Ming And Qing Female Dramatist Study

There were less than twenty-nine female playwrights in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, who had created more than seventy plays and about half of them had been handed down. The plays created by women were important and noticeable component part of Chinese talented-women culture and traditional-drama culture. So, the first chapter of this thesis aims to introduce the historical and cultural background, in which benefit the development of women play creation in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The accumulation of their own rich knowledge and the influences from their familiar atmosphere and local culture, provided for women to write plays.Chapter 2 and 3 research all female-created plays in the Ming and Qing Dynasties handed down by their different subject. Plays written by women were aimed to describe the authors'personal emotion, adapt some love stories of famous people, and to meditate on the problems about gender and society. This thesis compares the plays which described female playwrights'thoughts with several plays written by male playwrights live in the beginning of Qing Dynasty.The forth chapter talks about Wu Lanzheng, an excellent playwright in Qing Dynasty, and her Hong Lou Meng drama. Wu Lanzheng have dedicated all her emotion into creating her Hong Lou Meng drama and have given a lot of care on the female roles in it. As the most productive writer among female playwrights, the number of Liu Qingyun's extant plays is 12.She put her feelings and thoughts of society, morality, gender and family in twelve plays. The fifth chapter of this dissertation not only discusses her plays'content from traditional notion and time spirit, but also takes her art practice into account in their systems of text and music, and their scenarios and language.Their lives and creation of these female playwrights are roundly settled, detailedly examined and corrected in the appendices of the dissertation. The appendices revise some mistakes in other's research, and compile a lot of evaluative information about the female playwrights. This part presents the truth of history about them.