Poetic ‘Hypertext’, Evocative ‘Figure-in-Landscape’, and the Reading of Illustrated Plays in the Late Ming

Abstract Scholars of late Ming print culture have noted a ‘scenic’ shift in book illustrations of the late Wanli period. But how did the ‘scenic’ style vary across different genres of books, and what impact did such variations have on reading? This article examines a series of drama illustrations attributed to the Hangzhou publisher Rongyu tang ( RYT ), and explores the RYT ’s subtle reconfigurations of the relationships between figures, landscapes, and poetic captions to produce new experiences of reading plays. I argue that the RYT developed its own repertoire of ‘figures-in-landscape’ that, while intersecting with visual motifs in a wide range of paintings and prints, distinguish themselves through the fine-tuning of the relative size of figure to landscape and the integrating of poetic ‘hypertexts’. Through close examination of three figure types – traveler, fisherman, and female performer – in landscape, I show that the images gave rise to a poetically recollective, visually evocative, and culturally contextualized mode of reading that appealed to varying levels of knowledge and interests. They afforded readers the flexibility to immerse themselves in the atmosphere or emotions of select scenes, to reflect on the overarching themes of the plays, or to take an imaginative flight out of drama to appreciate the images’ broader poetic and visual associations.