A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China.

• Author: Kile, S.E.

A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China. By LI YU, translated by JING SHEN and ROBERT E. HEGEL. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. xxv + 330. $25.

First published in 1661, the chuanqi play A Couple of Soles is a bold and boisterous celebration of theatricality that challenges preconceptions about traditional Chinese theater today with the same panache that it overturned widespread prejudice against actors in the seventeenth century. Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel's authoritative translation of this play by the maverick cultural entrepreneur Li Yu (1611-1680) is the first of his ten extant plays to be translated into English. Bringing Li Yu's distinctive comic flair and theatrical virtuosity to the Anglophone world for the first time, A Couple of Soles will be a welcome addition to courses on Chinese theater and drama. Moreover, the play's particular focus on the theater world and its experimentation with the metatheatrical possibilities of the role types that were the cornerstone of traditional Chinese theatrical performance broaden its appeal substantially. It has much to offer scholars of drama and theater in any tradition, and it would be well placed as a core text in a course on early modern theatricality, or in a survey of world theater history.

A Couple of Soles dramatizes the inner workings of a theater troupe. The culmination of this depiction occurs in scene fifteen, when the troupe's female lead, Fairy Liu, actually leaps to her death from a riverside stage while performing a scene from The Thorn Hairpin (Jingchai ji) in which its female protagonist drowns herself in a river. The scene then depicts onstage audience members reacting to her righteous suicide and seeking justice by reporting the case to the magistrate. The performance of a play within this play shifts readers' attention from the fictional characters depicted in plays to the living actors who perform them. In making an actress character the female lead, it also elevates the status of an actress to that of a chaste beauty fit to be paired with a talented scholar in a romantic comedy.

The talented scholar for whom Fairy Liu leaps to her death is Tan Chuyu, a student who auditions for the theater troupe in order to get close to her. Initially cast as a jing (painted face) role type, he and Fairy Liu strategize together to have him recast as the sheng (male lead) so that they can play husband and wife onstage. When Fairy Liu's mother tries to sell her to a lecherous rich man, she publicly proclaims her fidelity to Tan and then leaps to her death. Tan jumps...