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  • The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions trans. by Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema
  • Regina Llamas
The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions. Translated and introduced by Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. 391. $65 (cloth). ISBN 978–0231168540.

The Orphan of Zhao and other Yuan Plays is the latest installment in the long-established partnership between Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema. Here they translate seven of the earliest known versions of northern Chinese zaju 雜劇 plays, which are collected in the volume The Thirty Miscellaneous Comedies Printed in the Yuan (Yuan kan sanshi zhong 元刊三十種; hereafter, Yuankan) and date from the fourteenth century. Together with these seven plays, the translators have included four additional translations of later recensions of the same plays. Three of these translations are from the well-known early seventeenth-century Selections of Yuan Plays (Yuanqu xuan 元 曲選) by the southern scholar Zang Maoxun 臧懋循 (1550–1620), and one, Tippler Zhao Yuan Encounters the Prior Emperor, is taken from the very fine selections of plays from the mid-Ming, the Maiwang guan 脈望館 collection. The book also includes a general introduction dealing with the textual history of the Yuankan plays. Each individual play is also preceded by an introduction discussing the theme and background of the story as well as authorial attribution where they exist. With this book, West and Idema have supplied students of Chinese drama with an indispensable and invaluable source for the study of Chinese dramatic history.

In the preliminary "Note to the Reader," the authors observe that the aim of the book is to take the reader interested in Chinese drama into a realm that differs from the more widely represented drama edited by mid- and late Ming literati and to provide a means of comparison of the structure, linguistic register, and values expressed between these earliest plays and the later Ming recensions. In order to allow for a productive comparative reading of the texts, the authors have placed the early Yuan plays and the four later recensions side [End Page 247] by side. In this way, the reader immediately notices the differences between the Yuankan texts, believed to be either "role texts" or singing parts—possibly composed for the instruction of the main singing role—and the later Ming editions, probably conceived as reading texts produced for an educated public. While the translation of the Yuankan version of the plays is entirely new, their work also draws on earlier comparative research between early plays and the later Ming editions, and I would recommend anyone interested in the differences between the texts to read these studies.1

West and Idema have long been of the opinion that what has been considered Yuan drama and held by drama historians as its textual canon is in fact the appropriation by mid-Ming literati of earlier versions of the plays. In these essays, the authors show how dramatic texts are the product of constant negotiation between the authors, their culture, contemporary conventions of stagecraft, between actors and audience, and even between collators and publishers aspiring to create the definitive textual edition of a dramatic text. For instance, West compares two versions of the play Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan 竇娥冤): one taken from the Gumingjia zaju 古名家雜劇 collection of plays printed in 1588, and the other included in the Selections of Yuan Drama edited by Zang Maoxun and printed in 1615–1616. West's analysis shows how late Ming literati rationalized the language of the plays, standardized the format, added dialogue and stage directions, changed or entirely re-wrote arias, altered the prosody and rhyme patterns, and at times completely revised the plot of the story. These changes resulted not just in a textual and literary homogenization of the plays, but also in a fundamental change from commercial values "of personal benefit, reciprocity, self-benefit and karma" to the "duty-centered righteousness of Confucianism."2 In another earlier article, Idema also discussed how fundamental political changes in government were reflected in the changes in values between the Yuankan and the Selections...

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