The available evidence suggests that the art of the Arabic shadow play existed from at least the tenth century ce. The only surviving such plays from before the Ottoman period, however, date from the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century and were authored by Ibn Dāniyāl (1248–1310), an eye doctor, poet and playwright of Mamluk Egypt, who is the subject of Guo's study. Being a unique example of this art from medieval times, Ibn Dāniyāl's plays have attracted scholarly interest since the very beginning of the twentieth century, but the first adequate scholarly edition appeared only in 1992 (Three Shadow Plays by Muḥammad Ibn Dāniyāl, ed. the late Paul Kahle, prepared for publication by Derek Hopwood and Mustafa Badawi, Cambridge). The comically licentious plays, which are replete with droll scenes of contemporary Cairene lowlife, have eclipsed the poet's other work, especially his ceremonial poetry, which has therefore been largely neglected.

The importance of Guo's study lies in its extensive use of Ibn Dāniyāl's understudied and inadequately edited poetry in an attempt to sketch his obscure life trajectory and to elucidate various aspects of the shadow plays. The study falls into three parts. Part 1, entitled “Life as a play” (pp. 3–100), is a biographical essay, itself divided into three sections, dubbed “acts”, presumably pointing at the pitfalls involved in reconstructing a poet's life on the basis of his work. “Act one: Eye doctor and street buffoon” tells of Ibn Dāniyāl's early years as a fledging oculist (c. 1267–80). In the aftermath of the Mongol occupation of his native Mosul, and while still in his late teens, he fled to Cairo, where he worked as an eye doctor and soon made a name as a poet and wit by rubbing shoulders with local poets and intellectuals. “Act two: court panegyrist and jester” traces the poet's career as a eulogist at the Mamluk court in the period 1280–93. His most prominent patrons were three sons of sultan Qalāwūn (r. 1279–90), the heir apparent and two of Qalāwūn's successors. But apart from the Qalāwūnids, Ibn Dāniyāl praised several Mamluk notables, viziers and army commanders and produced numerous celebratory odes on various formal occasions such as military expeditions, the accomplishment of building projects, festivals and hunts. In the period 1294–1310, covered by “Act three: satirist and playwright”, though not totally estranged, he was less at ease with the ruling sultans and supported himself primarily by eulogizing less illustrious patrons such as merchants and qadis. “Acts” 2 and 3 contain useful discussions of some of his panegyrics and other poems which were later reworked and incorporated into the shadow plays, and foreground his activity as a poet, to which earlier studies rarely paid due attention. Even though the above scheme corresponds to the poet's life-stages as reflected in his artistic production, the details are nevertheless elusive and some of Guo's assertions are highly speculative. To give just a few examples: Ibn Dāniyāl's acquaintance with Cairene lowlife does not make him a low-lifer, and to dub him a “street buffoon” on these grounds, or a “court jester” on the basis of a few anecdotes on his quick repartee (pp. 47–50) is unwarranted. Complaining about poverty, a recurrent theme of his poetry, was a common literary topos and does not allow any safe conclusions regarding his real-life circumstances. The meat and fodder rations he received were by no means his sole remuneration as a court poet (pp. 46, 49).

Part 2, “Legacy and controversy” (pp. 102–51), deals with some general features and problems of Ibn Dāniyāl's art and also falls into three parts: “The making of the Arabic shadow play” relates Ibn Dāniyāl's poetry to his shadow plays and convincingly argues for dating the plays to his later years, besides discussing other issues such as the heroes' comic names and the music of the plays. “The ornament of the poetry” focuses on the most prominent stylistic ornaments of Ibn Dāniyāl's poetry, the tawriyya (double entendre) and the jinās (paronomasia). “The many faces of a performer” seeks to account for the apparent contradiction between the poet's wide respectability and the licentious character of some of his poetry and the shadow plays. Guo seems to suggest that the poet's “libertine” persona was constructed over time (p. 147), but this need not be so, because libertinism was seen as a token of wit and was generally condoned in littérateurs (see Zoltan Szombathy, Mujūn: Libertinism in Medieval Muslim Society and Literature, Cambridge, 2013, 247–302).

Part 3 (pp. 155–220) is a translation of the first and longest shadow play, “The Phantom”. The texts of Ibn Dāniyāl's plays are riddled with thorny lexicographical and philological problems. Apart from the many obscure colloquialisms and slang terms, their difficulty also relates to their often absurd humour and the several passages of nonsense prose and poetry which they contain. It is thus understandable that Guo's translation is not free from mistakes and flaws, and the author should have made it clearer to the general reader that it is only a tentative rendering (there are several unjustifiable mistakes too, e.g. his rendering ṣafaʿa as “to slap in the face”). Nevertheless, precisely because of the significant textual difficulties, his translation and the book as a whole are a useful contribution to the study of Ibn Dāniyāl. Much remains to be done to improve and elucidate the extant text of the plays and, more generally, to evaluate Ibn Dāniyāl's work as a whole and set it in the wider perspective of Mamluk literature.

The book closes with two appendices (pp. 221–8): one on the manuscripts of Ibn Dāniyāl's shadow plays and poetry; and the other on medieval Arabic sources for Ibn Dāniyāl's life.