Storytellers, Sermons, Sales Pitches, and other Deceptive Features of City Life: A Cognitive Approach to Point of View in Chinese Plays

Abstract

This paper draws on scholarship in performance history, art history, cognitive humanities, and the anthropology of urbanization and markets to argue that theatrical conventions like “fourth wall” illusion and asides first developed in China’s Song-Yuan period and matured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the special influence of new demands of city life, commerce, and print culture. As anthropologists argue that participation in markets requires temporary, imaginative suspension of other roles and identities, so suspension of disbelief in mimetic portrayals (as opposed to storytelling evocations) of fictional characters with fictional minds requires “leaving one’s identity at the theater door.” Song-Yuan Chinese theater, like Japanese Noh of the Muromachi and later periods, accomplished this in a mediated fashion by including star characters to focus on and “spectators’ representative” characters to identify with. Drawing inspiration from the protean, promiscuous space and punning humor of printed miscellanies and annotated vernacular fiction, the late Ming comedy Ge dai xiao 歌代嘯 (A song for a laugh) “flattens” the “asymmetric” (mediated) structure of the traditional Yuan form it takes for its model by stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes featuring buffoonish “side” characters in a generic town setting.

Keywords:

• cognitive humanities
• performance history
• point of view
• suspension of disbelief
• text world theory
• urbanization

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editorial board and reviewers for CHINOPERL for their patient reading and helpful comments on multiple iterations of the present study. I would also like to thank Professors Jia Jinhua 賈晉華, Kong Qingmao 孔慶茂, and Sun Shulei 孫書磊 for their help in enabling me to view the original and download scans of the extant manuscript of Ge dai xiao at the Nanjing Library. Early versions of this paper were presented at the AAS and MLA as part of panels organized and chaired by Flora Shao, Benjamin Elman, Liana Chen, and Alexa Huang.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Casey Schoenberger is Assistant Professor of Chinese Culture at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on cognitive, comparative, linguistic, and musical aspects of East Asian poetry and performance.

Notes

1 See William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Haiyan Lee, “Chinese Feelings: Notes on a Ritual Theory of Emotion,” The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 9.2 (2016): 1–37; and Ling Hon Lam, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

2 See Naifei Ding, Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in “Jin Ping Mei” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) and Shang Wei, “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture,” in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, ed. Judith Zeitlin and Lydia Liu (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), pp. 187–238.

3 See Paul Werth, Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse (Harlow: Longman, 1999); Tracy Cruickshank and Ernestine Lahey, “Building the Stages of Drama: Towards a Text World Theory Account of Dramatic Play-Texts,” Journal of Literary Semantics 39.1 (2010): 67–91; and Dan McIntyre, Point of View in Plays: A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Viewpoint in Drama and other Text-types (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006).

4 See Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002); and Jonathan Hay, “World-Making in Performance and Painting: An Intertwined History,” in Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture, ed. Judith Zeitlin and Yuhang Li (University of Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2014), pp. 30–43.

5 See Michèle de la Pradelle, Market Day in Provence, trans. Amy Jacobs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way,” The Holocene 20.4 (2010): 565–73.

6 Wilt Idema, “Why You Never Have Read a Yuan Drama: The Transformation of Zaju at the Ming Court,” in Studi in onore di Lanciello Lanciotti, ed. S.M. Carletti, M. Sacchetti, and P. Santangelo (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici, 1996), p. 783 and Shang, “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture,” p. 209.

7 See Hay, “World-Making in Performance and Painting,” p. 32.

8 Besides the Chinese examples cited in this essay, others include Golden Age Athens (the most populous and commercial of the Greek city-states), late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Northern Italy, Molière’s mid-seventeenth-century Paris (when the population nearly doubled and much new infrastructure, like street lighting, was built), and Tokugawa-era Japan (when Jōruri and Kabuki theaters flourished among urban audiences in commercial centers like Ōsaka and Edo, the latter arguably the largest city in the world for much of the eighteenth century). See Colin Chant, “Greece,” in Pre-Industrial Cities and Technology, ed. Colin Chant and David Goodman (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 48–80 and James McClain and John Merriman, “Edo and Paris: Cities and Power,” in Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, ed. James McClain, John Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 3–38.

9 See Goldewijk et al., “Long-term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population.”

10 Apart from the Tang capital of Chang’an 長安, located near present-day Xi’an 西安, Chinese cities are referred to by the names of the cities that now stand on or near their historic sites, such as Kaifeng 開封 for Bianliang 汴梁, Hangzhou 杭州 for Southern Song Lin’an 臨安, and Wenzhou 溫州 for Yongjia 永嘉.

11 Max Weber, The City, trans. D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), p. 13.

12 See Stephen Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), esp. chap. 5.

13 Chye Kiang Heng, Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes (Honololu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), p. 7.

14 Strict curfews were enforced by official drumbeats; see ibid., pp. 19–23.

15 Stephen West, “Playing with Food: Performance, Food, and the Aesthetics of Artificiality in the Sung and Yuan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57.1 (1997): 70.

16 See Naide Weng 耐得翁 (c. 1235), “Shijing 市井” (Markets and Wells) in Ducheng jisheng 都城紀勝 (The countable splendors of the capital), Yingyin Wenyuan ge Siku quanshu 影印文淵閣四庫全書 (Printed facsimile Wenyuan ge Complete library of the four treasuries; Taipei: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1983), vol. 590. This seemingly chaotic state of affairs paradoxically also corresponded to a shift in perception toward cities as spaces of natural beauty. See Christian de Pee, “Nature’s Capital: The City as Garden in The Splendid Scenery of the Capital (Ducheng jisheng, 1235),” in Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127–1279, ed. Joseph Lam, Shuen-fu Lin, Christian de Pee, and Martin Powers (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017), pp. 179–204. The early modern city not only became a space where much consumption was on offer, but also a space worth “consuming” in its own right.

17 See West, “Playing with Food,” pp. 98–100.

18 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology 44.1 (1938): 12.

19 See, for example, West’s translation of the famous Yuan Dynasty song suite, Zhuangjia bu shi goulan 莊家不識勾欄 (Country bumpkin knows naught of the theater), in “Playing with Food,” pp. 94–97.

20 Associated especially with Yuan Dynasty northern China, zaju composition had become more of a literary exercise by Ge dai xiao’s time, though performance of famous works was still common, albeit likely using methods of a more contemporary style, like Kunqu 崑曲. The Yuan Dynasty methods for performing zaju were believed lost by the late Ming: see Wang Jide 王驥德 (d. 1623), “Zalun di sanshi jiu, shang” 雜論第三十九上 (Number thirty-nine: Miscellaneous theories, part 1), Qulü 曲律 (The gamut of songwriting), fascicle 3, in Zhongguo gudian xiqu lunzhu jicheng 中國古典戲曲論著集成 (Collected works of classical Chinese dramaturgy; Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1959), 4:155.

21 The precise date and location of Ge dai xiao’s composition are not known. The only surviving premodern version is a hand-copied manuscript, dated to 1826, currently held at the Nanjing Library. That manuscript, purportedly a copy of an older version created at the behest of Shaoxing calligrapher and bibliophile, Shen Fucan 沈復粲 (1779–1850) (see fig. 1), attributes the play to painter–calligrapher–poet, Xu Wei 徐渭 (1521–1593), and includes a preface and annotations attributed to Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610) (see fig. 4), a set of “guidelines” (fanli 凡例) attributed to one “Hangzhou’s Adept of the Original Energy” (Hulin chonghe jushi 虎林沖和居士), and illustrations attributed to Pan Chengxuan 潘承選 (see fig. 2). For more details on this edition, as well as the authorship question, see Sun Shulei 孫書磊, “Ge dai xiao jiujing chaoben ji qi zuozhe kaobian” 歌代嘯舊精抄本及其作者考辯 (The Nanjing Library rare book manuscript Ge dai xiao and textual research on its author), in Nanjing tushuguan cang guben xiqu congkao 南京圖書館藏孤本戲曲叢考 (Collected research on rare drama texts housed at the Nanjing Library; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), pp. 138–49. Though not attempting to answer the question definitively here, I agree with Sun’s skepticism regarding the Xu Wei attribution, and tentatively assume that the playwright and author of the guidelines are one and the same. As Sun argues, Fang Ruhao 方如浩 of Hangzhou (fl. c. 1611–1644) seems more likely than any other candidate, though this raises further questions, such as the authenticity of the Yuan Hongdao preface and comments, or the possibility of Fang having been active earlier than previously thought. Attributing the work to (Hulin) Chonghe jushi throughout, I cite the version published in Xu Wei ji 徐渭集 (The collected works of Xu Wei; Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1983), pp. 1231–73, which most accurately reflects the Nanjing Library manuscript in its details (song titles, differentiation of “padding” characters, and so on).

22 Xiao 嘯 refers to a style of whistling and/or singing practiced by medieval artists like the third-century “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” (竹林七賢). See Jia Man 賈嫚, “‘Xiao’ yuezhong de renwen pinzao—yi Tang taizong fei Wei shi mu yuewu bihua xiaoji wei li” “嘯”樂中的人文品藻—以唐太宗妃韋氏墓樂舞壁畫嘯伎為例 (Humanistic evaluation of “xiao” music—Wall painting of xiao technique in tomb of Tang Taizong’s Consort Wei as case study), Renwen zazhi 人文雜誌 (The journal of humanities) 12: 87–91. Though no one in the late imperial period knew how to xiao, they sometimes still used the word to mean “sing” with a rarefied implication. At the same time, the late Ming saw a new focus on the homophonous laughter (笑), as reflected in titles like Shen Jing’s 沈璟 (1553–1610) episodic comedy, Boxiao ji 博笑記 (World of laughter) and the late Ming miscellany, Boxiao zhuji 博笑珠璣 (Pearls of laughter), which includes many of the same puns, riddles, and recontextualization elements that constitute the humor of Ge dai xiao. For analysis of the latter and related urban culture, see Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), esp. chap. 1.

23 Chonghe jushi, Xu Wei ji, p. 1233.

24 Karl Kao describes a similar dynamic in the “sequel” to Journey to the West, Xiyou bu 西遊補, composed around the same time as Ge dai xiao. See Karl S.Y. Kao, “A Tower of Myriad Mirrors: Theory and Practice of Narrative in the Hsi-yu Pu,” in Wen-Lin Volume II: Studies in the Chinese Humanities, ed. Tse-tsung Chow (Madison, WI: Department of East Asian Languages and Literature and Hong Kong: N. T. T. Chinese Language Research Centre, 1989), pp. 233–35. The original, sixteenth-century novel literalizes certain Buddhist metaphors, like “the monkey of the mind,” and Dong Yue’s 董說 (1620–1686) sequel expands the idea to compare fiction and reality to “emptiness” and “form” in the Buddhist sense.

25 The use, throughout the play, of the monks’ lay surnames is atypical, hinting, perhaps, at their worldly natures. The use of these surnames also helps bring to life the idiom, “Li wearing Zhang’s hat.”

26 Kimberly Besio, “Singing in Place of Screaming: Subversion as Satire in Late Imperial China,” in Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essays in Honor of Wilt Idema, ed. Maghiel van Crevel, Michel Hockx, and Tian Yuan Tan (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 153–73 includes a full translation of this act. All translations in this article are my own unless otherwise indicated. See ibid. for more on the play’s word play and modification of Yuan zaju conventions. My translation of the full play is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2020.

27 A modern adaptation directed by Su Yu 蘇宇 was put on in Beijing in 2009.

28 The fanli notes: “The songs in Yuan Dynasty drama are all performed by one actor, either a male lead or a female lead. This is because they generally focus on the story of one character. This play tells four different stories in four different acts with no one star in particular … . Nevertheless, each act focuses on a single star singer. Is the classical model not thereby upheld?  … The four singing characters are all suitable for painted-face (clown) roles; alternatively, Wang Jidi’s wife and mother-in-law may be played by female role types with the painted face actor taking on the part of the husband. However, the wife is definitely not a refined lady.” (元曲不拘正旦正末, 四齣總出一喉. 蓋總敘一人事也. 此曲四齣四事, 原無主名 … . 然一齣終是一人主唱, 此猶存典型意乎?  … 四唱者俱宜花面, 無已, 王之妻或姑用旦角. 而其花面則以厥夫代之. 蓋縱妻終非俊物也.) Chonghe jushi, Xu Wei ji, p. 1232.

29 See Werth, Text Worlds and Cruickshank and Lahey, “Building the Stages of Drama.”

30 See Werth, Text Worlds, chap. 8.

31 On “embodied transparency” (moments when spectators enjoy relatively direct access to a fictional character’s thoughts or feeling), and why such moments must remain limited in duration, see Lisa Zunshine, Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp. 21–43.

32 As compared to the sort of novel a reader of Western languages may be accustomed to, traditional Chinese vernacular novels include a high proportion of verse in the form of poetry, storytelling, and drama performances that may take place within and/or frame the fictional world evoked by the narrative. For a prominent example, see David Rolston, “Nonrealistic Uses of Oral Performing Literature in the Jin Ping Mei cihua,” CHINOPERL Papers 17 (1994), esp. pp. 18–36.

33 Chonghe jushi, Xu Wei ji, pp. 1242–43.

34 Though this level of embeddedness may not occur before the late Ming, extra-dialogic stage directions related to knowledge and emotion, even stage directions prescribing that a character, e.g., “feign a smile/laugh,” were not new in the late Ming. See, e.g., Wilt Idema, “Some Aspects of Pai-yüeh-ti’ing: Script and Performance,” in Proceedings of International Conference on Kuan Han-ch’ing (Taipei: Xingzheng yuan wenhua jianshe weiyuan hui, 1994), pp. 57–77 on early such examples.

35 See Wu Hung, The Double Screen, esp. pp. 72–102.

36 See Hay, “World-Making in Performance and Painting.”

37 Ibid., p. 37.

38 Ibid.

39 Regina Llamas, “Comic Roles and Performance in the Play ‘Zhang Xie Zhuangyuan’ with a Complete Translation” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1998), p. 65.

40 See, e.g., Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, chap. 2 and Lam, Spatiality of Emotion, “Prologue.”

41 Lam, Spatiality of Emotion, pp. 27–28.

42 See ibid., pp. 151–52.

43 See David Griffiths, The Training of Noh Actors and “The Dove” (New York: Routledge, 1998), chap. 2.

44 See Qitao Guo, Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage. The Confucian Transformation of Popular Culture in Late Imperial Huizhou (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 6; David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), esp. pp. 168–75; and Ren Bantang 任半塘, Tang xi nong 唐戲弄 (Tang plays; Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, [1958] 1984).

45 See Ren, Tang xi nong, p. 498.

46 For example, the two most popular premodern Korean performing arts were talchum, a masked drama featuring heavy audience engagement, and pansori, a musical storytelling art. Korean performers and audiences arguably did not develop mimetic drama with a strong “fourth wall” separating audiences from a fictional world until the twentieth century. Marshall Pihl, The Korean Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) notes that there were no public theaters in Korea prior to the twentieth century, perhaps owing to the relative lack of a merchant class. The urban fraction of Korea’s population did not approach that of Song China until 1800; see Goldewijk et al., “Long-term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population.” Since the twentieth century, pansori performers have attempted to translate the form into a full mimetic drama called “changgeuk,” yet it is still less popular than the original, more fluid storyteller performance.

47 See Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, chap. 4.

48 See McIntyre, Point of View in Plays, pp. 106–17.

49 La Pradelle, Market Day in Provence, p. 7 (emphasis added).

50 See Avner Offer, “Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard,” The Economic History Review, New Series 50.30 (1997): 450–76.

51 See Heng, Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats, pp. 183–86.

52 Wilt Idema, “Why You Never Have Read a Yuan Drama,” p. 783.

53 Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (Leiden: Brill, 1990), pp. 137–39.

54 See Zeami 世阿弥, Zeami: Performance Notes, trans. Tom Hare (New York: Columbia University Press [fifteenth century], 2008), pp. 103–105 and pp. 152–53.

55 Between zaju and xiwen (also the late Ming–early Qing chuanqi drama that largely inherits the conventions of xiwen) there is an important difference in the functions of the mo role: whereas in zaju the mo means roughly “male role,” with the zhengmo 正末 serving as the “star” of plays with a male lead, the mo in xiwen and chuanqi serves in more of a mediating, supporting, or “stage director”-like capacity, with the role type of sheng 生 serving many of the functions assigned to the zhengmo in zaju.

56 Llamas, “Comic Roles and Performance,” p. 61.

57 See Yongle dadian xiwen sanzhong jiaozhu 永樂大典戲文三種校注 (Three southern plays from the Great canon of the Yongle era, annotated), ed. Qian Nanyang 錢南揚 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), p. 16.

58 Lam, Spatiality of Emotion, pp. 112–17.

59 Ibid., p. 27.

60 See McIntyre, Point of View in Plays, pp. 58–60.

61 Lam, Spatiality of Emotion, pp. 122–23.

62 See Wang, “Lun yinzi di sanshi qi” 論引子第三十一 (Number thirty-one: On preludes), Qulü, fascicle 3, 138.

63 See Edward Slingerland, Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 221–31.

64 See West, “Playing with Food.”

65 Stephen West and Wilt Idema, “Introduction,” in The Story of the Western Wing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 78.

66 Zunshine cites research showing that, in reality, people of lower social status tend to be better at “reading” the thoughts and feelings of higher status people than the reverse; see “Mindreading and Social Status,” in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). That lower class characters would be suitable audience “interpreters” for higher class characters, therefore, seems consonant with actual psychology. The asymmetric relationship between Crimson and the elite lovers at the “center” of the story is also implied by the physical size of the characters in artistic renderings such as Ming painter Qiu Ying’s 仇英 (1498–1552) (though not obviously much younger than them, Crimson appears to be much smaller than the hero and heroine). As Zhang Fa notes, it was only in the Song urban environment that some artists began to depict figures as equal in size regardless of social status; see The History and Spirit of Chinese Art, Volume 2, trans. Charlie Ng and Phoebe Poon (Honolulu: Silkroad Press, 2016), p. 102.

67 See Yu Fusheng 余復生, “Song zaju ‘duansong’ kaobian” 宋雜劇“斷送”考辨 (Differentiating the sending-off music of Song Dynasty variety drama), Journal of Tianjin Conservatory of Music 4 (2006): 52–68 and Yu Fusheng, “Houhang kaoshu” 後行考述 (On back-row musicians), Musicology in China 3 (2017): pp. 82–87.

68 West, “Playing with Food,” p. 96.

69 Southern Song paintings of peddlers by, e.g., Li Song 李嵩 and Su Hanchen 蘇漢臣 testify to their having become an object of inherent aesthetic interest.

70 See Lam, Spatiality of Emotion, p. 118.

71 Guben Yuan Ming zaju 孤本元明雜劇 (Single-edition Yuan-Ming variety drama), ed. Wang Jilie 王季烈 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1941), 10:49. I have interpolated the padding characters in accordance with Wang Shoutai 王守泰, Kunqu qupai ji taoshu fanli ji: beitao, shangce 崑曲曲牌及套數範例集北套上冊 (Collected guidelines for Kunqu aria suite patterns: Northern suites, vol. 1), ed. Ren Bantang 任半塘 (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1997), p. 272. Listed in the early fifteenth-century sequel to Lugui bu 錄鬼簿 (Roster of ghosts) and cited by Zhu Youdun 朱有燉 (1379–1439), this story is unlikely newer than the early Ming, though it is hard to tell to what extent it might have been revised between then and the time it was recorded in the extant Maiwang guan 脈望館 (sixteenth century) edition. The women’s items Li Kui tries to sell seem to reflect a Jurchen style.

72 La Pradelle, Market Day in Provence, p. 20.

73 Ding, Obscene Things, p. 57; see also ibid., pp. 63–79. Ding argues that Jin Shengtan’s extensive prefaces aim to correct a mistaken view, popularized especially by philosopher Li Zhi 李贄, of the vernacular novel, Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 (Water margin), as a co-authored, exhortatory expression of righteous indignation. Jin’s prefaces instead evoke a cautionary tale of high literary craft wrought by a single author (Shi Nai’an 施耐庵 alone, rather than Shi and Luo Guanzhong 羅貫中). Twentieth-century critics like Ye Changhai 葉長海 typically describe Ge dai xiao as a wry, absurdist indictment of the corruption of the times, with English-language critics like Besio frequently translating xiao 嘯 as “scream.” While this creates a nice parallel with Xu Wei’s four “cries,” I believe it is mistaken for reasons described in notes 21 and 22. See Ye Changhai, “Sisheng yuan, Ge dai xiao ji qita” 四聲猿, 歌代嘯及其他 (Gibbon of four cries, Song for a laugh, and others), Xiju yishu 戲劇藝術 (Theatre arts) 1994.4: 111–18 and Besio, “Singing in Place of Screaming.” The homophony with “laugh,” seems more likely an intentional pun, hence the translation “Song for a laugh.”

74 Shang, “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture,” p. 209. See also He, Home and the World, esp. chap. 1.

75 See Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-century China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), pp. 63–67.

76 See Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

77 Chonghe jushi, Xu Wei ji, p. 1236. Many of the jokes here play on the analogy between war and sex, common in late imperial erotic literature, and on the potential slippage between moral guidance and sexual initiation of a younger man by an older one. The sentence, “He is not my disciple, but he leads men skillfully, step-by-step,” for example, combines phrases from two different passages in the Analects of Confucius, one in which the sage permits disciples to use military force against a corrupt former student, and the second from a passage on the sage’s skill at initiating disciples into profound mysteries. The analogy between learning and “entering a gate” or “penetrating” a “Way” provides additional such fodder. See, e.g., Peimin Ni, Understanding the Analects of Confucius: A New Translation of “Lunyu” with Annotations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), pp. 235–36 and p. 269. Citing medieval comic dialogues and early twentieth-century cross-talk performances, Yuming He demonstrates the non-mutually exclusive nature of scholarly debate, textual exegesis, and humorous spectacle. See “Talking Back to the Master: Play and Subversion in Entertainment Uses of the Analects” in Confucius, The Analects: A Norton Critical Edition, trans. Simon Leys, ed. Michael Nylan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), pp. 243–58.

78 Possibly the oldest extra-dialogic indication of “aside” in the Chinese tradition occurs in the Yongle dadian court case drama Xiao Sun tu 小孫屠 (Little butcher Sun). See Yongle dadian xiwen sanzhong, p. 287 and note 34 above.

79 See Besio, “Singing in Place of Screaming,” pp. 154–55.

80 Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, p. 108.

81 Hay, “World-Making in Performance and Painting,” pp. 31–32.

82 Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, p. 55.

83 The Shanxi village performance tradition of Luogu zaxi 鑼鼓雜戲 (cymbal and drum variety plays) includes a special role called the “dabao 打報” designated to fulfill precisely this mediating function. Moreover, as suggested by Dou Kai 竇楷 and Yuan Hongxuan 袁宏軒, the dabao, like Zhang Xie’s mo, may have been an evolution from a storyteller figure who ventriloquized many different roles. See “Shilun Shanxi luogu zaxi” 試論山西鑼鼓雜戲 (Initial observations on Shanxi cymbal and drum variety plays), Xiqu yishu 戲曲藝術 (Theatre arts) 4: 73–79.

84 Song and Ming Dynasty ministers’ official hats featured wing-like extensions on their sides to symbolize the virtue of speaking face-to-face. On the traditional stage, the most famous judge figure, Judge Bao, always appears wearing a hat with long “wings” in the style of the Northern Song, when he lived.

85 Chonghe jushi, Xu Wei ji, pp. 1260, 1262.

86 See Shiamin Kwa, Strange Eventful Histories: Identity, Performance, and Xu Wei’s Four Cries of a Gibbon (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), chap. 2.