The Eternal Present of the Past

This study draws together various elements in late Ming culture – illustration, theater, literature – and examines their interrelation in the context of the publication of drama. It examines a late Ming conception of the stage as a mystical space in which the past was literally reborn within the present. This temporal conflation allowed the past to serve as a vigorous and immediate moral example and was considered a hugely important mechanism by which the continuity of the Confucian tradition could be upheld.
By using theatrical conventions of stage arrangement, acting gesture, and frontal address, drama illustration recreated the mystical character of the stage within the pages of the book, and thus set the conflation of past and present on a broader footing.

Li-Ling Hsiao, D.Phil (2002) in Art and Literature, University of Oxford, is Asssistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has published extensively on the book illustration and theater of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China.