Kai In The Zaju Of Yuan And Early Ming Dynasty

As one of the blossoming flowers of Chinese classical literature, Zaju has developed from simple imitation to artistically skilled story performing. In this course, various traditions have formed, one of which is the pattern of appearance and its special promotion. After appearing on the stage, the characters always directly face the audiences and introduce themselves, tell story background, even talk about the plays. This kind of promotion has its particular name:Kai.It has been severely divergent for a long time about the role and meaning of Kai in Zaju. Based on the mass of ancient dramas and historical records, integrating my own research, I will discuss this problem through the following four parts.The first chapter mainly defined the research object and summarized the study of Kai in Zaju since the 20th century. On one hand, as the retention condition of Kai has direct relation with the version of Zaju, we defined our study object by the axis of both time and version, and fixed our study on the Zaju of certain version in Yuan and early Ming Dynasty. On the other hand, by sorting out the relevant research results since the 20th century, we divided them into four categories.In the second chapter, we surveyed the detailed use of Kai in Zaju, and described it from two aspects including the meaning of Kai and its performer, frequency and position. After this work, we draw the conclusion that the present research results have their bias and inadequate.Chapter III is the analysis of several concepts relating to Kai, including Kaihe, Kainian and Nian, Kai and Yuanben. By the comparison of these similar but different concepts, the meaning and content of Kai can be highlighted more cleanly.The part of appendix is some added examples about Nian that is used at the beginning of characters'appearance and as the marks of verse.