|
COPYRIGHT 2005 www.wmich.edu/compdr
The origin of Chinese theater can be traced back to its ancient roots in Chinese primitive shamanism. The birth and growth of a full-fledged drama with dialogue, singing, action, and most importantly, impersonation, in medieval China, however, began in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), the golden age of Chinese drama. The tradition of Yuan zaju (Yuan poetic and music drama, or literally, "miscellaneous drama") was practically lost to us in spite of its short revivals in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties (1644-1911). Little external evidence survived to substantiate a reconstruction of the original conditions and performance style of Yuan zaju. This essay is a study of the performance of Yuan zaju vis-a-vis its stage directions in the context of its speeches, dialogues, and songs. It draws on an electronic database that I have designed to collect all stage directions marked with ke (indicating action in a stage direction) totaling more than 7,300 with an average of more than 45 for each play from the corpus of Yuan zaju that consists of 162 plays.
Since Yuan zaju was centered on qu (songs and tunes of songs), bai (spoken prose and poetry) and ke were not considered as nearly important as qu. As a matter of fact, the plays (with a few exceptions) in Yuankan zaju sanshi zhong (The Thirty Zaju Plays in Yuan Printings), the earliest surviving collection of the thirty Yuan zaju plays printed in the Yuan dynasty, include only some incidental prose and a few directions marked with ke, and some of the plays feature only songs and tunes. While studies in Yuan qu have been systematic and exhaustive and studies in the spoken parts of the Yuan zaju plays so far have been significantly improved, a systematic study of the stage directions as they are used in the corpus of Yuan zaju as a whole has yet to be made. (1)
The difficulty of using and studying stage directions as internal evidence to the performance of Yuan zaju resides in several critical issues. First, it is the issue of the texts of Yuan zaju. We have now only thirty play scripts that were printed in the Yuan dynasty as some examples of the Yuan zaju as the Yuan audience knew and watched in performance. The texts of the majority of these plays, however, appear, or were intended to be, incomplete with only a few stage directions and, in some cases, no stage directions at all. The majority of the Yuan zaju plays are available to us in a number of Ming collections produced during the Ming dynasty. As this study demonstrates in the following, these plays were edited, collated, or revised in varying degrees by Ming scholars and bibliophiles and were, directly or indirectly, derivative from or related to, and thus influenced by, the Ming court performances. Consequently, they may not reflect the original performance of the Yuan zaju plays. In addition, the "inconsistent" practice of marking a stage direction with or without ke or the presence or absence of a stage direction in certain scenes in plays from different collections may point to the fact that not all stage directions are reliable sources or evidence. Moreover, the extreme terseness of the majority of the stage directions may not provide enough concrete information on the actual performances. The last critical issue is that some of the stage directions may have been only authorial and editorial decisions and were probably never realized in actual performances. Given these facts and possibilities, however, the Ming collation and revision were primarily focused on the sung and spoken parts and, although stage directions were added or trimmed, the kinds of stage directions and their use do not appear radically different from their counterparts in the Yuankan plays. Because of the high rate of repetition of the same or similar stage directions in different dramatic and scenic situations, those "inconsistencies" in the marking of individual stage directions appear rather insignificant. Furthermore, for the same reason, the conciseness of the stage directions may indeed testify to the existence of established performance conventions and rules available to the contemporary players. Therefore we may gain a substantial understanding of the enactment of those individual actions suggested by the stage directions and the general style of Yuan performance by studying those stage directions in the context of songs, speeches, and characterization.
Historically, one of the difficult issues that have baffled generations of scholars of Yuan zaju has been its extreme lack of external evidence. Yuan zaju did not have a Henslowe keeping his diaries or a Samuel Pepys recording his play-going accounts. It had neither a Zeami keeping alive the secret art of Noh nor a Bharata formulating a science of ancient Indian theater. A surviving fourteenth-century temple wall painting (see figure 1) about an actual performance of a zaju play, a fourteenth-century collection of biographical notes and anecdotes about Yuan performers (Qing lou ji; The Green Bower Collection), and some other small artifacts tell us little about the actual performance and staging of Yuan zaju aside from some vague information about certain players, costuming, and musical instruments. Internal evidence from songs and speeches can provide, at best, ambiguous information about the actual performance of Yuan zaju. Thus, scholars' imagination and their studies of Yuan zaju in relation to its performance and staging have been heavily influenced by modern and contemporary practices of other xiqu (traditional theater) forms whose earliest developments were more than two hundred years removed from the decline and demise of Yuan zaju. Therefore, alternatively, a systematic study of the stage directions is, in my view, the surest and most reliable way of uncovering and understanding the actual performance of Yuan zaju as it took place during the Yuan dynasty.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
I
The extant texts of Yuan zaju fall into two categories: the earliest surviving examples printed in the Yuan dynasty and later collections published during the Ming dynasty. As mentioned previously, the earliest surviving thirty plays were put together in a collection, Yuankan zaju sanshi zhong. This collection, printed in 1350, was privately owned successively by several scholars and bibliophiles (the first known owner was the playwright Li Kaixian [1502-1568]) from the late Ming dynasty through the Qing dynasty and the early Republic period before it was formerly published in 1915. (2) Now the thirty plays can be found in several modern collections of the Yuan zaju plays. Three of these collections were solely dedicated to these Yuankan plays with annotations and collations. (3) These plays were copied and printed originally for the use of contemporary players and playgoers (see figure 2). The value of these plays lies in the fact that they are the only surviving examples from the original Yuan zaju repertoire that can be used to investigate the original conditions and performance style of the Yuan zaju plays. The usefulness of these plays, however, varies in the degree to which their texts have been properly edited and completed with songs, speeches, actions, and stage directions. The core component of Yuan zaju is qu (songs and tunes), hence Yuan zaju is more often called Yuan qu. The Yuankan plays are role scripts prepared for the female lead (zheng dan) or the male lead (zhengmo), the only role whose player is allowed to sing throughout the play. These scripts copied the songs and tunes and kept, in a few instances, the speeches and stage directions for the male or female lead, but left out, for the most part, the speeches and the stage directions for the minor and supporting roles. Thus the majority of the plays (with only three exceptions: Gui yuan jia ren Baiyue ting, Tiao feng yue, and Bowang shao tun) have only a few pieces of spoken prose (bal) and a few stage directions. In fact, two plays (Guan Zhang shuang fu xishu meng and Zhaoshi guer) feature only the songs and tunes without any trace of speeches and stage cues. Two other plays (Yan Ziling chui diao qili tan and Chuzhao Wang shu zhe xia chuan) have only one and three cues, respectively, for exit. Still two other plays (Guan Dawang dan dao hui and Sheng si jiao Fan Zhangji shu) have some speeches and a few stage directions, but none of the stage directions is marked with ke. One play (Xin bian Yue Kongmu jian Tie Guaili huan hun), oddly enough, has significantly more speeches and stage directions than the majority of the Yuankan plays, but none of the stage directions is marked with ke. The number of the stage directions marked with ke in all other twenty-three plays significantly varies from 1 (Yu Chigong san duo shuo, Feng Yue Ziyun ting) to as many as 44 (Baiyue ting (4)).
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
The majority of the Yuan zaju plays survive in a number of the Ming collections produced approximately during the Wanli period (1573-1620) of the Ming dynasty. Therefore, in order to gain a full account of the performance of the Yuan zaju plays, stage directions from the texts of different Ming collections will be included and compared with one another and with those from the Yuankan collection. The relative importance and value of the plays from these collections as internal evidence to the Yuan performance and staging will be gauged in their chronological proximity to the original performance and staging of Yuan zaju as they took place in the Yuan dynasty.
The earlier Ming collections of Yuan zaju include Gai ding Yuan xian ch uan qi (5) (1522-1566), the Yu Xiaogu collection (6) (1545-1607), Gu ming jia zaju (7) (1588-1589), Zaju xuan (8) (1598), Gu zaju (9) (1575-1600), Yang chun zou (10) (1609), and Yuan Ming zaju (11) (1575-1620). Gai ding Yuan xian chuan qi originally had sixteen Yuan zaju plays, selected and edited by Li Kaixian during the Jiajing period (1522-1566) of the Ming dynasty. Now with six plays extant, this collection is the earliest following the Yuankan collection. The Yu Xiaogu collection was edited and owned by Yu Shenxing, Yu Xiaogu's father; the origin of the plays in Yu's collection has been unclear. According to Sun Kaidi, however, they may have been related to the manuscripts at the Ming imperial court. (12) One of the earliest Ming collections of Yuan zaju, the importance of this collection lies in the fact that its plays were considered by the contemporary Ming scholars and bibliophiles the most authoritative texts available to them. Zhao Qimei (1563-1624), a noted Ming bibliophile and collector, not only copied plays from Yu's collection into his own collection, but also collated against them some of the plays from Gu mingjia zaju and Zaju xuan. Gu mingjia zaju, edited by Chen Yujiao, contains sixty-five of the Vuan and Ming zaju plays (forty-two of them are Vuan zaju), of which fifty-five (thirty-four are Vuan zaju) were included in Zhao's collection and ten were photomechanically copied into Gu ben xiqu cong kan sift, serial 4. Zaju xuan, edited and published by Xijizi, originally included thirty plays. Of its twenty-six plays (twenty-two are Yuan zaju) now extant, fifteen were included in Zhao's collection and eleven were photographed into Gu ben xiqu cong kan siji, serial 5. Gu zaju, possibly edited by Wang Jide (?- 1623), included twenty of the Yuan zaju plays, all photographed into Gu ben xiqu cong kan sift, serial 2. Yang chun zou, edited by Huang Zhengwei, originally had thirty-nine plays, but only three of them survived and were copied into Gu ben xiqu cong kan siji, serial 6. Yuan Mingzaju, edited and published by someone called Chen, his family name, has four plays (three of them are Yuan zaju) extant and were copied into Gu ben xiqu cong kan sift, serial 7.
Of all the Ming collections, Maiwangguan chaojiaoben guji zaju (13) (1614-1617) and Yuanqu xuan (14) (1615-1616) are the two most important and comprehensive. The Maiwangguan collection, owned by Zhao Qimei, was named after Zhao's private library. It includes 242 Yuan and Ming zaju plays, both printed editions and manuscript copies, from three previous collections--the Yu Xiaogu collection, Gu mingjia zaju, and Xijizi's Zaju xuan, from the playscripts held at the Ming imperial court, and from plays with sources unknown. Zhao's collection was recovered in 1937 and was photographically reproduced in 1958. Since most of the Maiwangguan plays were either from earlier collections or directly copied from the playscripts used for performances at the Ming imperial court, they combine to attest, more than any other single Ming collection, to the performance of Yuan zaju even though they were influenced by the performances at the Ming imperial court and compromised by Zhao's corrections, revisions, and collations of the texts.
In contrast, the one hundred plays in Yuanqu xuan, on the other hand, were heavily edited and revised by Zang Maoxun according to the established literary norm and standard. Yuanqu xuan has long been accepted and used as the standard collection of the Yuan zaju plays. Its authority has gone largely unchallenged for over three hundred years. Since the recovery and publication of the Yuankan collection and the Maiwangguan collection, scholars and critics have questioned its authority and accused Zang Maoxun of altering the texts of the original Yuan plays by his revisions. (15) Although Zang added more stage directions and left out or modified some others, (16) thus making the stage directions more standardized, as this study will demonstrate, their function and use, for the most part, do not radically differ from those found in other collections of the Yuan zaju plays, including the Yuankan collection.
Because of their chronological proximity to the zaju plays staged and published during the late Yuan dynasty, the zaju plays by Zhu Youdun (1379-1439), (17) the prince of Zhou of the Ming dynasty, written and staged during the early Ming dynasty, are of particular importance in its relationship to the performance of Yuan zaju as it occurred in the Yuan dynasty. Thus the use of stage directions in Zhu's plays will be considered in contrast to that of the zaju plays in the Yuankan collection and the Ming collections.
My study of the stage directions from different collections reveals a significant and continuous increase in the average number of ke for each play in each of the collections in a chronological order. The average number of ke for each of the Yuankan plays (twenty-three in total, excluding those seven plays that have no ke) is 10.7; it is about 19 for each of the thirty-one plays by Zhu Youdun; it is around 30 for each of the six plays in Li Kaixian's collection (30.3) and for each of the eleven plays in Xijizi's Zaju xuan (32); it is 42.6 for each of the thirty-eight plays of the Maiwangguan collection that were not included in Yuanqu xuan; and it is 51.52 for each of the one hundred plays in Yuanqu xuan. The average increase in the total number of ke for each play from each collection is about 10. The lowest average number of ke for a Yuankan play certainly resulted from the condition of the Yuankan texts as role scripts for the lead roles, with actions and speeches (suggested by stage directions) for the minor roles (and in some cases even for the lead roles) left out or kept at a minimum. The relative lower number of ke in Zhu Youdun's plays, however, testifies to the fact that the original Yuan zaju plays (with the exception of Baiyue ting) must have had significantly fewer stage directions than those in the later Ming collections. Since this is the case, the original Yuan performance of northern zaju may have been less formalized than we have assumed today. The increase in the average number of ke attests to the standardization and formalization of the Yuan stage directions. It likewise attests to the progress of zaju staging and performance, a progress toward an increasingly formalized style of performance from the late Yuan dynasty to the early Ming dynasty.
II
Stage directions in the corpus of Yuan zaju can be roughly divided into two types: the one including those stage directions not marked with ke, and the other covering those stage directions marked with ke. The former includes stage directions such as yun (speaking) and chang (singing) used to mark spoken parts and sung parts in a play, directions for a player's entrances and exits, and all other directions that suggest a physical action or a mental state but are not marked with ke. The majority of the Yuan stage directions, however, are marked with ke with the exception of a few cases in which ke is replaced by jie. (18)
Scholars since the Yuan dynasty have tried to define the meaning of ke. Tao Zongyi of the late Yuan dynasty mentions kefan in his Chuo geng lu as one of the components of yuanben or zaju performance, noting that one of the three great players of the time was good at kefan. (19) Tao, however, did not explain kefan in any detail. Xu Wei of the Ming dynasty explained that "meeting, bowing in salute, doing obeisance, dancing, sitting and kneeling, all these physical actions were called ke." (20) Modern and contemporary scholars basically followed Tao and Xu in their explanations of the term. Thus, Wang Guowei further notes that kefan refers to actions. (21) Feng Yuanjun argues that"[k]efan is what is said of kefa (rules and laws), which refers to rules of actions by different roles." (22) Feng further complains that "[t]he kefan of ancient drama was stereotyped, following the same rules and copying each other slavishly." (23) Wang Jisi maintains that" [k]efan refers to various sets of actions, which has established rules and conventions to follow." (24) Following Wang Jisi in his assertion that ke is kefan, Kang Baocheng has further attempted to trace the origins ofke (andjie) back to religious rituals, especially Daoist rituals. Kang's argument suggests that the performance of Yuan zaju may have been influenced by religious rituals, although he does not substantiate his argument by a systematic analysis of Yuan performance. Indeed, Kang asserts that ke "as xiqu convention that follows established rules and exemplars must have drawn on elements of religious rites," (25) All these arguments consider ke (or kefan) as certain established conventions and rules that prescribe the actions and performance style of Yuan zaju.
In my view, ke may have been used in most cases to mark and give precedence...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
