“All the world's a stage” was a sentiment that animated thought and literature much the world over, whether in Elizabethan England, Edo Japan, or Ming-Qing China, indicative, perhaps, of a distinctly early modern sensibility. Exploration of this theatrum mundi trope lies at the heart of Mei Chun's finely wrought study of theatricality in the fiction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China, The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China. The first two chapters trace the etymology of the term xi (translated as “theatricality”) and the proliferation of its use in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary commentary, and analyze the self-conscious attention to viewing and being viewed in Ming and early Qing visual sources. This sets the stage, so to speak, for the central acts of Mei Chun's textual analysis, which offer close readings of Shuihu zhuan (Water margin) and Xiyou ji (Journey to the west) in light of the concept of theatricality. A final chapter explores the difference between “didactic theater” and “playful theatricals” in two seventeenth-century short-story collections.
Mei's study departs from earlier readings of Shuihu, which she claims have evaluated its many heroes from the perspective of morality. In contrast, by invoking the concept of “heroic theatricals,” she shows that heroism was made manifest by the coupling of characters who engaged in spectacular acting and those who served as their admiring spectators: Li Kui and Song Jiang, Lu Zhishen and Lin Chong, and Yang Xiong and Shi Xiu are a few examples of such pairs. The ability to recognize a hero also distinguished someone with a heroic disposition; that is, audience and performer were mutually constitutive in this equation of heroic theatricals. This skill at recognition is further a male trait within the discourse of Shuihu. Within this logic, it is the usurpation of the role of spectator by the promiscuous women of the novel that renders them dangerous and warrants their grisly demise.
In turning to Xiyou ji, Mei proposes that reading this novel, too, in terms of theatricality helps to avoid the traps of older interpretive strategies, which fixated on the dominant religious teaching embedded within the work. For Mei, theatricality—defined here as the staging of scenes and their subsequent restaging through mimicry—undermines all religious messages within the text. The result is a highly subversive text that subscribes neither to one doxy (Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist) nor even to a coherent Three Teachings syncretism. Instead, theatricality—with its blurring of distinctions between the real and the unreal, demons and deities, and the high and the low—rules the text (p. 124). Monkey is shown to be a bogus immortal, the pilgrims' progress does not progress, and cosmic order is rendered impossible. It was this facet of the novel, Mei suggests, that so delighted literati commentators and readers of seventeenth-century China.
Throughout her study Mei traverses easily from analysis of her main two novels to other works and genres, including one-act plays, short fiction, and woodblock prints. Her impressive facility with such a wide range of sources helps to undergird her arguments about the centrality of theatricality to seventeenth-century discourse.
Mei's sympathies clearly lie with the subversive possibilities of play-acting. But was the delineation she draws between playful theatrics and didactic theater quite so definitive in the literary commentary of the times? As her study shows, this trope of theatricality betrays a tension between performativity and authenticity; paradoxically, the authentic expression of the self could be revealed through role-playing. And yet, even in those texts that delighted in “playful theatricals,” acting was not always seen as a positive good. Certainly, some commentary on the “heroes” of Shuihu evinces a wariness of characters who are too good at playing a role. The seventeenth-century critic Jin Shengtan, for example, accuses Song Jiang (the spectator par excellence in Mei's interpretation) of being a false hero. Jin's redaction of Shuihu also labels Shi Xiu, who artfully stages the murder of Pan Qiaoyun, as “scary.” In Mei's admirable effort to provide a new logic for understanding the Shuihu heroes, she glosses over these more critical appraisals of theatricality by commentators of the time.
The Novel and Theatrical Imagination identifies this literati concern with theatricality as both early modern and bounded by the political and literary context of the late Ming and early Qing. Indeed, Mei's final chapter intimates that Li Yu's Wusheng xi (Silent operas) is the last hurrah of playful theatrics before its appropriation by a sterner Qing morality. Granted, Mei's work is meant as a literary study, but a more specific discussion of what about the discourse of theatricality is early modern, or why—and if—this discourse comes to an end in the mid-seventeenth century might have lent her close readings greater historical significance. These minor reservations aside, Mei's study is a valuable addition to the scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary thought and culture.
