A book concerning two dramatists from disparate traditions unified by a date is, at first glance, an unpromising echo of earlier comparative literature. This book, however, is a reflective venture, which by its organization, participants, and internal discussions tries to address the theoretical issues at stake. The book is organized around ten topics to encourage meaningful dialogue. Each topic has a paragraph setting the issues and short essays by one scholar of Chinese drama and one Shakespeare scholar. Each scholar was asked to read and engage the essay of his or her counterpart. Some did so. The date of the deaths of both Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu, 1616, is an anniversary and the nominal center of the book, with the essays leading off into proximate periods and authors. The success of these pairings varies.

This reviewer is struck not just by the disjunctions between Chinese and English early modern drama, but also by the disjunction between scholarly traditions, how scholars locate the question, and what is a nonquestion. In the first pairing, “Setting the Scene: Playwrights and Localities,” the scholars read “locale” differently. Yongming Xu follows Tang Xianzu’s career from place to place, noting what he wrote and what he gathered. Paul Edmondson writes about Stratford-upon-Avon. It is a wonderful essay, but in all the other English essays, there is only one locale, London. In English scholarship this is a nonquestion, but becomes noteworthy when read against a tradition in which the capital is largely irrelevant and the world of drama is spread through major cities far from the capital. “Classics, Tastes, and Popularity” focuses on the term popular. Wei Hua’s and Nick Walton’s are both excellent essays, but, as the volume later shows, audiences are segmented, and popularity is defined quite differently, depending on which segment of the audience is meant.

“Making History” is one of the closest pairings, dealing with plays on recent history. Here the issue of censorship surfaces. It is not clear that the English scholar would have an idea that there was no licensing of play production and that censorship was post facto. The Ming lacked the bureaucratic machinery to systematically police the production and printing of plays, as was done in London—though playwrights were well aware of the possible repercussions. “The State and the Theater” would seem to be a promising topic and indeed is in the English context, from court performances to licensing. Tian Yuan Tan does a fine job on the sixty Ming palace plays and the vast dramatic institution of the imperial court. The reader will, however, notice that the Ming emperor is not viewing contemporary plays in the contemporary style, but modified plays from three centuries earlier. This is closer to Queen Victoria in her old age watching bowdlerized performances of Shakespeare.

The following six topics all deserve comment: “The Circulation of Dramatic Texts and Printing,” “Audiences, Critics, and Reception,” “Music and Performance,” “Theater in Theory and Practice,” and “Theater across Genres and Cultures.” The quality of these essays is uniformly high, and all are in touch with current scholarship. Again we face different histories: the segment of the very large Chinese field of drama studies that can communicate with Shakespearean scholars is small and well represented in this volume, but it is still quite distinct from Shakespearean scholarship. In the final essay, Kate McLuskie does a remarkably thoughtful job trying to sort this out. McKluskie did the sensible thing, reading a book on Chinese critical commentary on theater. This lies very much in the far background of some of the essays on the China side. But the Chinese critical focus of attention on emotion and conveying it hides some things. The Shakespeare scholar would scarcely notice that the long chuanqi plays often need their military scenes to satisfy that “vulgar” audience to which McLuskie refers. Likewise, the Shakespeare scholar would scarcely know of the comic scenes with the bawdy vernacular of low characters that intrude on the serious parts. The Shakespeare scholar might possibly notice that these Chinese plays all have subplots. The question of why these were excluded from Chinese drama theory is no less interesting than why they were foregrounded in English drama criticism from Dryden on (perhaps responding to the French theoretical challenge).

This is a fine, well-conceived, and well-written book, the best attempt so far to put the traditions together. It is as interesting for the fissures in dialogue as for the points of contact. The dialogue is worth continuing.