Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showmanby Da Zheng (review)

Abstract

The Chinese playwright Shih-I Hsiung is probably best understood through a perspective that consists of both literary and historical lenses. Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman fulfills the latter approach extensively, with both skill and reverence. The author, Da Zheng, draws upon a rich bounty of source material, some known and a great deal previously unpublished. Including personal correspondences between Hsiung and family members, friends, government officials, and prominent figures in artistic fields, this study creates the most complete record of Hsiung’s life in a single volume. Scholarship on Hsiung is mostly geared toward dissecting and analyzing his most prominent accomplishment—the adapted play Lady Precious Stream (Wang Baochuan 王宝钏). This is unsurprising, as it is both the achievement that defined his career as a playwright and an event that changed the course of his life. As a result, the framing of Hsiung’s story in other scholarly work is most often delineated along the lines of artistic choices in staging this famous play and how well or how poorly his production lived up to what it was “supposed to be,” from both the modern European and canonical Chinese perspectives. Zheng shows us, however, that there is much more to know about Hsiung and his career. Complementing existing work, the author’s penetrating biographical treatment of Hsiung makes for both a