Dream In Drama

It is a literary miracle that Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, peaks of the world drama, emerged in China and England simultaneously in the late sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the past six decades, the two dramatists and their works have been compared and contrasted by numerous scholars. Like "a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty", they are always worth further investigating and exploring. In light of the methodology of parallel studies and cross-civilization studies, this dissertation conducts a comparative study of the role of dream in Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare's plays: contrasting the two masters' life experience and their social contexts, and expounding the relationship of dream to the good qing, the bad qing, religion and dramatic structure in their works.As contemporary dreamers, Tang Xianzu lived in China of the late Ming dynasty and Shakespeare in England in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. In terms of thought, Tang Xianzu's China and Shakespeare's England witnessed the emergence of individualism and humanism. The lives of the two masters were quite different: Tang Xianzu made an attempt to actualize his political dream in the officialdom but ended up frustrated. Shakespeare, creating plays and dramatizing his dreams on the stage in London, enjoyed a great success in his theatrical world. Comparatively, Tang Xianzu was not compatible with his social context, creating his plays as an outlet for his despair and indignation. But Shakespeare was in tune with the times, writing dramas as his profession. Tang Xianzu, in the eye of his contemporaries, was, above all, a political figure, while Shakespeare was primarily a playwright. Yet, they are both immortalized as dramatists.Qing, or love, is the foundation for dream. The love between a young man and a young woman, which is expressed through dream, is a dominant motif in Tang Xianzu's The Purple Hairpin and The Peony Pavilion, and Shakespeare's A...