China and the West

William Shakespeare und chinesisches Theater = Shakespeare and Chinese theatre.
Zhang Xiao Yang : The differences and affinities between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama are especially obvious in their tragedies and comedies. Shakespearean political tragedies are linked by the theme of a struggle for power in a royal family or among the leading figures in the political arena, while most traditional Chinese political tragedies recount the conflict between virtuous ministers and treacherous minister. The themes of traditional Chinese love-political tragedies are more complex than those in Shakespeare's tragedies. These plays deal with not only the incompatibility of the desire for love and the desire for power, but also with the way the pleasures of love are destroyed by the great turbulence of Chinese history. Thus in the plays the lovers encounter desperate situations caused by domestic troubles and foreign invasions.
A striking contrast between Shakespearean and traditional Chinese tragedy lies in the treatment of the protagonists. In Shakespearean tragedies the chief characters are mainly great heroes of high degree such as kings, princes, or the leaders of states. They need not obey anyone nor follow any conventional moral doctrine. Since they are their own masters and can exercise great freedom of choice, they are unlikely to become victims of other people's wills. By contrast, Traditional Chinese tragedy is concerned with people in relatively lower social position. These are people who cannot decide their own actions, who are not the rulers but the ruled. They have to submit to the authority of a monarch or comply with the moral doctrine of Confucianism. Another phenomenon in the tratment of the protagonists is that Shakespeare's tragedies revolve around men and traditional Chinese tragedies encompass women. The tragic effects of Shakespeare's tragedies come from the death of the male protagonists, but the tgragic mood in the Chinese plays is created by the suffering and destruction of the women, which appeals strongly to the audience's sympathy and pity.
Shakespearean tragedy represents a general trend of the Renaissance in which people began to criticize conventional ideas and establish new ideological and value systems. To some extent, Shakespearean and Chinese tragedies demonstrate one of the main differences between modern Western and traditional Chinese cultures. Since the European Renaissance Western culture has become a dynamic 'culture of regeneration' with the ability to constantly produce new ideas. On the other hand, Chinese tragedy clearly shows that although unique and rich, Chinese culture had become a static and closed system, since Buddhism was mingled with Confucianism and Taoism during the Song and Ming dynasties.
Most Shakespeare critics classify Shakespearean comedies into three categories : romantic, problem and tragicomedy. Traditional Chinese comedies are usually classified according to two general types : they either attack vice, folly, or foolish behavior, or they describe the achievement of happiness or praise virtuous action. Most critics agree, that the major themes of Shekespearean comedy are love and friendship. Similarly almost all the Chinese laudatory comedies are concerned with love and marriage and some of them with friendship.
There is a striking similarity between Shakespearean and traditional Chinese drama in dramatic techniques. That is, both have a very free deployment of time and space. There is no fixed time limit in Shakespeare’s plays because his plays cover a time period much longer than twenty-four hours. Sometimes the events in his plays last for many years, particularly in his romances. Like Shakespeare, Chinese playwrights always felt free to determine the time length of their plots. In traditional Chinese drama, very few plays take place within twenty-four hours. Most plots proceed for several days, weeks, or months, and sometimes even for many years. The deployment of place in traditional Chinese drama is absolutly free.
Unlike Shakespeare, Chinese dramatists did not concentrate on human nature as a whole. Rather, they paid special attention to the moral and social sides of their characters. In traditional Chinese drama, the two sides of humans are presented separately. The positive characters are always perfect and the negative characters are totally vicious. Neigher resemble people in real life. While Shakespeare's characters are not immoral, representing moral principles was not his main purpose. In traditional Chinese drama, the moral virtues of the characters are emphasized and heightened. Most of the characters tend to be moral types such as loyal subjects, patriotic generals, dutiful sons, chaste wives, and faithful friends. In Shakespeare's plays we often find admiration for the nobility of humanity. Classical Chinese playwrights followed the general rule of dramatic creation, trying to mix beauty with goodness.
The colorfulness and complexity of his characters provide one of the major artistic distinctions of Shakespeare's plays. By contrast, the characters of traditional Chinese drama are relatively monochromatic and simple, having protagonists that represent certain social classes in ancient Chinese society. Shakespeare's characters are complex and the Chinese characters are comparatively simple. The main reason for this is, that Shakespeare tried to explore the depth and range of humanity's inner world, while classical Chinese playwrights were generally content to describe only the outer actions and certain emotions of human beings.
The comparison between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama suggests that the type of characterization found in traditional Chinese drama may not satisfy Western audiences since they are used to Western dramatists, including Shakespeare, who emphasize complex psychological depth in character portrayal in the belief that the many-sided attributes of the subject help to round out their characters and make them seem real. Yet characterization in traditional Chinese drama has its own distinctive dramatic and aesthetic merit, considering that traditional Chinese drama and Shakepseare's plays belong to different modes of dramatic art.
In any comparison between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama one aspect constantly commands scholarly interest : both are examples of poetic drama and both show great richness in poetic presentation and the use of imagery. Like Shakespeare's plays, the text of traditional Chinese drama consists of two parts, verse (qu) and prose (bai). Verse generally expresses emotion or depicts scenery while prose recounts stories or develops dialogue. Most classical Chinese playwrights concentrated on using verse, so that prose is frequently interspersed with short poems.
The animal images used in traditional Chinese drama and Shakespeare's plays are a good way to illustrate such a difference. Traditional Chinese plays have far fewer of these images than do Shakespeare's works. Usually only animals having conventional symbolic meaning could be used as poetic images in traditional Chinese plays. By contrast, Shakespeare used many more kinds of animals as poetic images than did classical Chinese dramatists. He seemed to be familiar with their habits and characteristics. Hence he can accommodate them properly into his metaphorical visions. When Shakespeare chooses poetic images, he shows a special interest in domestic animals such as sheep, horses, dogs, and pigs, which are rarely used by classical Chinese plawrights as poetical images. The tendency of classical Chinese playwrights to choose beautiful and graceful poetic images was so strong that they could fill their descriptions with such images even when they wrote of intimate subjects such as sexual intercourse.
Traditional Chinese writers used a very beautiful and explicit image of clouds and rain as a symbol of lovemaking. Shakespeare's bias in favor of strong and vigorous images is evident even in his description of love affairs. His plays have many symbolic images that vividly illustrate abstract concepts.
Shakespeare's plays and traditional Chinese drama stem from different geographical circumstances and cultural backgrounds. England is a country noted for its navigation tradition, so it is easy to understand why the sea, ships, and sailing became traditional poetic images and affected Shakespeare's use of imagery. By contrast, China is mainly a large landlocked and mountainous country. Chinese civilization originated drom the Yellow River Basin, thus mountains and rivers were closely associated with the cultural thinking of the ancient Chinese.
In both Shakespeare's plays and traditional Chinese drama, two opposing images are very obvious, the sun and the moon. This is not merely because the image of the sun is frequently used in Shakespeare's plays while that of the moon is employed in traditional Chinese drama ; it is mainly because these two images are profoundly associated with Western and traditional Chinese cultures.
An examination of Shakespeare's plays and traditional Chinese drama shows that the former tends toward romanticism and the latter toward classicism.