Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Studies in the History of Chinese Texts

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David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera

Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the “National Drama” of China from the Late Qing to the Present

David L. Rolston

LEIDEN | BOSTON

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Cover Illustration: Backstage performance abstract giving lists of characters and the actors to perform them scene by scene for a Cheng Yanqiu play that premiered in 1924. Pasted on slips with actors’ names (in this case the slips of paper are red or faded red and are clearly no longer complete) are used to update such an abstract. Wang Wenzhang 王文章, ed., Jingju daishi Cheng Yanqiu 京劇大師程硯秋 (Jingju master Cheng Yanqiu; Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 2003), p. 41.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rolston, David L., 1952– author. Title: Inscribing Jingju/Peking opera : textualization and performance, authorship and censorship of the “national drama” of China from the late Qing to the present / by David L. Rolston. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Studies in the history of Chinese texts, 1877–9425 ; volume 12 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021011864 (print) | LCCN 2021011865 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004461925 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004463394 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Operas, Chinese—China—Beijing—History and criticism Classification: LCC ML1751.C58 B447 2021 (print) | LCC ML1751.C58 (ebook) | DDC 792.50951/156—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011864 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011865

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Copyright 2021 by David L. Rolston. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com.

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David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xix

Introduction: What Is Jingju, and Why Should We Care about It? 1 1 Names, Names, Names 1 1.1 “National” Dramatic Forms before Jingju: Kunqu 5 1.2 Yabu vs. Huabu 9 1.3 Anhui Troupes in Beijing: Mixing Performance Styles 13 1.4 From Luantan to (Xipi plus Erhuang equals) Pihuang 16 1.5 Beijing and Jingju 20 1.6 Old vs. New Plays, Beijing-Style vs. Shanghai-Style 24 1.7 Becoming National Drama 26 1.8 Spreading Out from Beijing 30 1.9 Spreading to the Borders 40 1.10 A National Form? 42 1.11 Jingju Outside China/Outside Chinese 44 1.12 A National Drama? 50 2 Why Should We Care about Jingju? 50 2.1 The Great Classroom: Theater and Education 51 2.2 Listening to Plays Is the Same as Reading Books 54 2.3 Representing China: Military and Political Leaders 56 2.4 Representing China: Cultural and Underworld Leaders 62 2.5 Everywhere You Look and Listen: Transmission through Old Media 65 2.6 Everywhere You Look and Listen: Transmission through New Media 73 2.7 A Nation of Jingju Fanatics 91

1 Jingju Repertoire(s) and Types of Plays and Playscripts 95 1 The Repertoire(s) 95 2 Types of Plays 123 3 Types of Playscripts 162 3.1 Manuscript Copies 165 3.2 Printed Copies 177 3.3 Play Format: Division into Scenes 187 3.4 Musical Notation 189

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3.5 Play Texts That Record Stage Movement in Detail (Chuantou, Paichang, Shenduan pu, etc.) 192 3.6 Textualization of Parts of Plays 196 3.7 Competition, Innovation, Printing, and a Preliminary Look at the Question of Libretto Fixity 201

2 Textualization and Authorship before Xikao (Research into Plays) 210 1 Authorship and Textualization of “Classical Chinese Indigenous Theater” 213 2 Two Kinds of Early Literati Jingju Playwrights and the Common Fate of Their Plays 226 3 Early “Ordinary” Actors as Playwrights 266 4 Literati Who Became Actors and Also Wrote Plays 280 5 Early “Professional” Playwrights 288

3 The Production of a Mass-Market Collection of Jingju Playscripts: Xikao (Research into Plays) 293 1 The Publication History of Xikao 296 2 What Is Xikao? The Title(s) 315 3 What Is Xikao? Looking for the Master Plan 355 4 Who Put Xikao Together? 371 5 Where Did the Playscripts Come From? 392 6 The Photos 397

4 After Xikao: The Rise of Theater Studies, Copyright, and New Censorship Regimes 406 1 Evaluation of Xikao 406 2 New Approaches That Arose at Least Partially in Reaction to Xikao 421 2.1 The Rise of Xixue/Juxue 421 2.2 The Development of Stronger Conceptions of Copyright, Authorship, and Performance Rights 428 2.3 New Censorship Regimes 444

5 New Kinds of Playwrights 482 1 Chen Moxiang: The Most Prolific Jingju Playwright of the Republican Era 482 2 Weng Ouhong: The Most Prolific/Famous Jingju Playwright 504 3 Playwriting after Weng Ouhong 513

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6 New Kinds of Publication 524 1 Single Plays Published in Anthologies 530 2 Single Plays Published as Books 536 3 Single Plays Published in Periodicals 549 4 New Media and the Recording of Image, Movement, and Sound 565 5 Recording More Detail in Play Texts: Adding Graphic Elements and Photographs 568 6 New Recording Media and New Ways of Telling Plays (Shuoxi) 576 7 New Recording Media: DVD Bonus Features, Digitization, Hypertexts, and the Web 580

Epilogue: Living with Textual Fixity 585

Appendix: List of Plays in Xikao 589 Bibliography 622 Index 711

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Preface

Jingju 京劇 (Peking opera)1 is known as a performance medium that privileges the actor over the playscript. Mainly for this reason, and because of the common conception that Jingju actors tended to be functionally illiterate, there has been a tendency to underestimate the importance of Jingju playscripts and other kinds of the textualization (in any media) of how plays have been or should be performed. This book focuses on the processes by which this theatrical tradition became textualized in a wide variety of forms, for a wide variety of purposes, for a wide variety of practitioners, consumers, and government censors. Written forms of this theatrical tradition became more important as its status, and the status of its practitioners, rose in society. These processes of textualization, along with some of the forces driving them (especially state censorship), worked to stabilize performance practice and remove a lot of the fluidity and improvisation that marked the tradition in its earlier stages. Certain aspects of my scholarly career have led me to stress written forms of Jingju (Peking opera) and to spend more time reading its libretti than most anyone I know. I did my doctorate in an area studies department that stressed written Chinese over spoken Chinese and literature over performance, as was very common then, even in the case of literary traditions that were not very “literary” and were thought to have been heavily influenced by oral storytelling. However, during my first trip to “Greater China” right after finishing my master’s degree (in 1980–1982 as a student on the campus of Taiwan University), I fell in love with xiqu 戲曲 (Chinese indigenous theater) and with its most influential form,2 Jingju, in particular. Having not had the advantage of grow- ing up listening to and watching performances of xiqu and possessing a pair of subpar ears (courtesy, I think, of eardrum ruptures and scarring when I was young), I found that I needed to do much preparation, in the form of reading playscripts, before I went to hear or watch3 performances; and when attend- ing theater performances, I had to keep my eyes on the subtitles to follow what was being sung (the fact that, for both movies and stage performances, Chinese subtitles are provided more consistently for sung portions than for

1 A history of the ways Jingju has been referred to, and the connotations of each, will be presented in the Introduction. 2 Evidence for this claim will also be given in the Introduction. 3 As will become evident in the Introduction, different audiences, at different times, stressed the aural over the visual or vice versa in performances of Jingju.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access x Preface dialogue can be taken as evidence that, even for native Chinese, the former is harder to understand orally than the latter). During those years on the campus of Taiwan University, I was fortunate to participate in a variety of activities that focused on Jingju: a one-on-one Jingju class at the “Stanford Center” (devoted at that time to improving the Chinese of American graduate students), a class on Jingju taught for regular Taiwan University students, and a student club devoted to learning and performing Jingju. In my second year, the teacher of the two classes and the faculty advisor of the club heard that the national opera school (Fuxing Juxiao 復興劇校) was looking for its first-ever foreign language secretary and recommended me. The school had regularly scheduled public performances by the students on campus (every Tuesday and Thursday morning) and public performances in the evenings by the school’s troupe (which included past graduates and current students) that took their place in the regular rotation of performances, along with the four military-based troupes, at the main theater for Jingju in Taibei. For all of the plays to be performed I had to produce English language plot summaries, and to act as guide and interpreter for any foreign guests4 at the performances on campus. This meant that I not only had to read the libretti first, but I also had to read them even more carefully than before. The school thought that a simple translation of the Chinese summaries they had been providing for Chinese audiences would suffice, but that quickly turned out to be completely untenable. One of the problems was that those Chinese summaries were extremely laconic and elliptical presentations of entire stories that did not bother to point out which parts would actually be performed, whereas I wanted to make clear in my summaries exactly what the foreign spectators would see. Another problem was that the Chinese versions assumed a level of competency in Chinese culture, literature, and theater that one could not expect in foreign spectators. For these and other reasons, my summaries ended up much longer than the original Chinese ones. I also translated a play that the school was planning to perform on an international tour.5

4 I was very excited when the famous “theater of the absurd” playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909–1994) came to watch the students perform traditional plays and to watch a Jingju-style performance by senior actors of his The Chairs, but his English was no good and my high school spoken French completely failed me. 5 The printed collections of Jingju plays I collected while in Taiwan to use as reference works for my work at the opera school included one that is featured in chapter 3 below and a later one that was heavily influenced by it. The first was bound in eleven volumes and the second in fifteen. I was able to find a copy of the second one in a used-book stall and talk the price down a bit, but even so the purchase required turning over all the money that I had on me. Not having even enough money for bus fare, my wife and I carried the set home on foot.

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After a month-long whirlwind tour of the Mainland in the summer of 1982, spending most every night watching performances of Jingju and other types of Chinese indigenous theater, I returned home to await the arrival of crates mailed from Taiwan packed with hundreds of recordings on cassette tape of Jingju, some purchased but the bulk recorded from radio broadcasts of both phonograph recordings and live performances. But although for many years I maintained a regime of listening to a play or a tape every night, I decided that for the purposes of my doctoral dissertation it would not be a good idea, for a number of reasons, to switch my original plan to work on Chinese fiction for my dissertation. It would not be until I got tenure that I first offered a graduate seminar on Jingju,6 and only after the publication of my second book on Chinese fiction (1997), that I began to concentrate my formal research activities on theater instead of fiction. It was around that time, the later 1990s, that I began to go to Beijing for a month or so every summer or every second summer to see what was going on in Jingju. I had contacts in the theater world that I had made during a year-long stay in Nanjing in 1986, and expanded on them by doing such things as going to performances, noting mistakes in translation in the programs or subtitles (at the time performances for regular Chinese audiences were losing money and only performances for foreign tourists were really profitable), bringing them to the attention of troupe administrators, and offering to help correct them. I have continued to contribute in this way to the English language textualization of Jingju up to the present, being responsible, for instance, for the finalization of the English subtitles for performances by visiting Jingju troupes at Lincoln Center in New York (2014 and 2015) and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. (2014). I have been pushing, particularly of late, for the provision of English language subtitles for DVD s of Jingju, and for the addition to such DVD s of specialist commentary, in both English and Chinese. There is a severe shortage of the former (what is available does not tend to be very well done), and a complete lack of the latter.7 This book developed out of an earlier project focused on the world that was represented on the Jingju stage, with particular attention to the types of characters that appeared, how they are categorized, and how those categories affected how they were handled. That book was planned to be twenty chapters

6 The students were initially quite resistant to the course. This was before the “canon” wars and the idea that popular literature was also worthy of study became common. My department still stressed a rather narrow idea of “literature,” although the name of the department had already changed from Far Eastern Languages and Literatures to Asian Languages and Cultures. It is only quite recently that my department hired someone in performance studies. 7 The translation of Jingju plays into English is taken up below, in chapter 6.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access xii Preface long, and it gradually became clear that finishing it would require another lifetime (besides the length of the project, there was also the problem that there has been an exponential boom in Chinese publishing on Jingju). The Introduction in the present book makes use, in a very condensed form, of some of the introductory material drafted for the earlier project.8 The Introduction first lays out the history of Jingju through the names it has been called and the importance that it has had, then explains how it works as a theatrical system. Jingju began as just another popular form of Chinese indigenous theater closely tied to one locality (Beijing) that was able, primarily through appropriating and assimilating attractive elements from other forms of theater, to develop into something many called the “national theater” of China. Despite only becoming a mature theatrical form with its own charac- teristics in the middle of the nineteenth century, Jingju has been able to con- vince many that it is older and more “classical” than it really is. For many, it “represents” China. Chapter 1 introduces the repertoire(s) of Jingju and the categories that Jingju plays were divided into and discusses how traditional Chinese play texts in general, and Jingju playscripts in particular, were originally organized. It discusses how elements of plays, including non-verbal and performance elements, could and were textualized before the advent of media that could con- veniently capture and integrate aural and visual elements into the “texts” that they produced. Chapter 2 covers the years from the very beginnings of Jingju up into the beginning of its “golden age” in the Republican period (1912–1949) when, in a brand new way, competition between stars became very fierce and that competition was waged, in part, through the production of new plays written with literati help. This chapter focuses on what kinds of roles playwrights had in the period prior to that new development, what kinds of people they were, and who among them were more successful than others. The playwrights ranged from literati without strong connections in the world of Jingju, who apparently thought that their pens/writing brushes could help their plays succeed regard- less of that flaw (until their plays’ failure to find permanent places in the Jingju repertoire proved otherwise), to people with a stronger understanding of the needs of performance (including ordinary actors who nevertheless managed to write plays, literati who became Jingju performers and also wrote plays, and a small number of professional playwrights with strong connections with indi- vidual troupes and actors). As will be shown in detail, only in the case of the

8 A chapter on Jingju’s stages, theaters, troupes, actors, and audiences will be made available as part of the supplementary material for this book posted on the publisher’s website.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Preface xiii plays by literati without theater connections were their works published under their names (or pseudonyms) in the hope that they would circulate widely and be influential as texts. The plays of the other playwrights did not, in general, circulate as texts, the exceptions only coming at the end of the period, when literati turned actors turned playwrights with an activist bent published their plays in newspapers under their own names. Chapter 3 traces the rather tortured but very interesting and telling history of the publication of a pathbreaking collection of over 500 Jingju playscripts, Xikao 戲考 (Research into plays), in forty installments, from 1912–1925, in Shanghai.9 At the time of its publication, it was the biggest such collection ever published, something that remained true, oddly enough, for a very long time. As will be shown in this chapter and expanded upon in the following chapter, Xikao became both the model for many later collections of Jingju playscripts and the object of criticism by their compilers, who claimed to have surpassed it, if not in bulk, then at least in how the play texts were collected, edited, and arranged on the page. It is only very rarely that Xikao mentions the name of anyone responsible for writing a play text it includes; instead the collection is most concerned with making the reader believe that some of its play texts originated from the private manuscript collections of the star actors who had created the most popular and influential versions of the main characters in them. One of the criticisms of Xikao was that it was not “scientific” enough. Chapter 4 shows that it was in the wake of the appearance of Xikao that different people advocated the study of theater as a discipline and began to pub- lish periodicals that also took that point of view. Those periodicals published Jingju play texts but did so in entirely new ways, one of which was to proclaim that the copyright and performance rights were retained by the playwright. It was also during this period that the Republic got more serious about enforcing copyright and censoring plays. As mentioned above, the Republican era was marked by a new and very intense competition between Jingju stars that most particularly took the form of a rush to premiere new plays, and even to premiere new plays that can be seen as responses to a rival’s new plays. Most of these playscripts were supplied by members of the star’s “brain trust,” who presented themselves as offering their services for free. Chapter 5 showcases the most prolific playwright of the

9 For a list of the plays in Xikao see Appendix A, where they appear in the order of their appearance in the collection and are assigned a serial number (for how this was done, see the introduction to the appendix). When plays are mentioned below, if they appear in Xikao their serial numbers will be noted; if they do not appear in it, that will also be noted.

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Republican era, who seems in a number of senses to have “worked” for the star that he wrote almost all of his plays for, but who almost never talked or wrote about actual compensation for the various things he did for that star. A second playwright, who wrote even more plays in total and for a much longer period than the first one, wrote them for a variety of stars in the Republic, and then phased from writing for some of the same stars in the early years of the People’s Republic to ending up as a professional playwright attached to the national Jingju troupe. The rest of the chapter looks at attempts, during the People’s Republic, to both professionalize Jingju playwriting and train enough playwrights to revise old plays and create new ones sufficient to meet the needs of a new regime of censorship that affected performance and playwriting in entirely new ways. In recent decades, as Jingju has lost substantial chunks of its old audience to old age and death and potential new audience members to new forms of entertainment, the number of in-house playwrights attached to troupes has declined severely, a gap only partially closed by the possibility of performing plays written by free-lance playwrights. The final chapter looks at the new types of Jingju play texts and new ways of publishing them that have appeared since 1949. It also looks at how more and more detail was preserved in some of those printed texts, through the inclu- sion of more highly detailed stage directions, notes, and appendices, and how unprecedented detail was preserved by means of film and video. The question of using such media, whether in the form of recordings of performances or of teachers teaching students, to wholly or partially replace the living teacher’s role in the transmission of Jingju and its repertoire naturally comes up. A theme that has appeared in many of the previous chapters, how to present Jingju to foreigners,10 is also addressed. The chapter ends with a discus- sion of how the information provided in digital forms of Jingju playscripts can be further enhanced by providing additional supplemental materials (expert commentary and other kinds of “bonus material”) to DVD recordings of performances, linking digital texts through hypertext links, and increasing access to playscripts and other material through online postings.

10 While I did spend precisely one day learning German (as a child I talked my father into using his high school German textbook to teach me; we both decided there was no future in the project) and passed a qualifying exam in French as a graduate student, I claim no competency in any European language, but I think I have a pretty good idea of the range of activities in this field of endeavor in English, having participated in some of them myself. As for the related question of scholarship on Jingju in European languages, cita- tions below are few, but I can affirm that to the best of my knowledge, nothing resembling the present project as appeared in any of them.

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The more print, audio, and multimedia reproductions of Jingju play texts have been made available, the more those versions of Jingju plays have been used to learn to perform the plays; and the more the student is required to emulate what is given in such fixed forms, the more likely it is that the ways the plays are performed becomes fixed. As is pointed out in a number of places in the book, and in reference to different censorship regimes, another prime reason for both the textualization and the textual fixation of Jingju has been the demands of censors. Censors both want to know in advance exactly what is going to be performed, and want a written record of what has been approved for performance that can be used to judge how faithfully performances stick to what was approved. Censorial regimes have gotten only more powerful and more intrusive as time has gone by in the history of Jingju. This book closes with a brief meditation on the darker side of the textualization (= fixation) of Jingju.11 Since this is the first book that I know of, in English or Chinese, that tries to give a sustained history of the textualization of a performance genre,12 let alone the history of the textualization of Jingju, I have had no models to follow.13 That can make one feel a bit isolated and wondering why no one else has thought of such a wonderful project, but it certainly is helpful in at least one respect. Since such explorations are clearly still at an exploratory stage, I have not been under the kind of pressure to “theorize” my approach to the material in the kinds of ways that trying to intervene in more crowded and competitive fields often makes necessary. Instead, my approach has been to use “common sense” terms (and common sense understanding of those terms) and language, so that the things I point out in this study will be more readily comparable with future work on textualization of very different performance traditions. I have also preferred to use broader conceptions of terms such as “text” and “textualization.” In my usage, in accord with more recent formulations of these two

11 It is not the case that textualization automatically means complete fixation, even of the play text itself. Early manuscript copies of Jingju playscripts, for instance, can provide either small or large scale examples of alternative choices by taking such steps as providing stage directions that say that here you can do either A or B, or say either C or D, or do something on the order of E. These basically disappear in printed play texts, except for rare examples in which alternatives are given in footnotes. It is not the case that print or multimedia prohibit the provision of alternatives, it is just the case that the main tendency has been to not exploit such opportunities. 12 I am excluding the work of folklorists on oral epics and folk songs. 13 An example of a book on a different performance genre that has influenced the ways I have approached some things, but in which the word textualization occurs only once (p. 287), is Julie Stone Peters, The Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access xvi Preface terms that have arisen to meet the needs of our increasingly multimedia world, the former is not restricted to written texts but includes multimedia “texts,” whereas the latter includes the making of tangible and transmissible records or notations of things that were not, originally, purely textual (in the older, more narrow usage). Despite the variety of opinions on the matter among literary critics, “texts” for me are always material.14 The title of the book includes five important terms. The first of these, “inscribing,” is used because it seems the least limiting way to refer to the fixation of aspects of Jingju in any media whatsoever.15 Whereas in folklore studies, “textualization” is used to refer to the transcription—through writing, aural and/or video reproduction, digitization, or combinations thereof—of (typically oral) “performance,”16 this book will cover both transcriptions of aspects of performances (transcribing all aspects being a practical impossibil- ity) and the writing and revision of playscripts for performance17 (in Jingju it is hard to find examples of “closet plays” not written with at least some hope of performance) and consumption (including reading, which does not, however, loom very large). In the development of Jingju, “censorship” preceded the development of a strong conception of “authorship.” In the late Qing and the Republic, for example, the owners of the theater where an objectionable play was performed were far more likely to be held liable for the harm thought to have been caused

14 For instance, Matthias Richter, The Embodied Text (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 9, speaks of the text as “essentially non-material,” while Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1989), pp. 16–18 and 26–33, speaks of the “work” as immaterial and the text as material. 15 In both the Near East and China, early forms of writing featured inscription or incision of symbols onto substances such as bone or stone, and many English words, such as transcription, memorialize that past, even when transcribing does not entail literal “inscription.” On the etymology of words for “writing” in a number of languages, see Ignace Gelb, A Study of Writing, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 6–7. 16 See, for instance, Jonathan Ready, Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 108–109, where he surveys the use of the word “textualization” and related terms and explains his decision to use the former to refer to the process of the writing down of the Homeric epics. 17 In folklore studies, the emphasis has been on recording oral performances to both pre- serve some feature(s) of them and to making them more accessible to study. See John Miles Foley, “From Oral Performance to Paper-Text to Cyber-Edition,” Oral Tradition 20.2 (October 2005): 233–65, for an example that involves the production of both an experimental paper version and a hypertextual electronic version. Textualization of performances to “revitalize” indigenous languages in decline has also been done. For an example, see Gerald L. Carr and Barbra Meek, “The Poetics of Language Revitalization: Text, Performance, and Change,” Journal of Folklore Research 50.1–3 (2013): 191–216.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Preface xvii than the playwright).18 Like Hollywood scriptwriters, Jingju playwrights rarely enjoyed the kind of creative authority and freedom (and attendant fame) asso- ciated with the “romantic author,” a conception of authorship that some scholars see as integral to the modern notion of copyright.19 Finally, the idea that Jingju was (and still is for some) the “national drama” of China conveys quite succinctly its cultural importance (a question addressed far less succinctly in the second half of the introduction). Desire for a national drama, something new to late 19th- and early 20th-century China, was largely prompted by new understandings (including misunderstandings) of the importance of drama in the West, fed by new information (sometimes dis- torted) arriving by new media first invented in the West, and a desire for theater that was Chinese that could be both seen and read by Westerners. Chinese regimes of censorship pushed for textualization of Chinese theater to facili- tate the policing of performances, something whose effects became more and more real as the power, capabilities, and interest of the state in these affairs increased, culminating in the demand that everything be textualized in the PRC. As opposed to the textualization of oral “literature” by scholars who were often non-native to the cultures that produced those traditions,20 in the case

18 This would change, with severe consequences, in the Cultural Revolution and the years leading up to it; the Cultural Revolution is commonly thought to have begun with criticism of a Jingju play (see chapter 4). The amount of resources the PRC currently invests in censorship, and its success at making certain things basically “disappear” is, of course, the focus of a lot of scholarly concern, but the target of that kind of censorship is primarily the internet and not theater. For two very recent books that make that fact very clear, see Margaret E. Roberts, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), and Margaret Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 19 As Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), shows in great detail, the solitary romantic author was and is a myth. In Chapter 8 he shows how authorship in plays and films is inherently collabora- tive, despite efforts by playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett who went to court to have their plays performed as written, and the pushing of the “auteur” theory in the case of film. Another way to move away from this romantic ideal is to speak of the author as a composite of functions, as in Raji C. Steineck and Christiane Schwermann, eds., That Wonderful Composite Called Author: Authorship in East Asian Literatures from the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2014), “Introduction,” pp. 1–29. 20 For an example of Chinese intellectuals textualizing an oral tradition and the kind of editorial decisions made, see Anne E. McLaren and Emily Yu Zhang, “Recreating ‘Traditional’ Folk Epics in Contemporary China: The Politics of Textual Transmission,” Asian Ethnology 76.1 (2017): 19–41. For an example of textualization that involved both Western scholars and native practitioners, see Mark Bender, “Co-creations, Master Texts, and Monuments: Long Narrative Poems of Ethnic Minority Groups in China,” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 38.2 (2019): 65–90.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access xviii Preface of Jingju, despite the input of literati and embedding of “cultural workers” and representatives of the Party in troupes and theater companies, the textualization of Jingju was mostly carried out by practitioners, including actors who were never professional actors such as Chen Moxiang 陳墨香 (1884–1912) and Weng Ouhong 翁偶虹 (1908–1994) (see chapter 5).

The supplementary chapter to this book, “Stages, Theatres, Troupes, Actors, and Audiences”, has been made available online and is referenced via a unique DOI number on the website www.figshare.com. It may be accessed by scanning the QR code, or alternatively by accessing https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14828352.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for many years, and in the course of those years I have become indebted to a wide range of people and institutions for their help and encouragement. My doctoral dissertation was on Chinese fiction at the University of Chicago, but the long years before I finished work on that degree included a lot of Chinese language training, two years in Taiwan watching plays whenever I could and working at a Chinese opera school. The whole process was overseen by my main advisor, David T. Roy (1933–2016), who was always more interested in the late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei than most any- thing else, but will always be my North Star when it comes to scholarship and professional integrity. I began teaching at the University of Michigan as a visiting lecturer even before I finished my degree, and was lucky enough to get a tenure-track posi- tion the next year. Over the decades both my department and the Center for Chinese Studies have been very generous in terms of financial support and the rich human resources of the Asian Studies community, including the graduate students, have always been important to my own growth. The three institutions outside the University of Michigan that have kept me in contact with scholars of like interests located primarily in North America are the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the Association for Asian Performance (AAP), and The Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (CHINOPERL). The annual meetings of these three organizations and especially being editor of the house journal of the last of the three have enabled me to come in close contact with a wide variety of scholars and scholarly approaches. I am particularly thankful for the chance to work with CHINOPERL’s wonderful editorial board. I have been very lucky in my interactions with people in the world of Jingju in both Taiwan and China. I must admit that I did not manage, over the decades, to keep in contact with those I met in Taiwan in 1980–1982, with the sole exception of Tseng Yong-yih (Zeng Yongyi), with whom I took a class at Taiwan National University and have been fortunate enough to see again sev- eral times at academic conferences. My first trip to China was for only a month, in 1982, too brief to get to know anyone as I ran from city to city with my wife to watch plays, but in 1986 we had the chance to live in China for almost a year, primarily in Nanjing. A young man came up to talk to me as I was waiting to go into a theater to see a performance in Nanjing and we became friends. His name was Wang Yuan and he

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access xx Acknowledgments was well connected and enjoyed introducing me to new people, face to face in Nanjing, and by letters that I took with me to Beijing and other places. It was through him that I met Wen Ruhua, who had become quite famous for performing a play that Weng Ouhong wrote for him that allowed him to show off both his skill at performing the young male roles that he, as a male, was offi- cially allowed to perform, and young female roles that he had secretly learned from Zhang Junqiu (1920–1997). Wang Yuan, unfortunately, was dead from a sudden illness by the next time I got to go to China, but I get to see Ruhua and hear his thoughts on Jingju every time I go to Beijing. It was in the late 1990s that I began to go to Beijing quite regularly at the end of most every school year. On one such trip, while I was watching the gradu- ation plays of the students of Zhongguo Xiqu Xueyuan (Academy of Chinese Theater Arts), someone came and sat next to me, we began to talk, and quickly became friends. His name was Hai Zhen and he was the Chair of the Music Department of the Academy at the time (later he would become the Curator of the Library, a post from which he recently retired). He arranged for me to give the first of a series, over the years, of talks for the Academy, and to teach there for a semester. He is extremely curious and interested in learning new things. It was through Hai Zhen that I got to know Fu Jin, a professor at the Academy who has been at the very center of a multiyear program to turn the study of Jingju into a real academic discipline, both in terms of organizing bi-annual conferences on Jingju and overseeing the editing and publication of a wide range of resources critical to the study of Jingju. Many people have read and commented on parts of this book and I am grateful to all of them, particularly to those who yelled at me. The colleague who put the most effort into trying to make its text readable and presentable, however, is Catherine Swatek, recently retired from the University of British Columbia. She is a repeat-offender, having also put a tremendous amount of effort into cleaning up the manuscript for my 1997 book. Being naturally thick- headed, I have not always accepted her good advice, for which she should not be blamed. Last but not least, it is with great pleasure that I acknowledge the long- term and very patient support of my wife, Kathryn Rinehart, and two children, Benjamin and Elizabeth. I made sure to sneak all three of them into footnotes, since their experience as a co-conspirator (Kathryn), a jazz musician (Benjamin), and a choreographer (Elizabeth) have been great sources of inspi- ration for me.

David L. Rolston - 9789004463394 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:08:38PM via free access