There are considerable differences in the physical format of the editions that we have used, and we have striven to maintain these distinctions in the translation. A typical zaju drama, stripped to its skeletal form, will have a title, a wedge (optional demi-act), four acts, and be concluded by a “title” and a “name.” Each act will consist of a suite of songs in a single mode arranged in order, written to the same rhyme, sometimes concluded by a coda (wei, or sha). As we noted in the introduction, the early plays may also be concluded by a “dispersal scene” (sanchang 散場). The play proper will then be concluded with the title and name of the drama. For instance, in the fourteenth-century edition of Tippler Zhao Yuan Encounters the Prior Emperor, the structure looks thus:
| [Act 1] |
[Act 2] |
[Act 3] |
[Act 4] |
| [XIANLÜ MODE] |
[NANLÜ MODE] |
[ZHONGLÜ MODE] |
[SHUANGDIAO MODE] |
| (Dian jiangchun) |
(Yizhi hua) |
(Fen die’er) |
(Xinshui ling) |
| (Hunjiang long) |
(Liangzhou) |
(Zui chunfeng) |
(Qiaopai’er) |
| (You hulu) |
(Muyang guan) |
(Ying xianke) |
(Tianshui ling) |
| (Tianxia le) |
(Gewei) |
(Shang xiaolou) |
(Zhegui ling) |
| (Nezha ling) |
(Gan huang’en) |
(Reprise) |
(Qi dixiong) |
| (Que ta zhi) |
(Hong shaoyao) |
(Shi’er yue) |
(Yan’er luo) |
| (Jisheng cao) |
(Pusa Liangzhou) |
(Yaomin ge) |
(Desheng ling) |
| (Zui zhong tian) |
(Coda) |
(Shua hai’er) |
|
| (You simen) |
|
(Second from Coda) |
|
| (Shanghua shi) |
|
(Coda) |
|
| (Reprise) |
|
|
|
| (Coda) |
|
|
|
| Title: |
Father-in-law and mother-in-law have venomous hearts, |
| |
The official concerned abuses his power to get a rouged beauty. |
| Name: |
In the snow a government runner takes great revenge, |
| |
Tippler Zhao Yuan Encounters the Prior Emperor. |
We use brackets for several purposes: (1) to add information that the Chinese implies but does not state (e.g., I see three golden-saddled [horses] tied to an aged mulberry tree), (2) to indicate a missing subject (e.g., [ZHANG QIAN speaks:] Face the judge) or (3) a missing object (e.g., If I write out [the divorce writ] …), and (4) to indicate acts and wedges in the early print editions (e.g., [Act 1]). These are meant only as a convenience to the reader. It is clear that these early editions did not conceive of hard-and-fast divisions between acts except as units of the play marked by the suites. It is clear that in many cases action was continuous between what later editors would stipulate as a separate acts. The change between “[Act 2]” and “[Act 3]” of Xue Rengui Returns Home provides an excellent example of the fluidity between suites of a drama.
Normally a play is composed of three basic kinds of text: stage directions, plain speech, and lyric songs (translated as free verse). Role types appear as small-capital text, stage directions as italic text, arias are inset three spaces, lines spoken within the arias are inset six spaces in reduced type. Poems are centered in the text. Recited text from other forms of performance (for instance, sections of ballad verse and the judgments pronounced at the end of the plays) that are not delivered in plain speech are inset two spaces and flush left. Tune titles are in italics, and the mode to which the suite is written is in small capitals.
The fourteenth-century print and Ming manuscript editions separate stage directions with only a large space to signal separation of the stage directions from each other, from the arias, and from spoken passages. To note these we utilize em dashes to separate the stage directions from other parts of the text:
EMPEROR speaks:—Zhao Yuan, do you want to see your enemies?—MALE LEAD speaks:—Your Majesty, I certainly do.—EMPEROR speaks:—Personal attendants, bring in the Prefect of the Eastern Capital along with Zhao Yuan’s in-laws and his wife Moon Fairy Liu.—CHU speaks:—Understood! The whole group go in and face Him.—Acts out taking OLD MAN, OLD WOMAN, PAINTED FEMALE, and COMIC and they all kneel.—EMPEROR speaks:—You miscreants, do you know your offenses?—COMIC speaks:—I don’t, Your Majesty.—EMPEROR speaks:—Why did you forcibly take a commoner’s wife?—COMIC speaks:—I certainly wouldn’t dare do such a thing. She made me be a live-in son-in-law.—EMPEROR speaks:—This miscreant knows nothing about how to act.—MALE LEAD sings:
Zang Maoxun’s A Selection of Yuan Plays editions use parentheses to enclose the stage directions:
(CHEN JIQING speaks:) Wife, I have to go off to the examinations. (FEMALE speaks:) Scholar, you just got home, how can you leave and abandon me? (She acts out grieving.) (CHEN JIQING speaks:) How could I ever set aside the feelings between us? It’s just that the time of the examination is pressing in, and in the blink of an eye another three years will be gone. What then? (MALE LEAD sings:)
We have annotated the text with primarily advanced students in mind. But, by the time these texts were created, many of the gems of Chinese poetry had entered the colloquial lexicon and had become standard, even cliché parts of ordinary speech. Unless a poem has special significance in the text or is rarely used, we have identified these passages by simply putting them into quotation marks. They function as a form of speech similar to what the Chinese call “set phrases” (chengyu 成語) or “colloquial sayings” (suyu 俗語), which are handy aphorisms that are spoken to capture the moment linguistically as a precise category of behavior or feeling. These clichés and set phrases are also enclosed in quotation marks.
The reader should also bear the following in mind:
1. Chinese texts seldom use personal pronouns, except for the first person. Instead, the common form of address is to use terms denoting kinship, social status, or official position. To make the text more readable, we have often emended these to simple pronouns, except in cases where they specify a key relationship of the speaker to the person being addressed.
2. We use serial periods to denote missing or blurred text. We do not include the actual character count of words missing. The reader who desires to investigate the number of characters missing or putative reconstructions of text should consult the annotations of Zheng Qian 1962, Xu Qinjun 1980, and Ning Xiyuan 1988.
3. We have attempted to follow the original printed edition or manuscript copy as closely as possible. This means that spoken text that is in smaller characters (often set flush right in the column) in the original is rendered in smaller type and placed apart from the lyrics of the aria (as shown in the preceding example). The text in smaller characters is either speech inserted between lines as part of the song or padding words (chenzi; see the introduction). Zang Maoxun’s text does not mark padding words, and we have, as he has, made them part of the lines of the arias, maintaining their original size.
4. The jing role includes both comics and villains. We have identified the jing role in the dramatis personae contextually as either a comic or a villain. Ming editors introduced a role type unknown in the earlier editions, the chou丑, which we have translated as “clown.”
5. Finally, it should be noted that the fourteenth-century Yuan texts do not use the stage direction “sing” in their texts. This is because these are role texts written for only one actor to use and therefore omit the redundant stage direction.