Editing Pipa Ji for the Late Ming Popular Theater: The Identity of the "Singing Hermit" and His Editorial Work

This essay is an investigation—combining biography, close reading, cultural history, and imaginative reasoning typical of the Sinological kaozheng scholarship—into a case of drama publishing during the late Ming publishing boom, from the 1570s to the 1630s.¹ It concerns patterns in drama editing, piracy in drama publishing, and clues to the puzzle of authorship. We know remarkably more about late Ming print culture in general than about drama publishing in particular. This essay fills in a gap of our current book history about the modus operandi of drama publishing through a detective story about how the manuscript of a revision of Pipa ji (The Lute) was acquired and published posthumously.

The drama edition under discussion is one of the thirteen Ming editions of Pipa ji, the literary landmark of southern drama or chuanqi attributed to Gao Ming (ca. 1305–59).² This particular edition, entitled Bojie dingben (The Story of Bojie, Definitive Edition), was published by Bidong shanfang (Bidong Mountain Villa) in the early 1620s.³ On the first page of each juan of Bojie dingben, the author/editor's pseudonym is inscribed as Panke shuoren (Singing Hermit), under the general heading of Citan qingwan (Idle Pleasures in the Forum of Songs), from which the Singing Hermit derived his other pseudonym, Citan zhuren (Master of the Forum of Songs). The major pseudonym, Panke shuoren, alludes to a poem in the classic poetry collection Shijing (The Book of Songs), said to have been compiled by Confucius.⁴ This allusion also has political undertones that suggest a Daoist pursuit of estranging oneself from the government, which was popular among late Ming literati.⁵ The secondary pseudonym, Master of the Forum of Songs, corresponds to the text of the book in that the views of several other commentators are recorded in the margins, suggesting that the Singing Hermit collaborated with a closeknit group of friends.

Two features make this particular edition stand out among all thirteen Ming editions of Pipa ji. First, the layout. As is shown in figure 1, above the main text of Pipa ji, almost one third of the page is devoted to eyebrow comments (meipi), what I would call "printed marginalia" (to distinguish it from the book owner's handwritten comments in the margins), consisting of the Singing Hermit's editorial commentaries on musicological and dramaturgical concerns. This two-register arrangement with eyebrow comments above and the main text below is reminiscent

Figure 1.

Page layout of Bojie dingben, 1:1a, woodblock print, ca. 1620s. The eyebrow comments in the printed marginalia take up almost one third of the space, a rarely seen large register among late Ming annotated full-text drama editions. On the first page of each juan of Bojie dingben the author/editor's pseudonym is inscribed as the Singing Hermit, under the general heading of citan qingwan (Idle Pleasures in the Forum of Songs), from which the Singing Hermit derived his other pseudonym, Citan zhuren (Master of the Forum of Songs).

of popular drama miscellanies (mostly printed in a cheaper manner) and song formulas (mostly exquisitely made). It is nevertheless rarely seen among the late Ming annotated full-text drama editions. This design itself might be conventional, but its application to a full-length play as opposed to an anthology of excerpted scenes or song suites was a novelty. Whoever the Singing Hermit was, he spoke volubly about his all-important musicological and dramaturgical decisions to make his voice and his friends' voices distinct, loud, and authoritative so that no reader could afford to ignore them. To give readers a sense of what a standard full-text drama edition looks like, I juxtapose Bojie dingben with a more standard annotated edition of Pipa ji, also produced by Bidong Mountain Villa in the early 1620s. The latter has a narrow strip at the top for glosses and brief comments. In the first half of this essay, I will focus on a close