The Chinese theater

by A. E. Zucker

The influence of the court fools was considerable, and on the whole salutary in China. Shih Huang-ti (255-206 B.C.), the builder of the Great Wall, was so addicted to great building enterprises that the people suffered in consequence. It was Yu Sze, the court fool, who caused the emperor to treat the people with more consideration. The successor of this mighty ruler conceived the plan of having the Great Wall painted—perhaps just a caprice on his part, perhaps in order to render the Wall less subject to the influence of the weather. Again Yu Sze dissuaded the emperor from carrying out such a costly and wasteful project. The history of Yu Meng is even more interesting. In the kingdom of Chou the family of Suen Lo Ngao had become extremely impoverished because the king had forgotten the merits of the chief of the house, a famous general. Yu Meng, the court fool, donned the armor of the defunct military leader and sang of his exploits before the royal palace; now the king could no longer refuse to recognize and recompense the merits of the family. This touching episode told by the historian in the “Biography of Court Fools” cannot but recall Will Sommer to whom “The King would ever grant what he would crave.”

During the Han Dynasty records show the existence of jugglers, magicians, rope-walkers, sword-swallowers, and also of plays in which masked actors disguised as gods, fearful leopards, cruel tigers, white bears, and gray dragons had their parts. Dwarfs and giants were made to play together in humorous pieces. Singing girls in costumes of feathers executed artful dances. Some of these performances are said to have been so indecent that passers-by covered their eyes. However, such performances were sharply censored at the time, just as they would be in present-day China.

All of these performances were very much favored by the rulers, but they consisted mostly of singing and dancing, while there was very little that might be called drama. In the northern Ch’i Dynasty (550-570 A.D.) however, there arose what might be called a historical play based on an episode in the life of a heroic warrior, Duke Lan Lu. This warrior had a somewhat effeminate aspect, and therefore he wore a mask in battle to inspire fear in the hearts of his enemies. His story was dramatized and became a very popular play, probably similar to the present-day “military plays” in which the play with swords and spears forms the pièce de résistance. There is a record about the same time of a comedy also based on an actual occurrence, called “The Drunkard.” A certain man, Su Pao-pi (a name alluding to red spots on his nose) was a very heavy drinker and after each spree would beat his wife in the village street until she wept pitifully. Two actors, one dressed as a woman and the other as a man, would amuse the people by a popular farce portraying this quarrel between husband and wife. The playlet must have been one of extraordinary vitality, for there are records of it in the Chi, Chou, and Sui dynasties—to be sure, three short dynasties that followed one closely upon the other. Music and dancing also played a part in these two early dramatic presentations, so that they were probably of the melodramatic (in the etymological sense of the term) variety, such as is most of the Chinese drama of to-day.

The dramas in China are classified according to the style of music they employ. Another play of the same, or perhaps a little earlier period, called “The Tiger,” is thought by Mr. Wang, because of the music of foreign tribes employed in it, to have been brought into China from “The Western Regions” (central Asia).[8] It is the story of a man who was killed by a tiger and whose son then set out on a search for the wild beast, fought with it and avenged his father by killing it in turn. Mr. Wang even hazards the suggestion that the two plays mentioned above, “The Mask” and “The Drunkard,” were in their music and manner of presentation imitations of “The Tiger,” in which case this form of drama would be a borrowing from a foreign country and not indigenous to China.

Two other early plays which Mr. Wang mentions deal with historical episodes. From the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-221 A.D.) dates the story of an unjust mandarin who had “squeezed” as they say in China, ten thousand rolls of silk and was put in jail. Later on the emperor moderated this punishment, because of the mandarin’s great learning, into the following: the culprit had to appear at court dressed in a white robe while for the period of one year the court fools were at liberty to make sport of him. This became the basis of a play shown by a number of records to have been acted frequently before the T’ang Dynasty. The plot seems, indeed, to have been a comedy made to order for the court fools to display their wit. There is evidence to show that this play was enacted in the imperial palace in the middle of the eighth century. A group of actors from Chekiang in presenting this play were said to have had voices so loud that they penetrated to the clouds—a circumstance that would win the favor of the devotees of certain types of modern Chinese drama. The other historical play has for a hero Fan Kuai, a noble who saved the emperor’s life by his prompt action against rebels. It is said to have been written by the T’ang Dynasty emperor, Chao Tsung himself, and to have been acted in the imperial palace in Ch’ang An.

It was during the T’ang Dynasty especially that a nonmusical type of drama flourished in the form of extemporized comedies. The plots hinged on local occurrences and differed with practically each presentation. However, much as in the Italian commedia dell’ arte, with its Arlecchino, Pantalone, Dottore, Scapino, etc., certain characters or character types seem to have arisen. The very same extortionate mandarin, mentioned above as the central figure of a play, became such a type who figured in almost all of these comedies—in fact he is a stock character on the Chinese stage even to-day—while opposite him there appeared as his regular companion a fool wearing a green cap. Thus dialogue between two actors—in other words rudimentary drama—became firmly established. Since the satirizing of current events and of local characters was the avowed purpose of these comedies, it will be readily understood by all familiar with life in the East that the dishonest official came in for his fair share.

A topical comedy with a purpose from the Sung Dynasty (960-1126 A.D.) played before the emperor attained all that might have been desired. Through the efforts of an unpopular official a system of coinage had been introduced in which the smallest coin had a value of ten cash. Naturally enough this caused great inconvenience to very many poor people. Therefore some actors called upon to play before the emperor in the course of a feast proceeded to give him a lesson in rudimentary economics. A vendor of syrups appeared and shortly afterwards a thirsty customer. The latter paid one coin and demanded one drink. The merchant explained that he had no change for the coin and asked his patron therefore to take a number of drinks. The buyer does his best, but after the fifth or sixth cup taps his bulging stomach and exclaims, “Well, I’ve done it at last. But if the gentlemen in the government were to make us use hundred-cash coins I should surely burst!” The emperor was moved to gay laughter and smaller coins were at once issued. However, the efforts of these actors were not always so fortunate in outcome. The story is told, for example, of actors who had dressed up to represent Confucius, Mencius, and other sages for the purpose of giving the emperor some very pertinent advice on the division of land in the very words of the great moral teachers. The advice proved to be so inconvenient that the emperor had the actors whipped for their pains.

From the Sung Dynasty (960-1127 A.D.) Mr. Wang reports the names of 280 plays and from the Chin Dynasty (1115-1234 A.D.) 690 plays, but fails to state how many are extant. Of the so-called Ancient Drama it is known that a certain kind of free metrical form adapted to music (ch’ü) was employed; that as a rule only two actors appeared in each play; and that theatricals, though still very primitive, were quite popular, as they were presented both to the general public in shabby mat-sheds and to the court at magnificent feasts. Our knowledge of the Ancient Drama is very meager to be sure, yet the work of Mr. Wang has made it possible to go beyond what Mr. Giles says in his “History of Chinese Literature”[9] after having mentioned the Pear Garden myth: “Nothing, however, which can be truly identified with the actor’s art seems to have been known until the thirteenth century, when suddenly the Drama, as seen in the modern Chinese stage play, sprang into being.” Owing to the great interest in Western drama in China at the present time it is very likely that other Chinese scholars will make researches in this interesting field and that more light will soon be shed on the origin of the Chinese drama.