Putting on a Play in an Underworld Courtroom: The “Mingpan” (Infernal Judgment) Scene in Tang Xianzu’s Mudan Ting (Peony Pavilion)

PUTTING ON A PLAY IN AN UNDERWORLD COURTROOM: THE ‘‘MINGPAN’’ (INFERNAL JUDGMENT) SCENE IN TANG XIANZU’S MUDAN TING (PEONY PAVILION) THOMAS KELLY University of Chicago This article is an attempt to present a new way of thinking about courtroom trials in traditional Chinese theater. I look at how one playwright, Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1616), used meta-theatrical devices to comically deflate and satirize judicial authority. At the same time, however, I argue that he used the scaffolding of the courtroom trial to experiment with theatrical scene composition in the chuanqi 傳奇 drama form. Tang not only used a theatrical idiom to parody the procedures of the courtroom, he looked to the format of the trial to stretch the representational possibilities of the dramatic medium. Questions of what constitutes juridical authority and what grounds an act of adjudication are equally pertinent to the role-playing of the courtroom and the illusionary domain of the stage in his most famous play, Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (The peony pavilion; preface dated 1598). I focus specifically on how these themes are treated in the complex courtroom scene in the twenty-third scene of the play, ‘‘Mingpan’’ 冥判 (Infernal judgment). The scene as Tang wrote it, I suggest, displays a heightened awareness of how dramatic representations of the law in both the world of the living and the dead can call into question the nature and artifice of the theater itself. THE ‘‘MINGPAN’’ SCENE IN TANG XIANZU’S MUDAN TING Tang Xianzu’s Mudan ting returns time and again to question the verifiability of characters’ testimonies and the disputed status of actions taken within the world of the play.1 The burden of proof falls on the two lovers, Du Liniang 杜麗娘 and Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅, who each must justify and corroborate their testimony before juridical authorities and also prove to family and friends who they are from Scene 16 on. Liu not only has to prove his credentials as a promising scholar to Miao Shunbin 苗舜賓 when the latter is inspecting jewels (Scene 21) and metropolitan 1 As Tina Lu has argued at length, questions of personal identity are at stake throughout the play: Are characters who they claim to be? Can we trust their outward appearances? These questions assume an added urgency in the underworld trial scene, which Lu only discusses in relation to issues of counterfeiting and slippage between material and nominal worth in the determination of monetary value (see Tina Lu, Persons, Roles and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001], pp. 106–13). CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 32.2 (December 2013): 132–155 # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2013 DOI: 10.1179/0193777413Z.00000000010 civil service examination candidates (Scene 41), he also has to prove that he is not guilty of robbing the grave of Liniang, the daughter of (the play’s chief patriarch) Du Bao 杜寶. Liu is arrested (Scene 50) and undergoes harsh interrogation and physical torture by Du Bao (Scene 53). It is not until the final scene (Scene 55) that Du Bao’s charges against him are finally dismissed by the emperor, even if this does not lead to Du Bao recognizing Liu as his son-in-law. Du Liniang never suffers judicial torture,2 but she also is required to repeatedly prove that she is who she claims to be and that her love—a love that both kills and resurrects her—is genuine. Although the final scene is initially presented as a contest between the counterclaims of Du Bao and Liu Mengmei, and it seems that Du Liniang only attends as a witness (she even arrives unescorted), after her arrival the key question becomes whether she is presently a ghost or not.3 Prior to that, however, Liniang is the main ‘‘defendant’’ in ‘‘Mingpan,’’ the play’s most elaborate and complex courtroom scene, a scene that appears almost half-way through the drama and marks an important turning point in the narrative.4 Earlier, Du Liniang encountered her lover in a dream (Scene 10), was unable to repeat the experience (Scene 12), became love-sick enough that she felt the need to paint and leave...