The Peony Pavilion

The Peony Pavilion (Chinese: 牡丹亭; pinyin: Mǔdān tíng; Wade–Giles: Mu-tan t'ing), also named The Return of Soul at the Peony Pavilion, is a romantic tragicomedy play written by dramatist Tang Xianzu in 1598. The plot was drawn from the short story Du Liniang Revives For Love and depicts a love story between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei that overcomes all odds. Tang's play diverges from the short story in that it integrates elements of the Ming dynasty, despite being set in the Southern Song.
The play was originally written for staging as Kunqu opera, one of the genres of traditional Chinese theatre arts. It was first performed in 1598 at the Pavilion of Prince Teng. Its author, Tang Xianzu, was one of the greatest dramatists and writers of the Ming dynasty, and The Peony Pavilion can be regarded as the most successful masterpiece of his life. It is also one of the dramas in Tang's famous collection Linchuan si meng (The Four Dreams in the Jade Tea Hall), along with Zichai Ji (The Purple Hairpin), Nanke Ji (A Dream Under the Southern Bough) and Handan Ji (The Handan Dream). Both the play and its dramatist get a high reputation on Chinese and international stages, and the study of Tang Xianzu has become a popular subject today.
The play has a total of 55 scenes, which can run for more than 22 hours on stage.
The story is set in the last days of the Southern Song dynasty. The stage performances traditionally center on the romance between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei, although the original text also contained subplots pertaining to the falling Song dynasty's defense against the aggression of the Jin dynasty. The romantic theme goes along the following outline.
On a fine spring day, her maid persuades Miss Du Liniang, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a senior official, Du Bao, to take a stroll in the garden, where she falls asleep and has a dream. In that fateful dream, Liniang encounters a young scholar (identified later in the play as Liu Mengmei, whom in real life she has never met). Liu Mengmei's bold advances ignite a passionate love affair between the two that flourishes rapidly. A flower petal that drops on Liniang startles her from the romantic dream (according to her soliloquy in a later act, "Retracting the Dream"). However, Liniang cannot get the oneiric love affair out of her mind since and her lovesickness quickly wastes her away. Unable to recover from her fixation, Liniang dies shortly after.
The president of the underworld adjudicates that marriage between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei is predestined and Liniang ought to return to the earthly world. Liniang subsequently appears to Liu Mengmei, who now inhabits the garden where Du Liniang had her fatal dream, in his various dreams. Recognizing that Du Bao's deceased daughter is the girl who appears in his dreams, Liu agrees to exhume Liniang's body upon her request and bring her back to life. Liu Mengmei then visits Du Bao to inform him of his daughter's resurrection as well as their relationship. The disbelieving and furious Du Bao throws Liu Mengmei into prison for being a grave robber and an impostor.
The ending of the story follows the formula for many popular Chinese dramas. Liu Mengmei narrowly escapes death by torture thanks to the arrival of the results of the imperial examination in which Liu has proved himself to be of great talent and value. The emperor pardons and delivers rewards to all.
In the first scene, there is a four-sentence introductory speech succinctly summarizing the main storyline:
There are total of fifty-five scenes in the play. This is the version translated by Zhang Guangqian. Scenes in boldface are those usually adapted/performed onstage.
There are around 160 characters in the play, with 30 main characters, including:
Albeit conventional in its narrative structure, notably the deus ex machina ending, The Peony Pavilion is unique in its lyricism and its text is hailed as one of the high points of Chinese literature, featuring a body of refined and lavish lyrics. Embellished and accentuated by the then still-developing Kun music, The Peony Pavilion's prosaic script agilely weaves a fabric of nuances and metaphors that seamlessly transgresses the divide between nature's beauty and man's inner cosmos of emotions and desires. Through the light and shadows of this lyrical fabric transpire ravishing delicacy and intoxicating effeteness. Yet at the same time, an underlying youthful optimism and playfulness palpitate throughout the entire script. Embedded in the leisurely and undulant melodies of the Kun music, the lyrics of the opera promptly pitch the audience into a world created by a prosaic banquet of metaphors, an ecstatic dance of the imagination, and most importantly, an unfettered celebration of sensitivity.
At the core of the play is a transcendental experience. The unfolding of the play leads the audience into the conviction that the daily life which they physically and temporally occupy bears little or no significance whereas the ultimate reality resides in the transcendental realm created by the play in which some of the most familiar conceptual dichotomies which fundamentally characterize the physical world and plague the human mind melt away. In both the content of the script and the storyline of the play, the audience constantly runs into the obscuring of the objective nature and the subjective feelings of a person, the blurring of the divide between dream and reality that marks the romance between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei, and the seemingly surreal interaction between the protagonists which transcends the hiatus between life and death and above all, the simultaneous presentation of the undying nature of beauty and its evanescent appearance. Apparently Tang Xianzu, the author, is not attempting to resolve such conceptual dichotomies by reason but to present them as necessarily coexistent and the divide between which can and have to be traversed through a transcendental experience such as the one created by the play. Underlying this construction of beauty and transcendence is Tang Xianzu's philosophical idea of '唯情', which advocates that the nature of a human being is NOT his position in the order of a certain grand scheme, be it the universe or a society as promoted by Neo Confucianism, but his individual sensitivity and emotions. Therefore the solutions to the fundamental problems of man, the resolutions of the basic dichotomies that haunt his existence must be found in his sensitivity and feelings and not in reason. It is in the transcendental experience that the play of the Peony Pavilion offers that one can find the final answer to his existential problems and therefore peace.
In creating this otherworldly experience for the audience, Kun music plays a vital role. As is the case always, the text of an opera is delivered through music. What is singular in the case of the Peony Pavilion is its unique way of integrating the text and the music so that together they resonate and deliver the audience to the realm of 情 - the realm attained through sensitivity and feelings. It is impossible to offer this transcendental experience if the text is divorced from the music. For this reason, the Peony Pavilion has established itself unquestionably as a summit of Chinese operas and classical Chinese plays in general.
From 1598 until 1616, the year Tang passed away, the Peony Pavilion was always performed with whole scenes onstage. But later, an increasing number of adaptions focusing on several scenes were adopted onstage rather than the complete play, since it would demand a significant amount of expenditure/energy and time to run the whole play. "A walk in the Garden" (遊園/游园) and "The Interruption of a Dream" (驚夢/惊梦), these two acts originating from one scene, namely "A Surprising Dream" in the original text, and "Reflection On The Lost Dream" (尋夢/寻梦), are generally considered as the apogee of Kunqu in term of their literary achievements as well as for their musicality, choreography, and the integration of all components. Due to the uniqueness of its lyrics, rhythm, and ancient style of prose, the translation became a daunting challenge for literature scholars and theatre practitioners.
Besides, recent adaptations have sought to inject new life, such as more accessible scripts for a modern audience, new choreography, or new theatrical technologies, into one of China's best-loved classical plays, but since such efforts have met with opposition from the Kun opera traditionalists, to a certain degree, some scholars seriously critique them. To keep its traditions or to make it modernized has become a controversial conversation in the Chinese theatre.
The play was widely acclaimed by the public and critics when it was first presented onstage, and it is also regarded as the Chinese version of "Romeo and Juliet". Through narrating a tortuous love story, Tang portrays an image of a young couple with a strong desire for democratic thoughts and individual emancipation, which evoked most audience empathy, especially women audiences, and regarded Du Liniang as their idol for free love. Subject/ theme on "uncovering social darkness and caring for people's sufferings", "qualities of heroism", "attacking feudalism and marriage system", "exposing the miserable fate of women" and "reflecting family and social ethics", etc., are generally discussed in ancient Chinese drama, which is also evident in The Peony Pavilion.
Some people also raise an idea that Tang's works of "The Four Dreams" somehow resemble Freud's interpretation of dreams. From the perspectives of psychoanalysis, the action of "A Walk in the Garden" is the awakening of Du Liniang's suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while the scene of "A Surprising Dream" is exactly her fantasy of sexual satisfaction.