Gu ben Yuan Ming za ju ?????? [Yuan and Ming Variety Plays Known in Only One Edition]

WANG, Jilie ???, ed

About this Item

32 vols. 8vo, orig. wrappers, orig. title labels on upper covers, orig. stitching. Shanghai: Hanfen lou ???; distributed by Shangwu yinshuguan, 1941. First edition of this important selection of previously largely unknown Yuan and Ming plays. In 1938, China and Japan were at war; the Chinese-controlled parts of Shanghai had fallen, and the front was moving eastward. When Changshu in Jiangsu was attacked by the Japanese, local bibliophile Ding Zuyin ??? lost his book collection. It resurfaced in neighboring Shanghai, where the foreign concessions were still free from Japanese occupation. Zhang Yuanji ??? (1867-1959) of the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan ?????) saw parts of it at the home of a Shanghai collector and made a discovery: the collection contained a set part woodblock books, part manuscripts titled Maiwang guan chaojiao ben gu jin zaju ?????????? [Copied and Collated Ancient and Modern Variety Plays of the Bookworm Residence]. With a proven provenance going back to Zhao Qimei ??? (1563-1624), the set contained 64 volumes and 242 plays, many of them unattested elsewhere. Variety plays or zaju have antecedents in the Tang dynasty, but in the Yuan, the term "came to mean [a] four-act music drama…The form created and introduced into Chinese literature a new language…[with] padding words, echoics, slang, aphorisms, language from the histories, from the classics, and from the streets mixed together in prose, a compressed colloquial lyric poetry, and even legal injunctions writs of divorce, etc." (The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, Vol. 1, 775-76). The genre continued to develop in the succeeding Ming period. In the early 20th century, there was renewed interest in the genre along with the will to forge a new canon of vernacular literature. Zhang Yuanji understood the value of the find, and he was not alone. Through the efforts of Zheng Zhenduo ??? (1898-1958), the Ministry of Education agreed to purchase the manuscript, and the Commercial Press, in turn, purchased the right to publish it (Hanfen lou was the name of the press s rare book department). Due to the complexity of the text (repeated collations and emendations, etc.), it was decided to prepare corrected editions of the plays that were not attested elsewhere and set them in type rather than issue a facsimile reprint. Drama expert Wang Jilie (1873-1952) was asked to carry out the collation work. During the difficult conditions provided by the ongoing war, the book was only published in the fall of 1941. The print run numbered only 350 copies. Liu Hecheng ??? has provided an engaging and detailed account of the book s history in his article "Guben Yuan-Ming zaju bianyin de qianqian houhou." References Liu Hecheng ??? "Guben Yuan-Ming zaju bianyin de qianqian houhou"??????????????? In Shuli shuwai: Zhang Yuanji yu xiandai Zhongguo chuban ???? ?????????? Shanghai: Shanghai jiaotong daxue chubanshe, 2017. Nienhauser, William H., Jr. The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature. Second, revised edition. Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Seller Inventory # 9644

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Title: Gu ben Yuan Ming za ju ?????? [Yuan and Ming...