A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China by Li Yu

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China by Li Yu Lenore Szekely (bio) Li Yu. A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China. Translated by Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xxv, 330 pp. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-02-31-19354-2. Paperback $25.00, isbn 978-02-31-19355-9. E-book $24.99, isbn 978-02-31-55036-9. The first of Li Yu’s (1611–1680) ten extant chuanqi plays to be translated into English, A Couple of Soles, makes a unique and significant contribution to Ming–Qing literature accessible to students and scholars. A play about acting, it continuously asks where the stage ends and reality begins. Tan Chuyu, a resolute scholar, condescends to become an actor to court an actress, the understated young beauty Fairy Liu. Tan’s intentions are frustrated by the unexpectedly strict rules against fraternizing among troupe members. As professionals, they can only play at romance for a profit. Doing it for free would betray the troupe’s code of conduct. The pair are able to realize their true roles as husband and wife onstage, until Fairy’s mother trades her for one-thousand taels to a corrupt local landowner to become his concubine. In its sensational play-within-a-play climax, Fairy publicly accuses her malefactors while performing her own revision of the Thorn Hairpin on a stage perched over the river before plunging to her death, with Tan racing to join her. The pair are transformed by divine intervention into a pair of sole fish, which gives the play its name, and are guided to the safety of retired official-turned-recluse Fisherman Mo’s net. Without revealing his former position for fear of being recalled to service, Fisherman Mo becomes Tan’s benefactor. The couple are married in a rustic wedding before Tan leaves to take the examinations, and earns the same official [End Page 299] post from which Fisherman Mo (formerly Murong Jie) has recently retired. Before escaping to reclusion, Murong defeated a bandit invasion. As Tan takes up his former post, Fisherman Mo pens him a guide to local governance, disguised as divine assistance to keep his former identity concealed. The half-human, half-beast bandit relaunches his attack and nearly succeeds by hiring an imposter to play the retired Murong. When he is recalled to government service to put down the bandit invasion, the imposter makes a treasonous retreat, deserting his troops and fleeing into reclusion. In the end, Tan is forced to try the real Murong Jie for the crime of his imposter, but Murong is finally saved from a sentence of death by Tan’s incorruptible pursuit of the truth. Having narrowly escaped this tragic conclusion, Tan Chuyu and Fairy Liu commit to joining Fisherman Mo and his wife to live out their days in a streamside retreat, free from the cares of the world. While Li Yu is known for his orientation toward performance, in English his vernacular fiction is better represented by Patrick Hanan’s delightful translations of Silent Operas (1990), A Tower for the Summer Heat (1998), and The Carnal Prayer Mat (1996). Despite chuanqi being an immensely popular form of entertainment in his day, and him being a widely known playwright, Li Yu’s contribution to the genre underlines the reasons why this translation of A Couple of Soles is so long awaited. Until now, in terms of full-length plays, chuanqi has been primarily represented in English by Chen Shih-hsiang, Harold Acton, and Cyril Birch’s 1976 translation of Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan, and Cyril Birch’s 1994 translation of Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion. While these two are undeniably masterpieces, they reflect trends that Li Yu worked against in his dramatic oeuvre. Peony Pavilion is fifty-five scenes and was immediately criticized for being difficult to set to music, lending itself to being performed in extract, and to being a desktop play. It also typifies late-Ming indulgence in sentimentality and emotion. Peach Blossom Fan is the prime example of the trend in early-Qing chuanqi to stage the...