Research Of Imperial Competitive Examination And Love And Marriage Plot In Sixty Operas

Mao Jin, the famous bibliophile, compiler and publisher in the late Ming Dynasty, compiled and published a set of thoughtful, highly artistic legendary anthology, Sixty Operas On the basis of this anthology, this article explores how the imperial competitive examination experience and personal feelings of the characters are reproduced through their attitudes, feelings, understandings and expectations and so on towards the imperial examination and love, marriage and family in the reality in the form of opera text.Heroes in the plays have great conflicts with the family and marriage before attending the examination:either represented by the lack of filial piety to their parents, inability to do their duties to their wives, which result in constant family entanglements, or expressed by the hindering of free love and marriage with the couple being torn apart against their own wishes. No matter the heroes in the play are proud of their official ranks or are frustrated in career, they will reach the consummation of secular life eventually through the halo of fame and the bestowment of the emperor. Most of them show their great longing for the official rank brought by the imperial examination simultaneously in the play.The externalization of this kind of emotion, either being praised or censured, either being disposed of to find love, or being secluded to go into the society, is a vivid reproduction of the complex mentality of the intellectuals in Chinese traditional imperial examination society through the writer’s own emotional experience. To sacrifice one’s life for the sake of the pursuit of the ideal "genuine emotion" by giving up the official rank, and the unconventional feeling to sacrifice one’s life to go into the society after seeing through the vanity of life, are life sustenance the frustrated intellectuals seeking for their minds with the exception of imperial examination.From the perspective of literary creation, this paper also discusses the effect and function the imperial examination has on the content, plot, structure, narrative aesthetic as well as playwriting in the play and so on.