Table Of ContentMonks, Bandits,
Lovers, and Immortals
Eleven Early Chinese Plays
Monks, Bandits,
Lovers, and Immortals
Eleven Early Chinese Plays
Edited and Translated,
with an Introduction, by
STEPHEN H. WEST
and WILT L. IDEMA
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2010 by Hackett Publishing Company,Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
For further information,please address:
Hackett Publishing Company,Inc.
P.O.Box 44937
Indianapolis,IN 46244-0937
www.hackettpublishing.com
Cover design by Abigail Coyle
Text design inspired by Stephen H.West
Composition by Agnew’s,Inc.
Printed at Sheridan Books,Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Monks,bandits,lovers,and immortals :eleven early Chinese plays / edited
and translated with an introduction by Stephen H.West and Wilt L.Idema.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60384-200-6 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-60384-201-3 (cloth)
1.Chinese drama—960–1644.I.West,Stephen H.II.Idema,W.L.
(Wilt L.)
PL2592.5.M66 2010
895.1’2408—dc22 2009045964
e-ISBN:978-1-60384-303-4 (Adobe ebook)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
A Finding List of Northern Dramas in Th is Anthology by Editions xxxvii
Table of Dynasties xxxviii
Conventions xxxix
Guan Hanqing
1. Moving Heaven and Shaking Earth: Th e Injustice to Dou E 1
2. Rescriptor-in-Waiting Bao Th rice Investigates the Butterfl y Dream 37
3. A Beauty Pining in Her Boudoir: Th e Pavilion for Praying
to the Moon 77
Bai Pu
4. Th e Autumn Nights of the Lustrous Emperor of Tang:
Rain on the Wutong Tree 105
Ma Zhiyuan
5. Breaking a Troubling Dream: A Lone Goose in Autumn
over the Palaces of Han 155
Zheng Guangzu
6. Dazed behind the Green Ring Lattice, Qiannü’s Soul
Leaves Her Body 195
Li Xingdao
7. Rescriptor-in-Waiting Bao’s Clever Trick: Th e Record of
the Chalk Circle 237
Anonymous
8. Zhongli of the Han Leads Lan Caihe to Enlightenment 283
Zhu Youdun
9. A Leopard Monk Returns to the Laity of His Own Accord 314
10. Black Whirlwind Li Spurns Riches out of Righteousness 356
v
vi Contents
Th e Writing Club of Hangzhou
11. Little Butcher Sun 389
Appendix 1: A Note on the Translation and Study of Early Chinese
Drama in Europe and the United States 455
Appendix 2: Bibliography and Suggested Readings 457
Appendix 3: A Partial List of Modern English Translations
of Early Drama 469
Index 473
Support for Hackett titles, and information about forthcoming postings, can be found at
www.hackettpublishing.com.
Acknowledgments
W
e have been working together on the study of early Chinese drama now for
more than thirty years, and this represents our third jointly authored book.
We repeat here the statement in our fi rst, Chinese Th eater 1100–1450, that this
is a truly “collaborative eff ort of both of us, for which we assume equal
responsibility.”
We continue our lifelong debt to our late teachers in the fi eld of Chinese
drama, Tanaka Kenji and James Irving Crump, but as we have grown older that
debt has spread to many colleagues in the fi eld who have off ered stimulating
advice and counsel: Tseng Yong-yih, Sun Chongtao, Wu Shuyin, Wang Chiu-
kuei, Hua Wei, Wang Ayling, Cyril Birch, Dirk Jonker, and a host of others, as
well as our drama students, He Yuming, Patricia Sieber, Karin Myhre, Robin
Ruizendaal, Tan Tianyuan, and Shiamin Kwa. Most of all, however, we have
always found it a joy to work together, and our working relationship has been
marked by humor, patience, and an intellectual stimulation that has created
expectations of a certain level of rigorous investigation of texts and a commen-
surate level of understanding of where those texts fi t in middle-period history,
culture, and literature.
In the preparation of the manuscript for publication, we would like to thank
Jennifer Bussio (Tempe), Tan Tianyuan (Harvard), and also Rick Todhunter,
Meera Dash, Abigail Coyle, Carrie Wagner, and all of their colleagues of Hackett
Publishing Company.
Tempe, Arizona, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009
Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema
vii
Introduction
Th e Historical Background
For the average Westerner, the impression of the Chinese theater is primarily
one of spectacle and cacophony. We are most often treated to Peking Opera
or to Kun Opera, with their lavish costumes, well-articulated masks of facial
paint, and string and percussion instruments. In eyes that are culturally at-
tuned to a mimetic spoken drama or to the staging of the classical opera, Chi-
nese opera seems strangely confusing. Th ere are no props beyond a table or
chair, stagehands walk freely back and forth on stage during the performance,
and the audience pays little attention until the singing begins. But what is ex-
otic to us is bedrock in Chinese culture. Drama, along with ritual and food, is
one of the three major legs of ordinary Chinese life. And it has been so for a
millennium.
Th e plays that are presented in this anthology all come from the early part
of that thousand-year span, and all stem from specifi c places and specifi c times.
Th ey are documents that must be placed in historical context in order to un-
derstand their provenance, their social and cultural background, and their liter-
ary value. Th ese dramas, fi rst written in the period from 1250 to 1450 but often
only preserved in much later revised versions, build on and refl ect a living oral
tradition of performance that already had a long history by the time they
emerged. Th ey therefore do not spring onto the stage fully formed and utterly
new, but are a genre of writing that shares structures and language with earlier
types of performance art. Th e commonalities they share are their structure—
an alternation of prose and sung poetry; their language—a mixture of dense
colloquial and simple classical Chinese; and their mode of presentation—one
singer functioning both as a describing and judging narrator of events, and as a
lyrical voice of the singer/protagonist’s emotional and physical state. Th e diff er-
ences are in certain modes of presentation—while other forms relate stories
solely through the eyes of only one singer-storyteller, in plays other people pop-
ulate the stage as secondary and interactive characters.
While the language and the basic structure of performance art—alternating
prose and rhymed text—can be traced far back in time, at least to the so-called
transformation tales (bianwen) of the eighth to the tenth centuries, zaju, or
Northern drama, which accounts for the bulk of plays in this anthology, is part
of a recognizable group of urban arts that fl ourished in the great cities of China
ix
