Jingju
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
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
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 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 characteristics in the middle of the nineteenth century, Jingju has been able to convince 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 conveniently 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 regardless 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 individual troupes and actors). As will be shown in detail, only in the case of the 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
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 publish 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 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 inclusion 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 discussion 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.
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 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 impossibility) 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 than the playwright).18 Like Hollywood scriptwriters, Jingju playwrights rarely enjoyed the kind of creative authority and freedom (and attendant fame) associated 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 distorted) 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 facilitate 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 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
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
A history of the ways Jingju has been referred to, and the connotations of each, will be presented in the Introduction.
Evidence for this claim will also be given in the Introduction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The translation of Jingju plays into English is taken up below, in chapter 6.
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.
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.
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, citations 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.
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.
I am excluding the work of folklorists on oral epics and folk songs.
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).
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.
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.
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.
In folklore studies, the emphasis has been on recording oral performances to both preserve 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.
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).
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 collaborative, 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.
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.