Despite its prominence on the popular Chinese stage over many centuries (especially for the peasantry, who could not always afford to sponsor shows by human actors), Chinese shadow theatre has never attracted the same degree of academic interest in the West as the ‘operatic’ theatres (such as jingju) or shadow puppet traditions from elsewhere. Chen's book is a welcome development to both Chinese theatre and puppetry studies. It is an insightful and academically rigorous work that authenticates Chinese shadow theatre as a fertile area of study.
The first chapter provides a detailed history of shadow theatre which corrects the staggering number of errors in existing works on the subject. As Chen analyses an impressive variety of sources, it soon transpires that the history of shadow theatre is caught in a jumble of transcultural misunderstandings. Early twentieth-century English-language works that misread Chinese stories (and sometimes apparently invented them) were retranslated into Chinese as evidence for the origins of shadow theatre. Chen does an admirable job of scrutinizing the evidence and guiding the reader through a great deal of misinterpretation. The second chapter documents the religious aspect of shadow theatre by outlining its use in specific ritual festivals. Chen also surveys the numerous contexts of performance from public to private and religious to secular. In doing so, she outlines how the religious aspect of shadow theatre has persisted into the modern period despite economic and political pressures to secularize the form. The next chapter highlights the importance of female warrior characters in Chinese shadow theatre.
The author contextualizes these fictional women through an analysis of real female warriors who were barbarians or shamans capable of gaining the respect of armies through control of the supernatural. The plays often depicted rebellion in the face of corrupt and unjust officials and, when staged for peasants who were considered marginal, expressed the audience's desire for power and wealth. The author explores some complex but engaging examples, demonstrating how these characters undermined feminine ‘passivity’ whilst sustaining patriarchy by fighting on behalf of their male relations. Whilst this chapter is fascinating, I was left wondering about some of the contextual issues surrounding these plays in performance. To what extent were these characters performed by and for women? Or were these fantasies enacted by men for male consumption? In a later section, Chen hints that women were an important audience for shadow theatre, but one wonders about the implications of this here.
The book also includes three engaging plays which illuminate the arguments presented: two ritual dramas and a play including female warriors. In addition, there are valuable appendices on non-standard orthography, and lists of plays, by collection and tradition, and those featuring women warriors. Indeed, Chen's meticulous attention to scholarly detail is the major strength of this work. She has rendered Chinese shadow theatre accessible to a contemporary international audience and demonstrated its rightful place as an important part of China's popular cultural heritage.
