明刻孤本《海陵佚史》和《醒世恆言》中的〈金海陵縱慾亡身〉一繁一簡，同屬一個母本系統，以話本敷演出金廢帝海陵王（1122-1161）與其妃嬪淫蕩之事。然《海陵佚史》自命「以為通奴者警」，並通篇使用《西廂記》曲文為眉批，為我們了解萬曆晚期的書籍文化提供了一個極為獨特的案例。作為迎合晚明文人士大夫審美情趣的產物，《海陵佚史》將《西廂記》優雅的曲詞與低俗的正文敘事上下並置，通過挑戰菁英小眾讀者的閱讀預期使閱讀行為成為塑造敘事的創作源泉，以達到其鞭笞「夷虜淫毒之慘」的敘事目的。此外正文點綴在曲文之下，作為改頭換面的《西廂記》敘事，使得頁面上眉批—正文的賓主之分時時有逆轉的可能，而小說也成為對《西廂記》的一種評點，最大程度地釋放了曲文自身攜帶的語意場，充盈了該文化符號可能的詮釋範疇。由此可見，閱讀同寫作一樣，同屬社會行為，不僅是可資塑造敘事的藝術，更是文人士大夫分辨他者╱自我之團體凝聚力的所在。

The anonymous Retrieved History of Hailing, printed between 1606 and 1627, is the fuller counterpart to the story of King Hailing in Tales to Awaken the World 醒世恆言edited by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. While both stories copy verbatim from the Official History of the Jin Dynasty 金史to lay out the framework of the narrative and flesh out the historical outline with anecdotes in the storyteller’s voice, Retrieved History of Hailing alone capitalizes on the act of reading as the ultimate source of meaning-making. By employing marginal comments that cite exclusively from Wang Shifu’s 王實甫zaju 雜劇play The Western Chamber and Li Rihua’s 李日華chuanqi 傳奇adaptation, the novella invites the reader to compare the storytelling to disparate dramatic moments that are inserted in the most incongruent narrative contexts, thereby turning the reader’s expectations into a source of narrative energy that accentuates the foreignness and barbarity of King Hailing as the ultimate other. The hierarchy of the book page in its spatial layout may also be fully reversed, as the text proper presents itself to be commentary on the play evoked by the marginal commentary. The foreign body of debauchery therefore finds its most productive modalities not so much in the novelty of writing, but by unearthing buried possibilities of reading the romantic play Reading as a social act therefore fuctions as much as that of writing in contributing to the solidarity of late Ming literati communities.