Drama has long been marginalized by the Chinese literary elite or coopted (rather than appreciated in its own right) by historians into the generalized narratives about China's poetic wen literary tradition. In the English-speaking world, it has been a challenge to teach premodern Chinese drama in translation due to the lack of quality translations and accessible textbooks.

The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama is part of the most recent scholarly endeavors to advance the field and make translations of traditional Chinese dramas more readily available, especially translations of the earliest mature form of Chinese drama. A welcome addition to the classroom, this anthology introduces its readers to ten representative works of Yuan drama (also known as northern drama or zaju). The anthology is the culmination of the effort by two generations of sinologists, and has been long in the making. According to Jonathan Chaves, one of the translators, this project was initiated decades ago by C. T. Hsia and George Kao. Several of the graduate students in Hsia's seminar on Yuan drama at Columbia University participated in the project, and they have now become well-known scholars and translators. Wai-Yee Li oversaw the final editing and completion of the entire anthology.

The ten selected works are organized by the five most commonly found themes in early Chinese plays: history play (The Zhao Orphan and Tricking Kuai Tong), crime and punishment (Selling Rice in Chenzhou and The Moheluo Doll), folly and consequences (The Eastern Hall Elder and The Tiger Head Plaque), female agency (Rescuing a Sister and Qiu Hu Tries to Seduce His Wife) and romantic love (On Horseback and Over the Garden Wall and Scholar Zhang Boils the Sea). The general introduction offers an eloquent and succinct account of the aesthetic and structural features of northern drama, its performance conventions, and the cultural and historical contexts in which northern dramas were produced and disseminated. The introductions to each individual work, on the other hand, provide explanations of each play's literary and historical sources, comparison with other Yuan plays that deal with similar stories or historical figures, and analysis of major themes and motifs.

Additionally, the anthology highlights the complexity of the editorial history of Yuan plays. The earliest extant northern dramas are a group of thirty Yuan plays collectively referred to by modern scholars as “thirty zaju published during the Yuan dynasty” (Yuankan zaju sanshi zhong). While the significance of these Yuan editions has long been acknowledged, they present a major challenge to readers because they lack stage prompts or full dialogues that facilitate the advancement of the plot. Later editions by scholars of the seventeenth century may have brought to us more readable plays with standardized narrative structures and full-fledged characters, but they also bear a strong imprint of the moral values and ideologies representative of the Ming-dynasty elite culture. One has to ask to what extent can later redactions approximate the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Yuan textual traditions. As Wai-Yee Li argues in the introduction, “It is probably more useful to think of [a Ming edition] as a composite Yuan-Ming creation that contains both Yuan elements and Ming editorial changes” (p. 1).

This principle is reflected in the anthology's treatment of textual variations, as it seeks to balance between restoring “authentic” Yuan texts and respecting the aesthetic value of Ming editors' versions. In contrast to Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West's recently published The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), which is based on the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Yuan scripts, The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama's choice of adopting scholar-turned-entrepreneur Zang Maoxun's (1550–1620) seventeenth-century Selection of Yuan Plays (Yuanqu xuan) is backed by a different set of considerations. Zang's edition not only is more influential throughout history, but also presents more coherent and readable texts, with plots trimmed and narrative sharpened. Readers would surely appreciate the meticulous annotations to each play, where textual variations are identified and explained.

To illustrate the structural and ideological differences between the Yuan edition and the canonized version by Zang Maoxun, the anthology also features two translations of the frequently taught and widely adapted play, The Zhao Orphan. The juxtaposition demonstrates how the Yuan play was Confucianized and transformed by the Ming literati.

The translations of the plays are a joy to read—they are lucid and accurate, with rhyming schemes that approximate the Chinese original. In contrast to currently available translations, the anthology features a wider variety of plays that would work well in world literature classes. For those who are interested in comparing different editions, this anthology serves as a decent complement to West and Idema's Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010) and their most recent The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).