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About us. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. In Stephen Greenblatt, a well-known authority on Shakespeare, drew attention by publishing Cardenio , his own version of a lost play by Shakespeare. In an age when we study literature not in order to write it but to write about it, such an action may be more unusual than it was in earlier times when one studied literature in order to become an author oneself by imitation and emulation of the works of the masters.
When literature became established as an academic discipline in China in the beginning of the twentieth century, the earliest generations of university teachers as well as college students as a rule still had been initiated to the study of literature in the traditional way: many of them were not only critics and historians of the genres they taught and read but also practitioners, showing their mastery of the subjects they taught by the works they produced on the side.
In the s and s this applied not only to essays, poems, and lyrics, but also in the field of traditional drama. The works of Gu Sui had already earlier started to attract attention. In the wake of the Folklore Movement of the s many Chinese scholars had also developed an interest in the development and meaning of folktales.
This tale of a girl who passes as a boy in order to pursue an advanced education away from home, and whose love for her roommate is thwarted when on her return home her parents marry her off to another young man, perfectly fitted the agenda of the May Fourth Movement with its emphasis on gender equality and free marriage choice.
This lost play was often mentioned by scholars on the legend to prove its early popularity on and off stage. A comparison of these two plays may be helpful to bring out the characteristics of these two authors, and so perhaps be a small contribution to the study of modern zaju.
A closer look at these two plays may also be of interest for the study of the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, because both authors did not base their adaptations on the best-known versions of the legend from the Jiangnan area, but on the local traditions of their hometowns in respectively northern Anhui and southern Hebei.
After Chang Renxia established himself as a major authority on ancient Chinese art. Students of early Chinese drama are of course acquainted with his monographs on ancient Chinese dance. But little in his early youth predicted such a scholarly career. Chang was born in a small village in Yingshang district in northern Anhui, north of the Huai River.
He was forced to leave his hometown in because of floods, but a generous gift from a brother-in-law allowed him to travel to Nanjing, where was admitted to the Special School for the Arts. Upon graduation from that school he was later admitted to the Central University, where he studied with Wu Mei.
Upon graduation he was retained at his alma mater. The academic year —36 he spent in Japan, where he pursued an M. His first exposure to drama was, however, as a young boy to the various forms of local theater in his home village.
Late in life he left a vivid description not only of his huaju activities but also of his childhood exposure to traditional theater:. As a child I grew up in Yingshang district in northern Anhui and I only went to school at ten. The dramatic arts that I encountered all were as local as local could be. Each year on the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar there would be a large local market fair where the farmers could buy and sell livestock and implements, and there you could find all kinds of locally-produced woodblock-printed small songbooks, some of which were local plays, and I collected not a few of them.
At the time of the new year according to the lunar calendar people everywhere were selling woodblock-printed, brightly colored New Year prints, many of which showed dramatic scenes, and I also collected not a few of those.
For more elaborate performances the young Chang Renxia had to wait for the annual festival in the district capital on the first of the tenth month. As a teenager he learned from a blind singer the tunes he performed, and he also learned to play the flute and the two-stringed fiddle.
My teacher Wu Mei also provided me with additional instruction. At times he would in the classroom play the flute and correct the tune when lecturing on prosody. These were all published after they had been corrected by Wu Mei himself. When in earlier years I was a student at the Central University, I studied the methods of arranging suites and devising scenes with my teacher Wu Mei, and I also read northern plays with great joy, but even though I might understand their import in my heart I had not yet mastered their skill.
I spent my days leaning on the window and watching the fishes, despondent because I could not go out. Thereupon I selected four stories, planning to compose four zaju to while away my time. In one or two days I had finished the first act. During these last few years I have been quite busy and have not practiced this craft anymore. By chance rifling through my trunks, I found my old manuscript still there. When I promptly took it to my teacher, and after he had corrected it, I handed it to the printer.
It only serves as a memory. Despite these words of modesty, Chang Renxia must have thought quite highly of Zhu Liang yuan , as this preface was included when Chang had it printed in a limited edition of two hundred copies on the eve of his departure for Japan in In the first act Zhu Yingtai enters on stage in male attire.
She relates that her parents, lacking a son, had raised her as a boy and told her, when she reached the age of sixteen, to accompany Liang Shanbo and study at an academy. In the three years at the academy he never has found out that she is a girl but happily shoulders tasks that are too heavy for her, such as hauling water.
The second act is devoted to the parting of Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo. Zhu Yingtai claims she is leaving because of her concern for her aged parents. In the third act Liang Shanbo, accompanied by his book-boy, arrives at the Zhu mansion for a visit to his roommate. When Liang declares that this will be his death, she promises him that she will follow him in death.
The cast is kept as limited as possible, the prose dialogues are short, and each act includes a very minimal number of songs. The language of the arias is quite clear and almost free of allusions, but quite lively.
In a small compass it provides a relatively complete version of the legend. For the details of the plot, it borrows from the version of the legend as this circulated in southeastern Henan and the neighboring areas of northern Anhui. The academic community in China in the s was still very small and experts in traditional drama were few and far between.
Could his own play on the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai have been inspired by a desire to show both his junior colleagues down in Nanjing and those self-proclaimed Japanese experts on things Chinese how it should be really done? But even if these motivations might have played a role, Gu Sui was of course too much of a gentleman to confess to such considerations. Liang does not guess her meaning and arrives too late—she has already been affianced by her parents to a man called Ma.
She appears to Liang in female attire and the latter is shocked to find that his schoolmate is actually female. He pines away due to love sickness and, on learning of his death, Zhu dies as well in some versions she flies into his coffin. In many versions they appear after death as a pair of butterflies.
In terms of traditional moral values, Zhu Yingtai violated the central canon of female virtue. Women were sometimes able to or even helped to become literate in their home settings. However, they were never encouraged to depart from their homes and travel to study with an illustrious teacher, as was often the case with educated males.
As for cross-dressing as a male, studying in the same room with men, and sharing the same bedroom with a male, this was regarded as a certain compromise of maidenly virtue. The Liang-Zhu story cycle has been retold in different versions in stories and plays, and more recently in movies, for over a millennium. Liang Shanbo was a scholar from an ordinary family, while Zhu Yingtai was the only daughter of a wealthy family.
In the Eastern Jin dynasty, women were not allowed to go to school. Yingtai tried her best to persuade her parents to send her to school, and finally was able to attend classes in disguise as a man. On her way to the school from her hometown, Yingtai met Liang Shanbo, and they became best friends. Yingtai soon found herself falling in love with him, but she could not express her feelings to him without revealing her secret. It was months later, when Shanbo finally realized that Yingtai was a woman.
The two were extremely devoted to one another, and Shanbo decided to propose. Filled with heartbreak and regret, Shanbo became critically ill, and died soon after. The most dramatic part of the story happens on the day of marriage, when the strangely strong winds prevent the wedding procession from passing the bridge where Shanbo's grave was. Yingtai stopped to pay her respects at his grave. Suddenly, lightning and thunder split open the grave.
Unwilling to get married with anyone except for Shanbo, Yingtai jumped into his grave without hesitation. Everyone was stunned as the grave reopened, and a pair of beautiful butterflies came out and flew away together. Among all of them, the Liang Zhu Violin Concerto is the most famous and recognizable.
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