West and Idema's Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals is to date the most comprehensive anthology of and the best guide to early Chinese drama. This marvellous collection includes lively translations of eleven plays written in the period from 1250 to 1450. Prepared by the two foremost scholars in the field of Chinese drama, this book offers much more than an anthology of translated plays. It includes a wealth of up-to-date and meticulously researched information which enhances the reader's understanding of these early Chinese plays in their literary and socio-cultural contexts.

The eleven plays in this anthology have been judiciously chosen and they well represent the wide thematic scope and varying styles of early Chinese drama. The selection strikes a nice balance between canonical works (e.g. The Injustice to Dou E and Autumn over the Palaces of Han) and plays that may be lesser known to the general readers but which are certainly no less charming. Interesting choices include Lan Caihe, an example of a Daoist “deliverance play”, which is previously better known perhaps only to the specialists because of its value to the history of Chinese drama in its detailed description of Yuan theatre life. We also find several examples of courtroom plays, including two featuring the famous Judge Bao, namely, Butterfly Dream and The Record of the Chalk Circle. The latter, which has been translated into several languages and adapted for the western stage, will be of special interest to students of comparative literature and theatre. Two early Ming plays, A Leopard Monk Returns to the Laity of His Own Accord and Black Whirlwind Li Spurns Riches out of Righteousness were inspired by the tales of the outlaws of the Liangshan marshes, which were already very popular with the Yuan playwrights. In addition to the works by the so-called “Four Masters of Yuan Drama”, namely, Guan Hanqing, Bai Pu, Ma Zhiyuan, and Zheng Guangzu, the anthology also includes plays written by a royal playwright, members of the writing club in Hangzhou, and anonymous writers, which informs us of the various social milieux associated with early Chinese theatre.

The translation is reliable, sensitive, and highly readable. Faithful to the original texts, it captures the lively and, admittedly, at times vulgar language of early Chinese drama. Some readers may not be familiar with this feature of vernacular Chinese literature, as this reviewer has gathered from the responses of some students who were slightly taken aback by the ‘crude’ language of some plays in the anthology. But therein lies precisely the merit of the present translation. It does not attempt to omit ‘offensive’ passages or refine ‘vulgar’ lines. Hence, thankfully, the true spirit, direct voice, and colloquial language of these early plays have been preserved perfectly in this anthology.

Each translated play is introduced by a short scholarly guide and analysis. A more comprehensive ‘Introduction’ at the beginning of the book discusses various aspects of early Chinese theatre, such as its historical background, urban setting, and actors, with the support of contemporaneous descriptions in song-suites and visual evidence in a temple wall painting. The section on ‘Editions and Social Background’ tackles the complex issue of the textual production and transformation of Northern drama with admirable command and clarity, and will be especially helpful to students and scholars of Chinese drama. The editors also highlight the multifarious printings and editions of ‘Yuan zaju’ by consciously basing their translations on a variety of editions, ranging from the ‘Thirty Yuan editions’ to early Ming private editions and late Ming anthologies. It is noteworthy that only one play (The Record of the Chalk Circle) is translated from Zang Maoxun's influential Yuanqu xuan edition with which most readers are more familiar and on which many previous translations are based. In their earlier studies of Northern drama, the editors have convincingly demonstrated the importance of these various textual forms to our understanding of the social background and functions of early Chinese theatre. In many ways, the design of this present anthology can therefore be read as a manifestation of their scholarly approach towards early Chinese drama.

If the formal features of a Chinese dramatic text might appear daunting to a reader who is new to the genre, the editors have thoughtfully included a very useful note on ‘Conventions’ (pp. xxxix–xlii) which helps the reader to navigate the text. It guides us masterfully through a complex web of the various kinds of texts within a Chinese play – stage directions, plain speech, recited verse and lyric songs, with those words used as padding carefully differentiated – it also defines role-types and mode and tune titles all with the aid of a sample page from one of the plays. One should mention that the note ‘Conventions’ is prepared specifically with the formal features of the Northern dramatic form (zaju) in mind. In terms of drama genres, this is largely an anthology of Northern drama. Ten of the eleven translated plays are zaju. The inclusion of Little Butcher Sun as the only example of a southern play (nanxi or xiwen) in the anthology is therefore noteworthy. The term ‘Yuan drama’ has sometimes been used loosely to refer to ‘Yuan zaju’, as if taking zaju as the totality of Yuan drama. This anthology is a timely reminder of the co-existence of another form of early Chinese theatre with its origin in the south, which has been relatively overlooked in western scholarship in comparison with the Northern zaju genre, as reflected in the ‘Bibliography and Suggested Readings’ (Appendix 2).

Two other appendices contain valuable information on the translation of early Chinese drama. Appendix 1, ‘A Note on the Translation and Study of Early Chinese Drama in Europe and the United States’, is highly interesting and it would have been especially useful to have a fuller discussion. The present account is very brief and deals only with zaju. Its discussion on the early translation of zaju into European languages also focuses only on the works by French sinologists and there is no mention of early English translations such as those by John Francis Davis in the nineteenth century or more recent ones by William Dolby, though the absence of the latter is compensated in ‘A Partial List of Modern English Translations of Early Drama’ (Appendix 3). One wonders whether the brevity of Appendix 1 might be due to the pressure on space, which might also explain why a twenty-four-page classified glossary of Chinese terms is not found in the printed book but only available on the publisher's website (http://www.hackettpublishing.com/mblsup). Such measures might have been necessary to bring down the cost of the present anthology. For a very substantial volume of over 500 pages, one must say that this book is rather reasonably priced and appropriately so, as we can foresee it will be used as the standard textbook for courses on Chinese theatre and performance, as well as more general courses on Chinese literature or comparative literature and theatre.

This is a magnificent book and one hopes we will not have to wait long for more anthologies and monographs from this pair of eminent scholars and translators who, in their individual works and joint collaborations, have made significant contributions to the study of early Chinese drama in the last few decades. <tt26@soas.ac.uk>