reading

Faraway Settings:
Spanish and Chinese Theaters
of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries

Juan Pablo Gil-Osle & Frederick A. de Armas (eds.)

Faraway Settings:
Spanish and Chinese Theaters
of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries

Juan Pablo Gil-Osle & Frederick A. de Armas (eds.)

IBEROAMERICANA - VERVUERT - 2019

Awarded with the Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture Grant
from
The American Council of Learned Societies-ACLS
and
Society from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International
Scholarly Exchange

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Diseño de la cubierta: a.f. diseño y comunicación
Imagen de cubierta: Foto del espectáculo El astrólogo fingido de Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Laboratorio Escénico Univale, 2005. Dirección: Ma Zhenghong y Alejandro González Puche. En la foto: Margarita Arboleda y Elizabeth Parra. Fotografía: Archivo Laboratorio Escénico Univalle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
JUAN PABLO GIL-OSLE/FREDERICK A. DE ARMAS

THEATRICAL ORIGINS

Jongleuresque Origins
BRUCE R. BURNINGHAM

Spain Learning about Chinese Theater (Miguel de Luarca’s Verdadera relación de la grandeza del Reino de China)
JORGE ABRIL SÁNCHEZ

ONEIRIC EXCESSES AND THEATRICALITY

Painting Emotions and Dreams (Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion and Lope de Vega’s La quinta de Florencia)
FREDERICK A. DE ARMAS

Global Climate and Emotions
JUAN PABLO GIL-OSLE

Emotion, Object, and Space (Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño)
CARMELA V. MATTZA SU

GLOBAL STAGINGS

Picaresque Theater (Miguel de Cervantes’ Pedro de Urdemalas, directed by Alejandro González Puche and Ma Zhenghong)
ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ PUCHE

Theatrical Characters (Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El astrólogo fingido, directed by Alejandro González Puche and Ma Zhenghong)
马政红 MA ZHENGHONG

Audience Reception (Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El astrólogo fingido, directed by Alejandro González Puche and Ma Zhenghong)
MARÍA JOSÉ DOMÍNGUEZ

From Novel and Theater (Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño, directed by Chen Kaixian)
MATTHEW ANCELL

SINOSPHERE

Christian sacred plays and Nō Style
JAVIER RUBIERA

Depicting Japan: Lope de Vega and Los primeros mártires del Japón
CLAUDIA MESA HIGUERA

Contributors

Index

PREFACE

Juan Pablo Gil-Osle
Frederick A. de Armas

Over the years, evolving schools of scholarly production have paradoxically followed the path of the Spanish Empire. By this we mean that since the nineteenth century, criticism of Iberia has slowly widened to reflect its global expansion. While early critics centered mainly on the Peninsula, over time, colonial studies came to be seen as an essential element in the understanding of early modern cultural productions. For example, Diana de Armas Wilson understood Cervantes through the lens of the New World, thus breaking disciplinary boundaries between Peninsular and Latin American studies.¹ Today we study figures like Juan Ruiz de Alarcón as part of a transatlantic space.² Moving beyond these two spaces critics have come to visualize a series of American interactions, thus furthering notions of imperial reach through hemispheric studies. For example, Lisa Voigt has shown how writings of captivity in Europe, North Africa, and the Americas share commonalities. Through narratives of captivity, borders are crossed, and discourses are mediated.³ In this long and productive journey, critics, as the Spanish explorers before them, found themselves confronted with the almost insurmountable space of the Pacific Ocean, or the then-called Mar del Sur. The Spanish dream of reaching the riches of Cathay and the Spice Island was constrained by Magellan’s understanding of the vastness that had to be traversed. This impossible journey has also been undertaken by recent critics. Serge Gruzinsky compared the conquest of Tenochtitlán to the attempts to penetrate the Ming empire, while Christina Lee collected a series of essays that analyze western visions of what Miguel Martínez has called a third New World, the innumerable cultures and islands that exist within the Pacific Rim.⁴ After the conquest of the Philippines, the Spanish imperial conglomerate reached the point of considering how to deal with highly complex societies that amazed the Europeans. While some even thought to conquer China, others sensed the martial and cultural strength of the land and its peoples.⁵ Indeed, the West was faced with cultures that could capture the minds and hearts of travelers as they visited the almost marvelous lands of Cathay and Cipango. This encounter led to a notable production of books, reports, and maps concerning the great powers of Asia, and the wonders of China.⁶

Among the great wonders of China, one was the production of books: “tienen impresión y grande multitud de libros porque hay muchas tiendas en cada ciudad do hay muchos para vender y los que nosotros habemos comprados impresos y visto allende de muchos cantares y farsas y otras historias que no quisimos comprar…” (Luarca, 127). This is proof that by 1575 the “cantares y farsas,” which were part of Chinese theater in Fujian, were already known to Spaniards. Although the Habsburg empire in Iberia produced thousands of plays during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ming dynasty in China (1368-1644), which started much earlier, was equally inclined to the theater: “More than four hundred playwrights produced over fifteen hundred plays, ranging from one-act skits to works of more than fifty scenes” (Hu 60).⁷ Furthermore, during the latter part of the Ming dynasty (1572-1644) theater in China experienced a second Golden Age thanks to a new form of theater, the southern chuanqi.⁸ A Spanish audience would have been surprised to see that most of these plays were suffused with music and singing, although in Spain, Calderón would begin experimenting with an operatic format two decades later. Spanish opera began to be performed in America by 1700.⁹

While in Spain the public performances predominated, they seemed to be secondary in China’s Ming dynasty. The performance spaces in China tended to be in private residences and the troupes themselves would belong to these elite families. However, after Tang’s Peony Pavilion there was a “popular turn” where more general audiences were kept in mind. “Stage appeal” seemed more important than “literary value.” The language was simpler, the vulgar jokes increased, and the figure of the courtesan possessed by love became increasingly popular.¹⁰

Equally astounding for a Spaniard would have been the length of some of the Chinese plays, with as many as fifty-five scenes and taking several days to perform.¹¹ A Spaniard attending one such play would be particularly astonished by the constant use of the supernatural, since many of the works derived from existing legends. They would encounter, among others, the Eight Immortals and they would be taken to realms beyond the human. On the other hand, they would fully understand the feeling of disillusionment with this world, which would easily translate into desengaño.

Chinese plays of the period never surfaced in Spain, nor are there references to Spain in Chinese plays of the Ming dynasty. While China thought of the Iberian empire as a place too far away to be concerned with its literary works, Spain was fascinated by reports on Chinese culture and Chinese theater. Lope de Vega, when seeking to describe a far-off place, often describes China. Cathay thus becomes almost commonplace in Spanish early modern theater. This book then focuses on two theaters that were not apparently in dialogue with each other, in order to scrutinize them in spite of the distance that must be traversed to understand / translate each of them. One of the results of this attempt is the many commonalities they share. It is as if there was a circulation of ideas and tropes, although it did not seem to happen. What may be the case is that both Spain and China shared a more popular and performative kind of play, where the fourth wall was partially breached. These commonalities were lost within the neoclassic bent of the eighteenth century. The modern era has been slowly recovering the interaction between actors and stage and has thus turned to China to once again breach the fourth wall.

A comparative study of Ming and Iberian theaters has never been attempted. Thus, this book aims to provide the reader with a series of different approaches. First, through a comparison of specific works by Spanish and Chinese playwrights during the Ming and Habsburg periods, we aim to show that at times certain commonalities are in reality spaces fraught with misunderstanding. A melancholic character in Spain would not be the same as a melancholic figure in Chinese theater. A particular plant or flower had completely different symbolic meanings. However, it is curious to note how certain character types in both theaters resemble each other; and how the interaction between actors and audience would show clear parallels. At the same time, this is a book that also finds the thrill of commonalities as they are recovered through modern staging.

In order to reinforce the notion that Spanish and Chinese theaters complement one another, this volume includes a series of essays showing how Golden Age plays are appreciated in modern China, and how plays written in a Chinese mode have been successful in America. In other words, these two theaters are not a far-off place. Written at approximately the same time, they show surprisingly similar ways of thinking. Emotions, dreams, honor, and farce; and the bringing together of different styles and modes from the comic to the tragic, are all items that are part of these plays’ makeup. Both theaters were nurtured by ancient tales. Whereas Spain tended to use classical myths and medieval Christian legends, Chinese theater was nurtured by its many living myths. Thus, protean characters such as Pedro de Urdemalas could well fit into a Chinese work, where the Monkey King is also born from a rock. Examples from Japanese theater also show the closeness of dramatic productions in the east and the west. In order to move an audience to conversion, Jesuits would turn to Nô theater to appeal to people’s emotions. In other words, this book allows us to think in a global manner as we confront the theaters of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca as they have become interlocutors in a transcultural dialogue that shows China’s closeness then and now.

THE ESSAYS

This collection is divided into four sections. The first consists of two articles. In the first, Bruce Burningham proposes a new way of looking at the rise of Spanish theater, and also relates it to Chinese drama. Both of them, he argues, have roots in the jongleuresque traditions. While early modern Spanish theater slowly did away with jongleuresque insertions and the presence of acrobats and other forms of entertainment in their theater, in China, the opposite occurred. Indeed, Spanish Golden Age Theater was later considered by neo-classicists as a failed type of theater. It was not serious enough and did not impose a fourth wall separating the stage from the audience. On the other hand, Chinese theater did not have to deal with neoclassical rules. Highly stylized acrobatic performances became standard in the theaters of Cathay. It was through Bertold Brecht that jongleuresque practices were again inserted in the western theatrical tradition through the revalorization of Chinese theater. Characters could communicate directly with the audience, making their actions transparent. Thus, Spanish Golden Age theater is most compatible with Chinese theater since both partook of the jongleuresque where audience and actors collaborate in the mise-en-scene, as can be seen in a number of essays in this volume dealing with staging. The second essay deals with the first major Spanish work on China, and the first one to make reference to Chinese theater: Miguel de Luarca’s Verdadera relación de la grandeza del Reino de China [True Account of the Greatness of the Kingdom of China] (1575). Luarca, a member of the first diplomatic mission to China, includes commentaries on a number of Chinese theatrical performances staged for the occasion of their visit. Jorge Abril Sánchez stresses the point that even though Luarca provides a first-hand description of these works, members of the diplomatic delegation did not acquire any books or manuscripts containing any of these productions, their music or theatrics, including the uses of acrobats and puppets. At the same time, this essay allows us to better understand the plot of these performances and who the characters might be. Indeed, one of the plays dealt with one of China’s foundational myths.

The second section consists of three essays that take up oneiric phenomena and emotional distress as points of departure for comparative approaches to Spanish and Chinese theaters. The first essay, by Frederick A. de Armas, begins with the opposite assumption, that the intertextuality of the two theaters has enough substance to sustain comparisons. He compares Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion with Lope de Vega’s La quinta de Florencia [The Florentine Villa], written the same year as Tang’s work (1598). The study also alludes to a later play by Lope, El caballero de Olmedo [The Knight from Olmedo]. After proposing some general similarities and differences between the two theaters, De Armas argues that Tang Xianzu shows what seems to be a more complex and fluid use of theatrical devices than Lope de Vega. In the Chinese work, Du Liniang encounters Liu Mengmei in a dream and falls in love with him. The affair continues in the dream until she wakes up, becomes melancholy and dies of lovesickness, not without first having a portrait of herself painted. Lope de Vega, La quinta de Florencia features a figure that falls asleep and falls in love. César does not paint, but instead looks at a work of art as he finds himself in a state between dreaming and waking. His beloved, a new Venus, emerges from art and dream. Neither Liu Mengmei’s beloved nor César’s goddess exist in this plane of reality. Both César and Liu Mengmei attempt a necromantic resurrection, but of different kinds, in very different ways, and with different results. Discussing art, dreams, gardens, melancholy, necromancy and theatricality, this essay shows how the many similarities between Tang and Lope de Vega often become divergences or points of inflection when cosmology, myth, and the oscillating meaning of terms and symbols are taken into account. Each playwright serves as a mirror to the other, further enriching textures and meanings. The second essay, by Juan Pablo Gil-Osle, begins with the premise that Ming and Iberian Habsburg theater traditions were not in contact at the time. Therefore, it would seem that the differences from these far-away places would be so daunting as to make comparisons fruitless. Nevertheless, representations of emotions and global climatic events serve to link these lands and their theaters in the seventeenth century. Gil-Osle focuses here on the connection between global climate change in the seventeenth century and the overwhelming passions surrounding human relationships, particularly friendships. The third and final essay in this section again takes up Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion. Carmela Mattza utilizes the dream, the flower (the peony), and emotions to analyze these plays. She defines emotions as a disposition to act according to the Way (dao). Indeed, Mattza finds glimmers of this use of emotions in the Spanish Golden Age play La vida es sueño [Life is a Dream]. Both plays endow the female protagonist with agency as they enter forbidden spaces. Mattza compares Xianzu’s garden with Calderon’s tower, showing them as forbidden spaces, but also as places of love, pain and melancholy. In the garden, the blooming azaleas may point to sadness while the peonies that only bloom in summer can refer to future fulfillment. Indeed, it is a flower that in both east and west is connected with occult practices. In the Chinese play, it connects to the three realities of the Shen. While the dream in the Chinese work takes Du Liniang to other realms, in Calderón it is also part of an experiment to prove the truth of oneiric cognitions. The article concludes with the uses of the portrait in both works. It “becomes a metaphor for the freedom that makes the artistic imagination possible.”

Section three deals with global stagings and is made up of five essays. In the first piece, Alejandro González Puche discusses how he staged Cervantes’ Pedro de Urdemalas [Peter of Urdemalas] at Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama in 2008. The essay centers on the challenges faced by the production of a comedia in a culture where the basic concepts of Golden Age Theater are unknown. For instance, professional actors in China consider themselves civil servants. As a consequence, the Spanish picaresque genre with its critical view of society had to be clearly explained to the actors so they understood how to enact criticism. Ironically, despite the challenges, the staging was a great success and the Chinese actors and audience showed a better understanding of the protean transformations of Pedro de Urdemalas than today’s Spanish-speaking troupes and audiences. Thus, the essay speaks to the convergence between the two theaters in spite of initial moments of uncertainties. In the second piece, Ma Zhenghog discusses two different methods of staging Calderón’s El astrólogo fingido [The Feigned Astrologer], the Stanislavski system and that of Chinese traditional theater. Whereas the first one is based on interpretation, the Chinese opera uses a kind of theater of representation which relies on external illustration and on stereotypes and artificial forms. According to her experience, the application of the Stanislavski method was a failure, which led her to research other theatrical traditions that did not rely on psychological truths but on performance mechanisms. After considering works by Meyerhold and Brecht on Chinese opera, as well as the speeches of Jiao Juying, she reassessed her mise-en-scene of Calderón’s play. The new production was successful as detailed by the following article. Ma’s explorations led to the discovery that the conventions of Chinese opera and Spanish Golden Age Theater have many similarities, including the fact that neither theater was naturalistic or realistic. The third essay continues this discussion. María José Domínguez analyzes a mise-en-scene of the same play, Calderón de la Barca’s El astrólogo fingido at the International Siglo de Oro Festival at the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas. The play was directed by Ma Zhenghong. She gauges the public’s reception of the use of Chinese music, Chinese clothing, and Chinese recitation techniques in this baroque play, and concludes that the audience becomes the protagonist of the work, revitalizing a Spanish classic through the use of elements from the Peking Opera. In the fourth essay of this section, Matthew Ancell examines a direct encounter between China and Calderón in a 2015 production of the second act from La vida es sueño, directed by Chen Kaixian, Emeritus Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Nanjing. The English department at Nanjing organized a festival in 2014 to commemorate a Shakespearean theater festival from 1964 put on by Chen’s father, who was the head of English at the time. Following this precedent, Chen organized a student theater troupe, called El Grupo Teatral Estudiantil Quijote [The Quixote Student Theater Group] in 2015. The group adapted the second act of La vida es sueño and Chen wrote a short first and third act to complement the second by Calderón, in which appear Cervantes, Don Quijote, Sancho Panza, and in the third, Zhaungzhou (ca. 369-286 BCE). El Grupo Teatral Estudiantil Quijote is the first Spanish theater troupe in China —and the only student group in Asia— to only perform Spanish plays. The production draws the characters Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, as well as Cervantes himself, into the comedia in order to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the second part of Don Quijote. Moreover, they are joined by the Chinese philosopher as the play revisits the Cueva de Montesinos episode in the context of Calderón’s play as another dream within a dream. Central to the relationship between these works are the issues of adaptation and transformation. Chen exploits a quintessentially Chinese story in Zhaungzhou’s text, the Zhuangzi, about the oscillation between life and dream.

In order to round out this panorama of Spanish and Chinese theaters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is important to discuss Spanish missionary theater in the Sinosphere. Since China did not have this kind of theater, we turn to Japan in order to understand this phenomenon. The first of two essays in this fourth section is by Javier Rubiera. He analyzes the connection between Jesuit missionary theater and the Nô style of Japanese theater. Since missionary theater was targeting local populations, Jesuits turned to this style to better align their theater to the customs and manners of the Japanese. Thus, the Jesuits are able to present stories of the Christian faith in a manner that attracts audiences and achieves success. As it is well-known, the Christian missionaries experienced persecution in Japan during the times of the civil war at the beginning of the seventeenth century. One of the consequences, as Claudia Mesa Higuera states, was the public martyrdom of Christians. When news of the tragic events reached Spain, the writing and production of the only play dealing with Japan was commissioned: Los primeros mártires del Japón, a play attributed to Lope de Vega. She argues that this work “is structured around a hyperbolic metaphor of visual and verbal display.” Here, the supernatural has great importance since it was intended to provoke an emotional response. This response was also facilitated by the introduction of sympathetic and suffering characters.

WORKS CITED

ELLIS, Robert Richmond. 2012. They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

ESTRADA, José. 2019. “El Monstruo con su figura: Self-Fashioning in Ruiz de Alarcón’s Theater.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.

GARCÍA PINAR, Pablo. 2015. “Transatlantic Figures in Early Modern Spain.” Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University.

GASTA, Chad M. 2013. Transatlantic Arias: Early Opera in Spain and the New World. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.

GRUZINSKI, Serge. 2014. The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Polity Press.

HU, John. 1983. “Ming Dynasty Drama.” Chinese Theater from its Origins to the Present Day, ed. Collin McKerras, 60-91. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

HUA, Wei. 2016. “The ‘popular turn’ in the elite theatre of the Ming after Tang Xianzu: Love, dream and deaths in The Tale of the West Loft.” In 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China, edited by Tian Yuan Tan, Paul Edmondsho, and Shih-pe Wang, 36-48. London: Bloomsbury.

IDEMA, Wilt L. 2001. “Traditional Dramatic Literature.” In Columbia History of Chinese Literature, edited by Victor Mair, 785-847. New York: Columbia University Press.

LACH, Donald. 1963. Asia in the Making of Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

LEE, Christina H. 2016. Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522-1657. London: Taylor and Francis.

LUARCA, Miguel de. 2002. Verdadera relación de la grandeza del Reino de China. Edited by Santiago García Castañón. Luarca: Eco de Luarca.

MARTÍNEZ, Miguel. 2016. Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

OLLÉ, Manel. 2000. La empresa de China: De la Armada Invencible al Galeón de Manila. Barcelona: Acantilado.

TAN, Tian Yuan, Paul EDMONDSHO, and Shih-pe WANG. 2016. “Introduction.” In 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China, edited by Tian Yuan Tan, Paul Edmondsho, Shih-pe Wang, 36-48. London: Bloomsbury.

VOIGT, Lisa. 2012. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic. Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press.

WILSON, Diana de Armas. 2000. Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 See Wilson (2000).

2 See, for example, García Pinar (2015); Estrada (2019).

3 See Voigt (2012).

4 See Gruzinski (2014), Lee (2016), Martínez (2016).

5 See Ellis (2012, 67), Ollé (2000, 121).

6 See Lach (1963).

7 See Hu (1983).

8 For information about the southern chuanqi, see Idema (2001).

9 See Gasta (2013).

10 See Hua (2016, 38).

11 See Tan (2016, 1-3). The number of scenes in a chuanqi varies generally from 30 to 50; most chuanqi generally have around 40 scenes, with some extreme cases.

THEATRICAL ORIGINS

JONGLEURESQUE ORIGINS

Bruce R. Burningham

1. THEATER HISTORY AND THE JONGLEURESQUE

Elsewhere, I have proposed a theory of “jongleuresque performance” to help explain the rise of the Spanish comedia in the absence of a strong tradition of medieval liturgical drama on the Iberian Peninsula, arguing that such a performance tradition represents, quite literally, the popular theater of medieval Europe with or without liturgical drama, even when such theater consists of just one person watching another do somersaults on the village green (Burningham 2007, 7). My use of the term “jongleuresque” refers, therefore, to much more than just the quasi-literary activities associated with the medieval Iberian mester de juglaría. It refers, really, to an entire mode of popular performance that ranges from minstrelsy to circuses, from vaudeville to street theater, from magicians to mountebanks. It is a performance tradition that, as the thirteenth-century Provençal poem Flamenca clearly demonstrates in its description of an aristocratic banquet’s postprandial entertainment, encompasses epic singing, balladry, music, storytelling, acrobatics, prestidigitation, juggling, and dancing:

Then the minstrels stood up;
each one wanted to be heard.
Then you would have heard resound
strings of various pitches.
Whoever knew a new piece for the viol,
a song, a descort, or lay,
he pressed forward as much as he could.
One played the lay of the Honeysuckle,
another the one of Tintagel;
one sang of the Noble Lovers,
and another which Yvain composed.
One played the harp; another the viol;
another, the flute; another, a fife;
one played a rebeck; another, a rote;
one sang the words; another played notes;
one, the sackbut; another, the fife;
one, the bagpipe; another, the reed-pipe;
one, the mandora and another attuned
the psaltery with the monochord;
one performed with marionettes,
another juggled knives;
some did gymnastics and tumbling tricks;
another danced with his cup;
one held the hoop; another leapt through it;
everyone performed his art perfectly.
(Blodgett 1995, 33–35).

Borrowing terminology from Albert Lord and Hollis Huston, I suggest that the essence of all theater can be found among “singers of tales on simple stages” (Lord 2000; Huston 1992, 76). Moreover, and fundamental to this current essay, I argue that the central core of this jongleuresque tradition is the mutual awareness between performer and spectator that exists in performance—a performative “dialogue” that Huston characterizes as follows: “I will watch, says the viewer, as long as you do something that is worth watching. I will do something that is worth watching, says the actor, as long as you watch” (1992, 76).¹

Critics and historians of Chinese theater clearly see in many of the earliest examples of East Asian theater a number of elements that I would characterize as “jongleuresque,” even if they do not employ my particular terminology to describe these activities. It is not coincidental, therefore, that their descriptions of these early East Asian performance traditions echo the aforementioned scene from Flamenca. Consider, for instance, Chung-Wen Shih’s description of the “court jesters and entertainers” (known as yu, ch’ang, ch’ang-yu, p’ai-yu, ling, and chu-ju) who were an important fixture on the early Chinese stage: “Reminiscent of fools or court jesters in medieval Europe, their roles were not limited to formal performances, but also included making satirical observations, telling jokes and stories, and impersonating historical and contemporary figures” (1976, 3). Consider also William Dolby’s allusion to specific early modern European performers in his discussion of Chinese theater during the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE):

[Regional rulers and feudal lords] kept their own personnel for music, dancing and other entertainments, and it was probably from among these entertainers that the specialists in jest-couched counsel arose, the court jesters and wise fools of ancient China. Jester Meng, for instance, is known to have started his career as a musician or entertainer. Like Henry VIII’s Will Somers, Elizabeth’s Richard Tarlton and the other court fools and king’s jesters of mediaeval and later Europe, the Zhou jesters had the twofold duty of entertaining and of advising through the medium of humour. (1976, 2)

Dolby later characterizes this East Asian jongleuresque tradition during the medieval Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) in terms that are clearly reminiscent of the kinds of medieval European street performance often recorded in the margins of illuminated manuscripts (see Davidson, 1991):

Circus-like performances of the Tang included, in addition to such common skills as tightrope-walking and pole-climbing, a variety of rarer arts: horse-riding through an alley of sharp knives; rope-dancing by two pretty girls, later joined by two boys, on a tightrope a hundred feet long and nearly as high; a woman balancing a pole on her head with purportedly as many as eighteen people on the pole; and other breath-taking feats of balance and sword-handling. (1976, 11)²

Eugenio Barba even connects the popular aspects of the early East Asian performance traditions to the Italian commedia dell’arte (2010, xiii), a performance genre that I regard as the apex of the early modern jongleuresque in Western Europe.

Still, as with the Western European jongleuresque, the East Asian jongleuresque was not limited to just these kinds of acrobatic skills. Instead, like the kind of vocal performances that gave rise to the Western medieval epic tradition (reconstructed by such contemporary singers of tales as Benjamin Bagby in his celebrated performance of Beowulf [Bagby 2006]), the East Asian jongleuresque also included a strong musical and narrative component:

Oral storytelling of the Sung period [960-1279 CE] was not only the immediate predecessor of the Yüan drama, but also the most significant shaping force of the new genre. By Sung times, oral storytelling had become a regular profession. […] With their proved value as mass entertainment, oral narratives served as models for the emerging Yüan drama. (Shih 1976, 14-15).³

2. JONGLEURESQUE PERFORMANCE DURING THE MING AND HABSBURG DYNASTIES

The centuries that coincide with the Ming and Habsburg dynasties (roughly 1368 to 1644 for the Ming and 1517 to 1700 for the Spanish Habsburgs) mark an important period in the world history of jongleuresque performance, where both East and West established what have come to be seen as each culture’s “classical” theater.⁴ In Western Europe, for instance, the jongleuresque tradition was initially subsumed into the emerging commercial theaters of such early modern metropolises as London and Madrid. As Robert Weimann notes in his examination of the popular origins of Elizabethan theater, the sites of many early English playhouses were public spaces long associated with jongleuresque activities like “bear-baiting, bull fights, wrestling, and fencing, as well as juggling and other displays” (1978, 170). Or, as I argue in Radical Theatricality, the corrales of Habsburg Spain are quite literally built around public jongleuresque performance spaces—patios, courtyards, and the like—that had existed precisely as ad-hoc performance spaces throughout much of the Middle Ages, and that this “corralling” of the Iberian jongleuresque gave shape and energy to the Spanish comedia, helping to inspire the Golden Age literary explosion characterized by such prolific playwrights as Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and others (Burningham 2007, 132-70). In fact, the evolution of Western European literary drama from its pre-modern to early modern form is really what I consider to be the “jongleurization” of the medieval liturgical tradition. As the locus of the liturgical dramas moved from inside the churches out onto the streets, “the vitality of its language began to resemble that of the witty medieval storytellers, its high-born characters became more and more like those of the epics and romances, and its low-born characters began to interact with the audience in ways more than reminiscent of the buffoons and acrobats who juggled knives in the town square” (Burningham 2007, 218).

Meanwhile, in China, the East Asian jongleuresque congealed during the Yuan and Ming dynasties into what today is generically called “Chinese opera”—again, a form that Deben Battacharya rightly characterizes as: “a complex mixture of music, mime, acrobatics, and acting” (Bhattacharya 2004, 00:19:43). And like the prolific output of such Spanish dramatists as Lope and Calderón that marked the rise of the Spanish comedia, the rise of Chinese opera also coincided with an explosion in China’s dramatic literary production: “The Ming dynasty […] marks a most important chapter in the history of Chinese drama and theater. More than four hundred playwrights produced over fifteen hundred plays, ranging from one-act skits to works with more than fifty scenes” (Hu 1983, 60).

Still, despite what John Hu calls the Ming theater’s “polished singing, intricate choreography, and splendid costumes” (1983, 60), these Ming performances nonetheless continue to resemble precisely the kind of street theater that Miguel de Cervantes famously describes when remembering a performance by Lope de Rueda and his itinerant troupe during the mid-1500s:

No había en aquel tiempo tramoyas, ni desafíos de moros y cristianos, a pie ni a caballo; no había figura que saliese o pareciese salir del centro de la tierra por lo hueco del teatro, al cual componían cuatro bancos en cuadro y cuatro o seis tablas encima, con que se levantaba del suelo cuatro palmos; ni menos bajaban del cielo nubes con ángeles o con almas. El adorno del teatro era una manta vieja, tirada con dos cordeles de una parte a otra, que hacía lo que llaman vestuario, detrás de la cual estaban los músicos, cantando sin guitarra algún romance antiguo. (Cervantes 2016, 268)

Compare Cervantes’s well-known description of early modern Iberian performance praxis to that of China during roughly the same period:

A performance in the Ming period and, for that matter, for any traditional Chinese drama, could take place anywhere with a flat area for a stage. Scenery was unnecessary; it could be a hindrance, since the location for the dramatic action shifted fast at short intervals. […] The place for performance during the Ming [period] could be and often was a boat, a rice-threshing floor, a hall, a temple, or of course a permanent or temporarily erected theater. Wherever it might be, a red carpet spread on the flat place would be sufficient for “the stage.” (Hu 1983, 85)

Commenting on this early Chinese “simple stage,” Dolby notes the development of a synecdochic relationship (not unlike the English expression “on the boards”) between one of its scenic design elements and the performance space itself:

Raised stages were sometimes used in the Ming, but private troupes generally performed on flat ground in a courtyard or hall, with a space marked out and covered with a red felt carpet to serve as a stage, the musicians being located at the back of the carpet. […] “On the red carpet” came eventually actually to mean “on stage,” and the stage could be referred to simply as “the carpet.” Some bigger residences did have slightly raised permanent stages but a red carpet would still be placed on the stage to serve as a central acting space. (1976, 103)

Of particular importance in the preceding quote, Dolby also alludes to the crucial function of the musicians who work at the periphery of the performance space in traditional Chinese opera. Such a component is—not coincidentally, given its jongleuresque origins—very similar to that of Lope de Rueda’s “músicos,” who provide a lyric element to the otherwise “dramatic” spectacle. And such musical elements —present even at the very “beginnings” of Iberian and East Asian theater— make their way into the more “mature” work of the Habsburg and Ming playwrights precisely because these elements provide the kind of multiform entertainment that audiences had come to expect after several hundred years of the jongleuresque tradition (see Burningham 2007, 158-66).

3. THE EARLY MODERN DIVERGENCE OF THE EASTERN AND WESTERN JONGLEURESQUE

If the Ming and Habsburg dynasties represent a point of convergence during which these two jongleuresque traditions congealed to form the basis of each culture’s “classical” theater, then the two dynasties also represent the historical moment when these two theater traditions began to diverge in important ways. In East Asia, the jongleuresque not only became a highly stylized form (thus requiring a difficult and intensive training process for any performers who aspire to enter the tradition), but it also became the standard by which Chinese theater would be measured well into the twentieth century and beyond. In the words of Li Ruru: “Unlike its counterpart in the West, indigenous Chinese drama never separated itself from the song and dance that were the origins of virtually every theatre in the world” (2010, 13). Moreover, its current international prestige continues to mean that numerous troupes of “Chinese acrobats” tour the rest of the world —in places like Orlando, Florida and Branson, Missouri— as respected cultural ambassadors. Indeed, such acrobats were featured prominently in the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony; which is to say, in China, the jongleuresque tradition has carved out a space for itself precisely as one of the fundamental emblems of the national culture.

In Western Europe, however, and despite the particular importance of the commedia dell’arte, the past four centuries have largely seen a significant retreat from the jongleuresque. As the seventeenth century drew to a close, a radical shift in European sensibilities occurred. Neoclassicism, with its intense focus on Aristotelian “unities” and “rules,” became the self-proclaimed proscriptive model for nearly all European drama in the eighteenth century, leaving the all-too-jongleuresque Spanish comedia looking more and more antiquated with each passing year. Enlightenment playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín, for instance, announced the emergent disdain for this older Spanish form in his emphatically titled 1792 play La comedia nueva, in which the main characters—who sit in a café adjacent to a theater in Madrid and who pointedly perform the very conventions of neoclassical drama—discuss the supposed failings of an “old-fashioned” comedia being performed next door. Neoclassicism itself would later be replaced by romanticism, realism, and naturalism, until the ideal of all “serious” theater in the West became a play that the audience merely observed from afar, as if eavesdropping through an invisible “fourth wall” that enclosed the performance space contained within the three visible walls that constituted the set on a proscenium stage. This relentless march toward realism and naturalism culminated in the West in the late nineteenth century, by which time nearly all the traditional jongleuresque elements of the Western stage had either been purged or marginalized in favor of an absolute mimesis whose praxis and aesthetics would attempt to recreate the illusion of “real life.” Indeed, as Oscar Brockett notes, André Antoine was so committed to the French “naturalist” approach to the fourth wall that, in designing the set for his 1888 production of Fernand Icre’s The Butchers, “he hung real carcasses of beef on the stage” and even “arranged rooms as in real life and only later decided which wall should be removed” (1982, 550).

This is not to say, of course, that jongleuresque performance ceased to exist in the West, or that it ceased to attract audiences. One need only think of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, or of the early twentieth-century vaudeville circuit that gave rise to such comedy teams as the Marx Brothers or Abbot and Costello (not to mention the kind of contemporary stand-up and improv traditions from which so many of today’s TV and movie stars are ultimately drawn). But it is to say that during the past four centuries the guardians of Western European “high culture” have shown themselves to be profoundly embarrassed by the jongleuresque origins of European theater. And nowhere are the lingering effects of this embarrassment more widely felt than in the continued lack of appreciation for early modern Spanish theatre among critics and practitioners of European classical drama. Such a disdain—despite the German Romantics’ interest in the auto-sacramental—has carried through into the twenty-first-century, where Spanish “Golden Age” theater remains, in the words of British director Laurence Boswell, Europe’s last great “undiscovered” classical tradition (Boswell 2013). Indeed, one of the main reasons that early modern Spanish plays are not performed with the same frequency and regularity as those of other Western European nations is that far too many contemporary British and US theater practitioners remain artistically bewildered by the conventions and aesthetics of the Spanish comedia precisely because this tradition does not fit neatly into a historiographical narrative that describes the European theater’s “maturation” away from the jongleuresque.

4. BERTOLT BRECHT’S “REDISCOVERY” OF THE JONGLEURESQUE IN CHINA

Meanwhile, having largely purged Western European theater of its embarrassing jongleuresque elements, early twentieth-century avant-garde theater practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, in an attempt to “revolutionize” Western bourgeois culture, suddenly “discovered” in the East Asian tradition a whole set of jongleuresque practices that they found stunningly “radical”—not the least of which is the dialogic relationship between performer and spectator that I discuss in Radical Theatricality. Writing about a 1935 performance (in Russia) of a Chinese actor named Mei Lanfang, Brecht says the following:

The Chinese performer does not act as if, in addition to the three walls around him there were also a fourth wall. He makes it clear that he knows that he is being looked at. Thus, one of the illusions of the European stage is set aside. The audience forfeits the illusion of being unseen spectators at an event which is really taking place. The European stage has worked out an elaborate technique by which the fact that scenes are so arranged as to be easily seen by the audience is concealed. The Chinese approach renders this technique superfluous. As openly as acrobats the actors can choose those positions which show them off to best advantage. (2000, 16; original emphasis)⁵

As should be fairly obvious, Brecht’s description of Mei’s performance is haunted by the jongleuresque, and Brecht has always struck me as a particularly jongleuresque practitioner and theoretician. To begin with, his notion of what he called “epic theater” is overtly jongleuresque, tied as it is to Lord’s medieval “singer of tales”: “‘Epic’ (episch) is then more or less synonymous with the adjective ‘narrative,’ whether in verse or in prose” (Grimm 1997, 40). Moreover, Brecht’s notion of epic theater also included “elements from popular entertainment forms such as the cabaret, vaudeville, revues, the circus (especially clown acts in the style of Karl Valentin or Charlie Chaplin), film, radio plays, detective fiction, cowboy films, jazz, sports events, and children’s theater” (Kiebuzinska 1997, 50).⁶ In fact —and somewhat oddly, I would argue—, Brecht regarded his concept of “epic” as appropriately “scientific” for the modern age, as Arrigo Subiotto notes: “The epic mode is regarded as the most objective; the author excludes himself from the work but is present in the form of a narrator who conveys events through description and comment” (1982, 30). Or, as Martin Esslin says of Brecht’s epic theater:

By abandoning the pretense that the audience is eavesdropping on actual events, by openly admitting that the theatre is a theatre and not the world itself, the Brechtian stage approximates the lecture hall, to which audiences come in the expectation that they will be informed, and also the circus arena, where an audience, without identification or illusion, watches performers exhibit their special skills. (1971, 133)⁷

Of course, as Esslin also reminds us, Brecht’s theories of epic theater did not simply arise ex nihilo, but instead represented a revolutionary “rebellion” against the bourgeois theater of his day— particularly, melodrama and drawing-room comedy (Esslin 1971, 127-28). Moreover, as Saussy notes, Mei Lanfang’s visit to Moscow occurred in the wake of the 1934 formal adoption of an aesthetic policy of “social realism” by the All-Soviet Congress of Writers (2006, 10). Thus, Brecht’s presence in Moscow in 1935 was part of an ongoing debate about the “proper” role of theater in a revolutionary age, and the centerpiece of Brecht’s theories (and the element most closely related to his enthralled reaction to Mei Lanfang’s 1935 Moscow performance) is his notion of what he called the “Alienation effect” (‘Verfremdungseffekt,’ in German, often rendered as ‘V-Effekt’ or ‘A-effect’). Like Victor Shklovsky’s linguistic and literary notion of “defamiliarization,” Brecht’s “concept and device of alienation are essentially based on the assumption that the world in general and society and its workings in particular are too familiar to be really understood” (Grimm 1997, 41); “The new narrative content signalled by the term ‘epic’ was to be communicated in a dialectical, non-illusionist and non-linear manner, declaring its own artifice as it hoped also to reveal the workings of ideology” (Brooker 1994, 191);⁸ “Only after the standardization of the fourth-wall illusion [in the nineteenth century] would its breakage [in the twentieth century] provoke a shock effect upon theatergoers” (Davis 2015, 86). And what Brecht found —seemingly ready-made— in the classical “Chinese opera” performance exhibited by Mei Lanfang was precisely a non-Western theatrical tradition that could stand in sharp contrast to the tired and worn-out theatrical conventions of bourgeois Europe.⁹ As Carol Martin notes, “Brecht articulates a relationship between actor and spectator wherein both become critical observers (not without empathy) of the actions the actor performs” (1999, 77). More importantly, as Nathaniel Davis argues, this Brechtian relationship involves “a cutting criticism of the audience’s passive, fantasizing spectatorship” (2015, 87).

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