Jingyanggang Wu Song da hu
景陽崗武松打虎

Wu Song Fights the Tiger on Jingyang Ridge

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This story is : Metric throughout:
The entire piece is printed over a ‘matrix’ in seven-syllabic metre, forming couplets of top and bottom lines, with end-rhyme –ang for the bottom lines (and the very first top line). Some of the lines are irregular, with 1-7 extra syllables; they are found with irregular intervals throughout the piece, but the large majority of lines do consist of seven characters. On the pages of the woodcut edition, the horisontal lines are arranged in the usual way with a space between the top line and the bottom line of the couplet. There is room for seven characters in each line. When the line actually has more characters, these are either shrunk so that three characters occupy the space of two ‘normal’ characters, or the characters are diminished into half size and thus two small characters are placed side by side in the line. Whether the arrangement of smaller characters corresponds with faster rhythm in performance cannot be decided on the evidence of the printer’s arrangement alone. There is no insertion of extratextual markers to indicate the mode of performance, such as singing versus speaking or the type of melody. One can only deduce such features from external sources on the performance practice of drumtales. As mentioned, there is a passage of two couplets in section 3.7, page 7a, c. 3-4, that is specially indented on the printed page and cut with smaller characters. Both the printer’s layout and the contents of the passage—a prediction of the valour of Wu Song during the coming fight with the tiger—indicate that the passage should be considered a shi [poem]. It has, however, exactly the same rhythm and rhyme as the rest of the drumtale. It is interesting how one passage of the whole is arranged as and functions as a poem, while the rest of the drumtale by contrast is then ‘non-poem’, even if the entire text has the same rhythm and rhyme. In this way the text aquires two levels of poetic status where one portion is more of a poem than the rest.