| As
one of the Chinese prominent playwrights, Tang was born in
1550, 14 years older than William Shakespeare, and both of
them passed away in 1616. Tang's representative work is the
Peony Pavilion that is much similar to the Romeo and Juliet
written by William Shakespeare, a romantic love story, well
known by every family and household.
The
main character in Tang's Peony Pavilion was a 16-year-old
girl named Du Liniang (the second means Beautiful-Girl) entering
a beautiful garden with a Peony Pavilion to read a love poem
"A Pair of Lovebirds' Singing" conscientiously for
the first time out of her own boudoir. She felt so fresh and
so happy that she could hardly control herself, singing and
dreaming of a young man named Liu Mengmei ("Willow's
Dreaming of Plum-blossom" in Chinese.) while going to
bed again at mid-night. She was brave enough to make love
with the young man in the Peony Pavilion during her amorous
dreaming, and she had never found such comfort and excitement
before visiting the garden. She wished to dream of the same
dream again but failed. Thus all day long she found herself
uneasy and unhappy and uncomfortable in her own chamber. She
was getting weaker and weaker in health. She predicted that
the young man would try to seek for her before she died to
the nether world so that she tried to paint a picture of herself
as a hint to be left to the human world. Nearly three years
later, accidentally the young man also dreamed a strange dream
that a beautiful girl had fallen in love with him at first
sight in the garden with the Peony Pavilion. On his way to
the capital city for taking part in an imperial examination,
he stopped at the garden, by chance finding out a girl's portrait
in a box under a plum tree near a lake. He thought that it
was an exact portrait of the girl he had dreamed of. Hence
he hung her picture in the |
