Following up on recent efforts to bring media studies into the study of premodern Chinese drama, Yinghui Wu’s Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies offers an ambitious account of how drama was experienced in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Rather than treating dramatic works primarily as literary texts to be read or performances to be watched, Wu challenges the persistent “page-stage dichotomy” in drama studies by reconstructing a much broader ecology in which plays interacted with commentary, illustration, singing, religious practice, and even playful examination prose. What emerges is a history of drama not as a stable textual or theatrical object, but as a cultural form continually refashioned through other media.
The significance of Wu’s project lies in its attempt to shift attention away from playwrights and dramatic texts as the sole objects of inquiry and toward the diverse agents and practices that shaped the lives of plays. Publishers, commentators, illustrators, singers, and readers all emerge as active participants in the production of theatrical experience. Drawing on concepts such as remediation (the refashioning of one medium through another), immediacy (the impression of unmediated experience or affective immersion), hypermediacy (the heightened awareness of mediation itself), and media ecology (the study of how media and practices interact), Wu argues that these interactions generated new modes of experiencing drama and contributed to the formation of new subject positions. In doing so, she places early modern Chinese drama in conversation with broader debates in media studies while also contributing to book history, visual culture studies, and performance studies.
The monograph is organized around five substantial case studies. Chapter One reconsiders the “Li Zhuowu” commentaries on plays nominally attributed to the late Ming iconoclast Li Zhi (1527–1602) and shows how the real author, Ye Zhou (fl. 1595–1624), refashioned the historical Li Zhi into a vivid commentarial persona, thereby allowing readers to oscillate between affective immediacy and awareness of mediation. Chapter Two examines the hypermedial illustrations of the “Three Instalments of Five Plays,” a late-Ming illustrated compilation of five plays, whose combinations of poetic inscription and “figure-in-landscape” imagery connected drama to wider textual and visual repertoires. Chapter Three reconstructs qu singing, the performance of tune-based lyric texts apart from a full dramatic production, as a media ecology in which print, musical knowledge, performance, and connoisseurship were mutually implicated. Through a case study of Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), a late-Ming writer and publisher, Wu argues that the connoisseur was a subject position produced within this ecology. Chapter Four reads Jin Shengtan’s (1608–1661) commentary on the Yuan opera Xixiang ji (Romance of the Western Chamber) alongside spirit writing, Buddhist sermons, and Chan gong’an dialogues, tracing oral, haptic, and performative practices across literary and religious experience. Finally, Chapter Five approaches playful eight-legged essays on drama as acts of theatrical refashioning through which familiar characters acquired voices absent from the original plays, while debased or incongruous registers were introduced into examination prose.
The foregrounding of mediality is one of the book’s principal strengths, enabling Wu to ask a different set of questions of otherwise familiar materials. In Chapter One, for instance, moving beyond the longstanding question of the authenticity of the “Li Zhuowu” commentaries, Wu shows how Ye Zhou fashioned a recognizable persona from Li Zhi’s rhetorical mannerisms. “Li Zhuowu” cries, laughs, curses, and questions characters. Wu perceptively compares this persona to the theatrical role of mo, a male role type in traditional Chinese theatre, often associated with an older or middle-aged character, who here is positioned between the dramatic world and its audience. Yet while the chapter persuasively frames the commentaries as a form of remediation, understood here as the refashioning of dramatic material through commentary, it also points toward a further line of inquiry into the material conditions that made such effects possible. As Wu notes, the commentaries take multiple forms, including eyebrow comments placed at the top of the page, interlinear comments, tail comments immediately following an aria or dialogue, and summary comments at the end of a scene. Although Wu identifies these different forms, she does not examine in detail how their spatial arrangement on the printed page shapes the reading experience. Further attention to the organization of the page could therefore illuminate how the placement of different forms of commentary structures readers’ oscillation between immersion and reflection.
The experience of reading dramatic texts through these multiple layers of commentary is one of the book’s most intriguing contributions, and it establishes a productive connection between Chapters One and Four. In both chapters, the introduction of mediality as an interpretive framework shifts attention away from the more familiar questions that have dominated studies of the reception of Xixiang ji, toward the ways in which commentaries mediate readers’ encounters with the play. Rather than treating commentary simply as a vehicle of interpretation, Wu shows how it creates particular modes of experience. In Chapter One, readers are invited to engage with the play through the vivid persona of “Li Zhuowu,” whose interjections, questions, and emotional reactions create the illusion of a companion experiencing the play alongside them. In Chapter Four, Jin Shengtan’s commentary similarly transforms the act of reading into a mediated encounter: the reader becomes not merely an interpreter of the dramatic text but almost a spectator participating in a spirit-writing séance, attending a Chan dialogue, or listening to one of Jin’s literary and religious lectures. Mediality thus enables Wu to reconceptualize commentary not as a supplement to the play but as actively structuring the experience of reading.
Yet the richness of these examples also raises a larger question about the analytical scale at which the concept “media” operates. Wu deliberately adopts an expansive understanding of media, encompassing semiotic, technical, material, and cultural dimensions. This capaciousness allows phenomena usually studied separately to be brought into conversation, but it also means that “mediality” operates at different analytical levels across the book: through commentarial voice and persona; visual image and poetic inscription; musical notation; sensory and corporeal experiences such as hearing and touch; religious and performative practices; and, in Chapter Five, literary genre itself. These dimensions frequently operate concurrently, and indeed their interaction is central to Wu’s model. Yet distinguishing them remains useful, not to restore firm boundaries between different media, but to understand how mediation at one level enables or transforms mediation at another.
Chapter Five offers a revealing example. An eight-legged essay on a play encountered in a literatus’s collected writings does not necessarily invite the same mode of reading as one printed alongside dramatic material in a volume organized around the play. Wu notes the different contexts in which such essays circulated, but the comparison might have been developed further to consider how a text’s placement and presentation on the page shape its generic remediation and, consequently, the experience it affords its readers. Chapter Two, by contrast, demonstrates particularly well the rewards of attending to these different levels of mediation in conjunction. Wu considers the material design of illustrated drama books and the placement of illustrations within the “Three Instalments of Five Plays” before turning to the illustration itself as a configuration of image and poetic inscription. She further shows how poetic “hypertext”—a textual fragment that directs readers toward other poems, texts, or associations—interacts with visual “hyperimage,” an image whose elements evoke wider pictorial conventions and repertoires, with each opening onto different textual and pictorial repertoires, while also prompting readers to reconsider their relation to the play. The material organization of the book and the interplay of poetic fragment and image thus remain analytically distinct, even as Wu describes the hypermedial experience their interaction produces.
Yet Chapter Two also brings into view a broader methodological difficulty inherent in reconstructing media experience: the historical subject of that experience remains necessarily elusive. Wu is careful to acknowledge that the associations generated by an illustration depended upon the knowledge and previous experience of individual readers. A poetic fragment might activate memories of the play as well as other poetic texts, while a “figure-in-landscape” might evoke culturally familiar associations surrounding particular figure types—the fisherman with reclusion and carefree wandering, for instance, or, for some male viewers, the female performer with an eroticized world of entertainment. Such associations could in turn redirect readers toward particular moods or themes in the play, or prompt them to reflect on the distance between the illustration and the dramatic text. The richness of these possibilities is precisely what makes the chapter compelling, but it also makes it difficult to determine how particular readers actually navigated them. What the surviving books allow us to reconstruct with greater confidence may therefore be the affordances and invitations of particular media configurations rather than the varied experiences of their historical readers.
Chapter Three, to my mind, presents a somewhat different use of media ecology. Wu persuasively reconstructs Ling Mengchu’s connoisseurship as something formed through his involvement in print publishing, literati networks, and his intimate encounters with musical performers, especially Ms. Heyang. The resulting “media ecology” is therefore particularly effective in illuminating how the social position of the connoisseur was produced rather than simply assumed. Yet the chapter also gestures toward another question that I do not think Wu fully develops: what did it mean to experience a play through qu singing? Wu shows that dramatic arias—songs originally embedded in plays—circulated alongside independent qu songs in anthologies; that printed notation connected reading with singing; and that qu could be heard through forms ranging from private singing to staged performance. But she might have brought these observations more directly into the book’s larger inquiry into dramatic experience. How, for example, did encountering an aria extracted from a play and sung as qu reconfigure a listener’s relation to its dramatic context, characters, or affective world? How might listening in the company of connoisseurs, where singing could also function as cultivated evaluation and social display, have differed from hearing the same aria in a more intimate setting, or as part of a theatrical performance?
These questions do not detract from the importance of Wu’s intervention. Instead, they testify to the range of inquiries that Playing with Plays makes possible. By taking drama as an entry point into the larger media landscape of early modern China, Wu demonstrates the value of the analysis of mediality for bringing into view connections among textual forms, material objects, sensory practices, social relations, and modes of experience that have often been studied separately. The book thus contributes not only to the history of Chinese drama but also to a broader inquiry into mediality in premodern China. Most importantly, it demonstrates that media studies need not begin with modern technologies of mass communication; the questions the field poses—about how media interact, how they structure perception and experience, and how they shape the positions from which people read, listen, view, and perform—can productively reshape our understanding of premodern cultural practices as well. Playing with Plays should therefore be read not as the final word on these media ecologies, but as an invitation to explore the much larger history of mediation in premodern China that its case studies bring into view.
