A survey of scholarship on late Ming drama.

THIS PAPER COVERS the state of scholarship on late Ming drama, a period that coincided roughly with the Elizabethan (1558-1603), Jacobean (1603-25), and Caroline (1625-42) theater of Renaissance England. (1) Scholarly writings on Ming drama (1368-1644) are fewer than those on the zaju opera of the Yuan dynasty (1234-1368), or those on the regional genres of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The first work (1901) to attempt a history of Chinese literature includes one chapter on drama. (2) The author outlines the plots of three zaju operas of the Yuan, gives an eyewitness account of Qing theater in performance, but omits any reference to Ming drama. Similarly, a book on oriental drama published sixty years later does not include a single Ming work although it discusses some thirty translated plays of the Yuan and Qing dynasties. (3)

Ming drama was first introduced to the English-speaking world in 1936, when Yao Hsin-nung wrote about the development of the national theater of the late Ming. (4) His views are still valid today, although much has been added to that brief survey by subsequent scholarship. Yao's article evidently benefited from the then recently published History of Early Modern Chinese Drama by the Japanese Sinologist Aoki Masaru. (5)

Aoki's book had also benefited from the scholarly studies of his colleagues (Aoki 734-35), and especially Wang Guowei's multivolume study that initiated academic investigation of traditional Chinese theater. (6) Aoki's survey is still one of the most complete and respected works to date, despite its neglect of the performative aspects of Ming drama, a shortcoming that has yet to be fully rehabilitated even in scholarly studies today.

Another quarter-century elapsed before the surge of interest in the 1960s in the West in things Asian brought in its wake three books on the history of Chinese literature, each with a section on Ming drama. In Chinese Literature: A Historical Introduction, Ch'en Shou-yi discussed one music composer, no fewer than eight playwrights, dozens of plays, and introduced the structural features of the drama as well. (7) Lai Ming's A History of Chinese Literature covered a single playwright and one play, mistaking its heroine of sixteen years for twenty. (8) Liu Wu-chi's An Introduction to Chinese Literature focused on the librettos and intentions of the literati playwrights. (9) More detailed was Josephine Huang Hung's pocket-size Ming Drama, covering major playwrights and their representative works. (10) Both Liu and Hung also introduced the schools of dramatists of the late Ming.

In the sixties, scholarship was largely limited to the literary study of masterpieces about which scholars tended to disagree with each other. In fact, Ch'en and Liu provided two sharply contrasting views of Ming drama. While Ch'en portrayed Ming theater as contemporary, realistic, and entertaining, (11) Liu saw it as historical, poetic, and elitist. (12) If one uses Ming Feng Ji (The Phoenix Singing), a play about contemporary politics, as example and holds innovations in theater as intended to please the theatergoing public, one may agree with Ch'en. But if one reads the allusive and symbolic librettos that are a staple feature of the masterpieces of Ming drama, and regards their verses as incomprehensible to the mostly illiterate common folk, one may concur with Liu's interpretation. (13) Nevertheless, the fact remains that scholarship in the 1960s explored only a small number of plays and adopted narrow investigative angles.

In the 1970s, scholarship gradually saw a more equitable balance between attention to literature and to performance. C. T. Hsia focused on the philosophical ideas encompassed by the four dream plays of Tang Xianzu. (14) Colin Mackerras viewed Ming drama from the performative angle, and traced its historical development to the level of individual genres. (15) Combining the learning of the East and the West, Mackerras examined a large number of primary materials of the Ming era, such as the writings of Wang Jide and Zhang Dai, as well as many scholarly reports in Chinese, including the works of Zhou Yibai and Wang Gulu. Almost two hundred references are drawn from non-English sources in his paper.

In an extensive textual study using a wider range of data, Cyril Birch was able to conclude that Ming Feng Ji was "a rare instance, of its time, of a drama built around contemporary events" (220), and provided four more plays of the same nature (231). (16) However, the performative aspects were not addressed. On the other hand, William Dolby treated Ming theater not only as dramatic literature, but also as performing arts in A History of Chinese Drama. (17) He systematically tried to introduce staging elements, namely singing and music, costume and props, singing styles and role types. Performative features of Ming drama, albeit still incomplete and inaccurate, started to be addressed.

The 1980s saw the publication of the seven hundred page The Chinese Conception of the Theatre, in which the innovation of the Kunqu music was briefly delineated. (18) But John Hu's introductory chapter "Ming Dynasty Drama" proves insightful. It is characterized by a sensitive treatment of the available data and an objective presentation of the drama scene. (19)

In the 1990s, two alternative approaches to the performance space of Ming private theater emerged. In the introduction to his translation of selected scenes of Ming drama, Cyril Birch led his reader to a fictional garden performance, thus imagining the performance space. (20) Chen Shizheng, the director of The Peony Pavilion that opened the 1999 Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, strove for what "Tang Xianzu himself would have known," thus rebuilding the performance space. The centerpiece of Chen's set was a Ming style open-sided pavilion consisting of sixty hand-joined pieces--not a single nail was used. But his most unambiguous mirroring of the performance space is seen in the eighteen thousand gallon working pond next to the pavilion, complete with live ducks, fish, water-lilies and songbirds. Chen explains:

   The ducks floated on the water; the water reflected the lights; the
   birds chirped--these elements did not necessarily relate to the
   plot. But they certainly contributed to the environment in which
   the audience would come into contact with what the Ming literati
   must have experienced. (21)

Chen's authentic production in fact served an academic purpose: the Ming gardens were famous for their water features, and the Ming literati were known to stage plays at waterside pavilions.

Grant Shen's "Acting in the Private Theatre of the Ming Dynasty" describes the singing, dancing, and role playing of private actors and the functions of literati troupe owners. (22) Based on original records rather than scholarly reports, his study views its subject from the perspective of ancient theatergoers. The primary materials cited in the article are mostly new to modern scholarship. Shen also experimented with Ming methods in his reproduction of the classical style. (23)

To date, research on Ming theater has extended from dramatic literature to include performing arts, a development particularly important to the subject. Historically, the performing arts as well as the visual spectacles of theater have not developed simultaneously or proportionally with the dramatic literature. The presentation of golden age drama has been marked by immaturity and reductive simplicity. For instance, ancient Greek performance caught up with its text only during the Hellenistic age (336-146 B.C.), when Greek tragedy had long passed its golden age. The technical wonders that helped create illusionary stage images--proscenium arches, wing-and-shutter settings, painted-perspective designs, and the groove system--only became standard practice for the English Restoration theater (1660-88), when the glories of Renaissance drama had already faded. (24)

The traditional theater of China followed a pattern similar to that of the West. Whereas China's classical drama peaked during the Yuan dynasty, its performing arts matured during the Ming era. The Yuan style of presentation was relatively simple, with many vestiges of storytelling and other narrative entertainment. For instance, a Yuan zaju opera permitted only one singer in a play, a practice apparently inherited from that of zhugongdiao ballads of the Jin era (1115-1234). When a zaju opera called for two characters to sing, the singer would double his/her roles, just as Greek actors did when a tragedy needed more than three characters. (25) The Ming stage, on the other hand, featured sophisticated performing arts characterized by a variety of styles. The growing prominence of singing, dancing, role playing, and visual spectacles of Ming opera gradually equaled or eclipsed the importance of play scripts by the end of the dynasty.

The study of Ming drama, whether of its literary scripts or its performative aspects, has yet to match the numbers of scholarly publications on the earlier or later periods. This situation is partially due to the elitist nature of Ming drama and its sophisticated styles of performance. Even those with some experience of working on Yuan opera may encounter difficulties in evaluating a Ming text. For instance, a Ming chuanqi libretto was deemed "much inferior" after it was compared with a Yuan zaju libretto. (26) Yet the only criteria suggested for the judgment, "economy and freshness," are more suitable for sanqu poetry than for opera librettos (223). Not surprisingly, the fact that the Yuan lyric expressed merely a general feeling, while the Ming lyric depicted a specific dramatic circumstance is ignored. (27) Even the sentimental and stylistic similarities between the two librettos are overlooked. What's more, a sanqu poem, "Qiusi" ("Autumn Thought"), is used as a benchmark for the criticism. The superiority of the Yuan libretto is based on a comparison with "Autumn Thought" (223), against which it is claimed for the former that "it hardly seems inferior." No actual comparison is made between these two Yuan verses, except finding that they come from the same author. However, my research proves that only Yaoshantang waiji, a sixteenth-century source, ascribes the "Autumn Thought" to the celebrated Yuan author, while all three sources of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, Liyuan yuefu, Zhongyuan yinyue, and Shuzhai lao xue congtan, identify the sanqu poem to a folk or unknown origin. (28)

Another difficulty the researcher confronts is that Ming drama often features allusive and ambiguous language to be decoded during its performance. An investigation of the acting technique thus becomes vital in interpreting the text. (29) Even the comprehension of a colloquial passage may require some knowledge of its staging. The following text was cited to prove the playwright's debt and close affinity to the Ming novelists, because "in its easy loquacity and love of detail it smacks of Chin P'ing Mei brand of fiction rather than of the dialogue of the stage":

   Ah, daughter, today you talk of finding a husband, tomorrow you'll
   talk of finding a husband--what's so great about finding a husband?
   Marry some man and before you've got past his gate his first wife
   will be letting you know who she is. She'll soon have your coiled
   hair scratched down, and you'll have to kneel or kowtow any time
   she says kneel or kowtow.... Now go hurry and do your makeup and
   entertain your visitors, or I've got a whip here and I'll beat you
   to a pulp with no mercy if you go on like this. (30)

These lines were in fact meant for a farcical presentation of the chou (clown) role type, instead of the naturalistic persuasion of a courtesan by her mother-procuress, which may resemble the novel mode as assumed by the author.

While textual research is difficult and dependent on performance study, the latter too has its own problems. First, the primary sources are usually scattered in contemporary books, notes, letters, diaries, poems, and memoirs and are thus are hard to collect. Second, the Ming literati, from whose writings we gather much of our information, tended to write in the symbolic or allusive style, making them not readily accessible or comprehensible. For instance, Zhang Dai (1597-1679), one of the literati and private theater owners, reported how the Hades scenes as depicted by the Tang painter Wu Daizi were staged in a Ming public performance. (31) His eyewitness account vividly described the scenarios when the condemned sinners were tortured by Yaksha, Rakshasa, or Ox-headed and Horse-faced demons. However, the three-dimensional set pieces, including saws and grinding stones, freezing ice and boiling cauldron, sword-hill and blood-ditch, are compared to two-dimensional paintings; and the thousand taels of cash spent on the lavish set converted to paper hell-money in a modern interpretation:

   In a most extravagant production, the scenes of the supernatural
   were represented as vividly, we are told, as the Tang master Wu
   Daozi's painting "Various scenes from Hell". Thousands of pieces of
   paper sacrificial money were burnt--presumably by the audience in
   dread and fear of the hell which suddenly seemed so real and near
   to them? (32)

Zhi-za, the term in Zhang Dai's original version which stands for set, was probably first misunderstood as "paper-bundle" that was then determined as "paper sacrificial money." To read this passage correctly, one has to know that zhi-za means paper-made funeral objects, that the ancient Chinese considered theater as a platform for the dead, and that those appearing on it were figures of the past. The set made for their use, whether in paper or otherwise, thus comprises objects for the other world, thus named zhi-za.

The misreading of primary data is a common occurrence. Two more errors are located in the above mentioned paragraph:

1. "Yu yunshu" should not be read as "a certain Yu Yunshu," but "my uncle Yun." The show was organized and financed by Zhang Dai's uncle.

2. "Nu-tai" does not mean "loges for women," but a "smaller platform" that serves the function of a box or loge. The character "nu" does not always mean "female" in classical Chinese. For instance, "nu-qiang" does not mean a city wall defended by Amazons, but that top portion of a city wall that is smaller in size.

While there is much room for improvement in existing scholarship, there is even more opportunity for discovery. The three theater worlds of the Ming--the court, the private, and the public--each generally separated from each other, and presenting different performances, demand individual critical attention. For example, Grant Shen's study covers only acting in the private theater, which differs from that in the court or public troupes with their respective styles and strengths. For another example, many have mentioned the schools of dramatists of the late Ming, yet none has shown a genuine appreciation of the technical issues that most concerned them. Academia's general support for Tang Xianzu's librettos in The Peony Pavilion would be more meaningful if the performance-related criticism of Tang's contemporaries were also understood.

Notes

A grant (R-103-000-007-112) is provided by the National University of Singapore to conduct thorough library research in the preparation of this article.

(1.) Scholarship often addresses the three hundred years of Ming drama as a whole. However, only references to the last one hundred years of the dynasty will be reviewed in this article.

(2.) See Herbert Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (London: William Heinemann, 1901), 256-75.

(3.) See Henry Wells, The Classical Drama of the Orient (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965), 3-153.

(4.) See Yao Hsin-nung, "Rise and Fall of the K'un Ch'u," T'ien Hsia Monthly 2, no.1 (1936): 63-84.

(5.) See Aoki Masaru's 1930 preface. The Chinese translation was published in 1936. See Zhongguo jinshi xiqu shi, trans. Wang Gulu (Shanghai: Commerce, 1936).

(6.) See Wang Guowei, Qu lu, vols. 3-5 (np: Fanyu Shenshi, 1909) and Song Yuan xiqu shi (Shanghai: Commerce, 1912).

(7.) Ch'en Shou-yi, "Ming Drama," in Chinese Literature: A Historical Introduction (New York: Ronald Press, 1961), 519-35.

(8.) See Lai Ming, "Libretti of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties: The Life of Tang Hsien-tsu and His Works," in A History of Chinese Literature (London: Cassell, 1964), 245-51.

(9.) Liu Wu-chi, "Dramas of the Literati and the People," in An Introduction to Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 247-61.

(10.) See Josephine Huang Hung, Ming Drama (Taipei: Heritage Press, 1966).

(11.) Ch'en concluded his study with the following:

   In the selection of plots ... Ming drama looked persistently if not
   exclusively to contemporary events for inspiration. Thus, in a
   sense, as far as the plots go, Ming drama was on the whole much
   more realistic, reminding us of the rise of middle-class comedy in
   eighteenth-century England as well as continental Europe. Ming
   drama ... has a tendency to utilize the vehicle for mere
   entertainment with no philosophical message. (535)

(12.) As if to call attention to his disagreement with Ch'en, Liu began his study of Ming drama with the following:

   [D]uring the Ming and Ch'ing periods, drama lost its intimate
   contact with the audience, particularly the common people, and
   tended to become a type of studio play for a few connoisseurs of
   ch'u poetry rather than a stage presentation for popular
   entertainment.... Little attempt was made to invent new plots or to
   deal with contemporary events and stories of social import. (247)

(13.) Liu sees the "declining into mere feats of poetic skill" and the "loss of contact with the people" as the weakness of the dominant genre of Ming drama (260).

(14.) See C. T. Hsia, "Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T'ang Hsientsu," in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 249-90.

(15.) See Colin Mackerras, "The Growth of the Chinese Regional Drama in the Ming and Ch'ing," Journal of Oriental Studies 9 (1971): 58-91.

(16.) See Cyril Birch, "Some Concerns and Methods of Ming Ch'uan-ch'i Drama," in Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, ed. Cyril Birch (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 220-58.

(17.) See William Dolby, "'Nanxi' Drama, 'Chuanqi' Drama, and the Beginnings of Kunqu Drama," and "The Theatre World during the Ming Dynasty," in A History of Chinese Drama (London: Elek Books, 1976), 71-113.

(18.) See Hsu Tao-Ching, "Changes in the Chinese Theatre since the Advent of the Drama: The Innovation of the K'un Tunes," in The Chinese Conception of the Theatre (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 272-76. The next chapter, although titled "The Decline of K'un Dramas and the Future of Chinese Theatre," turns to the rise of Beijing opera, the author's favorite topic, again.

(19.) See John Hu, "Ming Dynasty Drama," in Chinese Theatre: From Its Origins to the Present Day, ed. Colin Mackerras (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 60-91.

(20.) See Cyril Birch, "Introduction: To the Readers as Fellow Mandarin," in Scenes for Mandarins: The Elite Theatre of the Ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 1-20.

(21.) Interview with the author on 5 February 2002 at the Esplanade, Singapore, which is published in The Arts Magazine (January/February 2003): 18-21.

(22.) See Grant Shen, "Acting in the Private Theatre of the Ming dynasty," Asian Theatre Journal 15 (1998):64-86.

(23.) See Grant Shen, "Zaju and Kabuki in English: Directing in the Classical Styles," TDR The Drama Review 171 (2001): 134-48.

(24.) By the 1630s, only the Jacobean (1603-25) and Caroline (1625-42) court entertainment employed Italian staging techniques, introduced by Inigo Jones.

(25.) Acting in Greek tragedy was not a profession and began as a mere appendage to playwriting. Both Thespis and Aeschylus, for instance, acted in the tragedies they penned. As a rule, the chorus outnumbered the actors. Sophocles called for no more than three actors in tragedy, and his judgment actually prevailed.

(26.) See Birch, "Some Concerns and Methods," 223-24.

(27.) Birch's translation of the Yuan lyric reads:

   Setting sun, wide sky, darkling river's meander,
   Hills of Ch'u, folds of green, rest on the clear air.
   Ice-jar cosmos, sky to earth,
   Trees tall and short are cloud-brocaded.
   Will someone ask Wang Wei
   For a landscape to transcribe this sorrow?

His translation of the Ming lyric reads:

   Singing strings, metal pick, body of sandalwood
   Have made a knell for oh, so many who were young.
   Startle the roosting bird from his still forest
   Make dance the dragon in his dim ravine--
   But no strum, no twang
   Can all express of this sad song of pining.

(28.) See Quan Yuan Sanqu [Complete collection of sanqu poetry of the Yuan dynasty], compiled by Sui ShusEn (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 242, 1732-33.

(29.) See Shen, "Acting in the Private Theatre," 74-76.

(30.) See Birch, "Some Concerns and Methods," 225-26.

(31.) See Zhang Dai, Taoan mengyi [Taoan' Remembrance of Dreams], vol. 6 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, [early 1700s] 1982), 52-53.

(32.) See Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama, 111.

GRANT SHEN is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. He has directed English versions of zaju opera (1995), kabuki (1998), and Sanskrit theatre (2002), all in their classical styles. He has published in TDR, ATJ, and Theatre Journal. His drama reviews appear regularly in arts magazines.