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A Couple of Soles is a classic comedic romance by the seventeenth-century playwright Li Yu. The first major comedy from late imperial China to appear in English translation, it provides an unparalleled view of the theater in seventeenth-century China.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Note on the Translation
Introduction, by Jing Shen
Dramatis Personae and Their Role Categories
Preface, by Wang Duanshu
Scenes
A Couple of Soles
Appendix: The Playwright and His Art, by Jing Shen
Notes
Bibliography
About the author
Robert E. Hegel (Columbia PhD) is Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature in Arts and Sciences and Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Washington University, St. Louis. His publications include Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1998) and The Novel in Seventeenth Century China (Columbia, 1981) as well asthe translated volume Idle Talk Under the Bean Arbor: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Collection (Washington, 2017) and numerous edited collections, book chapters, and articles.
Summary
A Couple of Soles is a classic comedic romance by the seventeenth-century playwright Li Yu. Tan Chuyu, a poor young scholar, falls in love with the beautiful actress Liu Miaogu. He joins her family’s acting troupe, and, in plays within the play, romance ensues. After Liu’s family attempts to marry her off to a local country squire, she performs a famous scene in which a heroine drowns herself—and then jumps off the stage into a river, followed by Tan. The local river deity rescues the lovers from death by transforming them into a pair of soles. Li balances their romance with the adventures of a retired upright official involving banditry, bribery, and mistaken identity—and who nets and shelters the two fish when they regain human form.
Written at a time when China was beginning to recover from the cataclysmic Ming-Qing dynastic transition, A Couple of Soles displays Li’s biting wit as well as his reflections on the concerns of his age, including the dangers of administrative service and the role of theater in society. The play combines witty wordplay and caustic satire with a strong emphasis on traditional moral values. The first major comedy from late imperial China to appear in English translation, A Couple of Soles provides an unparalleled view of the theater in seventeenth-century China. A general introduction and a detailed appendix shed further light on the play and its context.
Additional text
This brilliant book combines excellent scholarship about the innovative seventeenth-century dramatist Li Yu, noted for his unrestrained speech and behavior, with a wonderful translation of one of his comedies. Both translators have established reputations in the field of Chinese drama and literature, which this book will certainly enhance.
