| dc.description.abstract | “Romance of the West Chamber” is a play written as composing a poem. While poets carefully select the images of their poems, the playwright of “Romance of the West Chamber” cautiously picked the events of this play. Moreover, as poets meticulously organize images to form the imagery of their poems, the playwright of this play also arranged the events with prudence in order to develop dramatic plots. The composition of this play is very similar to that of a poem and the study illuminates this concept from four aspects.
First, the plot structure of “Romance of the West Chamber” was carefully formed. The play was written based on fold structure, utilizing methods including compression, consolidation, rewriting and addition to meticulously retell the event of “Master Tung’s Western Chamber Romance” so that each fold can have its dramatic effect. Second, the play focuses on the characters’ romantic relationships. To be more specific, the plots emphasize on the unfolding of the characters’ romantic relationships and their feelings rather than the narration of anecdotes and events. Third, the atmosphere of situations in the play was well created. The atmosphere of the play’s exposition as well as each fold’s opening was skillfully established; therefore, the plots are much more compelling and the audience can easily empathize with the characters. The forth aspect is the theatricality of the narration and the way emotions were expressed in the play. “Romance of the West Chamber” is very theatrical. The plots contain not only conflicts, the most basic element of a play, but also interesting and suspense elements. What is more, due to the theatrical plots, the song-set structure of each fold developed different styles, such as contrasting, interactive, lyrical, etc. | en_US |