| This study examines Chinese opera in the Qing capital, circa 1770-1900. It argues that opera in the city helped forge a widely shared urban culture. The real thrust of the project, though, lies in investigating how the stories of this common cultural repertoire came to be appropriated differently by audiences depending on class, gender, and ethnicity. This context and content approach to performance in Beijing reveals relationships between culture and power in the Qing dynasty metropolis.; Through an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to theater, urban, and gender history, I locate a kind of nascent "public sphere" in the networks of patronage, gossip, and literati connoisseurship reflected through and generated by the opera demimonde in the capital. Discourses about power, I suggest, were often articulated through romanticized representations of gender and class in the dramatic narratives performed in the playhouses and in literati writings about performance and actors. Still, this metropolitan forum for public commentary never fully coalesced into a viable challenge to state authority. By the late nineteenth century, the Qing court had co-opted or marginalized literati resistance, thereby neutralizing the oppositional potential of the urban playhouse and its most educated patrons.; This study is comprised of three parts: Part One investigates the key sources for Qing-era opera; Part Two explores the social context of opera; and Part Three analyzes the contents of one thematic grouping of scripts in light of their performance contexts. All three parts attest to the place and power of theatrical performance in Qing Beijing. Opera had the power to upset social hierarchies---making men of means and privilege feel emotionally vulnerable to status-degraded cross-dressing boy actors; it could parody social and cultural norms or it could be harnessed to the state's civilizing mission. Opera served as a kind of cultural glue---creating shared repositories of cultural knowledge (if not common cause) across differences of class, gender, and ethnicity within the Qing capital. Ultimately, the theater was a key site of public discourse in the Qing metropolis; and to the extent that it fulfilled that role in the urban community, it was also a site of competition, conflict, and controversy. |
