Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China by Sophie Volpp (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China. By Sophie Volpp. xiii + 371 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. Cloth $44.95. Sophie Volpp’s book, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China, is an important and timely study, alluring in both cover and content, and often provocative . Its importance lies in the attention it pays to the conceptualization of and obsession with theatricality as one of the defining features of the seventeenth-century Chinese intellectual realm; its timeliness stems from the current popularity of theatricality in literary studies to analyze gender, ethnicity, and identity, thus contributing to what Martin Puchner has referred to as “the theatrical turn of theory.”1 As such, Volpp joins Haiping Yan, Judith Zeitlin, and myself to bring the “theatrical turn” to the study and interpretation of Chinese literature. More specifically, Volpp’s brilliant and original work is an invaluable addition to our understanding of theatricality as the intersection between the history of theater and literary studies. Volpp’s central argument is that the “long seventeenth century” saw the emergence of two forms of theatricality, both social and cultural responses by the literati elite to the rising status of the nouveau riche. In the first configuration, Volpp argues that “anti-theatricalists” viewed theater and merchant self-imposture as contrived and artificial, like counterfeit silver and inflated titles, as Fan Lian 笵廉 (fl. 1602) so humorously put it in his biji 筆記 (random jottings; pp. 41–42). In the second configuration , literati elites distinguished themselves from merchants by drawing on modes of watching theater to create a type of social spectatorship in which “the discriminating spectator engages with illusion while understanding it to be such.… The vulgar concerned themselves with being seen; the more refined with ways of seeing” (p. 260). This “more profound” (p. 8) form of theatricality served as a new source of literati social capital by its celebration of theatricality as “the conjunction of illusion and actuality” (p. 56). Volpp’s argument thus adds new support for Craig Clunas’ Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (1991), in which he argues that the late Ming literati elite developed new social practices to distinguish themselves from wealthy merchants. The first two chapters of Worldly Stage lay out the details of the two conceptions of theatricality and discuss the influence of stage architecture on the origins of literati social spectatorship in the late Ming. Chapter 1, based on Volpp’s research on biji, maps the two configurations of theatricality. In Chapter 2, she contextualizes the literati elite’s form of social and participatory spectatorship in a discussion of stage 1 Martin Puchner, “The Theater in Modernist Thought,” New Literary History 33.3 (2002): 530. CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 35.2 (December 2016): 179–190© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2016 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2016.1183320 architecture and performance practices in the theater. Drawing extensively from contemporary theater scholars Liao Ben 廖奔 and Zhao Shanlin 趙山林 as well as seventeenth-century biji that describe theater performances, this chapter engages with a wide range of materials about mobile and fixed stages to draw our attention to their permeable boundaries. Fashionable performance practices, such as allowing the audience to select a scene instead of an entire play and the popularity of salonstyle performances, are key to fully understanding the nature of participatory spectatorship and its influence on other social practices. The core of Volpp’s work centers on an analysis of two well-known chuanqi 傳奇 plays, Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (The peony pavilion) and Taohua shan 桃花扇 (The peach blossom fan), the lesser known zaju 雜劇 play Nan wanghou 男王后 (The male queen), and a series of poems circulated between literati about an obscure actor named Xu Ziyun 徐紫雲. In Chapter 3, Volpp reads Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1616) as representative of the anti-theatricalists who configured theater as contrived and artificial. Volpp’s approach to the well-studied play Mudan ting is original; she focuses on two groups of minor characters and, through them, highlights the play’s inclusion and juxtaposition of two linguistic registers, the classical and the vernacular. She also nicely contextualizes the interplay of these two different sociolinguistic...