Rules of Qu

Rules of Prosody (Qulü) is a treatise on drama in forty chapters. The first two chapters, "On the Origins of Song" and "General Discussion of Northern and Southern Song," are introductory; chapters three through twelve treat prosody, including "On Tune Titles," "On Modes," "On Level and Oblique Tones," "On Yin and Yang," "On Rhyme," "On Closed-Mouth Characters," "On the Wutou," "On Vocal Style," "On Beats," and "On the Need for Literacy"; chapters thirteen through twenty-one treat the rhetoric of song, including "On the Need to Read," "On Schools," "On Tonal Quality," "On Structure," "On Sentence Method," "On Character Method," "On Padding Characters," "On Parallelism," and "On Allusion"; chapters twenty-two through twenty-nine treat methods of composition, including "On Transitions," "On Prohibitions in Song," "On Song Suites," "On Short Lyrics," "On Describing Objects," "On Humor," "On Difficult Rhymes," and "On Clever Forms"; chapters thirty through thirty-eight treat the writing of chuanqi drama, including "On Drama," "On Prologues," "On Passing Songs," "On Epilogues," "On Dialogue," "On Comic Business," "On Closing Poems," "On Role Types," and "On Erroneous Characters"; chapter thirty-nine, "Miscellaneous Discussions," in two parts, offers scattered remarks on drama and song suites in over a hundred sections, somewhat diffuse in content and focused chiefly on writers and works; chapter forty, "On Prohibitions in Song," appears to be an appendix. The whole work is comprehensive, tightly organized, and systematic.

Rules of Prosody advances rather striking ideas on composition, criticism, prosody, and performance, and is a pivotal work in the history of Chinese drama theory, exerting considerable influence on Li Yu's Xianqing Ouji: Ci and Song section.