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History as Meta-Theater: Kong Shangren's (1648-1718) The Peach Blossom Fan Allison E. Bernard Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Allison E. Bernard All rights reserved ABSTRACT History as Meta-Theater: Kong Shangren’s (1648-1718) The Peach Blossom Fan Allison E. Bernard This dissertation examines the uses of meta-theater in The Peach Blossom Fan, an early Qing historical drama by Kong Shangren (1648-1718), arguing that the meta-theatrical elements of the play serve as an innovative form of historiography. Kong Shangren, a member of the Confucian Kong lineage, is unusual for a Chinese playwright: he was steeped more deeply in the world of Confucian ritual music than the work of writing lyrics for dramatic arias, yet The Peach Blossom Fan is recognized as one of the last great chuanqi dramas of the Ming-Qing period. Kong wrote at a time of great social and cultural transformation, completing The Peach Blossom Fan not long after the violent conflicts of the mid-17th century Ming-Qing dynastic transition were finally coming to an end. At the same time, the literary genre of chuanqi drama was also in the midst of its own transitions, as writers of the early Qing increasingly turned to other literary genres beyond this popular late Ming form. I argue that The Peach Blossom Fan marks a key transition in the development of the chuanqi drama, owing both to the play’s formal innovations that exceed the traditional chuanqi form, such as its rejection of the conventional “grand reunion” finale and re-envisioning of the role-type system, and also to its synthesis of historiographical judgements with the world of theatrical performance. Focusing on the play’s uses of meta-theater, I show how The Peach Blossom Fan models the work of historiography by guiding its readers to cultivate the “cold, clear eyes” of a historical witness. Kong Shangren’s methods as a playwright-historian are at their best in The Peach Blossom Fan’s engagement with Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646): a blacklisted late Ming politician who was also a well-received playwright in his own time. Ruan’s life and work have been largely neglected in previous scholarship, despite his significance as a 17th century dramatist. The Peach Blossom Fan uniquely places Ruan Dacheng on stage as a dramatic character at the same time as it turns Ruan’s own chuanqi drama, The Swallow Letter, into an unsuccessful play-within-a-play. In so doing, The Peach Blossom Fan invites reflection on the writer alongside his work, synecdochically turning The Swallow Letter into the music of the collapsing Ming Dynasty and pronouncing Ruan’s fate as the villainous playwright who wrote it. Kong thereby creates a new dramatic motif of the “playwright on stage” — a method of meta-theatrical literary criticism that is picked up by later playwrights, such as the mid-Qing writer Jiang Shiquan. In The Peach Blossom Fan, Kong Shangren also creates a new vision for the worldly stage within and around his play; one in which the problems of social and theatrical performance are tied up in the formal world of the printed chuanqi drama. I analyze the textual dimensions of the play’s meta-theatrical innovations by focusing on Kong’s engagement with the late Ming Linchuan drama school, from The Peach Blossom Fan’s performative re-casting of the familiar female self-portrait motif, to the play’s meta-theatrical reflections on Kong’s own position as its early Qing playwright. The Peach Blossom Fan is framed through a series of paratexts, including an account of how the play itself came into being. The self-reflexivity of The Peach Blossom Fan as a literary text thereby extends its meta-theatrical frames to Kong Shangren’s world as its playwright, using notions of theatrical performance to examine the work of reading, writing, and ritual. Taken together, I contend, these layers of The Peach Blossom Fan theatricalize the literary genre of the chuanqi, drawing attention to the representational limits of historical narratives and capturing the ways in which writing is yet another form of performance. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..………ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Part I. Reading Ruan Dacheng 1. Meta-theater and the Making of Ruan Dacheng, The Peach Blossom Fan’s Playwright- Villain……………………………………………………………………………………………37 2. Discordant Sounds: The Swallow Letter as Script, Performance, and Synecdoche…………..99 Part II. The Linchuan School Legacy 3. Interlude: From Staging the Drama to Staging the Dramatist: Tang Xianzu in Dreams of Linchuan………………………………………………………………………………………..146 4. Printed from the Same Woodblock?: Portraiture and Performance from the Linchuan School to The Peach Blossom Fan………………………………………………………………………..177 Part III. The Theatrical Chuanqi Drama 5. The Grand Disintegration: The Ending Problem and the Shadow of the Linchuan School…246 6. The Body Problem: History, Ritual, and The Openness of The Peach Blossom Fan………..295 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...347 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………354 !i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing this dissertation has been made possible through the support, engagement, and encouragement of many kind and generous people. It has been an honor to spend nine formative, exhilarating, and thought-provoking years in the EALAC department at Columbia, during which I have benefited immeasurably from being part of this community of scholars. I first want to thank my dissertation advisor, Shang Wei, who from the very beginning of my time at Columbia as an MA student encouraged my work in Ming-Qing literature. Shang Wei’s creative thinking and incredible breadth and depth of knowledge are in turn humbling and inspiring, and my thinking about the field has been shaped through our many, many hours of stimulating conversations. I am so grateful to him for seeing my potential during my early years in the program and for all that I have learned from him throughout my years as his student. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Dorothy Ko, who has been a source of guidance and encouragement from the start. Not only has she offered meticulous comments and critiques on drafts of work in progress, but she has also helped me open up new avenues in my thinking by posing unexpected questions. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members, Lydia Liu, Haruo Shirane, and Patricia Sieber, for their comments and suggestions during my defense, and for helping me to think about how to revise the present dissertation into a book manuscript. A seminar with Lydia Liu early on in my PhD coursework, “The Digital in the Humanities,” introduced me to new ways of thinking about literature, text, writing, and language, while a seminar on Japanese poetry and poetics with Haruo Shirane was a wonderful opportunity to work comparatively with Japanese materials (not to mention test out my range in classical Japanese). I have learned a great !ii deal from Patricia Sieber’s work on Chinese drama, and greatly appreciate her many helpful suggestions for re-casting the dissertation as a book. Thank you all for your feedback and support. During my time at Columbia, I have also had the pleasure of working with many other faculty members in EALAC and beyond. In particular, discussions related to and outside of coursework with Gopal Sukhu, Li Feng, Robert Hymes, David Lurie, Gerald Cloud, Elisheva Carlebach, and Lening Liu have impacted various aspects of this project. Members of the EALAC office staff, including Tony Lee, Kevin Stillwell, and David Munevar, have been very kind and helpful over the past year. Laura Schlein gets particular thanks for finally figuring out how to handle my file, and also for being a source of friendly support. My work on this dissertation has benefited from conversations with scholars from other institutions as well, including the opportunity to participate in a range of recent conferences and workshops at various stages of the research and writing process. I would like to thank Judith Zeitlin for sharing her course materials on The Peach Blossom Fan with me. Regina Llamas offered valuable and detailed feedback on an earlier draft of Chapter 1, and kindly invited me to attend a workshop for the forthcoming How to Read Chinese Drama volume, where I learned a great deal from everyone present. I would also like to thank Kevin Wetmore for his questions and comments at ATHE in Boston; David Spafford for his comments at AAS in Denver on meta- theater and issues of performance; and Tarryn Chun for her mentorship during and after the AAP meeting in Boston. My writing and research for this dissertation has been made possible by generous financial support for time spent writing, conducting research abroad, and language study. FLAS !iii fellowships in Chinese and Japanese, as well as an EALAC summer fellowship, supported my language studies in Taiwan, Oakland, and Kyoto during my early years in the program. A Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities/GSAS Travel Grant from Columbia and a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship supported fieldwork for this project in China, and a Julie How Fellowship from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute was instrumental to helping me complete the writing process. I would like to thank my hosts at Peking University for welcoming me to campus during the bulk of my research period in China, and especially to Liu Yongqiang for his kind guidance and conversations in his office over tea. Thanks are also due to Zhu Wanshu for introducing me to his faculty and graduate student cohort at Renmin University; Yan Zinan and Liu Ziyun for their conversation and company during my time in Beijing; Jiang Lijing and her graduate student Lu Mei for logistical help during my trip to Qufu; Xu Zhengui for a long conversation about Kong Shangren; and Miao Huaimin for research advice in Nanjing.