ANY INQUIRY INTO HUMOR IN DRAMA CALLS FOR SOME preliminary observations. On the one hand, the theatre and its literature offer particularly auspicious ground for such investigation. In its primary meaning “comedy” signifies a type of drama which, as time has passed, appears one of the major species of theatrical art. Humor, which, of course, pertains to comedy, seems especially at home on the stage. Nowhere does it flourish more lustily than in its form of presentational art. On the other hand, the definition of comedy as a variety of drama is singularly elusive. That the world of comedy is in general sunny and that of tragedy dark, that an Elizabethan stage was commonly hung with yellow for the former and with black for the latter, carries an inquiry only a short way to an understanding of the two forms. A farce may keep its audience roaring with laughter throughout; a comedy of manners or a tragicomedy may for most of its scenes preserve a sober tone. The terms commonly used in the West for dramatic criticism derive for the most part from the Greco-Roman world and in their most negotiable definitions flourish only there and in Western drama during those times, now long past, when classical tradition prevailed on the stage. For most comedies it is best said that humor is merely an element occasionally dominating the scene. The play is humorous sporadically, not continuously. Whereas a short poem or short story may well be humorous throughout, the comic spirit in comedies, which are likely to be works of considerable length, is prone to come and go. Though it may be a leading factor, it is to be remembered that cordial laughter and smiles are normally sporadic; a fixed smile is likely to be considered a grimace, a deformity. In the poetry hitherto considered only relatively brief works have been cited; the assumption has generally been that these are humorous throughout. Pure farces are likely to be short. By far the larger number of plays rewarding attention in respect to the philosophy of humor are more substantial works each of which exhibits a variegated surface.

These observations have special relevance to the Chinese masterpiece, The West Chamber, written approximately in 1300 by Wang Shih-fu. At the commencement of a study of humor in Chinese plays it is well to examine this work partly because it is commonly thought one of the finest, indeed possibly the very best of them. Moreover, its humor is clearly representative of Chinese humor at its best. This humor is neither epigrammatic nor savage and satirical. It is manifested by an amused laugh at human errors where good humor and even kindliness prevail, while serious rebuke remains virtually out of the question. This is a sophisticated flower of high comedy, in fact, one of the chief flowers of Chinese civilization. It touches upon some of the deepest emotions and firmly held values in life. Although the general attitude is much more diverting than censorious, the grounds upon which the humor grows are of much consequence. These in The West Chamber, to mention two, are erotic love and mystical religion. The playwright’s point of view is by no means narrowly limited or doctrinaire. For example, the humor at the expense of Buddhist practices may be taken to infer gibes against Taoists as well, while Confucian ways of thought and practice, if not anywhere roundly condemned, are viewed with several grains of salt. Common sense, as most clearly embodied in an illiterate but shrewd serving-girl, is the germ of the play’s considerable wisdom. For the most part its ethics are of a singularly engaging character and the humor is especially fresh and ingratiating. The play is eminently a classic, a work of especially pure humanism. It has long maintained outstanding popularity.

It is by no means an hilarious comedy. In one version a conventional happy ending is supplied, which was, indeed, the usual ending for Chinese plays. But in more ways than one The West Chamber is unorthodox according to prevailing standards on the Yüan stage. Scholarship still debates many matters regarding it, leaving answers to questions that are raised so inconclusive that positive assertions are unwise. Fortunately, the arguments as a rule have little or no value in the interpretation of the play. As the text is most often printed the first and longest section comprises almost all that is of poetic, literary, or dramatic merit. This ends in a scene far from distinguished for humor, grave and not gay, with chords by no means resolved to the harmony of the dominant. At least in the judgment of the present writer, this episode constitutes a brilliant and an aesthetically gratifying finale. The remaining scenes in the longer version are certainly far inferior; as the first and longest part of the play reveals Chinese drama at its best, the second and shorter section shows it at its worst, with scenes of the most atrocious melodrama and sensational contrivance. A vulgar audience might possibly gloat over its violent and improbable action but no one could detect in it so much as a trace of the poetic quality or sophisticated humor found in the main part. Whether Wang Shih-fu, the presumed author of the earlier acts, wrote all the sequel, a part of it, or none, the sequel need not be mentioned in more than the preliminary discussion of the drama. It is here mentioned merely because it is well to make clear precisely what is to be discussed and because the glaring contrast between the two parts is actually instructive, revealing the best and worst that the Chinese theatre affords.

The work in its expanded form may even be regarded as five plays instead of one. The usual Yüan drama as performed on the stage consists of four acts. Frequently, however, plays were written in cycles. Thus The West Chamber may plausibly be regarded as being originally a cycle of four four-act plays, to which an inferior hand added a continuation in four acts. A cogent argument for this view is given by C. T. Hsia in a recent reprinting (1968) of an English translation by S. I. Hsiung (1936).¹⁴

Although humor in the earliest period of Chinese literature known to us is often or even very generally refined and sophisticated, the humor during the long period now envisaged as the age of the classics shows an unmistakable increase in urbanity. The civilization acquired in the course of centuries with some strenuous effort became a natural birthright, its ways of thought and action seeming almost instinctive and pursued without effort. After the remarkable synthesis of the philosophical and religious systems under the Sung dynasty, a somewhat complacent attitude existed creating a climate of serenity and relaxation in which humor readily flourished At least something of this evolution where humor is concerned may even be traced in the history of the story on which The West Chamber is based.

This story was first told by Yüan Chen approximately in 800 A.D., its title being The Story of Ying-ying. Some literary historians have credited the view that its author, with merely a change of names, related an adventure of his own younger years, doing so partly as self-vindication and partly to clear his conscience of dubious conduct. Reduced to its simplest terms the narrative, which is brief, describes an ardent courtship that came to fulfillment, although the progress of the affair was complicated by the timidity of each of the lovers. Circumstances largely of an official nature in time drew the man, named Chang, apart from the woman. The suffering was almost entirely hers. In the end each married a person who was encountered considerably later than the period of the youthful affair. Some dry but unquestioned humor occurs in the narrative, especially in the passages relating the ironic and conflicting tides in the courtship, where the psychological observation is especially acute. But on the whole humor plays distinctly a minor part. The tale is related chiefly from the point of view of a stern Confucian morality. Business should come before pleasure; the duties of manhood are more to be followed than the passions of youth. The author is impelled by a desire to report the emotional life accurately. His story has more harsh realism than genuine humor. A third character, Ying-ying’s maid, acts as go-between but wit and humor are barely present in her delineation. The work adds up to a sober and an instructive story.

In approximately 1200 A.D. Tung Chieh-yuan composed a long narrative poem, with alternating passages of verse and prose, entitled The Romance of the West Chamber. It followed the general lines of the long-popular short story by Yüan Chen but naturally introduced much that was new. The role of the maid, Hung Niang, was greatly enlarged and developed with considerable humor. In the end the lovers were happily united. This work was commonly regarded as the best long poem centered on the theme of love to be written in Chinese. Its fame made it virtually inevitable that it would later be used as the basis for a play. Apparently Wang Shih-fu was satisfied to dramatize the larger part of the romantic poem but, finding his chief interest, quite naturally, in the earlier episodes, declined to pursue the theme to the conventional happy ending. An inferior playwright carried the story forward to its sentimental conclusion.

Wang Shih-fu clearly possessed an ironic and humorous mind. These qualities he could exercise abundantly in the scenes covering the major part of the story. He was simply not interested in proceeding to a popular, humorless, and optimistic ending.

Of the three versions of the famous love story, successively the short story, the long poem, and the long play, the first is the most consistently serious, the second the richest in episodes, but the last by far the most richly endowed with humor. This humor, as already observed, is of a singularly refined and sophisticated character. The maid, Hung Niang, the arch-proponent of humor, has risen in importance equal to the two lovers; indeed, as Professor Hsia reminds us, the version of the story as seen on the Peking stage in the present century was entitled, “Hung Niang,” the leading actor appearing in this role.¹⁵ It is she who understands only too well the unreasonableness of the lovers, which elicits her wry smile, and she who most vigorously condemns the mother’s mendacity. At least once the oblique conduct of her mistress for a short time pulls the wool over her eyes but for the most part the outlook of the playwright and audience is virtually her own. She best understands the basic incongruities within the souls of the four characters who share the chief scenes with her, namely Chang, the lover, Ying-ying, the beloved, the straitlaced mother, and the abbot of questionable devotion, who controls the monastery which provides the scene of the action. The playwright was a master-humorist, which cannot be said of the author of the powerful short story concerning Ying-ying nor even of the gifted poet who rendered her misadventures in his brilliant verse narrative.

It should be acknowledged that the over-all impression made by the play is serious. Although we frequently find ourselves smiling at the leading characters and even laughing at the lesser figures, all their errors, follies and self-deception notwithstanding, we also find ourselves sympathetic with them and their vicissitudes, their joys and sufferings. The play’s finest music is the poetry of the emotions. One easily recognizes that the lyrical, or sung, passages, which are in fact the heart of the play, have great warmth of feeling and passionate conviction. Much of the time we are unconscious of the current of humor which nevertheless runs through so much of the play. It is part of the miracle of the playwriting that the serious and comic moods can be so united. Perhaps the entire work may be thought of as such a marriage, the serious and on the whole the more vocal element represented by the man, the humorous and more elusive, by the woman.

For English readers, however, this union need present no obstacle. The play may be roughly and succinctly described as a Chinese Romeo and Juliet, favored with a more or less happy ending, for even if Wang Shih-fu declined to terminate his play with the conventionally happy marriage, it will be presumed by almost any audience or reader that after passing his examination Chang will return to Ying-ying and make their union, which has already been consummated, regularized, as the mother promises, by officially sanctioned matrimony. (Chinese heroes seldom fail in their examinations.) In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet present the serious view of love while Mercutio embodies the humorous view. The two views are harmonized, though Mercutio dies far too soon. At least in a broad and general sense, the same ambivalence gives fascination and vitality to the Chinese masterpiece. The outlook in the English play, however, is simpler than that in the Chinese, Romeo and Juliet so clearly representing the romantic sublimation of love, Mercutio love as lusty adventure in sensuality. The Chinese lovers, on the contrary, are both seen as embodiments of the fundamental incongruities and irrationalities of passion. Humor in the Elizabethan play tends, accordingly, to be on the side of the physical, expressed with vigorous and imaginative bawdiness, whereas in the Chinese play humor is maintained on a higher level of psychological observation, with more inference and urbanity and, I think, it may safely be said, with less strenuousness and more relaxed charm. The Chinese play seems more feminine.

One glaring contrast exists between Elizabethan and Chinese. The messenger or go-between for the lovers is in one very close to being a bawd, indeed Juliet’s nurse is as close to the greatest figure on the Spanish stage, the old bawd Celestina, as English manners would allow, whereas the go-between in the Chinese play is a young woman in character both witty and refined. Of course, no generalization regarding East and West can possibly be made from these isolated instances. The Celestina image, that is, the garrulous old bawd, is brilliantly portrayed in Chinese fiction, as in the popular novels, All Men Are Brothers and Lotus, while the witty maid who serves the lovers and gains the full affection of the Western audience is perfected in the art of Molière and above all in that of Mozart. The subject and the comparison are raised here in general to stress the refinement of which the Eastern mind is capable and in particular to illustrate the elegant and sophisticated vein of humor animating Wang Shih-fu’s dramatic masterpiece.

Only one course is possible in the elucidation of Wang’s humor; it requires a fairly close inspection of individual scenes and lines. It becomes necessary to examine details. To this end one may begin with the minor or less important figures. Apart from one or two seldom-seen servants, there are ten speaking parts. Of these only two are conventional and humorless figures. These are the two military men, each having only the briefest speaking roles—the loyal general, friend of the hero, and the bandit chief, who, being a bad bandit, is ordered killed by the good general. The brief scenes in which they appear, except for advancing the plot, contribute little more than physical brilliance to the stage decor. The prevailing good humor, however, is exhibited in the confrontation between the two men. Although the virtuous general does decree the instant death of the villain, the bandit chief, he pardons all other members of his rabble. The play’s hero humorously and graciously observes that he will pray for the soul of the bandit since he has, indirectly, been the means for his union with his beloved.

All the other lesser figures contribute rather more than their share to the humor of the play, although their contributions are, naturally, upon a lower level than those of the major parts. There is undoubtedly humor in the role of the child, who is an adopted son in Ying-ying’s family. Children are forever seeing more than they should and blurting out embarrassing remarks on what they see. This is an old device of comic playwrights. The same humorous observation is made, for example, in the chief comedy of India’s leading dramatist, Kalidasa.¹⁶

Three figures are holy men in the monastery, all more or less absurd. Although the abbot may appear at first a venerable and sincere priest, he is soon discovered in ludicrous positions. He makes sexual advances to Hung Niang. During the memorial service for the soul of the dead statesman he beats on the bald head of his assistant priest, mistaking it for a drum. There is a plausible hint of homosexuality. He invites Chang to share his cell, an invitation that the hero, whose amorous propensities are destined to turn elsewhere, promptly declines. The assistant priest is drawn as a humble creature, almost a parody of religious humility. In his brief interview with Chang he serves to magnify the hero’s stature by the contrast between them.

The Buddhists are jocosely treated in most of the passages where they are mentioned or have a part. Chang unctuously proposes to honor the memory of his father by a memorial mass, although he makes it abundantly clear that he does so only to win an opportunity to see Ying-ying. The ceremony itself is presented with much humor. Its chief feature appears to be a thunderous banging of percussion instruments. As this is presented, one infers that the dramatist finds such performances offensive. Buddhism is treated even more cavalierly than Confucianism. It is, in fact, made a major butt of the humor. This, incidentally, does not mean that Wang Shih-fu was himself in the least antagonistic to Buddhism but only that monks often fare badly on the Chinese stage and become a means for exploiting scenes of comedy.

The chief episode dealing freely with Buddhist asceticism is that introducing the only broadly farcical figure in the play, the horrendous braggart, Hui Ming. This fellow, though indeed a monk, is represented as a Gargantuan clown, the antithesis of all that a monk should be. He claims prodigious powers with his weapons, thirsts for the blood of his enemies, has an inexhaustible capacity for food and drink, and harbors hatred of all learning, religious exercises, disciplines, and penances. A creature of insatiable vanity, he demands a splendid retinue to accompany him on his journey as messenger to the camp of the loyal general. In person he resembles the drunken guardsman in The Abduction from the Seraglio. The scenes in which he appears clearly stand outside the main current of the play, as they look beyond the walls of the monastery. He provides comic relief, strangely like that provided by certain messengers in Greek tragedy. Here the humor is timely and effective. It further confirms the play’s prevailing outlook, which is antireligious and anti-bureaucratic. The monk is a humorous figure such as the reader frequently meets in popular military romances, of which that best known to English readers as All Men Are Brothers is the chief. The long, refined play in four parts might become a bit monotonous if it were not for this single interlude of relatively low comedy.

Although the drawing of the mother is in general harsh and austere, some rather dry humor occurs. Any straitlaced conservative and unyielding guardian of the moral code is likely to appear distorted when seen through the eyes of one peculiarly endowed with humor, as Wang unquestionably was. Yet the character is by no means wholly unsympathetic, as would be the case in strict satire. With an almost disarming observation, she declares in the play’s last moments that she has done her best as a parent to whom the guardianship of a daughter is assigned. The role could, doubtless, have been played, even in Yüan China, in different ways. Actually, she says few words. Her intention is always to be serious. Yet the very fact that she is unbending renders her a trifle absurd in the eyes of high comedy. A good indication of this may be seen in the dry comment of her daughter: “You can’t imagine her frugality.”

Nine-tenths of the play belongs to its three leading figures, Chang, Ying-ying, and Hung Niang. Their importance is emphasized in that they alone have singing parts. The two lovers, though drawn with extraordinary deftness, are essentially conventional figures on the Chinese stage, the young scholar and the supersensitive young woman. Only Hung Niang was substantially a new conception among Chinese playwrights and even she, as we have seen, had appeared in comparatively shadowy form in fiction and narrative verse. Insofar as an alignment exists in the play’s humor, it moves between delineation of masculine vanity and feminine volatility. These are venerable themes but seldom developed as discerningly as here or with benefit of such delicate touches of comedy. Much of the delicacy is owing to the kindliness. The young people are lovable almost to the measure in which they are fallible and conceived through the insight of a singularly humane humor.

Chang presents a most remarkable blending of the admirable and the laughable, noble and ridiculous. A more ambivaient hero can scarcely be found. He is the brilliant scholar, the ardent lover, courteous on all occasions, a paragon of social graces, the glass of fashion and the mold of form. Obviously with promise of becoming a high official, as his father has been before him, he commands admiration and respect. As far as concerns intellect, imagination, sensitivity he represents the ideal as Chinese traditional thinking conceived it. He is entirely willing in the end to place public duty before personal involvement; the interests of the individual and the family must, according to the Confucian code, be for the scholar and member of the governing class strictly subordinate to the demands of the state. All this is approved and taken for granted. It is also taken entirely seriously. But for some reason by no means altogether clear, the most popular type of hero on the Chinese stage is not the all-perfect man but instead the young scholar, in time to become a statesman, who in his early manhood is susceptible to any number of venal weaknesses. His justifiable pride of place in the social structure becomes occasion for an absorbing vanity. His extreme sensibility leads to marked traces of effeminacy, his absence of aggressiveness to timidity. As a man of peace and paragon of civilization and urbanity, he has absolutely no capacity as a soldier. Whatever fortitude he possesses is completely destroyed at the touch of a romantic passion. Love overthrows all serenity and assurance, leading him to a temporary state of desperation. These weaknesses indeed seem incongruous beside his undeniable virtues. The incongruity accounts for much of the play’s humor. More than any other figure in The West Chamber, the hero is smiled at. The audience takes pleasure, it seems, in eavesdropping, catching the hero in his peculiarly unheroic moments.

Perhaps no class of society has exhibited more arrogance and complacency than the Chinese bureaucracy. But happier features have intervened to moderate and ameliorate these traits, saving the scholar-gentleman from his march to fatal hubris and banal heroics. The entire Chinese audience, aristocracy, merchants, and the common people, laughed at the weaknesses of the young scholar-hero of stage tradition. Just how far the figure faithfully and literally represented an actual type may well be questioned. That the virtues depicted were at least sought in reality and the weaknesses present to some degree can hardly be doubted. A social historian, however, might well question the naturalism in the figure-drawing, inquiring whether such a perfection of gentility and such a depth of vanity and self-delusion are strictly credible in a single person. Literal reality, it seems, has been distorted in the interests of a supremely effective type of art and exposition. The qualities are real; it is merely their arrangement, their extravagance and exaggeration, that are artificial, and in so many ways the source of humor.

Chang is clearly pedantic in his fastidious speech and manners. He frankly admits that he is chickenhearted. To save the monastery and its distinguished guests he depends entirely on the services of “his older brother,” the loyal general. He boasts inordinately of his irresistible powers as a lover but is pitifully overthrown when the girl whom he romantically adores becomes only for a moment difficult to woo. When fortune appears to favor him, he becomes so conceited and vain that he bows ceremoniously to his own shadow. When he appears at night in the monastery garden dressed in the scholar’s black gown, wearing his fantastic scholar’s hat at an oblique angle, Hung Niang pretends to mistake him for a crow. In the same scene by an absurd error he embraces the maid, whom he supposes to be the mistress—much the same error in a midnight garden setting enlivens the last act of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. When the maid holds the upper hand she requires the great scholar to kneel before her. On this occasion it is she who quotes Confucius; as American slang pleasantly expresses it, she throws the book at him. Truly, Chang is the most ridiculous figure!

Yet in the end he fully justifies himself, both as young lover and potential statesman. He is and he is not a butt of comedy. Idealism is the base, absurdity the decoration in this character portrait. When he is first seen, he launches upon a detailed and most faithful description of the Great River that shows him basically to possess a keen, clear, highly capable mind. The final scene in Wang’s play reveals both his heart and his ethical probity to be of the highest. All this is to be taken seriously. But his love affair, the play’s central theme, shows him alarmingly fallible, making him a theme for the most delectable humor. The basic incongruity in humor itself is enhanced by the ironic incongruities of mature dramatic art. Few scenes in any dramatic literature are as tender and emotionally convincing as the chief episodes in this drama, few scenes of pure humor more delightful. The formula stands fully revealed in the treatment of the leading figure. Neither of the preceding versions of the story, the short story or the long poem, equals it as a work of art or exhibits the comic spirit in so masterly a fashion.

If Chang represents the comedy of manners and ideas, Ying-ying represents that of the heart. She is what the Jacobean playwright, John Fletcher, called “a very woman.” It should be added that she is very young. She vacillates between her still-retained girlishness, with dependence upon her mother, and her instinctive movements to personal independence and devotion to her lover. These contradictions themselves have the most serious import for her as a person but nevertheless are the basis for the experience of humor which the part ereates for audience and reader. On her first appearance on the stage her only words are spoken to her maid: “Dear Hung Niang, I wish to see my mother.” Her last words, drawn from the depth of her heart, witness her devotion to her husband-to-be. Between these expressions of divergent emotions she swings back and forth, now with timidity, now with courage, with artful reluctance or ardent acceptance. All her attitudes seem instinctive yet in many cases she is remarkably shrewd. Her very shrewdness seems natural. A scene of great humorous vigor shows her superiority in strategy and wit even over her clever maid, who is half servant and half guardian. The witty maid becomes the tool of the still wittier heroine. To the maid she hands a letter addressed to Chang which she pretends to be written in anger and which is so presumed to be by Hung Niang. It is, in fact, an announcement that she will come of her own free will to his chamber that very night. This episode is presumably the most delightfully humorous in the play. It is, of course, by no means wanting in refined humor. This is seldom merely verbal, being the humor of discernment and situation.

A well-established convention in the Yüan theatre led to one of the most amusing achievements in Wang’s playwriting. This convention (not, to be sure, always meticulously observed) provided that only one person should sing in a single act or scene. The play’s two central episodes are the obviously contrasted visits exchanged between the lovers, the first, Chang’s visit to Ying-ying’s room, when her coquetry completely discourages her chickenhearted lover, and second, her visit to his room, where their mutual passions are gratified. In the first scene the girl sings and speaks eloquently, while the too-easily discouraged lover is reduced virtually to silence; in the second the lover becomes even more eloquent and loquacious than ever while the girl is completely still. Both scenes are, of course, charged with high emotions, yet especially in context they cannot be rightly experienced by the audience without awareness of their strong humorous connotations. Here, again, appears a well-established formula for high comedy: the view of characters on the stage differs widely from the view of their action or predicament as experienced by the audience. The audience may sit below the physical level of the stage but, spiritually speaking, sits far above it, in a higher realm of amused contemplation.

Hung Niang is from one point of view a choral figure whose privilege and distinction are to stand close to the lovers yet above them, well aware of the humorous distortions of vision which arise from emotional excitement. She enjoys, so to speak, the best seat in the theatre. It is primarily through this critical phase of her part that she becomes the dominant factor in the play’s humor. She herself, however, is the only important figure who is not conspicuously humor’s victim. To be sure, one episode, already mentioned, has been artfully arranged to prove her not all-knowing but, on the contrary, deficient even in the detection of feminine indirections. All the more human for this, she wholly mistakes the intention of Ying-ying’s poem-message to Chang. This helps to save the part from becoming coolly didactic, the aesthetic fault in most so-called choric figures. This unhappy condition never threatens the liveliest of the dramatist’s character-portraits. He feels sympathy and affection for Hung Niang at least equal in warmth to his sentiment for the lovers. Clearly, the maid is no puppet. She flirts with the abbot, confesses that she is drawn emotionally to Chang, though to all appearances she successfully disciplines herself in this respect; she suffers from the cold as, in her flimsy dress and frail slippers, she stands outside Chang’s window; she is completely devoted to her “little mistress”; she is the only person who can stand up to the rigid, all-powerful mother. She bravely endures a thrashing. In the strictest meaning of the word, she is the most heroic figure of all. Yet she is clearly the focal point of the humor. She can quote Confucian maxims in either a diverting or a most serious sense. Clearly speaking in humorous terms, in her first interview with Chang she throws the Master in the young scholar’s face:

Don’t you remember what Confucius said?

‘Never utter an improper word

Nor make a single move without propriety.’

Her harangue to the tyrannical mother which condenses the play’s morality commences with the weighty observation:

Good faith is basic in all human dealings.

A faithless man is of no human worth.

Few characters have better claims to citizenship in the world of high comedy.

It has been said that the humor throughout by no means lies in verbal acrobatics or a play of wit. Wang has few such mannerisms. The play and its style are all the more profoundly humorous on this account. About half the lines are in lyric verse and in performance are, of course, sung. Almost any of these passages could be quoted to demonstrate Wang’s poetic force. Even many of the prose passages have poetic power. For example, Chang’s soliloquy at the end of the scene immediately before the play’s climax comes astonishingly close in imagery and strength to Juliet’s remarkable lines as she impatiently abuses the sun, watching its slow descent to the horizon before the night so eagerly awaited. This is, indeed, a world-wide theme in poetic expression that is serious and imaginative but not humorous. Shakespeare and other Elizabethans presumably derived the image from Ovid. What lines shall, however, be quoted to exhibit the quality of Wang’s humor? A passage from Hung Niang’s part, the humorous chorus of the play, suggests itself as most clearly representative of the humorous content and its particular chemistry. Her admonishment to Chang immediately before the climax carries the play’s message in language where under the guidance of humor the two contrary forces, humor and common sense, come happily together. Lovers, she holds, must have the courage of their convictions. This is universal comedy. Molière confirms it, as do Shakespeare and Shaw.

Chang, speaking less objectively than the ideal literary critic, say s that Ying-ying’s poem reporting her forthcoming visit cannot compare with some sentimental verses that she has sent him earlier. Hung Niang bows her head reflectively and says:

No indeed! Ah, now I see it all!

My mistress has a magical prescription.

Then she sings:

When the cassia moon-flower casts its shade

At midnight scholars should retire to rest.

You hide within the shadow of a rock,

Following the fortune that rewards you best.

You may take this potion more than once,

Again and yet again, yet should reflect

The all-seeing mother may be still awake

Or I play false. Therefore be circumspect.

You truly are a pedant if you pore

Over this note to cure your cold despair.

The secret of your health resides in you,

Not in the verses that you ponder there.

When yesterday you saw your heavenly girl

From sheer embarrassment you missed your cue;

How natural is it that my youthful mistress

Should show this base ingratitude to you!

You sleep beneath a flimsy coverlet

And for a pillow use your long-necked lute.

How can you find the room for her to sleep?

How keep her warm, if so irresolute?

Take courage! Recollect that in the garden

Beside the swing, when night was almost spent

And all was dark, you failed her! Had you not,

Her poem today need never have been sent.

We have silk pillows handsomely embroidered

With mandarin ducks affectionately paired.

We have rich coverlets of turquoise blue.

But to what end are gorgeous beds prepared?

If you do not undress, what does it matter?

Better then not to have come at all.

But if your love is joyfully fulfilled

Happiness shall be yours, beyond recall.

She speaks:

Master Chang, I ask you to be frank

Concerning your relations with my mistress!

She resumes singing:

Her eyebrows are the lines of distant hills;

Her eyes are pure and dark as autumn ponds;

Her silken skin is whiter than whitest milk;

Her waist, like slim and pliant willow fronds.

Lovely her freshness, lovelier her heart.

She has no need for elegance of dress;

She has no need to give you magic potions;

Only herself can save you from distress.

She is your god of mercy, loved Kuan-yin.

With her your cure for sickness must begin.

Then she whispers in prose:

And yet, however that is, I still have doubts.

Refinement and elegance in the style of The West Chamber indicate that the author wrote from the point of view of the scholar class and on the whole with an upper-class audience in mind, even though much of the humor seems directed against the ossification of orthodoxy in religious and political institutions, in morals and in manners. The relative security on which these institutions stood assisted the humorist in subjecting them at least to good-humored criticism. Chinese drama, though it may have begun at an early date as diversion for the aristocracy, at virtually the earliest time from which texts have survived reflected thought from various segments of society. In the leisurely flow of centuries the upper class lost much of its potency; theatres were established to serve the pleasures of an increasingly popular audience. So conservative was the climate of Chinese thought that many elements in the earlier plays persisted in the later. Nevertheless, considerable changes became apparent. A shift occurred from more literary to more strictly theatrical values. Some of the earliest surviving plays, as the celebrated and wholly serious Sorrows of Han, appear more poetic than theatrical. Although it would be false to hold that works of this orientation wholly disappeared from the attention either of readers or audiences, their general appeal diminished, a racier and more colloquial drama gaining ground.

This evolution appears strikingly when such a play as The West Chamber is contrasted with an exceptionally creditable work of the so-called “Peking Opera,” a play Ch’i Shuang Hui, which has been brilliantly translated by Yao Hsin-nung under the title Madame Cassia. When the two are placed side by side several contrasts and comparisons are suggested. Not even six centuries brought about a revolution in cultural affairs. There can be no denying that the humorous portrait of the young scholar presented as the leading male figure has remained basically the same. Of this figure in Madame Cassia the translator writes: “Magistrate Chao belongs to the conventional ‘mg scholar’ type—moody, obstinate, femininely handsome, and so much ‘book-poisoned’ that he is hopelessly stupid and dumbfounded when confused or faced with unexpected difficulties but unusually sensitive and even witty when untroubled and happy.”¹⁷ This description clearly applies in large part to Chang in The West Chamber . It would be superfluous to trace here the relation of all elements in Madame Cassia to features of the Yüan drama of six centuries past. Suffice it to say that the timorous but shrewd and witty heroine, the brutal jailer, the wicked stepmother, the foolish old man, all type figures appearing in Madame Cassia, are directly in keeping with type characters long familiar on the stage. Humor in the earliest plays bears many strong resemblances to humor in the latest. Yet differences are equally evident. There has been a shift from a higher to a lower form of comedy. Humor in The West Chamber invites a smiling audience, that in Madame Cassia, a laughing audience. There is less dignity and more outright mirth. The figures are less sympathetic and, in fact, well on the way to becoming caricatures. They are less of flesh and blood and more like highly stylized puppets. The plot contains more improbabilities. The mood is more relaxed. Humor that was once insinuating has become hilarious.

The story and the sequence of scenes in Madame Cassia at once indicate a comic intention. A rapid summary of the action may be helpful. In a prologue in heaven the planet Venus, conceived as a beneficent deity, on looking down from heaven perceives the brutal wrong done to an old man, Li Ch’i. He is seen as an impoverished prisoner falsely accused of murder, tortured by a fiendish jailer who attempts to extract a bribe. Li Ch’i has had two children, a boy and girl, whom he has not seen in years. The children have lost each other and are ignorant whether their father is still alive, while he knows nothing of them. The daughter, Li Kuei-chih, has married a pompous but timid young man, proud, vain, and refined to a degree of absurdity. Through the divine intervention of the planet Venus the daughter learns of her father’s plight. She takes it upon herself to mitigate her father’s position. Meanwhile her brother, who has rapidly risen in the scholarly class, comes to the city in all the dignity of a visiting judge. Women, it is presumed, may not plead in court, so the husband induces his wife to disguise herself as a man and request a retrial for her father. She is gravely embarrassed; her disguise, chiefly the man’s hat which she wears, falls from her in her excitement but the revelation promptly shows the judge that she is his sister. The pretensions of her timid husband are completely taken down. The villain responsible for her father’s sufferings is summoned to trial. Despairing of his case, as well he might, he commits suicide in a singularly undignified manner. The miraculous reunion of brother and sister is occasion for celebration and unlimited mirth. Every incident in the play is conceived in a humorous light. A plot that might well have been used to induce pathos is used almost exclusively to produce mirth.

Madame Cassia represents the later stages of a national tradition in the theatre where conventions in stage business are carried to such extremes that to a foreign eye the artificiality may even appear naive and childish. Time and space are elided in the most cavalier fashion. The elaborate ritual of a courtroom trial is suggested by a few gestures and a minimum of furniture. This in itself may have to the foreigner a diverting look actually unknown to persons brought up on these theatrical conventions and symbols, or, in other words, to the manner born. But in final analysis of the play’s spirit and in particular of its comic spirit all these considerations are palpably superficial. The humor lies not in chairs and tables but in the human breast. The timidity and vanity of Magistrate Chao, Seventh Class, becomes hilariously amusing, as may also be said of the feigned timidity and actual shrewdness of his wife. Their scene together in the second act proves in this respect truly a comic masterpiece. Madame Cassia’s disguise as a man in the following scene is carried off with rare theatrical gusto; her husband’s jealousy is presented in the spirit of the gayest farce. The broadly humorous elements are artfully and boldly painted against the background of a solemn, ceremonious, and pompous court of law that in itself is ridiculous. The rapid, almost instantaneous transitions between public and domestic scenes add still another feature to the delightfully complicated comic organism.

All proceeds on the lightness of dancing feet. Action is brisk and continuous, speech reduced almost to a minimum. Yet even with full acknowledgment of the play’s strongly choreographic and pantomimic character, it must be recognized as truly poetic. The key to this condition is given by the forescene in heaven, that constitutes a prologue as surprising as it is effectual. Clearly, the body of the play deals with episodes altogether too familiar in daily life of the Chinese people. Madame Cassia resembles scores of celebrated Chinese plays, among which The Chalk Circle and Snow in Midsummer may be mentioned as outstanding, in which trial scenes, with torture, are conspicuous. The theatrical figures, even though caricatures, are only too clearly caricatures drawn from direct observation. Yet extreme artificiality appears at virtually every moment. The scene, then, both is and is not naturalistic. Insofar as it is fanciful, it belongs virtually to fairyland. Hence a mythology far closer in spirit to the traditional Western view of fairies than to the Western view of gods or angels provides material for the forescene of this eminently social comedy. The scene in heaven is obviously designed to be amusing rather than sublime. The episode is both intrinsically delightful and organically a part of the play’s essential proposition, which is, to put it simply, that all things turn out happily in the end. Naturally, it should be understood that no one in China ever seriously believed this proposition. It is an assumption of man’s incurably romantic mind, the key to the happy ending in fiction and comic drama, an illusion of pure fantasy, forever contradicted in the world of fact. The Chinese are nothing if not a sophisticated people. They do not and cannot at any time have accepted the doctrine literally, yet have consistently played with the idea. Nowhere is it more literally stated than in Madame Cassia and nowhere is it clearer that it is viewed entirely in a humorous light.

The forescene declares all’s well in heaven and on earth. At the play’s conclusion this proposition is advanced by the greatest fool of all, the senile father, and welcomed with unanimity and enthusiasm by all the assembled members of his family. The audience also accepts it for the nonce, patently a legitimate assumption of the theatre. The humor of the episode lies in the recognition of the “credibility gap” between the theatre of fancy and the theatre of the real world. In the great world-theatre the proposition simply does not hold. Only a fool could maintain it. But on the stage itself a fool proposes it and all applaud it. We witness a willing suspension of truth and a patent acceptance of wish-fulfillment. The complete and absolute gaiety of comedy is maintained.

No irony is intended, no reference to theological matters or rationality in any form whatsoever. This theatre unveils a naive and an aesthetic heaven, not one of serious conviction or belief.

Precisely what the psychology of the more sinister episodes in the play may be must remain a mystery beyond the scope of this investigation. Yet it is clear from the beginning that these dark features are not to be taken with realization of their potential emotional force. A degree of masochism may well be found in the torture scenes that abound on the Chinese stage, both in the most serious plays, as The Chalk Circle, Snow in Midsummer, and The Little Orphan of the Family of Chao and in the most light-hearted, as Madame Cassia. In the last mentioned all simulated emotions are seen through a comic lens, whether they be of pain or joy. In the final scene the father is so overwhelmed with joy that in laughing he comes in danger of dislocating his jaw. In the early scene he is subjected to torture before our eyes. But his tormentor, the jailer, is presented as a comic character; more is made of the jailer’s cupidity and veniality than of his brutality. The torture scene is not designed to achieve tragic depth. For one reason, the heavenly provision that the victim’s cries shall by magic be carried through thick stone walls to the ears of his daughter, who by happy accident as yet unknown to the leading figure lives in a house nearby, assures us that in the end all will be rectified. This is stated succinctly and in no uncertain terms by the god of the Planet Venus, who, speaking words that never fail, certifies to the ultimate triumph of mercy and justice among men. His angels—humorous little cupids who ride the clouds—see to that.

A title often given the play as seen on the Peking stage early in the present century, “An Extraordinary Twin Meeting,” emphasizes the implausibility of the story when seen from the literal or prosaic point of view. The assumption is that the better the artist the further his creative ingenuity will take him from a literal representation of life. The entire action is deliberately slanted away from mere verisimilitude. Dialogue is curt and clipped to serve the occasion. Far from any attempt to express passion in words, the style presents only an attempt to draw the mere outline of emotions and events, to reveal the course which they take, leaving the actor to use appropriate gestures. But these gestures will also be hints only. The mere reader must fill in all color and detail, all the warmth or shudders which the incident indicates. The dialogue becomes virtually a synopsis of a serious drama that is neither written nor intended. Such a style may appear naive but its simplicity itself is highly artful and ingenious. The incongruity between statement and reference becomes in itself delectable comedy. To this extent the play might even seem farce, travesty, or burlesque. But it is not this nor is it parody except in the sense that it is all these when referred to “real life.” In other words, the playwright has no intention to base his work on a spoofing of a serious classic, as did the masters of the opera bouffe in the European eighteenth century. It is all the sounder work of art on this account, since it wholly escapes the undignified state of being parasitical. It stands safely upon its own feet, or, one might better say, on its toes, dancing its joyous projection of a vision of the real world seen in a mirror where all features are reversed.

Unreality, at least when reality is viewed prosaically, becomes the essence of much comedy, an art known to some degree throughout the world but brought close to its perfection in China. In Madame Cassia, for example, the astonishment of the four members of the family on finding themselves reunited affords a large part of the scene’s humor. Astonishment itself constitutes understatement where reason would conclude not with astonishment but with complete incredulity.

Whereas humor in The West Chamber is an occasional outcropping, in Madame Cassia it is omnipresent, the groundwork of the entire play. When considered as performing art, the humor is even more obvious in gesture than in speech. The climax of Act Two occurs in the last, hilarious moment, when the humble wife points a humorous finger at the incredibly conceited husband and, with the best of spirit in the world, wins a triumph over him. The climax in Act Three occurs when, terrified by violence in the court, she allows her man’s cap to fall from her head, so revealing her real sex. The high point in the final act occurs as the father nearly cracks his jaw laughing with unrestrained glee, gloating over the fall of his enemies. Possibly the climax in Act One occurs as the absurd and brutal jailer is forced to place his own cushion under the knees of the pathetic old prisoner whom he has recently tortured. Here the pantomime is highly laugh-provoking. Stuttering, humming and hawing, prolonged hesitation and physical embarrassment, contribute far more to the humor than manifestations of verbal wit. Repeatedly the two chief butts of comedy, the husband and wife, are reduced to speechlessness. Again, prolonged laughter is achieved as the modest woman is reluctant to reveal the name by which she was known as a child in the intimacy of her parents’ household. Her action of grinding ink for her husband’s writing at the same time that she achieves complete mastery over him is hugely diverting.

It should be further urged that this absence of verbal eloquence and emphasis on action or simple speech do not actually demean the caliber of the play or of its humor. In fact, the presentation of life here is in many respects closer to reality than in such plays as the vastly more literary West Chamber. Persons in real life do not talk in verse. Moreover, the speech in Madame Cassia does at times become distinctly artificial. On several occasions in the last act, especially in the episode that depicts the apotheosis of the father, who exchanges his prisoner’s rags for a cloak of supreme elegance, his family speaks in unison. Of course it is regrettably true that in social life several people at times do talk at once but here we encounter virtually a chorus performing with the speaking voice, all using precisely the same words. Or at times the same remarks are made but, in accordance with the individual speaking, the proper names are different. The usage belongs not to a naturalistic theatre but to a convention frequently encountered in the comic opera of Mozart.

The scope of the playwright’s humor is intimated by his effective use of tears and laughter on the stage. When Madame Cassia relates the story of her father’s imprisonment, torture, and imminent danger of death as a common criminal, she shows her sensitivity by bursting repeatedly into tears. She simply cannot bear to relate to her husband the sufferings which her father has undergone. With the most magisterial dignity this magistrate forces from her the promise that she will curb her tears. This she undertakes to do but repeatedly fails to comply with the promise. From the standpoint of pathos the entire scene, of course, should be completely serious. But the comic playwright extracts his loudest laughs from the very moments that elsewhere would wring the heart. The humor in such cases is not really cruel; it is instead the art of a highly sophisticated sense for comedy. Again, in the final scene, as previously observed, the younger members of the family express genuine fears that the father will injure himself through his excessive laughter occasioned by his inordinate glee at the news of his enemy’s discomfiture. The entire scene is a brilliant contrivance of comic art. Tears and laughter are alike grist to the playwright’s mill.

No figure in the play escapes the shafts of comedy and mirth. The least ridiculous character is, obviously, Li Paot’ung, Li Chi’s son, who has risen to the high station of supreme judge over an entire province. It is he who lords it over the play’s hero, Chao-Ch’ung, magistrate of the Seventh Rank and virtual mayor of a small provincial city. Li Pao-t’ung is one whom fortune has showered with favors that are almost embarrassing. Perhaps he is a youthful genius. In any case, he asks the citizens to show him respect in view of his high office and generously to overlook his surprising youth. Even this part, then, is not conceived in a wholly serious manner. His modesty makes the hero’s timidity and deference all the more amusing. In one scene we observe the hero lording it over his obsequious wife; in the next we see him trembling at the feet of his lordly but youthful brother-in-law.

Finally, it is not to be supposed that familiarity bred contempt even in matters of Chinese theatrical decor. The villain of the piece, at least insofar as that term is applicable in such facetious playwriting, is Hu, the easily corruptible retired magistrate of the city. When caught in the surprising net of heaven’s irresistible judgment, he announces that he will kill himself. Consequently, he is seen on the stage to jump over a chair and thus drown himself in a well. A moment afterward he rises from the floor and in the guise of a ghost stalks off the stage. Perhaps an historian of the theatre, fortified with academic learning and an extremely severe temperament, might suppose this action to be so far a stage convention that to the playwright and his audience it would be received without a smile. I suggest, on the contrary, that such a view would be misleading and that even the Chinese audience was amused by such scenes of extreme artifice. One can only conclude that Madame Cassia is one of the most delightful of extravaganzas and moreover admirably representative of a large section of Chinese drama over a period of centuries.

Another chapter in the humor of the Chinese theatre is disclosed in plays based on popular legends taken by the public as historical. These plays are characterized by an infectious gusto. Humor here is relatively rude and obvious when seen beside the lighter touch and more refined and urbane art of such works as Madame Cassia. Nevertheless the category contains plays of considerable merit and a strength that has proved singularly enduring. Most of them are based on the most popular book in the entire annals of Chinese fiction, the Yüan novel, Shui-hu chuan, called by some translators The Men of the Marshes, but best known to English readers through the free translation by Pearl Buck entitled All Men Are Brothers. (The latter title, incidentally, translates a memorable phrase in the novel itself.) Many of its pages are rich in a popular variety of humor transported and even augmented in the scenes of the plays. So intimate and important is the relation between the work of fiction and the drama that a few introductory words are called for regarding the former. The examination of typical plays based on this material may, therefore, be preceded by comments on the famous novel or narrative, based on pseudo-historical legends.

This work was designed as a popular, entertaining narration, not primarily humorous but including strong comic elements. It was extremely episodic, with many exciting stories eminently fit for dramatic treatment. Its contribution to the theatre is easily explained on many grounds; there is violent action; there are vivid characterizations, together with sensationalism and enthusiasm. A large part of the book literally stands half-way to the theatre, being in lively dialogue. Moreover, it originally served even more as a prompt-book for professional reciters addressing an illiterate audience than as an item for a library. Only with gradually changing times was it admitted without hesitation onto the scholar’s bookshelf. It was apparently compiled in the Yüan period, synchronously with the sensational rise of the Chinese theatre. Frequently it is remarked that this tale of generous, great-hearted bandits came into being as a secret protest to inspire Chinese resistance to the conquerors. Since it was the unhappy destiny of the people to be for a matter of centuries beneath foreign rule, such veiled protests against authority are easily understandable. The book constituted something of a prose epic, though in many respects deficient as epic literature, partly because it fell short of voicing the culture of an entire people and because it lacks epic seriousness and a background in religion or mythology. The philosophy—if the word is admissible regarding so popular a work—had more of a Taoist than a Confucian complexion. The rigidity of the Confucian system is viewed much askance; the traditional love of scholarship and decorum is largely renounced. In place of Confucian morality is the license encouraged by Taoism, a cheerful sense of freedom from the prevailing moral code and a spontaneous acceptance of miracle, magic, and fantasy. Clearly, the book was unique, being neither epic, novel, poetry, nor chronicle but a blend of all these and much besides. In this free-moving content much humor inevitably found its place. The quality generally understood by the word bravado describes the mood best. There is little wit or refined humor in the sense that these are found in other Chinese classics. But for humorous gusto the book is truly incomparable. Its hardy spirit was readily transferred with much success to the popular stage. Two examples of this contribution to dramatic literature will suffice for examination, the Yüan drama, Li K’uei Carries Thorns, ascribed to K’ang Chin-chih, and the traditional drama, The Fisherman’s Revenge, said to have originally been a Shensi opera. It was later taken over by the Peking musical theatre. It has, incidentally, appeared under several titles, among them being A Fisherman Kills a Family and The Lucky Pearl.

Li K’uei, the chief character in the first play, is a clownish figure prominent in the popular prose novel. He is essentially humorous, impetuous, violent, irrational, vulgar, and equally extreme in brutality and kindness—the very antithesis of the Confucian scholar-gentleman. At one moment he commits what would according to conventional ethics be held an atrocious crime, in the next he sincerely repents his action. Repeatedly he embarrasses his comrades by the uncomfortable position in which he places them, yet they always forgive him. In one respect he does indeed follow the Confucian ideal for he is not only completely loyal to his friends but feels for them the most sincere affection. His language is profane, his manners are uncouth, his temper is incorrigible. Without his superhuman strength, energy, and valor, however, the robber band could scarcely maintain itself against the forces of law and order. Li K’uei is certainly one of the most brilliant creations of the Chinese imagination. He above all others must compensate for the long centuries of Confucian rigidity. He is scarcely less a part of the image of China than the seers themselves. The humor from which he springs is clearly a lower type of humor than that attained by such scholar-poets as the author of The West Chamber or the amazingly suave courtly painters who decorated the unforgettable tiles now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Yet the popular humor may stand only a short way below the sophisticated in China’s legacy to the world.

By a stroke of extraordinary good fortune that American scholarship perhaps scarcely deserves, readers of English possess a brilliant, racy translation of this play which in itself constitutes by far the best commentary. This is the work of Professor James I. Crump. Non-Chinese readers are referred to this for any consideration of the details and the texture of the play. Much can be said of the type of humor which it reveals.

Only one character in the drama can be viewed “straight.” All others are clownish in some degree, the hero most of all. This “straight” character is Sung Chiang, leader of the band of humanitarian robbers. At his side is commonly seen “Brother Lu,” a priest who has become a bandit and who to a surprising degree resembles Friar Tuck in the medieval Robin Hood cycle of English popular ballads.

Like most Yüan dramas, Li K’uei is comparatively short as well as succinct in the treatment of its subject. Only a minimum of speaking parts suffices to suggest a whole horde of land pirates. Outside these inhabitants of the mountain lair are four figures of less importance but nevertheless by no means of small interest. All are burlesque. Most conspicuous is Wang Lin, the keeper of a rustic tavern located in a valley beneath the mountain, affording a favorite haunt for the robbers. He is almost blind, extremely awkward and stupid, but well-meaning and, as befits a tavern-keeper, convivial and devoted to wine. Typical of his blundering actions is the embrace which he gives Li K’uei, mistaking him for his lost daughter. This girl, unmarried, age eighteen, is abducted for three days of uninterrupted sexual delights by two notorious rascals who pretend to be the leaders of the noble robbers, a deception successful less by virtue of their disguise than because of the father’s bad eyesight. The girl apparently enjoys her experience. Small trouble ensues since in the last scene her father promises to find for her a respectable husband. The two inferior robbers are obviously comic impostors, on a lower level from the glorious mountaineers.

The plot is as preposterous as the characterization and by its own nature contributes to the play’s broad humor. The robber chief honors in particular two holiday seasons, on one of which the action of the comedy takes place. This joyful occasion is celebrated by a vacation of three days for all the robbers, who may, if they will, go out into the world, visit the graves of their ancestors, and enjoy drinking, feasting, and all sensual pleasures. Whoever after his holiday returns late will lose his head. Since the mountain lair bears too much the appearance of a mountain monastery, the relief of such a vacation is readily imagined.

Li K’uei chooses to visit Wang’s tavern. It so happens that shortly before he arrives the two impostors have visited the place and taken away the girl. They pretend to be the robber chief and the robber priest. Their plot is unconsciously aided by Wang Lin’s stupidity in calling forth his daughter from the inner room of his establishment to give more gracious service to the thirsty and hungry men. Li K’uei is righteously indignant. Accepting the story of the innkeeper, he hastens back to the mountain to accuse the chief and the priest of the girl’s abduction. The chief, of course, denies the charge as absurd. He lays his head as a wager against Li K’uei’s head that the innkeeper will absolve him. When the robbers visit the inn the poor old host, half blind though he is, still perceives that these are not the culprits. So the too credulous Li K’uei has lost his wager and forfeited his life. But he does not wish to die. Consequently he returns to the lair bearing a load of wicked-looking thorns on his back. He begs the chief to spare his life and instead of the death sentence to thrash him with the thorns. The device proves futile. The hero, even though repentant, is about to be beheaded. But meanwhile the two abductors have returned, as they had promised, with the girl in hand. The innkeeper, who, though stupid, is not altogether a fool, contrives to get the men dead drunk and then hastens to the mountain to save his generous friend, Li K’uei. His arrival is in the nick of time. Li K’uei now for a second time visits the inn, captures the rascals, who are still too drunk to offer resistance, and returns in triumph to the lair. The villains are killed with torture while the entire robber band rejoices that all has turned out for the best.

From first to last the play is consistently comic, though there is perhaps a moment of apprehension when Li K’uei’s head hangs in the balance. Unlike a work of high comedy, as The West Chamber, or of middle comedy, as Madame Cassia, this is beyond doubt low comedy. Yet it is almost as artful as the more ambitious works. An imaginative style appropriate to such a piece is brilliantly sustained with the highest gusto and bravura.

Although a few snatches of racy songs occur, there is little to compete with the lyrical verse commonly used in more 01less sober Chinese plays. Style aims at briskness. All moves swiftly. Speakers shift from verse to prose over a hundred and twenty times. The soliloquy that opens Li K’uei’s participation in the play alone contains fourteen such transitions and several other passages assigned to him move back and forth from speech to song to speech again almost as lightly. It is, of course, of still more importance for the comic spirit that the manner alternates between passages deliberately rich in romantic and even sentimental poeticisms and others enlivened by racy colloquialisms. When one considers the play in the general light of Chinese literary history, it almost seems a parody of some epic now lost, though of course this is by no means the case. Undoubtedly it is the better in its poetry and humor for being altogether spontaneous and in no way ridiculing other works of drama or fiction. It stands firmly upon its own feet from the very first words, in which the robber chief introduces himself as “Herald of Justice,” to the last verses, as the hero rejoices not in his own escape from death but in the justice done by his master and their gang as servants of “the Will of Heaven,” manifest still further in Wang Lin’s safe recovery of his abducted daughter. That the play was destined to success is almost assured by Li K’uei’s first words: “Drinking without getting drunk is worse than being sober.״ Knowledge of Li K’uei’s appearance is decidedly helpful in appreciating this role and, indeed, the play as a whole. He is of the type of black-faced clown, deformed in features and humorously terrible to behold. Much is made of his uncouth gestures and appearance even in the play’s dialogue. Thus in the course of his first flight into verse he plucks a flower, gazes at it sentimentally, and, noting the incongruity between the tinted blossom and his black, coarse finger, with a guttural laugh and a kind word for the flower tosses it back where he found it. He can at will be rough as a bear or lyrical as an oriole. He knows what he believes to be right but his appetite keeps him from the right or prudent action. Realizing the danger of excessive drink, he makes a genuine effort to pass by the wine-shop but the temptation is too great for him. He is supersensitive to the claims of justice, this being the only ideal that he prizes above friendship, but rash and without the slightest trace of discretion. When he believes his master guilty of a crime, he casts the claim of friendship instantly aside but when his master refuses to grant him punishment by a thorn-thrashing as substitute for a head solemnly set up in a wager, he accepts the judgment completely, addressing his master only in terms of complete affection and loyalty.

It is virtually impossible to condemn a man of so many engaging qualities, no matter what his faults. From the point of view of ethics generally accepted by society he is an incurable criminal. From the viewpoint of the average man he is equally provocative of affection and mirth. The play stands well above the level which we are accustomed to assign to uproarious farce; it is, indeed, a humorous poem of high distinction. There are few productions in the West of this quality. Aristophanes also harmonizes poetic idealism and low comedy, exquisite lyric verse and the commonest talk of street and field, but the singular conjunction of rudeness and tenderness, moral idealism and complete freedom from moral responsibility, remains for the illogical Chinese. The result is exhilarating comedy, a poetic bravado and an unsurpassed example of the essential incongruity within the human soul.

Would that Professor Crump would give the public the formula for the elixir that inspired this typical passage in his translation! The scene gives Li K’uei’s account of the maudlin sorrows of the inebriated innkeeper. Needless to say, Li, as always, is drunk.

Li K’uei (sings). Sometimes the old man weakly weeps in his thatched shop;

(speaks) He looks toward our mountain, crying his hatred for Sung Chiang.

(sings) He restlessly rises to his feet

Then whimpers with wrath outside his wicker door,

(speaks) Crying, “Oh, Man-t’ang Ch’iao;”

(sings) And sighingly sobs his suffering.

Sung Chiang. What does he do with his sorrow?

Li K’uei (sings). He then gloomily looms by his wine vats,

(speaks) Picks up a dipper, takes the straw lid from the crock,

Dips up cold wine and drinks it in gulps;

(sings) Then dully, dizzily drunk

Clutching his scrap of matting

He listlessly lays it out on his brick bed.

(speaks) He goes outside again to look; sees no sign of her,

and then,

(sings) He sadly sinks to his bed

And snuffles and whines to sleep.

This will not do, brother,

This will not do.

Sung Chiang. What does he mean now?¹⁸

According to a formula for comic effects known in virtually all quarters of the world, the humor in The Fisherman’s Revenge is the antithesis of that in Li K’uei Carries Thorns. In the latter case the hero is a sophisticated man who speaks boisterously, in the former a valiant man who speaks gently. The two conceptions, even though in themselves antithetical, are alike romantic and alike humorous, inasmuch as humor resides in violent incongruity regardless of how or where it may be found.

The Fisherman’s Revenge is a shorter and simpler work with a perspicuous moral that has long made it popular, from a time lost to conclusive knowledge until the period of modern Communist China. According to one account, this was the last “Peking opera” to be performed before Peking’s theatres, only a short time ago, ceased to stage traditional type plays. Although hardly a literary masterpiece, it has considerable merit as a work of imagination, especially from the theatrical point of view, and well illustrates how humor and propaganda may accord. In substance it is a humorous political cartoon with the effect of inspiring one’s own party with confidence in its strength and of making the adversary appear weak and ridiculous. It represents folk humor close to its best.

The central figure, Hsiao En, derives in spirit though not in a literal sense from the same folk romances that inspired Li K’uei Carries Thorns. He is much addicted to the wine cup. He combines prodigious strength, the impulse for using it, and a passion for justice accompanied by tenderness and poetic idealism. In accord with the tradition of fishermen known throughout the world, he is a quiet, almost a silent man, loving the gentler aspects of nature, shrinking from the madness of the turbulent world. Yet, contrary to such an idyllic image, when aroused he proves ruthless, powerful, and indomitable. One imagines that his favorite reading included the poems of Tao Ch’ien and The Men of the Marshes. In the first scene he appears as a poor old man on the verge of retirement, who stubbornly pursues his fishing as means for sustaining his quiet, frugal way of life. His wife has been dead for some time, leaving in his care a young daughter of marriageable age. She is depicted as a quiet girl, in this respect much like her father. Her first instinct is to shrink from violence. Yet in the end her devotion to her father leads her into the most aggressive action. She changes from the timorous woman, the type most often presented on the Chinese stage, to that other feminine type well known in the so-called “military plays,” the fearless and indomitable female warrior. Both with daughter and father much of the humor springs from the surprising transition from the pacific to the militant mode. The very implausibility of the change makes it comic. This may well seem to signify a low form of humor but anyone who still recalls Mei Lan-fang in the role of the daughter must realize that such a part affords an astonishingly good vehicle for the comic actor. In its initial form, as indicated only by the words, the humor is elementary. Nevertheless it gives almost limitless possibilities for the inspired actor.

Among its varied aspects the plot provides considerable opportunities for a type of entertainment long popular on the Chinese stage and by no means unrelated to the comic spirit, the introduction of much purely acrobatic action. Two aerobatic scenes stand as high points in the presentation. The first is the confrontation between Hsiao and the Boxing Master, which is accompanied by only a few words; the second is the general melee in which the landlord and all his household are killed and where language itself fades out completely. Of course in scenes of so conventional a nature a few words, presumably expletives, may be improvised by the actors. The present study, however, deals exclusively with the literature of humor; what remains unwritten cannot be seriously taken into account.

Almost all the play’s features are familiar but all show deft handling. The prevailingly gay temper, so typical of most of the Peking theatre, is set by the first episode, a lively drinking party. Two members of a robber band such as that to which Li K’uei belonged pay Hsiao a call on his boat moored to the river bank. These are in substance choral figures or may be viewed as interlocutors necessary in revealing Hsiao’s character. One subject of their talk is the forthcoming marriage of Hsiao’s daughter. During the party the bailiff of the arrogant landlord who lives nearby on the opposite shore of the river peeks into the boat’s cabin to catch a glimpse of the girl. Shortly afterward the landlord’s steward arrives demanding that Hsiao pay the landlord a fishing tax. Hsiao declares that the water in the river has been low and consequently he lacks money. An altercation follows between one of the visiting bravos and the steward. The chief significance of this episode in developing the play’s comic spirit lies in the wholly deceptive attitude assumed by Hsiao. He is seen as a pacifier, doing his utmost to restrain the bravo and to pour cool water over the angry contestants. At the end of the scene the steward shows himself both shrewd and cowardly. He escapes unhurt. Of special note in the play’s lyrical spirit is an exchange of words between bravo and steward concerning the legality of the tax. Question and answer are snapped out like themes in a humorous duet. This passage is, for the sake of emphasis, several times repeated in the course of the play. It contributes an important feature to the play’s construction.

The next episode in the artful unfolding of the story is an enlargement and intensification of what has gone before. On this occasion the landlord sends a gang of thugs who may with only slight license be called “company police.” Their leader is the Boxing Master. From the first they show, nevertheless, that they are complete cowards and wholly ineffectual. The entire scene is conceived as broad farce, the Boxing Master being the most timid of all the gang. At first he is so afraid of meeting Hsiao that on seeing his cottage he pretends that infallible signs show no one at home. Much nonsense follows in the course of knocking on the door and the inevitable exchange of polite greetings. Again Hsiao declines to pay the tax, whereupon the Boxer proposes to arrest the fisherman, first putting him in chains. By a feat of dexterity Hsiao in counterattack puts the chains around the Boxer. The latter manages to get out of his confinement and, relying on the force of numbers, even commences an out-and-out fight with Hsiao. The engagement is, of course, pure farce but is extremely well contrived to produce its effect. Hsiao first sends the Boxing Master’s aides packing. Finally, left alone with the chief, he makes the man wholly ridiculous. Once more the action assumes choreographic form. The Boxer boasts that he can overcome Hsiao simply by butting him with his head. The fisherman accepts the challenge. Three times the Boxer thrusts his heavy head at Hsiao’s stomach with no discomfort in the least to the impassive defendant. Next the Boxer boasts that like the sages and mystics he possesses supernatural potency through control of his breath. He asserts that when he holds in a deep breath he becomes invincible. The test proves the contrary; as Hsiao touches him with a finger he collapses. The scene ends with a beating, Hsiao’s daughter entering the fray with a bamboo stick to administer the final thrashing.

The daughter, like her father, is compounded of ambiguity. When she first hears her father’s intention of launching on his course of desperate violence, her filial devotion and her own intrepid nature inspire her to say that she will accompany him. After a moment’s hesitation her father agrees to have her at his side. When, however, the boat that ferries them across the river reaches midstream, her girlish nature gains the upper hand. Momentarily terrified, she declares that she will turn the skiff around and return to the cottage. Her vacillation provides the dramatic value as well as the humor of the episode. Her hesitation proves to be only a passing cloud. She soon plucks up her spirits. The journey continues.

Shrewdness may be allied to humor but it must be acknowledged a rather distant cousin. Hsiao is in possession of a magic pearl that insures success to the wearer. This he has given his daughter before they set sail on their desperate adventure. On reaching the mansion Hsiao pretends that he has a precious gem which in sign of contrition he intends to bestow upon the landlord. To make this transfer the safer he requests that all attendants leave the room. After their departure Hsiao and his daughter easily kill the landlord.

The two diverting plays just examined are characterized by qualities long established in tales of imaginary heroes who live beyond the law and in their own eyes, as well as in the minds of the audience, justify themselves in their violent actions. These they consider to be in the interests of humanity and of the people, validated by “the Way of Heaven,” though not by officially proclaimed laws of state. All such plays are overshadowed, historically speaking, by the great Yüan novel to which allusion has already been made. A distinction, though possibly not drastic, exists between such works as these and plays based on at least semihistorical material. In the public eye in ancient China the distinction between history and legend certainly was not great, yet something of the sort did exist. The writing of history and chronicles had, of course, been firmly established at least by the time of Confucius and had long comprised one of the most highly esteemed forms of Chinese literature, the work of the most responsible scholars. It unquestionably established a point of view. The Chinese themselves made qualitative distinctions, for example, between a Li K’uei or a Hsiao En on the one hand and a Ts’ao Ts’ao or a Chu-ko Liang on the other.

It is of considerable interest that the plays based on this historical or semihistorical material tend to be both less humorous and less fanciful than those founded on folktales or folk literature. Yet they, too, are designed to be entertaining. One presumes that their authors had a less serious desire to dispense patriotic instruction in history than did Shakespeare on writing his plays based on the British dynastic wars. The Chinese “military plays,״ to use the conventional terminology, abound in gay and colorful spectacle, battles that are in fact dances, with much indulgence in pomp and circumstance. On the whole they are clearly more sensational and melodramatic than comic or humorous. Yet they, also, contain strong humorous elements.

In them is a pronounced tendency to present certain figures illumined by flashes of a distinctly comic spirit. The Chinese, like other peoples, tended to view public events as created by persons. This materially aided the creation of dramatis personae. There were even a few such persons who broke the closely woven net of theatrical conventions and wore unique costumes and employed gestures appertaining to them alone. The urge, as a rule so much more potent in the West than in the East, emerged to create “characterization.” Such figures on the Chinese stage are Ts’ao Ts’ao and Chu-ko Liang, the former a past master of military and political strategy, the latter virtually a magician with a more than mortal intellect. Both, then, are strategists, but Ts’ao Ts’ao instead of supporting virtue and good government is a usurper, a sensualist, and altogether a villain. Chu-ko Liang differs from the majority of the political and martial figures represented on the stage in that he is a man of ideas, an elder statesman who is not himself an active warrior. Ts’ao Ts’ao is no hero at all but a villain, yet one of those ambivalent stage villains who possess uncanny fascination for their audiences and who are, perhaps unconsciously, envied and admired—in short, analogous to Milton’s Satan as the foul fiend is envisaged by modern psychology.

Two anonymous plays in which Chu-kuo Liang stands in the center of the field may be selected to illustrate the famous strategist as a humorous figure in the mode of high comedy. This most revered hero of the Chinese people is, of course, never made ridiculous. It is he who makes others ridiculous. He is himself the arch-humorist, secure in the knowledge of his own invincibility. The first play to be considered, Stealing the Arrows, deals with one of the most celebrated episodes in Chinese history, the Battle of the Red Cliff. It depicts the defeat of Ts’ao Ts’ao’s greatly superior force by Chu-ko Liang’s superior generalship. The army loyal to the Emperor, aided by Chu-ko Liang, lacks both men and ammunition. The generals, being in despair, turn to Chu-ko Liang to rescue them from their predicament. He assures them that he will provide ammunition, consisting of a hundred thousand arrows, and also completely destroy the power of the enemy. To effect this he gives the surprising advice that they should fill certain old boats with hay and float them by night down the river. Although this appears absurd to the young generals, they know well enough not to resist the sage’s counsel.

Chu-ko Liang meanwhile divides his time between feasting and retirement in his study, wholly unconcerned with the excitement and terror surrounding him on every side. The fatal night of the experiment is foggy; the boats are released; Ts’ao Ts’ao, believing that an expeditionary force is sent against him in the night, orders his men to shoot their arrows at the dimly seen vessels, expecting to destroy the enemy even before they can land. A hundred and twenty thousand arrows are shot, firmly landing in the hay. The wind shifts; the boats come back to the loyal army; Chu-ko Liang has realized all his promises! When the astonished and delighted generals ask the sage how he has known that at a particular moment the wind would shift and that a fog would veil the boats, with supercilious scorn he replies to the young men: “A general who is ignorant of astronomy and geography will never rise above mediocrity.” This, if I may be allowed a personal confession, is in my experience the most amusing line in Chinese drama. The scene and all that it contained was cherished in the minds of native audiences. Chu-ko Liang has plausibly been called the favorite figure on the Chinese stage. The line just quoted marks his moment of supreme triumph.

A fairly similar play, Yellow Crane Tower, may be cited to illustrate another of Chu-ko Liang’s weird successes. Here, as in the incident of the Battle of the Red Cliff, his strategy seems in an equal degree to defy reality but no skepticism troubled the original audiences. With extraordinary faith in their strategic advisor, the leaders of the loyal army go to a banquet offered them by the treacherous Ts’ao Ts’ao, where their betrayal appears inevitable. But they are supplied with a small bamboo case which, it is promised them, will insure their safety. No need here to disclose the secret. They are saved after having enjoyed the feast at their enemies’ expense. Such plots are viewed in themselves as humorous and all such plays as this have in the nature of the case a comic aspect.

The noteworthy conjunction of humor and such characterization as the conventions of Chinese drama allow are well shown in another popular military play, The Battle of Ch’ang-Pan Po, where Ts’ao Ts’ao is prominent and Chu-ko Liang is absent. The two chief figures to be humorously drawn are Ts’ao Ts’ao, who is the fascinating figure always revealed when appearing in the theatre, sly, unprincipled, formidable but vulnerable, and the no less pushing and enterprising character, a woman, Tsou Shih, whose lust and ambition lead her to a brief, fatal liaison with Ts’ao Ts’ao. Characterization is, of course, in swift and bold strokes but none the less effective, a style that might be likened to the manner of Franz Hals. Strong exaggeration and high gusto in the delineation largely account for the unmistakably comic effect of the scenes in which the two appear. Viewed as a whole, the play cannot properly be called comic or humorous. It descends at times to commonplace melodrama. But the two leading roles are masterly achievements of the comic spirit.

Still another play with a largely military setting, Pearly Screen Castle, presents neither Ts’ao Ts’ao, Chu-ko Liang, nor any figures recently mentioned, but is much more conspicuously marked by hilarious and lusty humor. It seems almost a parody of other military plays. Some of the low but lively comedy shown here may owe its presence to the general setting, which is not in China proper but in Mongolia. The plot concerns military and diplomatic relations between the two countries. The humor lies in the extremely broad caricatures of the leaders in the Mongolian court, where the public functions of the sexes are completely reversed. Chief of the ridiculous characters are an aging king shown as a henpecked husband, and his first and second queen. The first queen is of Chinese extraction, the second of Mongolian. They are alike Amazons but, as might be supposed, the second is more formidable and ferocious. These royal viragoes are drawn in the broadest burlesque, with small trace of naturalism. The second queen is more than a Britomart, the king more senile than Polonius. The playwright, whoever he may have been, shows peculiar craftsmanship as a humorist. No fixed image, as he well knows, can remain long on the stage without becoming monotonous. Throughout most of his scenes the king is pitifully and mercilessly ridiculed, squirming under the heels of his terrifying wives. But in the end it is this fool and coward who with a sudden manifestation of craft and wit overcomes all obstacles and resolves a political crisis “according to the Will of Heaven.” As befits Chinese ethics, a man essentially a civilian accomplishes what the military cannot accomplish. This is low comedy but such comedy close to its best. The Chinese theatre in almost all periods as yet documented and especially as the centuries progressed was in part folk theatre, just as much of Chinese poetry, fiction, and music expressed the moral and aesthetic consciousness of the masses. Resulting from this condition are phases of humor ranging in drama from the highly inspired Li Kui Carries Thorns to such works of true but by no means transcendent merit as Pearly Screen Castle.

Most plays thus far mentioned are anonymous, although much of the Yüan drama that has been sturdy enough to survive has at least been assigned to known authors. As a rule there seems small advantage in attempting to create portraits of the dramatists, since in most cases little or nothing personal is known of them. One cannot describe the peculiar spirit or humor of this playwright or that with the confidence with which one can draw the literary portraits of Li Po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i. Nevertheless, one playwright does to some degree emerge as a fairly distinct figure, Kuan Han-ch’ing, who flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century. Eighteen of his plays are said to survive. They are lively productions, although in no case equal to a few masterpieces by other playwrights who are unhappily known by fewer works. Kuan evidently gave actors and audiences precisely what they wished. His contribution is considerable, yet it cannot be said that without him Chinese drama would offer a materially different image to the world. His popularity seems owing even more to the happily representative and theatrically brilliant quality of his work than to any marked originality or outstanding imaginative power. Kuan Han-ch’ing is highly proficient, a master craftsman, a professional to his fingertips, but hardly in the fullest sense of the words deeply inspired. For the present purposes his work has considerable interest in that a light and pleasing humor characterizes the larger number of his plays. To be sure, in some of them, among which Snow in Midsummer may be regarded as the chief, little or no humor appears, a seriousness not far from tragedy prevailing. In a recent selection consisting of eight works translated into English by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, Snow in Midsummer is rightly given the first place and the surprising tragic drama, Death of the Winged-Tiger General, the last. Between them is found a series of plays of a decidedly lighter weight, four of which may profitably be commented upon as regards their humorous content. These are The Butterfly Dream, Rescued by a Coquette, The Riverside Pavilion, and The Jade Mirror-Stand.

Kuan’s Butterfly Dream, incidentally, must not be confused with a celebrated Peking opera of the same name, to be commented upon at the close of this chapter. That work is on the whole too tart, ironic, and satirical to be regarded as essentially humorous. The later Butterfly Dream would have come close to tragedy if the author had not preferred to view his story for the most part with a satirical spirit and considerable application of salt. Kuan’s play, on an entirely different theme, relates the misadventures of a family. In one sense the play is the precise reverse of conventional tragedy, since death and disaster strike hardest in the first act, not in the last. The father of the Wang family is murdered. Angry to the verge of madness, the three sons kill the murderer. But the murderer was a man of influence. Consequently the sons are all arrested and tried. According to law, a single death must be paid for by a single death. Which of the three sons shall be executed? The play depicts the dire straits of the youths and their final release. They show extreme gallantry, each urging his own death as payment for the alleged crime. A certain amount of almost scholastic wit is thrown about in the insistence that three men, or boys, are too high a fine to pay for the death of one. Episodes balance episodes, as stanzas in a popular ballad. The youths are devoted Confucian scholars, true to every letter of the law, their natural feelings under an unbelievably firm control. In the end the law is gratified by a ruse well known to the theatre. The youngest son is taken from jail in wrappings that are supposed to contain the corpse of a common murderer. After the boy’s mother has mourned profusely over the supposed body of her son the boy leaps forth and all is well. Superficially the play might be taken for a burlesque of a tragic emotion. It is a curious but remarkably consistent affair, a tragicomedy in which in fact the comedy far exceeds the tragedy. A few scenes in Western drama offer analogies, yet it would be hard indeed to find in the West such consistent tragicomic buffoonery. No direct parody is, of course, intended. The Chinese have pursued the incongruity present in all humor to its ultimate source. To some eyes this, like other ideals carried to their extremes, may seem more extravagant than profitable. Be this as it may, Kuan’s work is an achievement intrinsically interesting and emphatically Chinese.

Two Kuan Han-ch’ing comedies, The Riverside Pavilion and Rescued by a Coquette, are complements to each other, both showing humor achieved more through lightness of touch than through its more robust or strenuous assertion. This is the comedy of situation, providing an enviable role for the leading actor. In The Riverside Pavilion a lecherous lord attempts to secure the wife of a magistrate as his concubine. In pursuit of this goal he intends to have the husband beheaded on a false accusation. The faithful wife, however, manages affairs to her own liking. The lord enters into the revels of a day of carnival. Disguised as a fishwife, the woman plays the coquette with him at his drinking party. After he and his companions have drunk to a state of stupefaction, she steals his insignia of office. This places him in such an embarrassing situation that she easily bargains with him to leave both herself and her husband unmolested. The woman’s part is clearly central in the play, the ribald humor of the scene of coquetry its heart. This incident with a magistrate’s wife who, in her earlier years, had actually been a pious young lady in a convent, not only has humorous overtones; it is of the essence of humor peculiarly effective for realization in the theatre.

The second of Kuan’s comedies mentioned here with a witty woman as its leading figure, Rescued by a Coquette, presents the story of two singsong girls who are devoted friends. One makes the mistake of marrying a profligate. In a short time the marriage proves intolerable to her. Her dear friend, the second singsong girl, easily tempts the husband and so far fascinates him that he completely drops his wife. In the end the libertine is left without either wife or mistress and the two girls are contented, one of them married to a promising young scholar. A scene of coquetry, which gives the play its name, is again the centerpiece. The wiles of the intriguing woman are not only clever but humorous, setting the play in a purely comic mode. Both these comedies give admirable parts for the leading performer.

A subtler form of humor and one more distinctively Chinese animates The Jade Mirror-Stand. The uncommonly compact and simple story unfolded in this deftly composed and well written little play in itself indicates its light, comic spirit. A pedantic scholar, member of the august Hanlin Academy, pays a formal call on his cousin, a shy, unmarried girl. Her mother secures him as the girl’s tutor in calligraphy and music. Al׳ though the scholar is middle-aged, he at once falls in love with the girl. He employs a matchmaker to arrange the marriage. The girl violently rejects him. The conclusion should be taken with more than a grain of ironic salt. A prefect succeeds in reconciling the aging groom and young bride by forcing the academician to pass a test as an impromptu composer of verse. The girl is so impressed by his triumph in this over-conventionalized art that she no longer finds him repulsive. Under highly implausible circumstances the two are reconciled and, at least insofar as appearances go, are united.

The play’s essence, however, lies, as is to be expected, not in the plot but in the characterization, admirably drawn by means of both incident and gesture. The play’s title refers to the mirror in which the principal figure and chief butt of the playwright’s humor delights in viewing himself. The man is of the conceited scholar type so often met in comic scenes in the Chinese theatre, yet differs considerably from such figures as the conceited husband in Madame Cassia and those in the majority of plays in question in that he is in his declining years though, blinded by insatiable vanity, he still regards himself as a dashing young lover. Kuan’s humor has some psychological depth. It also has remarkable lightness of touch, providing the beguiling charm and vernal atmosphere peculiarly delightful in the gayer passages of Chinese drama.

An outstanding quality of the Chinese people has long been their suavity. This is also an outstanding quality in the lighter plays ascribed to Kuan Han-ch’ing, several of which, like The Wife Snatcher and Lord Kuan Goes to the Feast, are better described as dramatic romances than as true comedies. If any Western playwright in this regard rivals this most famous of the Yüan dramatists it is possibly the most celebrated master of dramatic poetry in Spain, Calderón de la Barca.

In concluding this review of humor in Chinese plays three other works may give slightly new insights. They are, or at least were, found in the repertory of the Peking musical theatre in the present century but in origin date from much earlier years. All are anonymous. They have been reserved for the last part of this inquiry because for differing reasons they are by no means creations of pure humor throughout but none the less contain certain striking humorous elements. The first to be noted is the Peking play, The Butterfly Dream. Interestingly enough, the play is admittedly more humorous and less satirical and ironic than its ultimate source, the admirable Ming story, The Inconstancy of Madame Chuang.

The Butterfly Dream is, in fact, based upon a story known for many centuries and in many lands, having been especially popular in the West during the Hellenistic period. It admits many varieties of interpretation, ranging from cynical to hilarious. Briefly summarized, it tells of a husband who determines to test the fidelity of his wife, who has overprotested the firmness of her affection. He pretends to be dead, whereupon she almost immediately violates her pledge of faithfulness to his memory. In the Chinese version the husband is a magician. After he is supposed dead and deposited in his coffin, he reappears to his wife as a young scholar. This handsome young man suddenly contracts a grave illness. A master of magic declares that his disease can be cured only by a medicine taken from the brain of a man recently dead. Since the only corpse readily available is her husband’s, the wife herself breaks open the coffin. Thereupon her husband arises from his grave to confront her with her heinous misdeeds. Terrified by what seems to her an apparition and mortified by her guilt, she hangs herself. The play’s title has a bearing upon the work as a whole, although it gives no clear key to its interpretation. According to an extremely well-known story, of considerable import in the course of Chinese thought, the cynical philosopher, Chuang Tzu, dreamed that he was a butterfly and on waking found it impossible to determine whether he really was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. The gist of the fable is, of course, that life is a dream, reality an illusion. It is inevitable that to some minds the story will signify comic relief, to others bitter disillusionment. Even the tale itself has the germ of ambivalence.

The Ming prose version is decidedly serious, a dignified and almost tragic statement of a black view of life and morals. The modern version performed less than a generation ago as a Peking opera is of another complexion. The chief explanation is that the cheerful frivolity and general optimism prevailing in this form of entertainment precluded the traditionally austere, satirical, and pessimistic outlook. Peking opera was furthermore in most of its productions highly sentimental. But the sentimentality and orthodoxy of the modern Chinese musical stage in this instance equally discouraged a humorous interpretation. As a result the play is neither in the black of tragedy nor the gay colors of pure comedy. It turns out to be in a neutral gray. The larger part of Peking opera is of minor or less than minor literary value. Materials for comedy, or, for that matter, for tragedy, are present but no notable achievement in poetic drama is obtained.

These conditions, it must be admitted, militate more strongly to the disadvantage of the play as literature than as theatre. It is one of the basic contentions of this study that, contrary to widely voiced opinion, Chinese drama possesses strongly potential attraction as world literature, notably, of course, if artful translations are available. It seems unlikely that the classical plays will often be performed in the West or in the near future even in China itself. Still, a considerable number may well be read with much pleasure and satisfaction. But The Butterfly Dream is scarcely one of these. Especially is it deficient and ambivalent in humor. The potential for humor is present but the achievement remains inadequate. It neither stirs the audience to anger, as satire would, nor evokes hearty laughter or even amused smiles, as would comedy.

Professor A. C. Scott’s recent translation, with admirable and extensive stage directions of his own, attests to these conditions. He is certainly correct in holding that this is a play to be seen and not read. His version is presented not as offering aesthetic pleasure to its readers but as affording a helpful prompt-book for possible productions. The translator states that his commentary springs not only from his wide observation of Chinese stage practices, a field in which his acumen surpasses, I believe, that of any other Westerner today, but from his actual participation in a production in the United States. The stage directions are in reality more alive than the dialogue but can hardly be taken as dramatic literature. A Bernard Shaw can write directions as inspired as a brilliant dramatic text. So did Yao Hsin-nung in his translation of Madame Cassia, already discussed in these pages. His translation has comments in moderation. The stage directions in no way smother the text. In Professor Scott’s method, on the contrary, the directions are drawn to far greater length than the dialogue. From an historical point of view his treatment provides an account of productions in both China and America. From a literary point of view the work is actually more his own than that of the anonymous Chinese playwright. This condition contributes further to the alienation of the play from spontaneous and effectual humor. The Butterfly Dream, whether as a production or as a printed text in any form, is a fascinating and curious work. Rather surprisingly, all things considered, it is not aesthetically successful from the standpoint of comedy.

An instructive variant of this case appears in another Chinese play based on a story of long and world-wide currency, The White Snake. This presents, with considerable imagination, sympathy, and tenderness, the tale of a snake who becomes a woman and a devoted wife. As might be presumed, complications arise. In all the early versions of the story appearing on the Chinese stage the end is—contrary to some overfacile statements on Asian drama—tragic. In the version recently seen on the stage in Communist China and translated into English, the end is happy. Comedy is of necessity good-natured. When shadows pass over a comic scene, the comedy itself vanishes and out of its defunct body is born another species of art, quite likely to be satire, even possibly tragedy. The happy ending leads in this instance to romantic sentiment, not to comedy.

In the recent version the ending is entirely choreographic. A dramatic dance is performed by supernatural beings, divided into two groups, the good and the malign. The discomfiture of the evil spirits is certainly intended to be understood not alone as joyful but also to some degree as humorous. The evil angels are outwitted, outsmarted, fooled. The audience may even experience glee at the spectacle. This implies humor of a sort but not a fully developed humor. It represents rather good humor, which is quite another matter than the spirit of true comedy, mirth taking humor’s place. Besides, the last scene in The White Snake lies completely outside the domain of poetry or dramatic dialogue. Whatever is conveyed to the reader is likely to be pale, since verbal description is generally feeble in translating the meaning of a dance or at least successful only when a major poet writes at his best. Joy is not humor although humor in the strict and most viable sense of the word springs from some measure of well-being and happiness.

Chinese no less than Western drama, then, raises delicate questions concerning the nature of humor or comedy. The proposition cannot, of course, be considered without definite reference and such reference here is provided by the highly successful play, Beating the Drum and Cursing Ts’ao Ts’ao. This is a truly fascinating work that once enjoyed considerable popularity in stage production. As already noted, like all three of the works discussed at the close of this chapter, it is anonymous. The familiar figure of Ts’ao Ts’ao is conspicuous but the most important and central figure is a pedantic scholar, Mi Heng. Only in respect to pedantry does he recall the many members of the scholar class represented as leading stage characters. He is, or at least thinks he is, champion of free speech and truth-telling. The frankest and harshest of critics confronts Ts’ao Ts’ao, the most redoubtable of tyrants. The result as shown in the play is inconclusive, although Mi Heng is clearly doomed to a swift fall and death to occur shortly after the action of the play has closed. The play may well have stood in a cycle of works which included the final episode, Mi’s death, but no such piece, at least to my knowledge, exists today. The generally optimistic Chinese theatre was, of course, far more disposed to the happy than the tragic ending. Besides, the scholar class was to some degree sacrosanct. It is in keeping with the traditional and partly humorous delineation of Ts’ao Ts’ao that he should act slyly rather than impetuously. Fortunately for the satisfaction of the audience, he gives Mi Heng the opportunity to speak his mind freely. Credulity is strained somewhat in this instance but both the image of Ts’ao Ts’ao and that of the angry scholar are served by the scene as it stands.

The story is so striking and also simple that a brief account of it is serviceable. Mi has been chosen as a member of Ts’ao’s Court. On his first appearance before the great minister he breaks forth in a long harangue pronouncing Ts’ao a common rascal and all his generals and ministers of state mere fools. Ts’ao listens with repressed rage. In the end as a device to place Mi in the most ignominious position possible he orders him on the following day, which is a feast day, to serve as drummer. It is understood that this would put Mi in the very lowest possible station in the Court. With a counter-scheme of his own in mind, Mi accepts the insult. He believes that he can turn the penalty itself into a grave embarrassment to Ts’ao and his contemptible associates. When on the following day he stands before the Court as a drummer, he strips himself of his clothes, appearing stark naked in the midst of the gorgeous ceremony. Verbal abuse is again exchanged. Finally, Ts’ao Ts’ao orders Mi to carry a diplomatic message to a neighboring principality. Mi accepts. In a typical, cynical aside Ts’ao whispers to his ministers that Mi need not expect to remain long alive. The inescapable inference is that some trap will be laid for him either during his journey or immediately afterward. Mi, courageous as ever, indicates no suspicion or fear. The play is actually no more than a highly effective episode. There is no plot, only a vivid character portrait and a serious problem posed in the field of ethics and behavior.

Mi Heng is a Confucian scholar—if one credits his own words, the greatest of such scholars. There is no doubt that he is a man of learning nor is there a question that much of his abuse of the evil minister and his aides is just. But Confucian teachings were at least presumed by the Master and his followers to be practical and workable. One of the chief books ascribed to the Master is on the doctrine of the mean. Clearly, Mi is depicted as imprudent in his exclamations and excessive in his denunciations. Distortions of wisdom refute wisdom. The distorted figure becomes grotesque and ridiculous. Some humor is inferred, some comedy inevitable. As The Book of Songs declares, “too much is much too much.”

Yet what is the quality of this comedy? Can it be that moral sentiment has overpowered the sense of humor? It is a moot question. Much the same doubt has often been raised concerning Molière’s masterpiece, Le Misanthrope, which declines to fall into categories commonly used by historians and critics of drama. Satire appears to gain the upper hand. The idealism avouched by the leading figure turns against him through its excess. So much is evident. But shall the fault be thought laughable or simply deplorable? No final answer is available. Yet it seems clear that if laughter, the laugh is qualified, while if the episode is moralized, the voicing of morality is embarrassed by suspicion of humor. A play cannot, of course, be judged a failure simply because it fails to comply with categories smugly maintained by critical theory. All that need be inferred is that a comparatively unfamiliar type of expression has been used. Le Misanthrope is certainly a very great play; Beating the Drum and Cursing Ts’ao Ts’ao is assuredly a very good one. But as a work of humor it must be admitted to fall short of fulfillment. To consider it in relation to pure humor is instructive and valuable for interpretation of the play itself, of what should be considered pure humor and what should be held foreign to it.

Beating the Drum and Cursing Ts’ao Ts’ao also is instructive by indirection in the appraisal of the spirit of Chinese drama as a whole. It is most unusual in that it impinges on the problem play. It demands of any intelligent audience some consideration of ethical problems. The Chinese have, of course, long been among the people most eager to engage in ethical speculation. Yet this is hardly to be inferred from typical Chinese plays. On the contrary, their imaginative view of life is in general neither speculative nor in a strict sense intellectual. In a typical Chinese play ethical values are stated dogmatically and presumed to be fully and finally established to the satisfaction of all. Humor in the plays flourishes to much advantage on this secure basis, as garden plants flourish when undisturbed by high winds. Accordingly, when considered in terms of comparative literature Beating the Drum and Cursing Ts’ao Ts’ao is a window in the Chinese temple opening toward the West. Theatrically the play is a marked success. Conflict on the stage is brilliant, psychology in the delineation of both Ts’ao and Mi is illuminating. The traditional occupation of the Chinese mind with ethical subject matter is admirably shown. But speculation leads to wit and not to humor, opening the road to a satirical drama highly developed in the West, barely initiated in the East. With consideration of this distinctly exceptional play an examination of humor in Chinese drama may, then, come logically to an end.