⱽ Yuanlin wumeng ೦ᵫज໶ yuanben ೃ‫ء‬ Yuandi ‫ܗ‬Ᏹ Yuankan sanshizhong ց‫ע‬ԿԼጟ Yuanren ‫ܗ‬Ҏ Yuanren baizhong qu ցԳ‫ۍ‬ጟ‫ڴ‬ Yuanren gongchen ‫ܗ‬Ҏࡳ㞷 Yuanren zhi jiafa ցԳհ୮ऄ Yuanren zhi xinfa ‫ܗ‬ҎПᖗ⊩ Yuanqu ց‫ڴ‬ Yuanqu gailun ‫ܗ‬᳆ὖ䂪 Yuanshi jishi benmo ց‫׾‬ધࠃ‫أء‬ yuefu ῖᑰ Yuefu qunyu ᑗࢌᆢ‫د‬ Yuefu qunzhu ᑗࢌᆢఇ Yuhe ji ‫د‬ฏಖ Yuhuchun ⥝໎᯹ Yujingtai ‫د‬ᢴፕ yunshi ䷏຿ Yutai xinyong ‫د‬ፕᄅူ zaju ᠧᏣ zaju duo miben ᠧᏣ‫ءఽڍ‬

glossary /251 Zaju shiduan jin 䲰࡛क↉䣺 Zaju xuan ᠧᏣᙇ Zang Maoxun 㞻សᕾ zeng ᢤ Zeng Rui ᳒⨲ Zeng Zhaohong མਟ‫ؖ‬ Zhang Chong ᔉ≪ Zhang Gong ്– Zhang Haoran ᔉ⌽✊ Zhang Kejiu ്‫ױ‬Ն Zhang Xu ᔉ᷽ Zhao Mengfu ᎓࡯ᕃ Zhao shi gu’er 䍭⇣ᄸ‫ܦ‬ zhenben ట‫ء‬ zheng ㅣ Zheng Guangzu ᔤ٠ల Zheng Qian 䜁俿 Zheng Zhenduo ᔤ஡᥵ zhiyin ⶹ䷇ zhong ฒ Zhong Sicheng 䧬ஷ៤ Zhonggu si ᤪቔ‫׹‬ Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe Ё೟ᇣ䁾৆⬹ Zhongguo wenxue fada shi խഏ֮ᖂ࿇ሒ‫׾‬

Zhongguo wenxue shi Ё೟᭛ᅌ৆ Zhongyuan yinyun խ଺ଃᣉ Zhongzhou ren ЁᎲҎ Zhou Deqing ࡌᐚ෎ Zhou Enlai ਼ᘽ՚ Zhu Di ‫ڹ‬ཀྵ Zhu Jing 䚒㍧ Zhu Quan ‫ᦞڹ‬ Zhu Yuanzhang ᴅ‫⩟ܗ‬ Zhu Youdun ‫ڶڹ‬ᗆ Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ Zhu Xiang ‫ڹ‬ྉ zhuan ‫ڇ‬ Zhuangzi ๗՗ Zhuangzi Nanhuajing 㥞ᄤफ㧃㍧ zhugongdiao ᓯ୰ᓳ Zhuo Renyue धҎ᳜ zi ՗ zi you fayan 㞾᳝⊩ⴐ zifang ۞࣋ Zixinzhai 㞾ᮄ唟 Ziyun ting ࿫ႆஅ zongzai 㐑ᆄ Zunshengguan ༇‫س‬ᙴ zuo ԰ zuozhe ‫ृ܂‬

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Index

A Book for Burning (Fenshu, 1590), 128 A Chinese or the Justice of Fate (1774), 10 A Historical Survey of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe, 1924), 36 A Literary History of Contemporary China (Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi, 1933), 24 A Midday Dream in the Garden (Yuanlin wumeng, 1561), 73 A Premier Anthology of Drama (Xiqu jiaxuan, 1935), 23 A Record of Lotuses Transcending the Mud (Qingni lianhua ji, 1600), 73 Abel-Rémusat, Jean-Pierre (1788– 1832), 12, 14 Accompaniments of Sunny Springs (Yangchun zou, 1609), xvi, 105, 111 Among the Flowers (Huajian ji, 940), 80, 172 An Heir in His Old Age (Lao sheng’er), 11, 14, 17, 19 An Introduction to Yuan Drama (Yuanqu gailun, 1929), 30 Analects (Lunyu), 61, 169 Aoki Masaru (1887–1964), 1–2, 34–36, 178 Appadurai, Arjun, 154

Aristotle, 16, 183n81 Arranging a Love Match (Tiao fengyue), 95, 116, 213n12 art song (sanqu), xiv, 22; scholarly neglect of, 46; shared characteristics with song-drama, 46, 62–63 Assembled Pearls (Yuefu qunzhu), 65, 70 author-function, 46 authorship: and social collectives, xix; and vernacular genres, 46; attestatory, xvii–xviii, 44, 46–47, 74–76, 164–65, 165–68; collective, 164; cultural co-authorship, 4; quasi-attestatory, xviii; reconfiguration of, xvii; reproductive, xvii, xix, 44, 74–76, 164–65, 168–71; social, 164; socialized, 164; transindividual, 164 Autumn in the Han Palace (Hangong qiu), xiii, 25, 42–43, 89, 117, 172, 186n130, 200n19. See also The Sorrows of Han Bai Juyi (772–846), 167 Bai Pu, 51, 52, 55, 194n67 Baiyueting. See The Moon-Revering Pavilion Barthes, Roland, 77–8, 164, 177

254 / Index Bazin, Antoine Pierre Louis (1799–1863), 5, 12, 18, 180n12, 182–83n64 Beici guangzheng pu. See The Expanded and Corrected Formulary of Northern Songs Beijing opera (jingju), 22, 30 Beijing University, 31 Bell, Adam Schall von (1591–1666), 14 Berman, Antoine, 14 Besio, Kimberley, 117, 179n13, 180n16, 206n115 book collecting, 92 bookmarket, 85–86; alleged whims of, xxi; commercial taint of, xx, 86; literati participation in, 125 Book of Odes (Shijing), 61, 132, 133, 134, 138, 147, 150, 152–53, 157, 165, 169, 172, 216n80 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2 Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956), 43, 176 Brocade Sachet of Romance (Fengyue jinnang, 1553), 70–71, 127, 170 Buddhist notions of nonduality, xx–xxi; influence on Jin Shengtan’s rhetoric, 147, 149 Cai Yuanpei (1867–1940), 31, 189n187 caizi (genius), 125, 144–46 caizi shu (books by and for geniuses), xx, 149–52 canon formation, xvii, xxi, 20, 45–46; impact of classical canon formation on Chinese modernity, 4 Cao Zhi (192–232), 135, 144 Certeau, Michel de, 157 Chang, Kang-i Sun, 67 Changlun. See Treatise on Singing Chartier, Roger, 3, 164

Chen Bangtai (fl. 1598), 130, 214n44 Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), 151 Chen Jiru (1558–1639), 128, 185n110, 220n181 Chen Suowen (fl. 1604), 49–50, 214n44 Chen Yi (1901–72), 39 Chen Yujiao (1544–1611), 105, 200n12 Chenmu jiaozi. See Mother Chen Educates Her Son Cheng Juyuan (fl. 1580), 132, 134, 153, 193n63, 213n23, 215n62 Cheng Yuwen (fl. 1629), 110 Chengzhai yuefu. See Yuefu Songs from the Sincerity Studio Cherishing the Fragrant Companion (Lian xiangban), 174 Cherniack, Susan, 93 Chikamatsu (1653–1724), 20 Chinese Courtship (Huajian ji), 14 Chinese despotism, 10, 18 Chinese drama and its relationship to classical Greek drama, 17–18, 19, 25 Chinese poetry and its difficulties for translators, 14 Chinese Theater (1838), 13 Choice Melodies from the Forest of Lyrics (Cilin zhaiyan, 1525), 69, 90, 194n64, 194n65, 201n35 Chuci. See Songs of the South Chunqiu. See Spring and Autumn Annals Chuogeng lu. See Record of Respites from Farming Church, Sally, 152 Cilin baixue. See White Snow from the Forest of Lyrics Cilin zhaiyan. See Choice Melodies from the Forest of Lyrics Cixue. See Songs for Banter

Index / 255 classical Chinese fiction (gudian xiaoshuo), 20 Clunas, Craig, 4 Collège de France, 12 Commercial Press, 24, 28, 31, 185n121 commercialism, reaction against, xxi, 108, 154–55 comparative literature as a new discipline, 14, 183n70 Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), 152, 165, 166, 169 Connery, Chris, 43, 78, 80 court and drama: imaginary courtly approbation of drama, xx; Ming court and song-drama, xv, 47, 56–61, 87–91; impact on print conventions, 89, 90 Crossley, Pamela, 181n23 Cui Yingying as a courtesan character, 72–73, 198n137 Cui Hui, 73 cultural pursuits of late Ming literati, 92 Cultural Revolution, 176 Dai Jinhua, 185n127, 189n199 Daoist influences on Ming song-drama criticism and productions, 57 Davis, John Francis (1795–1890), xiii, xxi, 2, 13, 15, 160, 172, 178; as a translator, 11–12, 182n57; as a drama critic, 17–18 Denda Akira, 42, 125 Deng Zijin (fl. 1351), 194n81 Denton, Kirk, 28 Description of the Empire of China and Chinese Tartary (1735), 8–10, 14, 16 desire: aesthetic of, xvii; and obscenity, xvii; as a key theme in the late Ming reproduction of early

song-drama, 43–44, 173–74; as a problematic in early Confucian discourse, 61, 172–73; in medieval poetic sources, 61–62; in Yuan art song anthologies, 62–63; textual production of and control over, xxi; valorization of, xvi Diliu caizi shu. See Sixth Book of Genius Ding, Naifei, 148 Dissected Rhymes (Qieyun, 601), 48 Docherty, Thomas, 15 Dong Han (fl. 1630–97), 147–48, 152, 156, 168–69, 174 Dong Jieyuan (fl. 1190–1208), 134, 140, 142, 150 Dong Qichang (1550–1616), 112 Dongfang zazhi/Eastern Miscellany, 5, 24, 28, 31 Dongqiang ji. See Story of the Eastern Wall Dou E yuan. See Injustice to Dou E drama as a literary category, (Jap. gikyoku, Ch. xiqu), 22; early Chinese designations for drama-related genres, 22–23; post-1949 designations for drama-related genres, 23–24 drama reform (xiju gailiang), 29 Du Fu (712–70), 72, 150, 151, 216n80, 219n139 Du Mu (1459–1525), 69–70, 74 Du Shanfu, 55 Duara, Prasenjit, 4 East India Company, xiii, 8, 11, 160 Edifying and Curious Letters from China (1703–43), 8 editing and performative rhetoric, xv, xix, 86–87, 144–45, 152 École des Langues Orientales, 12

256 / Index “Encountering a Transcendent” (Huizhen ji), 45, 134, 141. See also “Story of Yingying” Encountering Sorrow (Lisao), 61, 149–51. See also Chuci and Songs of the South Epstein, Maram, xvi, 128 Euro-Japanese concepts, 3–4 European view of a Confucianized China, 8, 10 Evidential Studies of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu kao), 25 evidential scholarship (kaozheng), 33 examination system, xx; and official literary culture, xvi; impact of abolition in 1905, 26; influence of Neo-Confucianism on, 96–97; suspension during the Yuan dynasty, 26; the rhetorical manipulation of, 84–85 Expanded Rhymes (Guangyun, 1011), 48 Ezell, Margaret, 78 Fenshu. See A Book for Burning Feng Menglong (1574–1646), 73, 137 Feng Mengzhen (1546–1605), 102 Fengyue jinnang. See Brocade Sachet of Romance Fourmont, Étienne (1683–1745), 9 Formulary of Correct Sounds of Great Peace (Taihe zhengyin pu, ca. 1398), xviii, 39, 48, 56–58, 69, 89, 102, 110, 117, 173, 207n137, 208n162 Foucault, Michel, 77–78, 161, 164 Four Treasuries (Siku) project, 110–11 French conceptions of drama: their impact on the translation of Orphan of Zhao, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 183

Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi. See Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies Gao Yingqi (fl. 1544), 92 Gaotang fu (Rhapsody of the Gaotang terrace), 144 Gaubil, Antoine (1689–1759), 181n41 Genette, Gérard, 43 Genghis Khan, 10 Genjin zatsugeki josetsu. See Prolegomena to Yuan zaju Geng Tianxi (ca. 1220–ca. 1300), 52 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), 14–15, 20 Gottschall, Rudolf von (1832–1909), 18, 83–84, 160, 163–64, 168, 174 Gottschedt, Johann Christoph (1700–66), 16 Green Bower Collection (Qinglou ji, 1364), 55, 211n216 Greenblatt, Stephen, 119 Gu mingjia (The masters of old), 86, 105, 108, 109, 111, 116, 196n118 Gu zaju (Ancient zaju, ca. 1620), 105, 111, 116 Gujin mingju hexuan. See Joint Selection of Famous Plays Old and New Guan Hanqing (ca. 1220–ca. 1300), xviii–xix, 25, 32, 37–38, 43, 46–47, 51, 52, 57, 138, 163, 172, 177, 189n187, 202n53; as loyalist recluse, 55; as lowly functionary, 54; as modern revolutionary icon, 38–39; as palace examination graduate, 50–51; as reputed author of the Xixiang ji, 69–74, 134, 142; as romantic figure, 53, 59–60, 68–69, 74, 117–18; as target of poetic mockery, 66–67, 70–71

Index / 257 Guan Hanqing (Guan Hanqing, 1958), 175 Guan Yunshi (1286–1324), 52, 62, 138, 167, 181n20 Guangyun. See Expanded Rhymes Guignes, Joseph de (1721–1800), 181n41 Guo Xun (1475–1542), 65–66, 201n35 Guocui xuebao. See National Essence Journal guojia (nation), 4 guoxue (national learning), 21, 36 Guo Moruo (1892–1978), 2, 30, 39, 123–24, 160–61 Halde, J.-B. du (1674–1743), 2, 8–9, 11, 15 Han Chinese authors, xiii, 6, 26 Hangong qiu. See Autumn in the Han Palace and The Sorrows of Han Haoqiu zhuan. See The Fortunate Union Hatchett, William (fl. 1730–41), 10 He Changqun (1905–), 30 He Liangjun (1506–73), 88, 98, 201n36, 207n154, 213n24 Hegel, G. W. F. (1770–1831), 16, 18 Hegel, Robert, 139, 151, 218n135 Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803), 16, 18, 165 History of Chinese Drama of the Early Modern Period (Shina kinsei gikyoku shi, 1930), 1, 34–36 History of Chinese Fiction and Drama (Shina shôsetsu gikyoku shi, 1897), 20 History of Chinese Humanities (Zhongguo wenxue shi, 1904), 45–46 History of Chinese Literature (Chûgoku bungaku shi, 1898), 1, 20, 45

History of Chinese Literature (Zhongguo wenxue shi, 1932), 38 History of Drama (1865–76), 18 History of Japanese Literature (Nihon bungaku shi, 1890), 20, 36 History of the Ming (Mingshi): bibliographic treatise of, xix, 122 History of the Yuan (Yuanshi), 51 History of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu shi, 1913–14), 5, 21–27, 34, 83; as a source for other critics, 30 homoeroticism: male (nanse), 118; female, 174 Honglou meng. See The Dream of the Red Chamber Hu Shi (fl. 1548), 27 Hu Shi (1891–1962), 5, 29, 31, 40 Hu Zhifeng, 176 Hu Zhiyu (1227–95), 211n226 Huang, Martin, xvi Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), 133, 169, 203n68 Huang Zhengwei (fl. 1609), xvi, 105, 151 Hudiemeng. See The Butterfly Dream Huilan ji. See The Story of the Chalk Circle Huizhen ji. See “Encountering a Transcendent” Hunt, Lynn, 157–58 Hurd, Richard (1720–1808), 17 Idema, Wilt L., 43, 57, 59, 197n132, 202n41 Imperial Academy of Music ( Jiaofang si), 83, 88, 208n17 Imprimerie Royale, 12 Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan), 13, 25, 37, 38, 40, 42, 69, 188n186

258 / Index Jade Jar Spring (Yuhuchun), 59 Jang, Scarlett, 112 Japanese scholarship on Chinese drama, 1–3, 32–36 Japanese loanwords from classical Chinese, 23 Jesuit: compendia on China, 8; notions of Chinese literature, 11 Ji Junxiang, 25 Jia Baoyu, 21 Jia Zhongming (ca. 1343–after 1422), 58–60, 75–76 Jiang Xingyu, 74, 125, 212n8 Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus), 134, 149 Jin Shengtan (1608–61), xvi, 1, 2, 20, 43, 44, 45, 47, 168, 174, 177, 178, 185n110; and his assumption of textual fatherhood, 155–56, 159; and the discourse on obscenity, 152–54, 198n140; and the rhetoric of gift-giving, 154–55 Jin Yong, 149 jinhua (evolution, progress), 25 Jiu fengchen. See Rescuing a Coquette Joint Selection of Famous Plays Old and New (Gujin mingju hexuan, 1633), 42, 75–76, 173 jôruri (Japanese puppet theater), 1, 34; as Japanese tragedy, 20; as a newly respectable literary genre, 36 Journal asiatique, 13 Julien, Stanislas (1797–1873), 2, 12, 13–14, 18, 132 Jurchen, xiv, 6, 26 Kang Hai (1475–1541), 48, 71–72, 88, 92, 93, 150, 170, 193n62, 202n50 Kang Sheng (1898–1975), 39

Kano Naoki (1868–1947), 33–34, 41, 187n160; as a founder of modern Japanese sinology, 5, 33 Klaproth, Julius Heinrich (1783–1835), 12, 13, 14, 182n57 Klein, J. L. (1810–76), 18 Knowledge of the Chinese Language (1731), 9 Ko, Dorothy, 28, 67, 73, 79, 155 kokugaku (nativist study of Japanese literature), 33 kokubungaku (national literature of Japan), 33 Ku Cunxiao. See Mourning Cunxiao kunqu (Kun-style opera), 88; as a new form in the late Ming, xv; as a performed and literary form in the twentieth century, 35. See also Southern drama Kyoto University, 5, 32, 33, 34, 180n10 Lang Ying (1487–ca. 1566), 48–49, 94, 118 Lao sheng’er. See An Heir in His Old Age Leibniz, Gottfried (1646–1716), 14, 183n71 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), 16 Lewis, Mark, 78, 80, 166 Li Bai (701–62), 106, 150 Li Dongyang (1447–1516), 72, 97 Li Liweng shizhong qu. See Li Liweng’s Ten Plays Li Mengyang (1473–1529), 72, 97–98, 150, 169, 198–99n134 Li Kaixian (1502–68), xv, xvi, 2, 23, 49, 73, 81, 115, 127, 129, 133–34, 140, 153, 158, 167, 197n134, 210n199, 217n95; and his anti-romantic aesthetic,

Index / 259 95, 119; biography of, 91–92; construction of Yuan zaju, xx; relationship with Wang Jiusi and Kang Hai, 92; relationship with Li Mengyang, 97–98; views on the examination system, 99–100; views on publishing, 92–96 Li Liweng’s Ten Plays (Li Liweng shizhong qu), 174 Li Rihua (1565–1635), 73 Li Wa, 73 Li Wai-yee, 79, 143 Li Yu (937–78), 106 Li Yu (1610–80), 2, 72, 77, 86, 149–50, 152, 156, 173–74 Li Zhi (1527–1602), 128, 138, 150, 185n129 Li Zhifu, 6 Lian xiangban. See Cherishing the Fragrant Companion Liang Yusheng (1745–1819), 208–09n168 Liao Ben, xv, 201–02n37 Lin Chuanjia (1877–1921), 20, 45–47, 80 Lin Heyi, xv, 75 Lin Zhaohua, 176, 178 Ling Mengchu (1550–1644), 41, 132, 148, 208n164, 212n5, 213n24, 217n93, 218n121 Lisao (Encountering Sorrow), 144 Liu Chengxi, 107–08 Liu Dajie (1904–), 30 Liu, James, 78 Liu, Lydia, 4 Liu Yong (987–1053), 75, 118, 197n119, 203n68 literary field, 20, 23 literati interest in song-drama and performance-related matters, xv, 86, 92

literati rhetoric of frustrated ambition, 54 Love Songs from a Polychrome Brush (Caibi qingci, 1624), 67–68; attributions to Guan Hanqing in, xix, 68; theme of desire in, xvi, 67 Love Songs of Markets and Wells (Shijing yanci), 93, 94–96 Lu Lin, 59, 194n72 Lu Qian (1905–), 24 Lu Xun (1881–1936), 36, 38, 175 Lu Zhailang (Lu Zhailang), 69 Lu Zhi (ca. 1242–ca. 1314), 52, 62 Lü Tiancheng (1580–ca. 1619), 137, 197n129 Lugui bu. See Register of Ghosts Lunyu. See Analects Lüshi chunqiu. See The Spring and Autumn Annals of Lü Luo Guanzhong, 30 Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940), 5, 25, 32, 34, 41, 180n14 Luo Zongxin (fl. 1324), 47, 76 Luoshen fu (Rhapsody of the Luo river goddess), 144 Ma Zhiyuan (ca. 1260–ca. 1325), 30, 32, 51, 52, 75, 117, 163, 202n53 Manchu rule, 12, 27; perception of in early modern Europe, 10, 12; perception of in late Qing China, 27; perception of in modern Japan, 35 manuscript culture, xx, 87, 93–94, 107–09 Mao Qiling, 131 Mao Weitao, 176 May Fourth concepts, 28, 29 McGann, Jerome, 41, 120 McLaren, Anne, 135, 191n20

260 / Index Mei Dingzuo (1549–1615), 73, 102 Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), 30, 39, 43 Mencius (372–289 B.C.E.), 169 Meng Chengshun (1599–after 1684), xv, 23, 42, 59, 75–76, 106, 118, 173, 196–97n118 Min Qiji (1580–after 1661), 131 Mingfeng ji. See Story of the Crying Phoenixes Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762), 17 modern adaptations of Yuan plays: in China, 31, 175–76; in France, 42–43; in the U.S., 43 Mongol domination, 12; as a major modern theme of Yuan drama, 36–37; as occupation by a racial other, 30 Mongol songwriters, 6 Mother Chen Educates Her Son (Chenmu jiaozi), 116 Mourning Cunxiao (Ku Cunxiao), 116 Mowangguan gujin zaju. See Zaju Plays Old and New from the Mowang Hall Mudanting. See Peony Pavilion Murphy, Arthur (1727–1805), 10 Nanbei gongci ji. See The Annals of Palace-Style Northern and Southern Lyrics Nan wanghou. See The Male Queen Naitô Konan (1866–1934), 34–35 Nanhao shihua. See Poetry Comments of Nanhao Nanjing Poetry Society (Jinling shishe), 102 National Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao), 21, 24, 26, 31–32, 184–85n107 National Learning Review (Guoxue jikan), 31–32

New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong, 548), 56 New Sounds of an Efflorescent Age (Shengshi xinsheng, 1517), 90, 201n35 New Western Wing (Xin Xixiang), 142 New Youth (Xin qingnian), 29 Nietzsche, Friederich (1844–1900), 5, 15, 16, 19, 20, 31, 164 Northern drama (beiqu), 6, 22; and its partisans, 27 obscenity, discourse of, 132–36; function of dissemination, 124; projection onto low-status readers and performers, xx Office of Drums and Bells (Zhonggu si), 88 Ôki Yasushi, 94 “On Not Succumbing to Old Age” (Bu fulao, 1540), xviii, 47, 60, 80; changing authorial personae of, 65–69; differences from Yuan-printed sources, 65; translation of, 63–64 One Hundred Yuan Plays (Yuanren baizhong qu, 1615/16), xiii, xv, xvi, 3, 34, 41, 76, 83; as a canonical text, 156; history in Europe of, 5, 9, 50; impact on Ming-authored plays of, 76, 79; late Qing and Republican-era reprints of, 30; as a standard for reproductive authorship, 171 Oriental Translation Fund, 12 orientalism, 7 Orphan of Zhao (Zhaoshi gu’er), 9, 40; and the three unities, 17; as a Chinese tragedy, 9, 16–17, 25; first complete translation of, 13

Index / 261 Orphan of China (1741), 16; as an innovative treatment of Orphan of Zhao, 10 Orphan of China (1755), 10, 16, 176 Orphan of China: A Tragedy (1759), 10, 16 Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962), 23, 29, 39 Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), 173 Ouyang Xuan (1274–1358), 49 Owen, Stephen, 28, 172 Pan Zhiheng (1556–1622), 102 Peony Pavilion (Mudanting, 1598), xvi, 47, 75, 79, 145 Percy, Thomas (1729–1811), 11, 17 Pipa ji. See The Story of the Lute plagiarism, xix, 168–69 Poems on Sensuality (Yanqing shi), 146 Poetics, 16 Poetry Comments of Nanhao (Nanhao shihua, 1513), 69 post-Ming, xvi Prémare, Joseph de (1666–1736), 2, 9, 11, 13, 16, 177–78 prohibitions against song-drama, xiii, xiv–xv, 21, 88–89, 136, 159–60 Prolegomena to Yuan zaju (Genjin zatsugeki josetsu, 1937), 36 publishing: commercial, 85; private, 85, 92; official, 85; trope in literary criticism, 85–86 Qiannü lihun. See Qiannü’ s Spirit Leaves Her Body Qiannü’ s Spirit Leaves Her Body (Qiannü lihun), 75 Qiao Ji (1280–1345), 75, 96 Qian Zeng (1629–1701), 109 Quarterly Review, xiii Qian Jibo (1887–1957), 24

qian qizi (seven former masters of archaism), 92 Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), 100–01 Qian Zhongshu (1910–99), 43–44 Qieyun. See Dissected Rhymes qingchang (pure singing), 114 Qinglou ji. See Green Bower Collection Qingni lianhua ji. See A Record of Lotuses Transcending the Mud Qiu Jin (1875–1907), 185n123 Qiu Jun (1421–95), 71, 95, 136, 204n95 Qixiu leigao. See Seven Domains of Learning Qin Shihuang (r. 221–210 B.C.E.), 94; and the trope of bookburning, 94 Qu Yuan (343?–290 B.C.E.), 38, 61, 144–45, 166, 171, 174 Qulü. See Rules for Songs Rain in the Parasol Tree (Wutong yu), 88–89, 186n130, 200n19, 211n206 readership: imaginative constitution of, xx–xxi; differential meanings generated by, 2 reader-writers, xxi, 43–44, 81 reading-writing and elite status, xx realism (xieshi), 38 Record of Respites from Farming (Chuogeng lu, ca. 1366), 53 Records of the Historian (Shiji), 147, 149–51, 166 restored behavior, xvi, 87 rewriting: definition of, 2 Register of Ghosts (Lugui bu, 1330), xviii, 21, 26, 38, 53–55, 69, 70, 75, 76, 167 Ren Na (1894–), 24, 41 Renmin ribao. See The People’s Daily

262 / Index Rescuing a Coquette (Jiu fengchen), 38, 69 Revised Plays of the Yuan Worthies (Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi, ca. 1558–68), xv, xvi, 84, 98–100, 105 Rhymes of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan yinyun, 1324), xviii, 47–50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 76, 102, 126, 140 Rhymes from the Green Bowers (Qinglou yunyu, 1616), 67 Rites Controversy, 8 role types, xiv Rolston, David, xix, 218n135 Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), 149 Rongyutang, 104, 216n82 Rouzer, Paul, 61, 172 Rules for Songs (Qulü, ca. 1620), 142 Sacy, Silvestre de (1758–1838), 12, 182n62, 183n66 Said, Edward, 7, 12 Sange panni de nüxing. See The Three Rebellious Women Sanqu. See art song Sasagawa Rinpu (1870–1949), 1, 2, 20, 45–46, 132 Schechner, Richard, xvi, 87 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805), 16, 20 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), 5, 15, 16, 19, 20 Seven Domains of Learning (Qixiu leigao, ca. 1566), 48 sexology, 160, 174 Shakespeare, 16, 17, 37, 40, 119, 188n185 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 165 Shen Defu (1578–1642), 26, 50, 71, 83, 102, 106–07, 112, 118, 208n168, 210n199, 212–13n9

Shen Jing (1553–1610), 137, 208n164 Shen Pangsui (fl. 1639), 50 Shen Tai (fl. 1629), 105, 144 Shenzong (r. 1573–1619), 90 Sheng Ming zaju. See Zaju of the High Ming, 73 Shengshi xinsheng. See New Sounds of an Efflorescent Age Shijing. See Book of Odes Shi Nai’an, 149, 150 Shih, Chung-wen, 115 Shih, Shu-mei, 4 Shina, 32–33 Shina kinsei gikyoku shi. See History of Chinese Drama of the Early Modern Period Shiyonoya On, 186n132, 210n203 Shizong (r. 1522–67), 90, 205n112 Shuang Ying zhuan. See The Double Oriole Tale Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin), 168, 133, 148, 149–51, 155 Sima Qian (ca. 145–90 B.C.E.), 166, 169 Sima Xiangru (d. 117 B.C.E.), 135 sinification, 30 sinology: as a new academic discipline in Europe, 12, 14; as a new academic discipline in Japan (Shinagaku), 33–34 Sixth Book of Genius (Diliu caizi shu, ca. 1656), 149, 156 Shijing yanci. See Love Songs of Markets and Wells Société asiatique, 13 Song Yuan xiqu kao. See Evidential Studies of Song and Yuan Drama Song Yuan xiqu shi. See History of Song and Yuan Drama song-drama: analogy to amateur/ professional distinction in

Index / 263 painting, 57–58, 112; differences from narrative fiction, xix; prestige of prosody, xvi, 47–51; painting and illustration of, xv–xvi, 139–40 Songs for Banter (Cixue), 96 Songs of Great Peace (Taiping yuefu, 1351), xiv, 49, 53, 62, 65, 70, 167, 172 Songs of Harmonious Resplendence (Yongxi yuefu, 1540), xix, 65–67, 90, 127, 170 Songs of the South (Chuci), 166, 172 Southern drama, 22, 35, 88, 90, 104; partisans of, xv, 6, 91 spoken drama (huaju), 23 Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), 169 Spring and Autumn Annals of Lü (Lüshi chunqiu), 98 “Spring Outing of the Emperor and his Consort” (Difei chunyou), 111 storyteller rhetoric, xvi “Story of Yingying” (Yingying zhuan), xviii, 45, 73, 141, 173. See also “Encountering a Transcendent” Story of the Eastern Wall (Dongqiang ji), 116 Story of the Crying Phoenixes (Mingfeng ji), 72 Su Shi (1037–1101), 75, 150 Sui Shusen, 36 Sun Kaidi (1902–), 41–42, 108 Sunny Spring, White Snow (Yangchun baixue, before 1324), xix, 49, 51–52, 53, 62, 75, 167, 172; and textualization of sung forms, xiv, 167 Stuart, Sargeant, 94 Swatek, Catherine, 79

Taiping yuefu. See Songs of Great Peace Tanaka Issei, 42 Tan Fan, 125, 156, 212n8 Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), xvi, 45, 102, 128, 137, 170, 210n189 Tao Zongyi (ca. 1316–ca. 1402), 53 Tartars, xiii; as a civilizational force, 10, 13, 26, 186n134; as an object of European scholarship, 11, 13; as a military threat to Europe, 10; as a theme in European adaptations of Chinese plays, 10–12 Teikoku bungaku. See Imperial Literature The Annals of Palace-Style Northern and Southern Lyrics (Nanbei gongci ji, 1604), 49–50 The Banquet of the Five Dukes (Wuyan hou), 116 The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 19, 31 The Butterfly Dream (Hudiemeng), 69 The Century of the Yuan (1850), 13 The Courtyard of Purple Clouds (Ziyunting), 95, 116 The Double Oriole Tale (Shuang Ying zhuan), 73 The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), 20, 31 The Expanded and Corrected Formulary of Northern Songs (Beici guangzheng pu), 110 The Five Cardinal Relationships Perfected and Complete (Wulun quanbei), 71, 98 The Fortunate Union (Haoqiu zhuan), 11, 14 The Great Canon of the Yongle Era (Yongle dadian, 1403–08), 89, 100, 126 The Jade Mirror Stand (Yujingtai), 69, 117–18, 200n21, 211n206

264 / Index The Little Orphan of the House of Chao: A Chinese Tragedy, 17 The Story of the Chalk Circle (Huilan ji), 13, 176 The Story of the Lute (Pipa ji), 91, 145, 149, 173, 216n80 The Male Queen (Nan wanghou), 171 The Miser (Kanqian nu), 42 The Moon-Revering Pavilion (Baiyueting), 95, 116, 213n12 The Pond of Golden Threads (Jianxian chi ), 69 The People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), 39 The Sorrows of Han (Hangong qiu, 1829), 11–12, 17–18, 19, 25, 182n51. See also Autumn in the Han Palace The Theater and Drama of the Chinese (1887), 18, 83 The Three Rebellious Women (Sange panni de nüxing, 1926), 31 The Two Cousins (Yu Jiao Li), 14 The World as Will and Representation (1844), 19 The World of Education (Jiaoyu shijie), 21 theatrical performance: cessation of early zaju performance in Ming China, xv, 90–91, 201–02n37, 212–13n9; zaju performance in in Song, Jin, and Yuan China, xiv Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays (Yuankan sanshizhong, ca. 1330), xiv, 54, 117, 126; differences from later Ming editions, 9, 42; as a product of international scholarly collaboration, 32, 34, 41; and the implications of Li Kaixian’s ownership, 84, 116; as performance-related texts, 167 Thoms, Peter Perring (active 1814–51), 14

Tian Han (1898–1968), 2, 23, 31, 39, 161, 175–76, 177, 178 Tiao fengyue. See Arranging a Love Match Tokyo University, 20, 33, 187n167 Tôyô shi (oriental history), 33 tragedy, xiii; and a nation-based cultural field, 3; differing European conceptions of, 15–16; three unities of, 16; tragedies about Mongol rule, 3 translation: across multilingually hybridized spaces, 22; European translations into Japanese, 3; impact of translation from Chinese on Goethe’s Weltliteratur, 15; impact of translation on European ideas of tragedy, 16; impact of translation on Japanese notions of tragedy, 19–20; of Chinese plays into European languages, 9–14; of Jesuit compendia into European languages, 8; translation activity and cultural crisis, 5–6 translingual practice, 23 Treatise on Singing (Changlun, before 1324), 56 Tu Long (1542–1605), 102, 217n96 Unofficial Compilations of the Wanli Era (Wanli yehuobian, 1606 and 1619), 50, 107, 110, 208n162 Vega, Lope de, 17, 183n85 Volpp, Sophie, 199n11 Voltaire (1694–1778), 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 176, 178 Wagner, Richard (1813–1883), 19, 25 Wang Anqi, 57

Index / 265 Wang Guowei (1887–1927), 2, 32, 36, 40, 83–84, 132; and cultural synthesis, 4–5, 21–22; 174–75; and German philosophy, 20, 21; and The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), 20; and National Essence circles, 21, 26–27; and the question of dramatic tragedies, 21–22, 25–26, 37; and the origins of song-drama, 84, 96 Wang Fuzhi (1619–92), 27 Wang Jide (d. 1623), xv, 23, 73, 74, 76, 86, 100, 104, 111, 148, 158, 200n12, 208n164; and attestatory concerns, 137–38, 171; and connoisseurship of the feminine, 143–46; as editor of the Gu zaju edition, 105, 111, 116; and his fieldwork on Yuan authors, 51; and the problem of historicity, 141–43; and the discourse on obscenity, xx, 138–39; and the value of old editions, 140–41, 159 Wang Jiusi (1468–1551), 71–72, 88, 92, 93, 170 Wang Shifu, xviii, 50, 51, 77, 156; and the authorship of the Xixiang ji, 69, 74, 123–24 Wang Shizhen (1526–90), 72, 100, 102, 128, 150, 181n20, 202n53, 213n24 Wang Yunpeng, 214n39 Wang Zhenyuan, 155 Wang Zhaojun (Wang Zhaojun), 31 Wang Zhaojun, 117 Wanli yehuobian. See Unofficial Compilations of the Wanli Era Wei Wanchu (fl. 1596), 128 Weltliteratur (world literature), 14–15, 44

wen (writing), 25 Wen Jiao (288–329), 118 wenhua (culture), 4 wenxue (literature), 4, 25 Wenxuan (Refined selections of literature), 105 wenzhang (refined writing), 25 West, Stephen H., 43, 192n49, 200n12 White Snow from the Forest of Lyrics (Cilin baixue, 1606), 69 Wilkerson, Douglas, 198n135 Wolff, Christian (1679–1754), 14, 183n71 world history: Chinese participation in, 5, 40 world literature: Chinese participation in, 5, 29 Wu Changling, 72 Wu Guoping, 155 Wu Mei (1884–1939), 24, 41, 156, 209n186 Wu Mianxue, 151 Wu Weiye (1609–72), 110 Wuhou yan. See The Banquet of the Five Dukes Wulun quanbei. See The Five Cardinal Relationships Perfected and Complete Wutong yu. See Rain in the Parasol Tree Wuzong (r. 1506–21), 90, 201n36 Xia Yan (1482–1548), 91 Xianzong (r. 1465–87), 90 Xiaozong (r. 1488–1505), 90 Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi. See A Literary History of Contemporary China Xin qingnian. See New Youth Xie An (320–85), 134 Xie Tianxiang (Xie Tianxiang), 69, 196n118, 198n152

266 / Index Xie Wuliang (1884–1964), 29–30 Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), 104 Xiong Zide (fl. 1341–68), 193n50 Xiqu jiaxuan. See A Premier Anthology of Drama Xixiang ji (Story of the Western Wing), xvi, xviii, 3, 43, 46, 206n126; adaptation by Zeng Zhaohong, 176–77; adaptation by Tian Han, 175–76; alternate title Spring and Autumn Annals of Cui (Cuishi chunqiu), 98; art songs about, 66–67, 70–71, 126; attribution to Guan Hanqing, xix, 69–74; chantefable version, 140; as a courtesan/literatus play, 72–73; edition by He Bi, 129–30, 135; edition by Ling Mengchu, 41, 128, 130; edition by Jin Shengtan, 77, 124–25, 128; editions by Min Qiji, 131; edition by Shen Pangsui, 50; edition by Wang Jide, xx, 41, 124–25, 128, 129, 130, 213n24; Hongzhi edition, 127; Longdong shannong edition, 128; Xu Shifan edition, 128, 129, 130, 134, 213n23, 213n24; Xuzhizhai edition, 128, 130; Rongyutang edition, 129, 130, 216n82; Qifengguan edition, 128–29; inspiration for Aoki Masaru’s study of Chinese drama, 1; late Qing and Republican reprints of, 30; literati, quasi-literati, and commercial editions of, 126; as reading for young people, 168; Southern-style adaptations of, 124; survey of imprints of, 125–32; as a tragedy, 20, 31; translations of, 34

Xu Fengji (fl. 1580), 134 Xu Fuzuo (1560-after 1630), 103 Xu Shuofang, 108, 114, 198n152, 204n95, 209n176, 218n120 Xu Wei (1521–93), 128, 137, 181n20 Xu Zhimo (1896–1931), 31 Xuanzong (r. 1426–35), 90

Yan’an Zhi’an, 56 Yang Shen (1488–1559), 98, 201n37, 213n24 Yang Yichao (fl. 1588), 49 Yang Zhaoying (fl. 1320–51), 51–52, 167 Yangchun zou (Accompaniments of Sunny Springs), 105, 111 Yeshiyuan gujin zaju. See Zaju Plays Old and New from the Yeshi Garden “Yingying zhuan.” See “Story of Yingying” “Yingying Makes Public The Wrongs Committed Against Her” (Yingying suyuan), 70–71 Yongle dadian. See The Great Canon of the Yongle Era Yongxi yuefu (Songs of Harmonious Resplendence, 1540), xix Yu Huai (1616–96), 118 Yu Ji (1272–1348), 49, 167 Yu, Pauline, 61 Yu Jiao Li. See The Two Cousins yuanben (farce), 27, 88 Yuan drama: anti-imperalist mobilization of, 15, 39–40; as a discursive category, xvii, xx; and the discourse of national history, 7, 29; and the discourse of race, 7, 27, 29–30; and filial piety, 9, 11; and imperialist expansion, xxi, 1–2, 35; and interethnic

Index / 267 nation-building, 30; as a literary model for mid- and late Ming writers, 92; as a precedent for intercultural exchange, 30; as resistance to Mongol occupation, 39; as a tragic form, 37–38. See also zaju song-drama Yuan flavor, xvii, 79, 92 Yuan Ming zaju (Zaju from the Yuan and the Ming), 105, 111 Yuan playwrights and songwriters: creation of individual biographies for, 52–54; emphasis on talent rather than social standing, 53; socio-literary indeterminacy of, 51 Yuan Zhen (779–831), xviii, 73, 134 Yuandi (r. 48–33 B.C.E.), 117 Yuankan sanshizhong. See Thirty Yuan-Printed Plays Yuanlin wumen. See A Midday Dream in the Garden Yuanren baizong qu. See One Hundred Yuan Plays Yuanqu (Yuan-dynasty songs), xiv Yuanqu gailun. See An Introduction to Yuan Drama Yuanshi. See History of the Yuan Yuanshi jishi benmo (Recorded events pertaining to Yuan history, chronologically arranged), 110 Yuefu Songs from the Sincerity Studio (Chengzhai yuefu, ca. 1426–49), 89–90, 133 Yuefu qunzhu. See Assembled Pearls Yuhuchun. See Jade Jar Spring Yung, Sai-shing, 107 Yujingtai. See The Jade Mirror Stand Yutai xinyong. See New Songs from a Jade Terrace Zaju of the High Ming (Shengming zaju, 1629), 73, 105, 110, 121, 144

Zaju Plays Old and New from the Yeshi Garden (Yeshiyuan gujin zaju, 1938), 41 Zaju Plays Old and New from the Mowang Hall (Mowangguan gujin zaju, 1938), 41 Zaju shiduan jin. See Zaju: Ten Pieces of Brocade zaju song-drama, xiv; as an ancient form with a historical pedigree, xv; and the Ming restrictions regarding the social background of the protagonists, 88–89; as part of court entertainment and ceremonies, 89; print editions of, 104–05. See also Yuan drama Zaju: Ten Pieces of Brocade (Zaju shiduan jin, 1558), 90, 99 Zaju xuan (Refined selections of zaju), 105, 109, 111, 116, 196–97n118 Zang Maoxun (1550–1620), xiii, xv, xxi, 2, 26, 43, 44, 59, 81, 140, 177; biography of, 101–02; and commercial considerations, 112–13; and the construction of Yuan zaju, xx, 113–14, 180n16; and pictorial representations, 111–12; and readerly performance, 114–15; and Tang poetry, 106; and the trope of manuscript transmission, 107–09; and the spurious claim of drama-related examinations, 50, 83, 109–11; and the validation of elite male desire, 104, 116–19, 196–97n118 Zeitlin, Judith, 79 Zeng Rui, 68 Zeng Yongyi, 193n52, 197n134 Zeng Zhaohong (1935–), 176–77, 178 Zhang Longxi, 7, 165 Zhang Chong (fl. 1624), 67

268 / Index Zhang Kejiu (d. ca. 1324–29) Zhang Xu (fl. 1624), 67 Zhao Jingshen, 174, 189n197 Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), 57–58 Zhao Qimei (1563–1624), 41, 109, 112, 116, 170, 208n157 Zheng Qian (1906–), 41–42, 200n12, 209n186 Zhong Sicheng (ca. 1277–after 1345), 2, 26, 44, 66 Zhongguo wenxue shi. See History of Chinese Humanities Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe. See A Historical Survey of Chinese Fiction Zhongguo wenxue fada shi. See History of the Development of Chinese Literature Zhongguo wenxue shi. See History of Chinese Literature Zhongyuan yinyun. See Rhymes of the Central Plain

Zhou Deqing (1277–1365), 2, 47–50, 52, 74, 213n24 Zheng Guangzu, 52, 75 Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), 39 Zhu Di (r. 1403–24), 56, 58, 89, 197n132 Zhu Jing (fl. 1341–64), 55, 59 Zhu Lianxiu, 175 Zhu Quan (1378–1448), 2, 39, 48, 89, 95, 117, 120, 173, 197n132 Zhu Xi (1130–1200), 79, 99, 110, 133, 136, 153, 157, 170 Zhu Xiang (1904–33), 38 Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–98), 88–89, 91 Zhu Youdun (1379–1439), 72, 76, 89, 99, 120, 133, 167, 217n93 Zhuangzi, 147, 149–51 Zhuo Renyue (1616–36?), 141–42 Ziyuting. See The Courtyard of Purple Clouds