The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions

Abstract

while the underworld bureaucracy is, like the administration in the world of light, all staffed by men, it is not therefore even more misogynistic. Underworld judges are quite ready to be impressed by the virtue of women as the many stories show that contrast the fate in hell of good and evil women. The traditional underworld has not only a rather well-defined bureaucracy but also a rather stable geography, which is ignored by Gao Xingjian, who also introduces into the underworld deities such as the thunder gods who, to the best of my knowledge, rarely venture there. I make these remarks here not to criticize Gao Xingjian, but only to point out that his picture of the underworld is highly idiosyncratic. Gao Xingjian is, of course, utterly free to compose any underworld he likes, but students may perhaps like his version even better if they can make meaningful comparisons. In this connection one also wonders whether they (and performers) would not have benefited from illustrations showing these traditional deities in their grotesque shapes. Even simple reproductions of black and white woodcuts would have greatly enhanced the attractiveness of this volume, one would think. It might have been noted too that Gao Xingjian was not the only theater practitioner in the 1980s and beyond who was interested in plays on Zhuangzi and his wife. For instance, the Kun opera version, known as Butterfly Dream (Hudie meng), has been revived, a process that has been chronicled by Lei Jingxuan 雷競 璇, Kunqu Hudie meng: Yibu chuantong xi zaixian 崑劇蝴蝶夢:一部傳統戲的再 現 (The Kun opera Hudie meng: The re-presentation of a traditional play; Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2005). Again, Gao Xingjian’s deliberate modernization of a traditional play might have been put into greater relief by a brief comparison with these attempts to revive the tradition. Plays do not necessarily sell very well, so perhaps the translators have been urged by their publisher to keep their introduction and other explanatory materials as succinct as possible. While a proliferation of notes may well scare off potential readers, a short appendix on the development of this “ancient morality tale” and its modern life could have been an alternative. Even with such an appendix this still would be a very slim volume. Instead, teachers who want to include these translations in their classroom readings (as I would strongly advise them to do) will have to provide the needed background information themselves.