Reflections on Palace Plays in the Digital Age
During the past academic year (2014-2015), I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. Academia Sinica is a tremendous place to do research—it is such a vibrant intellectual community, with near-constant talks, symposia, conferences, and exhibitions. I was particularly excited to make use of their extensive library collections, which contain many rare manuscripts that cannot be found elsewhere. In the last couple months of my fellowship, I began preliminary research on a new project that emerged from my dissertation research. In my dissertation, I discuss the plays attributed to what is often referred to as the Suzhou School. This circle of playwrights—many of whom were friends or acquaintances and frequently engaged in co-writing and co-editing practices—was active in the late Ming and early Qing periods, and their plays were widely performed throughout the Jiangnan region. The surviving texts attributed to this circle are generally of two kinds. Most common are undated manuscripts, copied in a hand that is utilitarian at best and downright sloppy at worst. The overall appearance of these texts—the frequent homonymic errors, the inclusion of stage directions, etc.—indicates that these were probably used in some sort of performance context,
