During the late-Ming period, printing permitted ways of seeing to be recorded in large numbers of images. 8 Scholarship of late-Ming illustrated fiction and drama often analyzes such imprints as indexical of shifting relationships of text and image driven by the technological conditions of printing, its historical evolution, and its economic contexts. 9 Given their obvious relationship to practices of sight and vision, printed illustrations of dramas provide an index of the relationship between practices of vision and viewership in late-Ming China. 10 The corpus of late-Ming printed illustrated drama, because of its implicit relationship to stage production and viewership, represents in visual terms a range of habitual visual practices. These include: visualizing dramatic narrative in pictorial terms, watching dramatic performance, seeing dramatic performance, and representing other types of narrative action as dramatic performance.

The representation of dramatic narrative in pictorial rather than in visual experiential terms is evident in images in which conventions of painting narrative take precedence over representation of an audience-like view of dramatic performance. One illustration of this type is that of the maid Crimson eavesdropping on the lovemaking of Scholar Zhang and Oriole from an illustrated edition of ‘The Romance of the Western Chamber’published in 1498 (plate 1). 11 Specifically, the architectural infrastructure contained within the picture plane is elaborated beyond the schema of stage and stage props. Moreover, the diptych format creates a picture space like that of a handscroll, unified by orthogonal perspective. In narrative terms, the dimensions of the image, that is, longer than it is tall, imply its relationship to the handscroll. By extension, these proportions imply the potential for narrative movement.