Inspired by the Shakespearean conception of the world as a stage, Sophie Volpp conceives the world of seventeenth-century China as a stage. Her discussion is premised on a rubric of “theatrical spectatorship” that equates social roles and theatrical roles, analogizes acting and “social imposture,” and conceives theater as a figure for the disjunction of illusion and actuality. Wielding this rubric, Volpp investigates an array of seemingly disparate materials: Zhang Dai's memoir of the theater (seventeenth century); the school and farm scenes in Tang Xianzu's famous play The Peony Pavilion (1598); Wang Jide's short play The Male Queen (late Ming); poems about the cross-dressing actor Xu Ziyun by certain poets who belonged to Chen Weisong's circle (early Qing); and the figure of the story-teller Liu Jingting in Kong Shangren's famous play The Peach Blossom Fan (1699). Volpp's discussion focuses on the complex intersection or interaction between certain dichotomous elements: the theatrical realm and the social realm, the dispassionate observer and the passionate participant, theatrical spectatorship and social spectatorship, illusion and actuality, imposter and discerner, reading/watching drama and composing in the examination style, the vernacular voice and the scholarly voice, the “anti-theatricalist” conviction that theater debases and the “pro-theatricalist” conviction that theater elevates. This binary strategy also informs the structure and materials of her own book: the pairing of fictional materials (novels and plays) with anecdotal memoirs of the theatrical culture and the society of the seventeenth century included in various biji (miscellaneous notes); the pairing of The Peony Pavilion with The Peach Blossom Fan; and the pairing of The Male Queen with poems devoted to Xu Ziyun.

Volpp's analyses of the plays and poems are insightful and sophisticated, especially in chapters 4 and 5, which address homosexuality and homoerotic elements in The Male Queen and in the poems devoted to Xu Ziyun. The readings in these two chapters are original, insightful, and inspirational. Volpp's account of theatrical cross-dressing—what she calls “stage gender”—and the homoerotic seduction of male literati spectators is particularly illuminating. Volpp's strength as a reader of classical Chinese plays and poetry clearly lies in these subtle explorations of the homoerotic. I also applaud Volpp's translation of The Male Queen, which appears as an appendix. This makes available a relatively obscure yet complicated and important play.

However, the book reads like a gathering of essays only tenuously related by the themes of plays, theaters, and actors. Chapters 1 and 2 pertain to the theatrical culture of the seventeenth century and define the main thesis—how theatrical spectatorship influenced social spectatorship—that underlies the entire book. Chapters 3 and 6 explore the triumph of the vernacular over pedantic allusiveness and bureaucratic formality in The Peony Pavilion and The Peach Blossom Fan. Chapters 4 and 5 explore homosexuality and homoerotic sentiments in The Male Queen and in the poems celebrating Xu Ziyun. Volpp attempts to unify her discrete readings and observations by invoking the concept “theatrical spectatorship,” but the concept is neither clearly defined nor consistently employed. In some cases, as in her readings of The Peony Pavilion and The Male Queen, it remains peripheral.

Volpp's tendency to construe the seventeenth century as a coherent cultural unit is likewise problematic. She refers to the “long seventeenth century,” seemingly downplaying the crucial rupture represented by the fall of the Ming dynasty and the establishment of the Manchurian regime in China in 1644. This trauma entirely altered the nature of the political culture and redirected the philosophical, literary, and cultural explorations that burgeoned during the late Ming era.

Volpp's penchant for dichotomy leads her to oppose the lower class to the literati/bureaucratic class in her explorations of the two celebrated plays The Peony Pavilion and The Peach Blossom Fan. She particularly focuses on different language registers—the triumph of the vernacular over pedantic allusion and bureaucratese—in the attempt to demonstrate the playwrights' critique of the culture of Confucian scholarship. This polarization is problematic. The authors of the two plays, Tang Xianzu and Kong Shangren, do employ the vernacular, but even more concertedly employ the allusive language of traditional high poetry. Tang Xianzu is particularly esoteric and uncompromising. The Peony Pavilion is notorious for obscurity and density of allusion. Many late Ming drama critics, in fact, excoriated Tang for placing scholarly intricacies in the mouths of uneducated maids and servants, and thus misrepresenting real-world speech patterns. Tang goes so far as to end each scene of The Peony Pavilion with lines culled verbatim from the classics of Tang poetry. Volpp would have contributed more to the understanding of the theatrical culture of the late Ming and early Qing periods if she had taken her cue from the playwright's own discussions of theatrical language. The issue of language was certainly at the heart of seventeenth-century debates concerning the development of theatrical and literary culture. Such enormously articulate men of letters were prone to speak for themselves.