The Performers’ Brush: A Case Study of Scene Twelve “Composing the Score” (“Zhipu”) in a Mid-Qing Stage Script of Changsheng dian (Palace of Everlasting Life)

Abstract: Well-trained performers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China (and before) hardly documented how they staged a play, despite their devoted participation in the exuberant theatrical activities at the time. The lack of written records about the stage performance has frustrated modern scholars who hope to decenter the voice of playwrights, that is, the educated men who exercised their authority through literary composition, in the study of premodern Chinese theatre. For this reason, the full-length stage script of the renowned play Changsheng dian 長生殿 (The Palace of Everlasting Life) that was copied by a person named Shen Wencai 沈文彩 in 1750 provides invaluable information about how performers might have contributed to the creation of a play. Not only is the script a written record of how the play was once performed but it also contains detailed editing by an unknown individual with a deep understanding of the stage. While the script has not yet obtained much attention in the English and Chinese scholarship, in order to initiate in-depth, comprehensive examinations of this important source, in this essay, I take one scene from the script as a case study and compare the scene with the playwright’s version. By following and highlighting the traces of the performers’ brush featured in the script, I bring to light how performers in eighteenth-century China used their embodied knowledge of theatre to make a play performable while also claiming credits for their own creativity.