The Stage in the Temple: Ritual Opera in Village Shanxi by David Johnson (review)

A historian at heart, Johnson sees his studies of the rituals and operas performed at temple festivals in rural Shanxi as a window to the world of the “hundreds of thousands of villages that, until the mid-twentieth century, held probably 90 percent of the population” but are generally ignored by historians of China (p. 2). The Stage in the Temple: Ritual Opera in Village Shanxi is an extension of Johnson’s prodigious larger volume, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundation of Village Life in North China, on the rituals of the village festivals of southeastern Shanxi, whose ritual opera scripts have been lost. Having collected 43 Za Opera (zaju 雜劇/zaxi 雜戲, also known as Gong and Drum Operas luogu zaxi 鑼鼓雜戲) manuscripts (see Appendix 3, for a list and descriptions) from southwestern Shanxi, Johnson complements his previous study with discussions of eight selected scripts, along with histories of various village operas from the Song Dynasty to the near present and descriptions of their performances and settings.

Aside from the conclusion, titled “Questions and Conclusion,” The Stage in the Temple consists of three main parts: (1) “Scripts of Za Opera”; (2) “History of Za Opera”; and (3) “Village Opera in Performance.” Part 1 discusses “Five Scripts from Southwestern Shanxi” and “Three Scripts from Xinzhuang Village.” Part 2 consists of “Origins and Early Development of Za Opera,” “Early Stages in Shanxi,” “The Invisible History of Za Opera,” and “Nuo Opera in Anhui: A Parallel Tradition.” Part 3 consists of “Za Opera,” “Yuanben,” “Sai Opera,” and “Tiao Opera.” The book also includes an introduction; 3 appendices (“List of Early Stages in Shanxi,” “Note on the Authenticity of Our Scripts,” and “List of Za Opera Manuscripts”); a bibliography; and a glossary–index.

In Part 1, Johnson describes and discusses the following scripts: Presenting Incense; The Banquet at Hongmen; The White Ape Leads the Way; Changban Slope; The Fire Assault Stratagem; Thrice Inviting Zhuge Liang; Attacking Yanzhou; and Xue Gang Assaults the Court. Old manuscripts from identifiable villages and ranging in date from the late 1770s to 1906, the first five scripts “serve as an introduction to the genre” (p. 12), while the remaining three scripts are analyzed in detail. If we are to assume that the traditional village audience believed in the veracity of the plays (p. 6) and that even the mythic-religious elements represented veritable gods and their tales, these scripts portrayed for their audiences “historical” stories of deities, heroes, and their counterparts. Aside from Presenting Incense and The White Ape Leads the Way, which can be traced to mythic-religious tales of the Shang (similar to the novel The Enfeoffment of the Gods) and Tang dynasties (similar to Mulian Rescues His Mother and Journey to the West), the plays are framed as enactments of historical events from before the Song Dynasty. The Banquet at Hongmen portrays an event before the establishment of the Han Dynasty, Xue Gang Assaults the Court features a woman warrior attributed to the Tang Dynasty, and Attacking Yanzhou portrays action during the interregnum between the Tang and Song dynasties. The rest of the plays all depict episodes that can be traced to Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Johnson is particularly interested in the roles played by the literati in the revision of the plays (based on colophons), the lack of orthodox morality therein, and the connection of the plays to novels, storytelling, and chantefables (zhugongdiao 諸宮調) or ballads, and concludes that they “belong to an archaic, ritualized tradition that was quite separate from the main line of development of opera in north China” (p. 33).

Part 2, titled “History of Za Opera,” traces related early histories of Chinese opera, the locality, and a ritual opera from another province in order to contextualize and fill in missing pieces of the larger picture. “Origins and Early Development of Za Opera” shows how zaju began during the...