All the World's a Stage

Chinese Theatre in the Days of Kublai Khan, J.I. Crump, K’ang Chin-chih, Yang Hsien-chih, Meng Han-ch’ing*

I really enjoyed this book, although it’s probably of limited interest to many of the readers of this journal. It is in two parts – first, a very well-written and quite fascinating introduction to Chinese drama and theatre (not the same thing, as of course you all realise) of the Yuan period. In this section, which takes up almost half of the book, Crump discusses everything from key themes of Yuan drama to matters of stagecraft and conventions of writing stage directions. The style is that of one of those wonderful professors one sometimes has, who clearly knows just about everything there is to know about her or his subject, and can explain it easily while occasionally wandering off into sidelines of speculation or commentary that are just as interesting as the material intended to be presented.

The second part consists of three representative plays of the period:

K'ang Chin-chih, Li K'uei Carries Thorns
Yang Hsien-chih, Rain on the Hsiao-hsiang
Meng Han-ch’ing, The Mo-ho-lo Doll

Chinese theatre at this period was a form that combined speech, pantomime, ballad, operatic-style arias, and highly physical movement verging on acrobatics or gymnastics (Crump cites stage directions requiting an actor to enter the scene doing a sequence of somersaults, for example). All three of these plays contain spoken lines, ballads, aria, and pantomime sequences, and read, to this Western eye and ear, rather like a combination of Commedia dell’arte and the ballad operas of John Gay.

The plays themselves have very simple plots which rely heavily on conventions common to the dramas of many places and times – mistaken identities, unwise oaths, deliberate deceptions, separated family members who must be reunited before the plot can be resolved, the small clue that no one realises is important but which is the only thing that can reveal the truth and restore order, and so on.

In Li K'uei Carries Thorns, two villains pretend to be a respected warlord/bandit and his henchman, and abduct the unmarried daughter of a wine-seller, who then complains to the sworn brother/comrade of the warlord, Li K’uei, that his brother the warlord has dishonored the wine-seller’s daughter. LI vows to bring his brother to justice, and is caught in his vow when it is proven that it is the villains, and not his brother who abducted the woman.

In Rain on the Hsiao-hsiang, a government official and his daughter are separated while travelling by boat in a storm. The daughter is rescued and cared for by an honourable man, who arranges her betrothal to his nephew, an aspiring official, so she will be protected and secure (not that it was of all that much important to the audience at the time, but she likes the young man and enters the betrothal willingly). The young man goes off to write his examinations, is befriended by a senior official, and marries his daughter instead of returning to his betrothed. When his first betrothed arrives to find out why he hasn’t sent for her, he accuses her of being a household slave of his uncles who was dismissed for theft and has her sent to jail. The resolution of the plot and punishment of the wrong-doer hinges on the unexpected appearance of the young woman’s father.

In The Mo-ho-lo Doll, a man is murdered by his cousin, who lusts after both his cousin’s money and his wife, but when she refuses him, he accuses her of the murder. The proof of her innocence lies, unknown to all until the end of the tale, in the votive doll she had bought from a wandering peddler.

All told, when one looks at the structure of these plays, the similarities in essentials between them and many of those to be found in European traditions right up to and including the Bard of Avon himself are more striking than the differences of style and cultural reference, which makes them very accessible to the Western reader.

*This book was published in 1980 and uses the Wade-Giles system of romanisation rather than the now preferred Pinyin system adopted by the government of China and ISO in 1979. I have followed Crump and used Wade-Giles in my comments here as well.

Arthur the Warlord

The Warlord Chronicle, by Bernard Cornwell
The Winter Kingl
The Enemy of God
Excalibur

There are many variants of the modern Arthurian novel – the medieval fantasy, the Romano-Celtic fantasy, the more-or-less historical novel, the modern retelling, the translation of key themes to original modern fantasy or science fiction novel, and so on.

Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicle novels are mostly historical in nature, with a very serious attempt to recreate the era in which someone who might have been Arthur most probably lived – although of course, historians themselves vary to some degree in their interpretation of what’s known about that time period, so you can have two authors committed to their own sense of historical accuracy producing works as different as Cornwell's novel and those of Jack Whyte, even though both are quite clear about being set in a post-Roman Britain that retains strong Celtic elements, during the spread of Christianity, which faces the Saxon invasions.

Cornwell gives us some supernatural content, through the choice of a narrator who begins life as a Saxon child who survives being sacrificed by British druids, only to grow up in the household of Merlin, Druid to the Dumnonian king Uther, and ends his life as a Christian monk, writing the “truth” of the story of Arthur for a young queen whose lord rules in the days after Arthur has departed from human ken. Cornwell’s narrator, Derfel, was Arthur’s companion and sworn man and now, in his later years, at the prompting of a royal patron, is setting down his recollections of what happened from his perspective as a man close to, but not always in the middle of, the action.

The books are loosely structured around Nennius’ list of Arthur’s battles, but because there is such a wealth of detail of the daily lives of the main characters – quite a large cast – as well as the politics and religious debates of the time, the battles do not overwhelm the human story.

Cornwell makes use of some less common sources, and presents a set of interactions between characters that is rather different from the standard set familiar to most readers of works from Mallory onward. Here, Arthur is Uther’s bastard son, while Mordred is Uther’s legitimate grandson and heir, and Arthur is sworn on Uther’s death to hold the throne of Dumnonia for Mordred. Arthur must first fight against other kings to preserve his nephew's lands, and later try to forge them into one political unit under his leadership as warlord - Dux bellorum - to fold back the Saxons. In the end, after defending himself against repeated treachery from many quarters, he decides that Mordred does not deserve the throne and his loyalty, a decision which leads to the final battle of Camlann.

Competing religious beliefs have a great deal of influence on the unwinding of this version of the tale. Arthur is a follower of Mithras, but tries to balance pagan and Christian factions; he listens both to the advice of the Druid Merlin and of a moderate Christian bishop. Arthur’s sister Morgan begins as a student of Merlin and ends as the wife of one of the more fervent proponents of Christianity. Arthur’s wife, Guenevere, is a worshipper of Isis. Derfel, the story’s narrator, is raised by Merlin (and Morgan), becomes an initiate of Mithras, follows Merlin and his protégé Nimue in a quest for the 13 treasures of Britain, the most potent of which is a sacred cauldron, and finally becomes a Christian recluse under the authority of none other than Morgan’s Christian husband.

I enjoyed this telling of the tale – particularly because Cornwell, while bringing the latter-day interloper Lancelot into the story, makes of him a boastful, deceitful and manipulative coward who gains his glorious posthumous stature only through good press and being on the side that ultimately conquered – the Christians. In this way, and through Derfel’s comments in the frame about how the account he writes will no doubt be prettied up by his patron queen’s scribes because it’s not romantic and heroic enough, Cornwell reminds us that there are indeed many ways of viewing the tale of Arthur and acknowledges the ambiguity inherent in declaring any version as the historical truth.