Zhou Bangyan

Twelve Zhou Bangyan During Zhou Bangyan’s lifetime (1056–1121) there was a community of lyricists tied together by their direct or indirect association with Su Shi (though few followed Su Shi’s style in song lyric). They read and critiqued one another’s works, wrote colophons and prefaces, and composed companion pieces using the same rhymes as other lyricists in their circle. The genre had become another literati practice, though one that sometimes retained its own set of values (and these resisted shared public values). Even the elusive Yan Jidao, so tied to an earlier generation, was on the margins of that network. But Zhou Bangyan does not appear to have been a part of this community. While many Southern Song critics considered Zhou Bangyan’s work to be the culmination of Northern Song lyric, there is no entirely credible reference to his lyrics from the Northern Song itself. The possible exception is a mention in Chen Shidao’s Houshan shihua 後山詩話, whose own authenticity has been in doubt since the Southern Song.1 If Zhou held a brief appointment in Huizong’s musical establishment, it was a political one. In Li Qingzhao’s critical review of the major 1. A reference to something that occurred after the author’s death is one of the most reli- able indications that a text has, at the very least, interpolations. Other entries are considered dubious. We simply do not know which entries, if any, are authentic. It is a weak text on which to hang an argument that Zhou Bangyan’s lyrics were known to his more famous contemporaries. Zhou Bangyan 309 figures of song lyric, Zhou Bangyan is unmentioned. Since she picks fault with every lyricist she mentions, one possible explanation for her silence regarding Zhou Bangyan is that his work was above reproach. Another possible explanation is that she either didn’t know his work or didn’t consider it in the same league as those she did mention.2 In Yuefu yaci Zeng Zao begins the second fascicle with twenty-nine lyrics by Zhou Bangyan, but we must compare that with He Zhu’s forty-six lyrics and Ye Mengde’s fifty-five in the same fascicle. This may suggest that by 1149 his reputation was “on the rise” (or it may be simply what Zeng Zao had in his library). It seems that Zhou Bangyan’s lyrics were not simply the ancestor of the Southern Song style, but that he was selected—from a somewhat less prominent role in the world of song lyric—to be the ancestor. He was evidently a lyricist working largely in isolation from contem- porary lyricists—at least until his later years. Zhou Bangyan is usually treated as somehow “later” than the lyricists discussed previously, but his earliest datable lyrics may be from 1073, the same year that we begin to have credibly datable lyrics for Su Shi.3 His career as a song lyricist overlaps with all the lyricists of the generation after Su Shi, and He Zhu lived longer. None of them (again with the possible exception of Chen Shidao) acknowledge his existence, and he does not acknowledge theirs. A Hangzhou native, Zhou Bangyan had a good career, neither rising to the heights nor sinking to the depths of officialdom. Things began well for him when he presented a “Poetic Exposition on Bianjing” (“Biandu fu” 汴都賦) to Shenzong in 1072, and it made his reputation. Again in 1098 Zhezong summoned him, asking him if he remembered it, and Zhou Bangyan resubmitted it to the throne. This is solid evidence of someone known by the imperial house. He held a series of reasonably good provincial posts and was at least twice posted to the capital. He was apparently immune to the meteoric rise and fall of careers during the regime of Wang Anshi and his followers.4 2. We cannot definitively date the “Discussion of Song Lyric”詞論 . It could be late Northern Song. 3. The 1073 dating for several lyrics is Sun Hong’s dating; Luo Kanglie places the earliest lyrics a few years later. 4. There is a tradition culminating in Luo Kanglie that tries to read Zhou’s life and lyrics in .

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