The Moheluo Doll Revisited: Yuan Drama in the Late Ming

THE MOHELUO DOLL REVISITED: YUAN DRAMA IN THE LATE MING Kimberly Besio1 (Colby College) As a beginning graduate student one of the first books I read on Yuan drama (zaju) was James Crump’s Chinese Theater in the Days of Kublai Khan.2 Professor Crump’s unabashed exuberance about his subject matter, as well as his store of knowledge regarding zaju, has been an inspiration for my own research ever since. In the over twenty-five years since the publication of this book our understanding of Yuan zaju has changed considerably. As we have paid more attention to the complicated histories of the Ming texts that Professor Crump relied so heavily on, we have become more aware of the difficulties involved in analyzing these texts as direct reflections of Yuan stagecraft.3 Nevertheless, the three translated plays that make up the second half of Crump’s book remain lively reading, and still serve as valuable introductions to the genre. In this paper, I revisit one of the plays translated by Crump, The Moheluo Doll (Moheluo 魔合羅). Crump’s inclusion of this play in his introduction to Yuan drama was particularly felicitous. The Moheluo Doll exists in four different editions, including one dating from the Yuan dynasty. Comparison of these four texts can serve as a means of reviewing recent scholarship on Yuan drama since the publication of Professor Crump’s book at the same time that it allows us to explore the particulars of the ways the forms and functions of these texts changed from the Yuan to the Ming dynasty. But the focus here will not be on what these texts might tell us about Yuan performance or society. Rather, I am interested in what the variations in these texts confirm about the functions “Yuan” zaju served in their two Ming incarnations—that is texts produced at the Ming courts for performance and texts edited by late Ming literati editors such as Zang Maoxun 臧懋循 (1550-1620) and Meng Chengshun 孟稱舜 (1599-after 1684) and published in print anthologies for a reading public. 1 This paper has undergone many permutations; I would particularly like to thank Naifei Ding, Patricia Sieber, Ann Waltner, and Stephen West, all of whom read and commented on it at crucial points in its development. Its current form owes an enormous amount to the helpful comments and criticism of the two anonymous readers. Finally, I am exceedingly grateful for the patience, support, and valuable input of David Rolston, guest editor of this issue. 2 J. I. Crump, Chinese Theater in the Days of Kublai Khan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980). Edition of reference will be to the reprint with some corrections (see p. 423) that appeared in 1990 in the Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies series from The Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan (hereafter, Chinese Theater). 3 See Wilt Idema, “Why You Never Have Read a Yuan Drama: The Transformation of Zaju at the Ming Court,” in Studi in Onore di Lionello Lanciotti (Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale, 1996), pp. 765-91, for a cogent description of scholarship on this point. One of the first articles in English to draw attention to the variations between different editions of the same play was by Crump’s student Stephen West, “A Study in Appropriation: Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111.2 (1991): 283-302. CHINOPERL Papers No. 26 (2005-2006)© 2006 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 26 Specifically, my discussion demonstrates how plays that were performed on the Ming court stage emphasize the comic, and how this comedy tends to support those values which aided the Imperial agenda. Furthermore, this paper is concerned with how plays in the late Ming anthologies limited comic excess and further refined the poetics of the genre, so as to emphasize the genre’s affiliation with the lyrical tradition. We can clearly see an association drawn between Yuan drama and theories of poetry in this introductory comment on his edition of the The Moheluo Doll by the late Ming editor and playwright Meng Chengshun: The difficulty of writing qu 曲 lies in conveying emotions [chuanqing 傳情], describing scenery...