My Year of Peonies

The year 1998 marked the four hundredth anniversary of Tang Xianzu's^aPeony Pavilion. By 1999 three major productions of the play had appeared in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. Chinese literature scholar Judith T. Zeitlin is one of the few who saw all three productions. In this article she examines them in terms of their relationship to Tang's original text and to the modern kunqu^d performance tradition.