Xu was a
playwright as well. He produced the works
Singing in Place of Screaming (), as well as the treatise on southern drama
Nanci Xulu (). He wrote the four play cycle known as
Four Cries of a Gibbon (). This cycle consists of the following four plays: •
The Mad Drummer Plays The Yuyang Triple Rolls (Mi Heng) ({{lang-zh|s=狂鼓史渔阳三弄 •
Zen Master Yu Has a Dream of Cuixiang () - a
Buddhist story •
The Female Mulan Joins the Army in Place of Her Father () - describes
Hua Mulan •
The Girl Graduate Rejects the Female Phoenix and Gains the Male Phoenix () - describes
Huang Chonggu Xu's dramatic efforts often deal with women's themes. The British orientalist
Arthur Waley, in his introduction to the 1942 translation of
Jin Ping Mei argued that Xu Wei was the author but later scholars have not been convinced. Xu Wei was also a poet in
shi style. Xu's collected works in 30 chapters exists with a commentary by the late Ming writer
Yuan Hongdao. Xu cared most about calligraphy and then poetry. A modern typeset edition of Xu Wei's collected works,
Xu Wei ji, was published by the Zhonghua Publishing House in Beijing in 1983. Previously a 17th-century edition of his collected works known as the
Xu Wenchang sanji was reproduced in Taiwan in 1968. In 1990 a book length study of Xu Wei concludes that Xu Wei can be seen as a “scholar in cotton clothes” or
buyi wenren (布衣文人), a scholar who failed the civil service examination, yet became active in the realm of literature. Many such individuals appeared in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and attached themselves to officials or became independent in late Ming China. ==Painting style==