Watching Li Yu’s Plays in Seventeenth- Century China

This article attempts to explain how Li Yu 李漁 (1611–80), China’s “first professional writer,” made himself indispensable to the literati culture upon which he socially and financially depended by writing, commenting on, and performing chuanqi傳奇, or plays in the characteristic Southern style. This article analyzes four plays based on Li’s own short stories and theorizes their appeal to seventeenth-century audiences. It proposes that Li’s plays, at once irresistibly funny and painfully knowing, poked fun at the regnant literati culture even as they diagnosed its exhaustion.