Ts'ao Yu, The Reluctant Disciple of Chekhov and O'Neil
Ts'ao Yu, The Reluctant Disciple of Chekhov and O'Neil: A Study in Literary Influence
JOSEPH S.M. LAU
Copyright Date: 1970
Published by: Hong Kong University Press
Pages: 96
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc1pb
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Ts'ao Yu, The Reluctant Disciple of Chekhov and O'Neil
Book Description:

HISTORIANS OF modern Chinese literature have generally used the year 1907 to mark the inception of Western-style drama in China. For in that year, a small group of Chinese students in Japan, inspired by the Japanese experiments with Western drama, decided to follow suit and form the...

eISBN: 978-988-220-297-9
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Acknowledgements
    Acknowledgements (pp. v-vi)
    Joseph S. M. Lau
  3. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  4. Introduction: Ts’ao Yü and the Rise of Modern Chinese Drama
    Introduction: Ts’ao Yü and the Rise of Modern Chinese Drama (pp. 1-5)

    Historians of modern Chinese literature have generally used the year 1907 to mark the inception of Western-style drama in China. For in that year, a small group of Chinese students in Japan, inspired by the Japanese experiments with Western drama, decided to follow suit and form the Ch’un-liu She 春柳社 (Spring willow society), an amateurish dramatic club for experimental purposes.¹ Their first play Ch’a-hua nü 茶花女, staged in Tokyo in February of the same year, is an adaptation from Dumas’ La dame aux camélias. The play, to quote A. C. Scott, ‘had an all-male cast and used a strange mixture...

  5. I Thunderstorm: Its Source and Form
    I Thunderstorm: Its Source and Form (pp. 6-14)

    It is small wonder that Thunderstorm should have remained a favourite with the Chinese since its first public performance by the China Travelling Dramatic Troupe in Shanghai in the spring of 1936. For the play, despite its artistic flaws, touches upon two of the most sensitive issues involved in the May Fourth Movement: a socialist concern for the plight of the workers under capitalist exploitation, and an individual effort to assert personal freedom and happiness under the crippling weight of patriarchal society. In brief, Thunderstorm was so ruthless in its attacks upon traditional Chinese morals and the social system that...

  6. II Thunderstorm and Desire under the Elms
    II Thunderstorm and Desire under the Elms (pp. 15-27)

    Chou Fan-yi and Abbie Putnam are bound by the most uncomfortable of kinships: they both cherish an incestuous passion for their stepsons. But the circumstances under which they become involved are different. Unlike Fan-yi, who has been tricked into the Chou family, Abbie Putnam has a mind and a body of her own. At thirty-five, she is ‘buxom, full of vitality. Her round face is pretty but marred by its rather gross sensuality. There is a strength and obstinacy in her jaw, a hard determination in her eyes, about her whole personality the same unsettled, untamed, desperate quality’.¹ She has...

  7. III Sunrise and the ‘Tearful’ Art of Chekhov
    III Sunrise and the ‘Tearful’ Art of Chekhov (pp. 28-33)

    The interim years between Thunderstorm (1933) and Sunrise (1936) were most beneficial to the progress of Ts’ao Yü’s artistry, for in these three years he had gradually become aware of the limitation of his own craft as represented in Thunderstorm. ‘I have recently become more and more disappointed—to the point of nausea—with Thunderstorm’, he confessed in his Postscript to Sunrise, ‘I find its structure too “theatrical”, a result of my over-dependence on the magic of stage tricks’.¹

    Sunrise, then, presumably denotes Ts’ao Yü’s conscious effort to reject the mechanical technique of the well-made plays. No longer a follower...

  8. IV Sunrise and The Cherry Orchard
    IV Sunrise and The Cherry Orchard (pp. 34-42)

    Sunrise and The Cherry Orchard are comparable only insofar as they can be viewed as testimonies in witness to the passing of two civilizations.

    In Chekhov’s time, ‘Mother Russia’ was bankrupt, and her children are seen in The Cherry Orchard having fierce fights over the disposal of what is left of their property.

    Madame Ranyevskaia, residual Russian aristocracy personified, has just returned from Paris only to learn from Lopahin that her cherry orchard is going to be sold to pay her debts. Stunned, she says, ‘[But] if there is one thing interesting, one thing really outstanding in the whole country,...

  9. V The Noble Savage as a Rejuvenative Symbol
    V The Noble Savage as a Rejuvenative Symbol (pp. 43-50)

    One of the most unusual things about The Wilderness (1937) is the absence of a lengthy preface or postscript which Ts’ao Yü has often used as a kind of expository essay on life and art. To the extent that they furnish first-hand information on the sources and sometimes even unfortunate circumstances under which the plays were written, these essays are extremely valuable, especially since neither a biography nor an autobiography of the playwright is available.¹ We know from its preface, for instance, that Thunderstorm is intended as a dramatic projection of an unintelligible world in which the ‘wicked’ survive the...

  10. VI The Wilderness and The Emperor Jones as Studies of Fear
    VI The Wilderness and The Emperor Jones as Studies of Fear (pp. 51-56)

    From a technical point of view, none of Ts’ao Yü’s four plays being considered in this study offers a better opportunity for fruitful comparative study than The Wilderness. Though, as indicated early in the previous chapter, not a word is given by the playwright with respect to the genesis of the play, no reader familiar with O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones can fail to notice the striking histrionic similarities between these two plays upon first reading. Cast in the background of primordial jungles, both plays dramatize the psychic terror of two escaped convicts hounded by a guilty past. But unlike most...

  11. VII Peking Man and the Decline of Chinese Gentility
    VII Peking Man and the Decline of Chinese Gentility (pp. 57-64)

    Peking Man (1940) is the last of Ts’ao Yü’s four major plays being considered in this study. Never a favourite with the critics or the readers, this play, its technical flaws notwithstanding, is not only the most mature product of the author, but also one of the dramatic highlights of modern Chinese theatre. Its depiction of a decadent civilization is so powerful that even as stringent a critic of modern Chinese literature as C. T. Hsia has conceded:

    Ts’ao Yü was a conscientious playwright very much at the mercy of the prevalent attitudes of his time. . . . his...

  12. VIII Tseng Wen-ch’ing and Ivanov: Portraits of Two ‘Superfluous Men’
    VIII Tseng Wen-ch’ing and Ivanov: Portraits of Two ‘Superfluous Men’ (pp. 65-74)

    At first glance, Tseng Wen-ch’ing seems to have sprung from the same lineal stock that has produced Chiao Ta-hsing in The Wilderness. For one thing, both of them are henpecked, weak-minded, effeminate; for another, both are victims of a domestic tragedy in a woman-dominated family. Upon closer examination, however, it can soon be discovered that these two men, despite these superficial similarities, are essentially products of two different sets of circumstances. In terms of emotional involvement on our part, for instance, however acute his personal misery, Chiao Ta-hsing cannot command in us any greater response than a sense of pity....

  13. Conclusion
    Conclusion (pp. 75-78)

    Thus far I have considered four of Ts’ao Yü’s eight plays that are of special interest to students of comparative literature and which to me are just about everything in him that is worth considering. For after Peking Man (1940) nothing authored by him has ever risen above the level of what R. G. Collingwood would have called ‘art as magic’.¹ Shui-pien 蛻變 (Metamorphosis, 1940), a long play of four acts published in the same year as Peking Man, falls into this category. The story, which takes place in an army hospital in the great unoccupied interior of China during...

  14. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 79-83)
  15. Index
    Index (pp. 84-88)
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