Retribution, Revenge, and the Ungrateful Scholar in Early Chinese Southern Drama

It is only by chance that southern Chinese theater, nanxi 南戲, began its known textual career with two revenge love stories, both concerning ungratefulness and retribution. one, Zhao the Chaste Maid and Second Son Cai (Zhao Zhennü Cai Erlang 趙貞女蔡二郎), has come to us transformed into a dramatic exemplar of duty and filiality, and the other, the story of Wang Kui 王魁, has survived in song and short-story form. these pieces formed part of a larger repertoire of plays in the southern tradition that dealt with themes of love, disillusion and vengeance. Chinese southern theater is said to have begun during the Song dynasty (960–1279). Among the first scholars to mention southern theater as an established style of theater are Zhu Yunming 祝允明 (1460– 1526) and the later critic Xu Wei 徐渭 (1521–1593). Although they disagree on the date of the origin of southern theater (one arguing for the early-twelfth century and the other the late-twelfth), they agree on the subject of its first plots: namely, the first stories were Zhao the Chaste Maid and Second Son Cai and Wang Kui. these stories relate a prevalent motif in early southern drama about an ungrateful scholar who leaves his family and wife to take the imperial examinations and does not return. the theme of the ungrateful scholar is generally coupled together with plays on the desire for freedom of choice in love and placed under the general category of marriage. the latter theme takes up one-third