Passion, Romance, and Qing: The World of Emotions and States of Mind in Peony Pavilion.

AuthorMackerras, Colin
PositionBook review

Passion, Romance, and Qing: The World of Emotions and States of Mind in Peony Pavilion. By TIAN YUAN TAN and PAOLO SANTANGELO. Emotions and States of Mind in East Asia, vol. 4. 3 vols. Leiden: BRILL, 2014. Pp. x + 1555. [euro]349, S453.

In essence, this work is a dictionary of terms used in the most famous (and probably greatest) of all Chinese love-dramas, together with several essays on various allied subjects. It is enormous in its scope, innovative and more or less faultless in its scholarship, in its character detailed and specialized, yet interesting, and splendid in its quality.

The item under discussion is Mudan ting [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (The Peony Pavilion), a fifty-five-scene drama completed in 1598. Its author was Tang Xianzu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1550-1616), perhaps the greatest of all Chinese dramatists. This judgment, plus the fact that he died in the same year as the English bard, has given rise to his being called "China's Shakespeare." (Indeed, a volume by Tian Yuan Tan appeared in 2016 marking the four hundredth anniversary of the deaths of both dramatists.) Correspondingly, the most famous of all love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, was first published in 1597, its contemporaneity with Mudan ting leading some to call the latter work "China's Romeo and Juliet."

Tang Xianzu called Mudan ting a chuanqi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (literally "to transmit the marvellous"), a form of drama that had developed in South China since the twelfth century, but by his time this form was evolving into a genre called Kunshan qiang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], nowadays more often known as Kunqu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Not long after the rise of Kunqu, bitter debate broke out over the object and nature of drama. Some argued it should be about love or emotions (qing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), others demanding it be instead about reason or theory (li [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Mudan ting was the archetype of drama in the qing category.

The importance of Mudan ting in the history of Chinese theatre, compounded with its being the main drama representing emotion, is adequate justification for compiling the work under review. This is because the rich vocabulary of the play is deeply expressive not only of the world of emotions and states of mind in the drama itself but also in the Chinese society and culture of its time. It seems to me an ideal work to include in a series called "Emotions...

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