Chapter 3 The Production of a Mass-Market Collection of Jingju Playscripts: Xikao (Research into Plays)

In: Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera
Author:
David L. Rolston
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Type:
Chapter
Pages:
293–405
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004463394_005

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Abstract

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. 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.

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Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera

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

Series:  Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, Volume: 12
Cover Inscribing <i>Jingju</i>/Peking Opera
E-Book ISBN:
9789004463394
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
02 Jul 2021

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