Layers of Beauty: Yuan Sanqu’s Representation of Female Entertainers’ Stage Names

This article focuses on an understudied trope of Yuan sanqu: the representation of female entertainers’ stage names. In this article, from a cultural and artistic perspective, I study a corpus of texts to demonstrate how Yuan sanqu writers refined the art of punning by manipulating the names’ literal, literary, and erotic meanings to incorporate various referential fields. During this process, the writers complicated the relationship between ya 雅 (refined) and su 俗 (colloquial) by developing diverse writing strategies that allowed them to blur the boundary between the two. This phenomenon showcases Yuan sanqu’s potential for mixing a variety of aesthetic proclivities and linguistic registers.