How to read historical opera scripts (3)

Traditional Chinese printed books were mostly woodcut prints, meaning that each double-page of text and illustrations were carved onto a piece of wood. Wood and carving were expensive so these books were very economical with space.

Is that why they squeeze two lines where a single column should be? Actually this was used to differentiate between lines that were sung to a given melody (full-width) vs. lines that were spoken (half-width).

Along with the names of roles were also stage directions, like entering (上) or leaving (下) the stage. Other types of actions were indicated with the character 介.

Posted on 2022-01-20 00:00:00 +0000